Do you get a refund if the product doesn't work as desired? A new study has found that those who get aesthetic facial plastic surgery, such as brow lifts and eyelid surgery, aren't rated as significantly more attractive after their procedures, The New York Times reports. This is the first time anybody has done a quantitative scientific study of whether people become more attractive after these facial surgeries.

Of course, not all people who get plastic surgery do so to look more attractive, but that's the major reason behind these procedures in particular.

The researchers gave independent evaluators a random assortment of photos. The evaluators were supposed to guess the ages of the people in the photos and rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. No single evaluator would get before and after photos of the same person, which 1.) ensured the evaluators wouldn't deduce the study's aim and 2.) makes sense because few people see you with a before picture next to your face after you've gotten plastic surgery.

The researchers, a team of face and head surgeons in Canada and the U.S., found that on average, evaluators said the "after" photos looked three years younger than the same person's "before" photo. The differences in perceived age ranged from four years older to nearly nine and a half years younger. On average, patients' attractiveness scores were slightly higher, but the difference wasn't enough to count as statistically significant.

[New York Times]

Whether you can digest milk comfortably after childhood is a genetic fluke. For many people, the ability to produce lactase--the enzyme that allows the body to break down lactase, the sugar in milk--disappears after childhood, when we no longer need to survive on our mother's milk.

Lactase persistence--the gene that allows about a third of adults to drink milk without major digestive pains--tends to break down geographically, as you can see in this infographic from Nature's history of milk tolerance. It's largely a European phenomenon, evolving from a single genetic mutation that occurred less than 10,000 years ago.

As Nature explains:

Researchers estimate that the allele for lactase persistence might have popped up as recently as 7,500 years ago, starting in Hungary. The small pockets of milk tolerance in the Middle East, West Africa and southern Asia are thought to be part of different genetic mutations. (The data for this infographic came from a 2012 paper on the evolution of lactase persistence in Europe, which explains why it leaves North and South America out.)

Read more about the history of milk tolerance here.

During World War II, the Nazis used a famously complex code machine to communicate military orders, assuming that no one would go through the effort needed to break its formidable encryption. The typewriter-like Enigma was a marvel of engineering, full of gears, dials, lights, keys, and a plugboard. But despite its clever design, the cipher was eventually broken by computers; because it relied on pseudo-random mechanical encryption, there were only a finite number of patterns possible. By the end of the war, British and American intelligence services were routinely decoding and reading intercepted Nazi messages.

Now Seth Lloyd, a researcher at MIT, has demonstrated that by exploiting the quirks of quantum physics, it is possible to build an encryption machine that is truly unbreakable.

"The funny thing about quantum mechanics is when you measure something, you mess it up," Lloyd tells Popular Science. Lloyd's theoretical quantum cryptography machine works like this: When an eavesdropper tries to make a measurement that would help him or her crack the code, the act of making the measurement disrupts what he or she is trying to measure. Tricky, right?

A peculiarity of quantum physics turns photons, fired one at a time, into a secure lock. The observer effect states that an observed photon behaves differently than an unobserved one. If a code relies on patterns of photons, the key to breaking it is therefore unobservable. This protects the whole message and makes it impossible for a third party to eavesdrop on the conversation, because the very act of eavesdropping changes the code. The is called quantum data locking, and it is at the core of Lloyd's theoretical quantum enigma machine.

The intended recipient of a message is able to decode the transmission because he or she would already have prior knowledge of the message's quantum state.

There is one weak spot: If the third party intercepting the message has already received a decoded partial fragment of the message (and therefore knows how to measure the incoming message) the key securing the rest of the message can be broken, and then the whole message can be deciphered. (This, of course, would require obtaining a partial message through other means.)

The paper is titled "Quantum enigma machines."

Here in New York, there are lots of reasons to take pictures of strangers who aren't expecting it. The crazy lady pooping on the L train platform at Union Square? The guy who walks around Fort Greene Park with two African gray parrots on his shoulder? The impossibly old man riding a unicycle over the (very steep!) Williamsburg Bridge pike path? All totally acceptable scenarios in which to pull out your phone and take a picture. But in the U.K., more than 8 percent of people have confessed to taking illicit shots of...attractive people.

