Back in 1990, Charles Varnadore, a technician at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, had had enough with the unsafe conditions at the lab. He saw sloppy handling of radioactive materials, employees working in close proximity to hazardous waste, elevated cancer rates among employees, and more. He complained, and was moved to an office full of radioactive waste and asbestos--while recovering from surgery for colon cancer. But instead of quitting or giving in, Varnadore fought back, reached out to media, and by 1993 had permanently changed Oak Ridge, for the better.

Varnadore eventually filed complaints against his employer under whistleblower statutes. More than half of his 26 complaints were verified by the Department of Energy, and the Department of Labor ruled in favor of his whistleblower protection. But he showed just how hard it is to blow the whistle when, a few years later, his complaints were thrown out largely on technicalities (like being submitted too late).

He eventually retired, according to the Times, around 2000. He died earlier this year, back in March, but his death wasn't reported until now. The cause of death is not known. But he certainly made whistleblowing more acceptable for federal employees, even if the end result isn't the nicest reaction from the government.

[NYTimes]

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Drones, despite years of experience at war, are not yet a technology that's ready for widespread commercial use. That hasn't stopped businesses, including pizza restaurants, dry cleaners, and cake companies, from cashing in on the future prematurely. These drones, often converted toy models, are typically enlisted to deliver goods, even though they can be pretty wobbly, and they don't carry a whole lot. They are also not terribly cost-effective, especially when compared with a twentysomething with a bike looking to make some spare beer money.

But the drones don't actually need to be good at what they do. Simply by virtue of being drones, they've already served as news-catching gimmicks and cheap ad pitchmen. Here are seven of the best--by which we mean silliest--gimmick drones.

Call it Project Gemini. A pair of twins, employed by NASA, are volunteering to let their employer use them as test subjects for the effects of living in space, Florida Today reports.

One of the two brothers, 49-year-old Scott Kelly, will travel to the International Space Station in 2015 and stay in space for 12 months. Meanwhile, his brother, Mark Kelly, is now retired from NASA and will stay on Earth. The brothers came up with the idea for the study, Florida Today reports.

For now, NASA plans to have both Kellys take blood samples regularly. But outside scientists could have a say in what the brothers do. NASA is asking for scientists to submit research proposals for the twin study, NASA Watch reports. The study proposals should not be too disruptive, NASA Watch reports. Scott Kelly already has several experiments he'll be responsible for during his 2015 trip, which he'll take with Russian astronaut Mikhail Kornienko.

Experiments like the Kellys' help scientists develop ways of counteracting the ill health effects that future long-term human space missions would have.

Both Kellys have flown to space before. They're the only pair of human siblings to have both gone to space.

[Florida Today]

Mars rover Curiosity landed on the red planet one year ago today, so we here at Popular Science figured we'd take a look back at the journey. It's not an easy trip to summarize, since Curiosity marked a ton of firsts: only the discovery of the Higgs Boson rivaled it for biggest science story of 2012. But in case you need a refresher on just how big of a story the landing was, here's a reminder, courtesy of Google search trends for "mars curiosity rover":

The crests roughly correspond to Curiosity's greatest hits: there's the landing itself, the result of years of planning and engineering; the scientific analyses, which taught us more about another planet than we've ever known; and, man, the photos, which we droolingly awaited to be beamed back home. In all, according to NASA, Curiosity has sent back more than 70,000 images and shot a rock-blasting laser 75,000 times. Not bad, considering it has only gone a mile on its entire journey.

Here are 10 highlights from Curiosity's first year on Mars, but there were many more we could've added, and we're sure there will be many more to come.

It's no surprise that NASA is keeping track of all potentially hazardous objects, or PHOs, that surround our planet. If it's closer than 4.6 million miles away and larger than about 350 feet in diameter, NASA's watching it. And if a comet or asteroid's orbit comes close enough to ours that there's some potential for it to collide with our planet, NASA classifies it as a PHO. If something that size smacked Earth, it'd cause a major tsunami (if it hit water) or major regional destruction (if it hit land).

There are 1,397 known potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) at the moment, which you can see in this list. (The other PHOs are comets.) But why look at a list when you can look at a massive gorgeous picture? The image above, taken from NASA/JPL's Photojournal, shows all 1,397 of those PHAs as represented by their orbits. Kind of amazing that we haven't been hit by one, isn't it?

[via Photojournal]

Three graduate students at UCLA's school of Architecture & Urban Design have created a 3-D printed wrist splint that they hope could one day provide underdeveloped regions with quick and effective medical relief. The team's prototype is gorgeous-an intricate exoskeleton designed around the actual structure of bone to provide support exactly where injured wrists most need it.

Nicholas Solakian, Peter Nguyen, and Derek Buell were in part inspired by a disaster relief doctor who works on the Thailand-Burma border. Wrist and joint injuries, the doctor explained to the team, are prevalent and debilitating in underdeveloped or disaster-stricken areas. The current aid for such injuries typically involves manufacturing mediocre splints in first-world countries, then coordinating and funding their packaging, shipping, and distribution. In extremely remote areas, the process gets even hairier. The students realized that 3-D printing could make custom-fitted splints cheap, strong, and readily available.

"The structure itself changes in density so that areas further away from the break requiring less structural rigidity become more porous and flexible making the entire splint more breathable," Nguyen explains. A method of 3-D printing called selective laser sintering (SLS) allows the splints to be rigid, lightweight, and intricate. Also, with a manipulatable CAD file and a 3-D scanner, the splints could be fine-tuned on a case-by-case basis for exact fitting and appropriate rigidity.

Unfortunately, impoverished areas may not get these splints any time soon: SLS machines are large, expensive, and require careful maintenance. Still, if the splints show promise in both ease of production and, more importantly, therapeutic effectiveness, the team will have made a significant step towards their original goal: relief from debilitating injuries in underdeveloped regions of the world. Barring significant technological advances that enable affordable and portable SLS machines, though, it's hard to fathom actual implementation for that cause. To overcome this obstacle, the researchers are working with Direct Relief International and investigating alternative manufacturing methods that use less expensive machines.

See a video interview from Solid Concepts with the students below:

Experimental setups for letting paralyzed people communicate usually work by measuring brainwaves, so they can be pretty invasive for patients. For many, it's probably well worth the effort, but one team of researchers thinks there's a better and cheaper way.

A team of brain scientists from Europe, Australia and the U.S. has demonstrated that some people with locked-in syndrome are able to answer yes-or-no questions by widening their pupils. Usually pupils aren't under people's conscious control-that's the part of the eye that tightens in bright light, for example-but learning that control doesn't take any training, the researchers say. For the patients for whom the method works, a computer-and-camera setup was able to pick up their intended answer 67 to 84 percent of the time.

The setup could be simple and cheap enough for people to use at home, Steven Laureys, the clinical coordinator for the study, told the New Scientist. Laureys studies comas at the University of Liège.

Laureys and the rest of the team originally found a 1964 study that showed that people's eyes dilate when they're doing difficult mental arithmetic, Science magazine reports. That eventually led the team to devise a computer setup that asks patients a question, and then shows them two possible answers in succession. Each answer is accompanied by a mental arithmetic problem. (And not easy ones! Try 24 x 57 or 29 x 49.) Researchers told the patients they only needed to work on the problem for the answer they wished to choose.

Just working on the problem is enough to dilate the eyes, lead researcher Wolfgang Eisenhäuser told the New Scientist. The patient doesn't have to get the problem right, or even get all the way through the problem.

The setup wasn't tested in very many people, and didn't work for everybody. Just six healthy people and seven paralyzed people were part of the study. The system worked well for all of the healthy study volunteers. Among the paralyzed patients, three were able to pick answers at a rate that was better than chance.

The team published a paper about their work today in the journal Current Biology.

Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, will purchase the Washington Post and several of its holdings for $250 million, according to a report from, um, the Washington Post.

Amazon is not involved in the purchase; Bezos is buying the Post from the Graham family--which has owned it for four generations--entirely on his own, out of pocket. $250 million, it should be said, is less than one percent of Bezos's net worth, which is estimated by Bloomberg to be about $27.9 billion. (It's also the quarter the price of Instagram, which sold to Facebook last year for a cool billion dollars.) In another post, published on the Post, which he now owns, Bezos assured the employees of the Post that "The values of The Post do not need changing. The paper's duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners." He also said that he would delegate day-to-day management of the newspaper to existing management.