A survey of 2,076 Britons, taken by Nokia, reveals some surprising facts: there are enough attractive people in the U.K. for one-twelfth of the population to creepshot attractive strangers with their phones. (JK we love you guys.) "Our research has given us a real insight into the ever-changing quirky habits of the British public," said the head of marketing for Nokia. Quirky and weird! Don't do that, Britons. Creepshotting weirdos: fine. That guy with the parrots wants us to take his photo. The cute girl at the laundromat? She just wants to do her laundry.

[Independent via Daily Mail]

Any individual phytoplankton--a single-celled, photosynthetic ocean critter--is impossible to see without a microscope. Get enough of them together, however, and they're visible from space.

This is a true-color satellite photo of a phytoplankton bloom in the North Atlantic Ocean. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) captured the photo on July 23, during what would have been the afternoon in the U.S.

Blooms are population booms of phytoplankton, tiny organisms that live in water, photosynthesize and form the base of the ocean food chain. They're like the plants of the deeper ocean, except that unlike plants, some species are able to swim. Some species also eat other organisms in addition to getting energy from photosynthesis.

Blooms of phytoplankton are triggered by just the right light, nutrient and temperature conditions. They are common in the ocean and MODIS can snap photos of several miles-long blooms a year.

A bloom may last weeks, but not so the individuals in it, which rarely live for longer than a few days. Instead, blooms are renewed by the phytoplankton's offspring until conditions dissipate.

There's nothing worse than sitting in a dull, drab cubicle. If you're going to be stuck in one place for 40 or more hours a week, it might as well be pleasant--for the sake of your sanity and your company's bottom line. Research shows that how you arrange and decorate an office can make a difference for both mental health and productivity, which is why companies like Google shell out for sweet corporate digs.

Even if your workspace isn't the hippest thing around, you can spice it up with a few relatively easy changes. 99U has a roundup of some of the latest findings in the science of arranging the most pleasant and efficient workspace possible. Some tips from them:

Decorate it.

A 2010 study of London office workers found that being allowed to decorate an office with as many plants and pictures as they wanted made workers 32 percent more productive than the control group that wasn't given the same option.

By the same token:

Make it nature-y.

Studies have shown the presence of plants in an office can improve your ability to pay attention for longer periods of time and reduce stress. So go grab a fern... or a dozen.

Make things round.

We tend to find curves attractive. A study published earlier this summer found that curvilinear spaces were more likely to be seen as beautiful than plain rectangular spaces. A previous study had also established that we tend to find round furniture more appealing than furniture with straight edges. So, basically, the Oval Office has the right idea.

Read the full list at 99U.

Back in 2008, researchers discovered a massive hydrothermal vent system in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, between Greenland and Norway. This is basically a group of enormous undersea volcanoes, more than 7,500 feet underwater, shooting out superheated water in 40-foot plumes of sulfides. They were christened "Loki's Castle," and there's nothing else quite like them on the planet--and now Norway is considering protecting them by naming them a national park.

Loki's Castle is what's called a black smoker--a type of vent that mostly shoots out sulfides. Sulfides, though, aren't the only minerals around Loki's Castle; researchers have found large deposits of iron, and there is almost certainly other stuff they haven't yet identified. Scientists from the University of Bergen are concerned about the mining industry disturbing the pristine environment of Loki's Castle. So they want to make it a national park, which would afford it certain environmental protections. "It is our opinion that this area is so unique that it should be preserved. We are talking about very vulnerable environments," Professor Rolf Birger Pedersen of the University of Bergen said in a press release. It is in effect a blank spot on the map; we know it's a black smoker, and we know water temperatures are searingly high (up to 570 °F), but nobody knows much about what kind of flora and fauna survive down there, or how Loki's Castle was formed, or how old it is, or its history. Twenty new animal species have been found there already! Deep-sea mining could compromise additional discoveries.

Park protection is usually thought of for parks that people can easily visit--parks like Yellowstone or Yosemite here in the states. But it's actually been proposed for places humans can't exactly pitch a tent in, like the moon and Mars. Loki's Castle would fall into that camp: not a tourist park, but an important natural wonder that needs protection.

[University of Bergen]

For years, anti-drug and anti-smoking ads have relied on scaring people about the potential health risks of substance abuse. These are smoker's lungs! This is your brain on drugs!

Unfortunately, scaring kids into sobriety with information about how terrible drugs and alcohol are for your health doesn't seem to be an effective tactic, according to a study released this month by the International Journal of Public Health. In fact, drug users probably know more about the risks of drugs than people who decide not to use them.