Bezos is not acquiring many Post properties not directly relating to the newspaper, like the website Slate and the education division Kaplan.

The Washington Post, like pretty much every other newspaper, has been struggling lately. Earlier this year, MediaBistro reported that the paper was forced to lay off dozens of employees. Other papers of similar size have been bought by billionaires recently; just this month, Boston Red Sox owner John Henry agreed to buy the Boston Globe.

But no other purchase has as intriguing a set of possibilities as this one. Jeff Bezos, more than any other figure in tech, has totally changed the way people read, thanks first to Amazon's store (which began primarily selling books) and then thanks to its Kindle ebook ecosystem and Kindle devices. Bezos has enough money to purchase the Post as a lark, like his space project, but he also has the infrastructure and experience to turn it into something quite different.

We'll be keeping a close watch on this collaboration in the future.

Popular Science first printed the words "Neil Armstrong" in June 1958, when the 27-year-old "tall, slim, crew-cut blond" aeronautical engineer was training for a flight in the X-15: an experimental rocket plane that would take a man to the edge of space. "The men who first fly it will take a tentative dip in the mysterious sea of outer space before future men plunge in," wrote Popular Science reporter Wesley S. Griswold.

But before he could fly the 4,000-mile-per-hour space plane, Armstrong had to test his skills under extreme G-forces in a giant Navy centrifuge in Johnsville, Pa. He would be strapped in to a working model of the X-15's cockpit, inside a gondola attached to the end of a 50-foot rotor arm. "An incredibly complicated and ingenious hook-up between gondola, centrifuge and an analog computer enables the pilot in the gondola to put the centrifuge through dizzying maneuvers that simulate the X-15's expected flight behavior," Griswold wrote.

Though Armstrong took the X-15 on seven low-altitude test flights, pilot Joseph A. Walker was the only person to fly the plane higher than 100 kilometers, the definition of a spaceflight. (The X-15, retired in 1970, still holds the record for the fastest manned aircraft.)

Just weeks before the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, Popular Science published a breathless moment-by-moment guide to what Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins would face on their trip to the moon:

"[T]he moon's surface, out of sight of the crew before, creeps into view from the bottoms of their windows. What they see is a flat and comparatively crater-free lunar plain... Finally comes the high spot of the mission - an action-packed program of two hours and 40 minutes of ‘moonwalking.' Descending a ladder from the forward hatch, Commander Armstrong is to be first to set foot on the moon. Almost his first act is to scoop up a bagful of loose lunar soil, and hand it up to Aldrin to stow away."

The moon landing, we said, "will be an epic achievement-the conquest of the greatest engineering challenge we have ever faced."

The June 1989 issue of Popular Science contains perhaps our sweetest tribute to Armstrong. Cosmochemist James R. Arnold, of the University of California, San Diego, developed a way to estimate the erosion rate of lunar rocks and soil. Because the moon lacks an atmosphere, and therefore wind and rain, the only threat to Armstrong's footprints are slow-working cosmic rays. Arnold calculated that the momentous steps will be visible in the dust for another half million years. "The moon is a quiet place," he said.

Armstrong was born August 5, 1930, in Wapakoneta, Ohio. He died August 25, 2012, following complications from heart bypass surgery. He was 82.

This article originally appeared on PopularScience.com on August 27, 2012.

A device the size of an espresso machine quietly whirs to life. The contraption isn't filled with fresh, pungent grounds but, instead, spoonfuls of opaque, sterile goo. Its robotic arm moves briskly: It hovers, lowers, and then repositions a pair of syringes over six petri dishes. In short, rapid-fire bursts, they extrude the milky paste. Soon, three little hexagons form in each dish. After a few minutes, the hexagons grow to honeycomb structures the size of fingernails. No one here is getting a latte anytime soon.

The honeycombs are human livers, says Sharon Presnell, chief technology officer of Organovo-or at least the foundations of them. The tiny masterpieces of biomedical engineering are nearly identical to tissue samples from real human livers, and they are constructed from actual human cells. But instead of growing them, scientists in the gleaming, 15,000-square-foot headquarters of Organovo print them, just as they would a document. Or, more accurately, just as they'd print a scale model.