The self-reported survey of 11,930 young Swiss men found that alcohol and cannabis users searched for health information on substances significantly more than people who abstained. They were also more likely to report that they had a "very good" knowledge of the risks associated with their preferred substance, though this might not be the most reliable metric, since it was self-reported.

"When you know a lot about the risks and everything about the substances, it doesn't really bring you to consume less," study co-author Petra Dermota told LiveScience. "You even consume more." She suggests this could be a result of the negative health consequences, like liver damage from alcohol use, seeming too far away to influence users' immediate choices, or because drug users feel the benefits outweigh the risks.

Future substance abuse campaigns should do more than just spout information. They should be interactive and encourage critical thinking, she says.

"Substance users appear to be more informed and knowledgeable about the risks of substance use than non-users," the paper concludes. "Consequently, interventions that focus only on information provision may be of limited benefit for preventing substance use."

[LiveScience]

Mars One, a Netherlands-based private spaceflight project, announced April 22 that it would begin accepting applications for a one-way mission to colonize Mars; three weeks later, 78,000 people had already signed up. We admit we wondered at the sanity of everyone involved. So we tracked down a few of the applicants and asked them: Why do you want to die on Mars?

Katrina Wolfe, 24, is a video game designer who lives in Los Angeles. You can watch her Mars One application video here.

Popular Science: How would your parents feel about you leaving Earth forever?

Katrina Wolfe: My dad is more excited than my mom. She wouldn't want me to go. When I told my dad about it, he said, "That would be awesome, I want a call from Mars!" But it's funny, because I remember growing up, we would always ask each other the hypothetical question: If Captain Picard beamed down right now and said, "I need you to come to the Enterprise, you have three seconds to decide, and you can never come back." Would you go? My family always said yes.

I don't know if I would go if there was, say, a 70 percent chance I wouldn't even get there alive.PS: What would you do on Mars?

KW: I'd love to do desert sailing on Mars, with a wind sail. [Editor's note: Dunno about wind sailing, but you might be able to snowboard on Martian dry ice!] But I know most of our time there would be spent getting the colony to the point of sustainability.

PS: Aren't you worried about dying?

KW: Of course death is a worry to some degree. It's hard to say now. I don't know if I would go if there was, say, a 70 percent chance I wouldn't even get there alive.

PS: Did you ever want to be a NASA astronaut?

I'd love to do desert sailing on Mars, with a wind sail.KW: In 8th grade I did a project on how to become an astronaut. I knew that trying to become an astronaut would mean becoming an engineer and going through NASA. It appealed to me, but very few people actually get to be an astronaut through that path. At some point I realized I would also love to go into game design. I actually majored in classics and minored in video game design and management. This Mars opportunity is even more appealing than being a NASA astronaut because it's about starting a new civilization.

PS: Do you think this mission actually has a chance of happening?

KW: I know there are a lot of unanswered questions about how we're actually going to survive on Mars, but there's lots of time to figure that out. I think that Mars One can make it happen. Listening to the founders speak, I'm very impressed with their vision for the company. I like that they see Mars as the next big step for humanity.

PS: What will you do if you have to stay on Earth?

KW: I'm very excited by life expectancy research and the singularity. There are a lot of big questions we need to answer as a society; how are we going to deal with robots in our lives? What if we live to be 200? I would try to be involved with questions like this if I couldn't go to Mars.

Read more about the Mars One program here. And stay tuned on PopularScience.com for more interviews with the applicants.

180,000-200,000 years ago: the time when humanity's last common male ancestor likely walked Earth

28.3 mph: the speed at which Boston Dynamics' Cheetah Robot can sprint (it is one of our 10 favorite athletic robots)

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$300-$2,000: the money a 3-D printer could save you per year by printing household items

73,000: the number of images used to create this picture of an x-ray telescope shifting its gaze

2,500: the estimated number of baseball bats that shattered in players hands in 2008 (thankfully, the U.S. Forest Service is on the case!)

112: the atomic number of the radioactive synthetic element Copernicium (see it on this beautiful periodic table, which uses no numbers or letters-only dots)

4.7 inches: the size of the screen on the new Google/Motorola Moto X smartphone, which is delightfully quiet

8 percent: the portion of people in the UK who admit to taking creepshots of hot strangers in a recent survey

548: the number of images in a 2-minute video documenting the rover Curiosity's first year on Mars

1958: the year President Eisenhower signed the bill that created NASA

Since 2008, Dr. Mark Post has been working on growing edible meat in a laboratory. Today, at an event in London, the first in-vitro hamburger has been served.

Muscle stem cells were taken from a cow's shoulder in a gentle biopsy and grown in calf serum, with micro-exercise so they wouldn't be flabby. 20,000 cells were then assembled into a burger, bound with bread crumbs and egg (but curiously no salt), colored with beet juice and saffron, and presented to the public. The event was also broadcast on Culturedbeef.net.

Dr. Post, a cardiovascular biologist from Maastricht University, brought his raw burger out, in a petri dish under a cloche. On a television set, chef Richard McGeown, opining that it looked a little paler than normal, cooked it in butter and oil before a hungry audience, then served it to two lucky volunteers: Austrian food futurist Hanni Rützler, and Josh Schonwald, author of The Taste of Tomorrow.

Hanni: "There is quite some intense taste. It is close to meat; it is not that juicy. I missed salt and pepper. More than I expected of the the structure, it's not falling apart."

Josh: "The texture, the mouthfeel, has a feel like meat. The absence is the fat. It's a leanness. But the bite feels like a conventional hamburger."

The technology to grow fat cells is still lacking -- Schonfeld characterized the texture as like "an animal protein cake" -- but that is the next step for the team. "I think it's a very good start," said Dr. Post. "This was mostly to prove that we can make it."

The following challenge will be to scale up the process. Dr. Post currently estimates that it will take 10 to 20 years before cultured meat can be mass-produced. For the last few years, the project has been funded by an anonymous benefactor who, Dr. Post revealed today, is Sergey Brin.

Dr. Post answered some other questions from the audience.

Can you make a steak? In theory. "We are currently focusing on minced meat products, using shorter fibers, because there is a limitation on the diffusion distance of oxygen and nutrients into the center of the tissue."

Can they use this technology to make burgers from less common animals? Penguins? "I don't like the smell of penguins, but I guess we can. You can do it with any sort of satellite cell from an animal."

The leftovers were taken home for Dr. Post's children.

With all the depressing, worrisome news floating around this summer about the NSA, spying and metadata, sometimes it's good to take a break and indulge some nostalgia for the good old days, when spying seemed a little bit…sexier. A little more Bond-y, if you will.

Except that, even in 1966, the government had "been electronically spying on its citizens for years," as the author of this 1966 LIFE Magazine cover story writes. Except LIFE was talking about putting a bug in the olive of your martini, not cataloging every single phone conversation you've ever had.

The author goes on: "Despite the protections against invasion of privacy afforded by the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, bugging is so shockingly widespread and so increasingly insidious that no one can be certain any longer that his home is his castle--free of intrusion." Sound familiar, Edward Snowden?

Though the fact that we all carry cell phones everywhere we go makes it even easier to listen in on someone nowadays, snooping was a novel, rapidly expanding trade in the '60s, as technology allowed smaller and smaller eavesdropping devices (sugar cube sized! LIFE gushed). Microphones in wristwatches and cuff-links, hidden transmitters in pens and innocuous-looking paintings of fruit--some labs were even experimenting with putting body-heat-powered FM transmitters in animals.

See more Bondtastic gadgets in the spreads below. Click the image captions to see the pictures in full screen mode--with a little squinting you can read most of the text.

A team of researchers from Georgia Tech has created the "Mini Lisa," a 30-micron thick version of the Mona Lisa. That makes it about one-third the width of a human hair.

The tiny masterpiece was made through a process called ThermoChemical NanoLithography: with a heated cantilever, a tiny device that can accurately apply heat to a surface, the researchers induced heat-based chemical reactions on a surface. The more heat they applied, the lighter a shade of gray the picture became in that area. So with each area acting like the pixel in an image, the researchers applied different amounts of heat at different spots, until they created a gray-scale version of da Vinci's famed painting.

The project sounds more like a proof of concept than anything else: the researchers have shown that complex chemical reactions can be applied on a microscopic scale, which could have implications for the production of nano-tech devices. Awesome, although it's tough to top sending the Mona Lisa to the moon using lasers.

Almost a mile beneath Gran Sasso mountain in Italy sits the DarkSide detector. DarkSide, which started operating in May, is designed to capture the faint signals generated by dark matter, the elusive particles that scientists suspect are partially responsible for the gravitational pull of the universe. Despite an immense international effort, scientists have yet to observe dark matter because it doesn't frequently interact with standard matter.