In two decades, 3-D printing has grown from a niche manufacturing process to a $2.7-billion industry, responsible for the fabrication of all sorts of things: toys, wristwatches, airplane parts, food. Now scientists are working to apply similar 3-D-printing technology to the field of medicine, accelerating an equally dramatic change. But it's much different, and much easier, to print with plastic, metal, or chocolate than to print with living cells.

"It's been a tough slog in some ways, but we're at a tipping point," says Dean Kamen, founder of DEKA Research & Development, who holds more than 440 patents, many of them for medical devices. In labs around the world, bioengineers have begun to print prototype body parts: heart valves, ears, artificial bone, joints, menisci, vascular tubes, and skin grafts. "If you have a compass and a straight edge, everything you draw is a box or a circle," Kamen says. "When you get better tools, you start thinking in different ways. We now have the ability to play at a level we couldn't play at before."

From 2008 to 2011, the number of scientific papers referencing bioprinting nearly tripled. Investment in the field has spiked as well. Since 2007, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health has awarded $600,000 in grants to bioprinting projects. Last year, Organovo, raised $24.7 million in equity.

Three factors are driving the trend: more sophisticated printers, advances in regenerative medicine, and refined CAD software. To print the liver tissue at Organovo, Vivian Gorgen, a 25-year-old systems engineer, simply had to click "run program" with a mouse. Honeycomb-shaped liver tissue is a long way from a fully functioning organ, but it is a tangible step in that direction. "Getting to a whole organ-in-a-box that's plug-and-play and ready to go, I believe that could happen in my lifetime," says Presnell. "I cannot wait to see what people like Vivian do. The potential is just out of this world."

The very first bioprinters weren't expensive or fancy. They resembled cheap desktop printers because, in fact, that's what they were. In 2000, bioengineer Thomas Boland, the self-described "grandfather of bioprinting," eyed an old Lexmark printer in his lab at Clemson University. Scientists had already modified inkjet printers to print fragments of DNA, in order to study gene expression. If an inkjet could print genes, Boland thought, perhaps the same hardware could print other biomaterials. After all, the smallest human cells are 10 micrometers, roughly the dimension of standard ink droplets.

Boland emptied the Lexmark's ink cartridge and filled it with collagen. He then glued a thin, black silicon sheet onto blank paper and fed it into the printer. He opened a Word document on his PC, typed his initials, and hit print. The paper spooled out with "TB" clearly delineated in off-white proteins.

By 2000, Boland and his team had reconfigured a Hewlett-Packard DeskJet 550C to print with E. coli bacteria. Then they graduated to larger mammalian cells, farmed from Chinese hamsters and lab rats. After printing, 90 percent of the cells remained viable, which meant the product was useful­­, not simply art. In 2003, Boland filed the first patent for printing cells.

While Boland's lab worked out the problem of bioprinting, other engineers applied 3-D printers to different medical challenges. They printed bone grafts from ceramic, dental crowns from porcelain, hearing aids from acrylic, and prosthetic limbs from polymer. But those engineers had an advantage that Boland and his colleagues did not: They could print in three dimensions rather than just two.

So Boland and other bioprinting pioneers modified their printers. They disabled the paper-feed mechanisms in their inkjets and added an elevator-like platform controlled by stepper motors; the platform could move up or down along the z-axis. Labs could print one layer of cells, lower the platform, and print another layer. Suddenly, bioengineers went from drawing life on a flat canvas to building living sculptures.

"It was like magic," says James Yoo, a researcher at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine who is developing a portable printer to graft skin directly onto burn victims. The ability to print cells in three dimensions opened up new applications. "Every wound is different; the depth is different; and they're very irregular," Yoo says. "By mapping the area, you can determine how many cell layers are needed for the subdermal tissue, as well as the epithelial area. The advantage of the printer is that you can deliver cells more accurately and precisely."

Scientists could also print with many types of "ink." Cornell engineer Hod Lipson, co-author of Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing, prototyped another kind of tissue: cartilage. "The spatial control over the placement of cells has never been possible to this degree," he says. "That opens up multiple dimensions of possibilities." Lipson and his colleagues decided to print a meniscus, the C-shaped piece of cartilage that cushions the knee and other joints. The team used CT scans to create a CAD file of a sheep's meniscus and extracted cells from the sheep to print an identical one.

Although Lipson's first meniscus looked promising, when he showed it to knee-replacement surgeons, they deemed it too weak to withstand the body's routine abuse. "As somewhat of an outsider coming in [to biology], my impression was ‘Okay, I'm gonna put the cells in the right place, incubate it for a while, and we're gonna have our meniscus,' " Lipson says. "There is more to making a meniscus than just putting the cells there. Real menisci are actually pounded every day, all the time, and they shape up and become stiff. So the pounding that's in their environment is actually very much a part of their growth."

Suddenly, bioengineers went from drawing life on a flat canvas to building living sculptures.A printer that can dispense the right ink, in other words, is only the first step. Cells have specific requirements, depending on the tissue they're destined to become. In the case of a meniscus, it might mean developing a bioreactor that can approximate pounding or use heat, light, or auditory pulses to stress the tissue into formation. "For some tissues, even the simple ones, we don't even know exactly what it takes to make the tissue behave like a real tissue," says Lipson. "You can put the cells of a heart tissue in the right place together, but where's the start button?"

Most organs are highly sophisticated structures with dozens of cell types and complex vasculatures evolved to do very specific jobs. The liver alone performs more than 500 functions. Like machines, bodies wear out and break down over time, sometimes unexpectedly. Even when transplants are feasible, donated organs can't keep pace with demand. So as mechanical engineers began to build early 3-D printers, tissue engineers tried growing replacement organs in a lab.

They started by pipetting cells into petri dishes by hand. Then, led by Anthony Atala at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, researchers began to seed those cells onto artificial scaffolds. Made from biodegradable polymers or collagen, the scaffolds provide a temporary matrix for cells to cling to until they're robust enough to stand alone. The system worked beautifully: Atala successfully implanted the first lab-grown organs-bladders-into seven patients at Boston Children's Hospital between 1999 and 2001.

Researchers soon adopted 3-D printers to make scaffolds more precisely. But manually placing the cells onto them remained a time-consuming and arduous process. Printed bladders can be made with just two cell types; kidneys, for example, consist of 30. "When you try to engineer more complex tissues, there's no way you can manually place different cell types into different locations that can replicate the native tissue structures," says Yoo. "Hands are not the optimal method for delivering cells."

At Wake Forest, Yoo's and Atala's teams built custom bioprinters that are faster than modified inkjets and can print with many more cell types-including stem cells, muscle cells, and vascular cells. They also designed one printer to create both the synthetic scaffold and tissue in one fell swoop; they're now using it to produce intricate ears, noses, and bones.

Scaffolds provide tissues with mechanical stability, and they can be used to deliver genes and growth factors to developing cells. But, as in the case of polymers, they can introduce foreign materials into the body and cause inflammation. Cell types also respond differently to certain scaffold materials, and so the more complex the organ, the more complicated the necessary framework-and the more difficult to predict how the cells will migrate around it. As a result, not everyone believes scaffolds are necessary, including Gabor Forgacs, Organovo's co-founder and a biological physicist at the University of Missouri.

Forgacs's plan is to print an organ composed entirely of living human tissue and let it assemble itself. "The magic," he says, "happens after printing has taken place." Therein lies the biggest misconception about bioprinting: What most people think of as the finished product­-the newly printed cellular material-isn't finished at all.

Once researchers scale up the vascular system, printed organs will become only a matter of time.At Missouri, Forgacs studied morphogenesis, the process that determines how cells form organs during embryonic development. By arranging cellular aggregates-tiny spheres containing thousands of cells-into a circle, his lab could watch them fuse and form new structures. The aggregates accomplish this by working together. A molecule on one cell causes a receptor protein on the cell membrane to change shape, tugging on the cytoskeleton of a second cell. A cascade of communication ensues, eventually reaching the nucleus and triggering a change in gene expression.

A grant from the National Science Foundation enabled Forgacs and his team to experiment with bioprinters instead of laying down aggregates by hand, and the technology transformed their research. "What had taken us days, we could do in maybe two minutes," he says. Using a bioprinter, Forgacs proved that aggregates containing different cell types also fuse, without any human intervention or environmental cues.