The subterranean DarkSide consists of two nested chambers: a 13-foot-diameter outer sphere surrounded by 100 quartz sensors that measure background radiation, and a liquid-argon-filled inner cylinder with 38 similar sensors poised to capture flashes of light, produced if a dark-matter particle collides with an argon nucleus.

This article originally appeared in the August 2013 issue of Popular Science. See more stories from the magazine here.

One year to the day after Curiosity made its incredible sky-crane landing onto Mars, Mattel has announced that Barbie will be joining the rover on the red planet. Mars Explorer Barbie wears a very close-fitting space suit with pink plastic space boots, helmet and backpack. (We hope her "one-doll mission" isn't also one-way.)

While we're stoked for Barbie's new career, we want to make sure she realizes that life's pretty different on the red planet than it is in Malibu. Some helpful advice:

1. Better set some ground rules with Ken. According to NASA, going to Mars and back will take anywhere from one to three years. (At least until the space agency gets its warp drive up and running.)

2. Go easy on the pink. We hear it clashes with red.

3. Zero gravity is a tough look to pull off. Keep your locks tamed in a bun, braid, or tasteful French twist.

4. Space travel can really mess with your beauty sleep. We already know that astronauts average about two fewer hours a day than they would on Earth. And scientists suspect that the human body may respond differently to the yellowish-brown daylight on Mars than it does to the blue-green wavelengths on Earth. Long story short: Ambien is your friend.

5. You should really find some space gloves. Your suit is designed to mimic the pressure on Earth. If it's not sealed on Mars, where the surface pressure is almost nil, you'll start to develop relatively minor problems-sunburn, the bends, swelling-before you just pass out. It's also cold there. Really, really cold.

6. Even though your helmet might be giving you hat hair, keep it on tight. Martian air is nasty stuff. Not only is there very little oxygen, but rovers have also detected perchlorates (particles that can be harmful to the thyroid) and gypsum (a mineral that can build up in lungs like coal-dust).

7. Women are more susceptible to muscle atrophy in space than men are, losing as much as 2 percent of their muscle mass each week. And bone density will also drop about 1 percent a month-that's 10 times the rate during menopause. Try a spaceathlon to slow these effects.

8. Even if you're in the protection of your capsule or rover, forget sunbathing. Mars doesn't have the same protective magnetic field that Earth does, making radiation levels from the sun dangerously high. Think SPF 60 will help? Try SPF 1000.

Looking for a new project for your 3-D printer? New York lawyer Martin Galese has an idea. He's turned drawings from expired patents into digital blueprints for 3-D printers. That means anybody can get his very own plastic hat holder, cup for drinking without spilling in bed, or combination pen-holder-bookmark (if you still have any paper books).

As a lawyer, Galese works with modern software patents for his job, The New York Times reports. Such patents often make the news today, as the subject of lawsuits between huge technology companies. But these older patents drew Galese because of their artfulness and beauty, he told the Times.

I don't know if "beauty" quite the word for all of them, but they are quirky and fun. Take, for instance, this guy:

Granted a patent in 1875, long before George Lucas imagined Jabba the Hutt, it is actually a pot scraper. Its original inventor intended it to be made of cast iron.

Here's a travel chess set, which was granted a patent in 1948 for the extremely improvement of adding a slide-and-lock mechanism for the pieces on the board:

What's this? It's a stand for flowers, circa 1875. Nice lines:

Here's the original drawings for it, signed by its inventor, Samuel Vanstone of Providence, Rhode Island:

Galese has made at least one of his designs, an improved screw that received a patent in 1910:

Galese's 3-D printer designs are a kind of redux of a practice from the U.S. Patent Office's earliest history. From the office's founding in 1790 until 1880, it actually required would-be patenters to submit small models of their inventions with their paperwork. Now you can remake such models on your own, with tools America's first inventors could never have imagined.

[The New York Times Bits]

It sounds different because it is different. "When you speak, the vocal folds in your throat vibrate, which causes your skin, skull and oral cavities to also vibrate, and we perceive this as sound," explains Ben Hornsby, a professor of audiology at Vanderbilt University. The vibrations mix with the sound waves traveling from your mouth to your eardrum, giving your voice a quality-generally a deeper, more dignified sound-that no one else hears.

Through a loudspeaker or recording device, you pick up sound only through air conduction. "The sound we're used to hearing has a lower frequency from the bone vibrations," Hornsby says. "We like that because it sounds rich and full." Many people cringe at the playback sound because our brain struggles to accept that this foreign voice is our own.

This article originally appeared in the July 2009 issue of Popular Science magazine.