Tissue engineers shouldn't place cells where they'd be in a finished organ, Forgacs says; they should arrange cells based on where they need to be to start forming an organ, as in an embryo. "The cells know what to do because they've been doing this for millions of years. They learned the rules of the game during evolution."

Another key lies in printing cellular aggregates. "You will never build an extended biological structure, a big organ or tissue, by putting down individual cells," Forgacs says. "A tissue is very well organized, according to very stringent rules, in cellular sets. A half-millimeter aggregate is already a little piece of tissue. Those pieces bind together and exchange information."

Technologically speaking, it's already possible to build tissue by stacking piles of cells along the z-axis. In fact, scientists at Organovo did this with cardiac cells; when they fused, they beat in unison, just like a heart. Biologically, however, there's still a major hurdle: It needs to thrive. An organ requires networks of blood vessels to distribute nutrients and oxygen. Without this core function, cells will wither and die.

Organovo's researchers have made relatively robust vasculature by printing filler, such as hydrogel, among tubes of tissue cells. The filler can later be extracted, leaving empty channels for blood cells. Ibrahim Ozbolat, a mechanical engineer at the University of Iowa, has also developed a bioprinter, which uses multiple arms moving in tandem, to deposit a vascular network and cellular aggregates at the same time.

"The major challenge," Ozbolat says, "will be creating very small capillaries"-the hairlike blood vessels linking larger vessels to cells. He foresees wrestling with this in two years. Once researchers can scale up the size and complexity of the vascular system, graduating from biological parts and pieces to whole printed organs will become only a matter of time.

Actor Bruce Willis gazes at visitors from the side of a machine in a 1,500-square-foot clean room at Organovo. Several of the company's 10 bioprinters have been named and labeled for characters from the 1997 sci-fi film The Fifth Element. Steps from Willis's "Dallas," past a half dozen refrigerator-size incubators, sit the bioprinters "Ruby" and "Zorg," adorned with photos of Chris Tucker and Gary Oldman, respectively.

In the film, set in the 23rd century, an automated pod with two robotic arms uses cells from a severed human hand to print and reanimate an entire woman. Science is a long way from accomplishing anything remotely close to this feat-and it may never get there. But a major milestone would be to develop tools advanced enough to clearly visualize and model the entire process.

What bioprinters so far lack-and what will enable the field's next wave of breakthroughs-is biologically sophisticated software. With an inanimate object like a coffee mug, a 3-D scanner can create a CAD file in minutes and upload the design to a 3-D printer. There is no medical equivalent.

"An MRI doesn't tell you where the cells are," says Lipson. "We're just completely in the dark in terms of the blueprints. That's half the puzzle. There's also no Photoshop-no tools to move cells around. That's not a coincidence. It's beyond what most computer software can handle. You can't have a software model of a liver. It's more complicated than a model for a jet plane."

"Instead of printing a test tube out of plastic to do chemistry in, let's print our test tube out of tissue."Sensing an opportunity, Autodesk has teamed with Organovo to develop CAD programs that could be applied to bioprinting. "The areas we explore don't always have an immediate business case to be made, but they may have one in the coming years," says Carlos Olguin, head of Autodesk's Bio/Nano/Programmable Matter Group. "If so, we want to be ready not just to explore but deliver."

As a first step, Autodesk plans to create a modern cloud-based CAD shell to help streamline the design process. Eventually, its goal is to integrate the math that describes self-assembly and other cellular processes into bioprinting software. In April, Olguin's team released Project Cyborg, a Web-based platform geared toward nanoscale molecular modeling and simulations for cellular biology. Ultimately, researchers want to be able to design cellular aggregates digitally, press "enter," and visualize, in seconds, how the structure would change and evolve into a finished living tissue.

"In the very short term, we're going to dramatically reduce the time it's going to take them to bioprint," Olguin says. "But in the mid-term, by removing them from this amazingly tedious work of creating the most basic shapes, we would hope they would then be able to focus on more interesting applications."

Organovo's first biological product will be liver tissue for drug testing. Every year, the pharmaceutical industry spends more than $39 billion on R&D. According to the Food and Drug Administration, liver toxicity is the most common reason for a drug to be pulled from clinical trials-as well as from the marketplace after it's been approved. There's still no reliable way to evaluate how a drug will affect the human liver before it's ingested-not even animal trials.

"There are some pretty significant species differences between animals like rats and humans," says Organovo's Presnell. "So you can get a lovely answer from a rat that says, ‘Yeah, go forth!' And in reality, in a human, it would not do well."

Bioprinters could build organs with tumors so that surgeons could
practice.At Stanford, researchers have tried to get around this problem by breeding mice with livers made up mostly of human cells. A study published in October showed the mice predicted how well a drug for treating hepatitis C would be metabolized by humans. Scientists at MIT have built miniature liver models using micropatterning, the same soft lithography technique used to put copper wires onto computer chips. The problem, says Presnell, is that micropatterned structures are typically only a couple of cell layers thick, which limits the complexity of questions researchers can ask and answer.

Next year, Organovo will begin selling its liver assay-a petri-dish-like well plate containing liver cells arranged in a 3-D structure 200 to 500 microns thick (two to five times as thick as a human hair). The potential market is vast. Every drug taken orally, whether a painkiller, an anti-inflammatory, or a new cancer pill, must pass a liver tox.

"People normally do a reaction, purify the chemicals, take the drug, add it to cells, look at the response, formulate, maybe do animals, and then go to humans," says Lee Cronin, a University of Glasgow chemist and nanoscientist developing a 3-D printer to manufacture medicine using chemical inks. "Instead of printing a test tube out of plastic to do chemistry in, let's say we now print our test tube out of tissue, and we do chemistry in the tissue and look at the response in real time. That's where things get really interesting."

If bioprinted assays provide pharmaceutical researchers with better, quicker data, the entire drug-discovery process will accelerate. Moreover, they could lessen the need for extensive animal testing.

Ozbolat's goal, at the University of Iowa, is to print pancreatic tissue for therapy instead. It would be made up of only the endocrine cells capable of producing insulin. Implanted in people, such tissue could regulate blood sugar and treat type 1 diabetes, he says.

Bioprinters could also prove invaluable for medical schools. Students now train on cadavers, but when it comes to procedures like cutting out cancer, nothing matches the real experience. Rather than printing healthy tissue, bioprinters could build organs with tumors or other defects so that surgeons could practice before entering an operating room.

Whole, transplantable organs that function properly will be the ultimate challenge, but also, in the long run, change lives most profoundly. In the U.S., more than 118,000 people are currently on the national donor waiting list, which grows by 300 every month. It's not just an issue of supply versus demand. The odds of finding a suitable match are low. Bioprinting organs with cells grown from a patient's own body could eventually help doctors churn out perfect matches at will.

Perhaps, scientists say, bioprinters could even enable bionic organs-body parts that don't just restore, but extend human ability. To that end, researchers at Princeton University have been experimenting with integrating electronics into bioprinting. Earlier this year, they created a matrix of hydrogel and bovine cells in the shape of an ear, incorporating silver nanoparticles to form a coiled antenna. The system could pick up radio frequencies beyond the range of normal human hearing. In a similar manner, bioengineers might one day incorporate sensors into other tissues-for example, creating a bionic meniscus that can monitor strain.

Bioprinters are already demonstrating scientists' remarkable mastery of biology and engineering. Back at Organovo, inside an otherwise unremarkable, neon-lit clean room, "Dallas" arranges human cells into intricate patterns that mirror those of nature. For young researchers like Vivien Gorgen, there's little reason to stop and marvel at this. The machine has become just another tool-one that helps build tissue more precisely. A printer can put all the human pieces in the right places. But, as Forgacs continues to wonder, why do those pieces do what they do? Only life itself knows. At least, for now.

Steven Leckart is a writer-at-large for Pop-Up Magazine, which is created and performed for a live audience.

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

A finalist in the Popular Science #CrowdGrant Challenge is stirring up trouble on the internet. Baba Brinkman, a "Canadian rap artist, writer, actor, and tree planter" based in New York City is spearheading a jokey campaign with a serious point entitled "Don't Sleep With Mean People."

The idea is exactly what it sounds like: Inspire people to intentionally avoid sleeping with jerks. Brinkman cites Aristophanes' satirical Lysistrata as his inspiration: In the play, the women of Greece refuse to have sex with men in an attempt to stop the Peloponnesian War. Though he holds on to some of the satire, Brinkman hopes to do more than sexually frustrate mean people into changing their ways; he actually wants to prevent mean people from reproducing, which would change humanity for the better, he says.

Brinkman hopes to raise $15,000 through the Rockethub-Popular Science #CrowdGrant Challenge to make both a sharable, fun music video as well as a longer, scientifically informative documentary regarding evolution and genetics.

But, some internet vigilantes aren't too pleased. The idea has been attacked on all fronts: Isn't this eugenics? Will the project actually teach people about evolution? Is there even scientific consensus that meanness is a genetic trait? Et cetera.

Brinkman has obviously done his best to respond to these charges, and interested readers can venture down that internet wormhole themselves. When you've reached the end, you can decide how you feel about the project, and whether or not you'd like to support his quest to stamp out meanness. All other aims aside, it's hard to deny that just spreading the phrase would be a good thing-a "Golden Rule of Sex," as he describes it.

For more on the Rockethub-Popular Science #CrowdGrant Challenge, go here.

I'm on a small boat. A woman in a bikini stands next to me dumping gallons of blood into the sea. Beside her, a man in board shorts strings barracuda heads onto large fishhooks as crooked as a witch's finger, and in front of him, toward the bow, an engineer fiddles with an instrument that looks like a cross between a model rocket and a giant hypodermic needle. I'm covered in fish guts.

We are in the Bahamas, in a marine preserve, fishing for sharks. We have a research permit to do what's otherwise illegal in this country, but the boat and its crew have a rough, paranoid quality to them, everyone as superstitious as pirates. Since I came on board, we haven't had a single strike. The ocean seems empty, the crew is agitated, and I get the sense that I'm being blamed for the dry spell. The lead fisherman tells me flatly, "I think you're bad luck."

Just as the captain raises the anchor to motor to another spot, a spool of 900-pound monofilament begins unwinding furiously off the stern. A buoy attached to the line pinballs across the choppy ocean. A cameraman in a wetsuit readies his $50,000 waterproof HD-camera rig. A scientist grabs a steel lasso and a cordless drill, and an engineer snatches up the rocket-looking thing, which includes a plastic tube filled with sensors and a satellite transmitter.

The rocket-looking thing is one of the reasons we're all here. It is a prototype of a new kind of shark tag, one designed to last decades, not days or months as current models do. It will record a shark's behavior every few seconds, beaming back data when it can. If the tags work, scientists will get an unprecedented look into the secret lives of sharks. But in order for them to work, we have to tag a shark. And to tag a shark, we have to catch one.

Then the line goes limp, and the hook comes up empty.

The shark's role in our oceans is almost entirely a mystery. Because scientists typically track sharks for only a few months and because sharks live for decades, the gaps in our knowledge are immense. We don't know-with much detail-their migration patterns or where they mate and give birth. More important, we don't understand their contribution to the health of the oceans, though it's almost certainly significant. Most sharks are apex predators, akin to lions on the African savannah or polar bears in the Canadian Arctic, and those predators typically serve critical roles in maintaining the ecosystem.

"The ocean is like a fancy Swiss watch. If you take a major spring out, it's not going to work as well as it is supposed to."One thing scientists do know is that sharks are in trouble. Every day, more than a quarter-million sharks die as bycatch or as a result of the finning trade. Some ecologists say populations are down by 90 percent from just a few decades ago. No one knows what might happen if they fall beneath a certain threshold or disappear entirely.

"The ocean is like a fancy Swiss watch," says Neil Hammerschlag, director of the marine conservation program at the University of Miami. "I don't know how all the gears work together. But I do know that if you take a major spring out, it's not going to work as well as it is supposed to."

Hammerschlag, 34, spends nearly every weekend out on the water in South Florida, armed with hooks, lines, and tags. As a result, he is intimately acquainted with the limits of current technology; most tags, he says, are too expensive and don't last long enough. Two years ago, he partnered with Marco Flagg, an engineer, to develop a new device. The production version of the HammerTag, he says, will last years and maybe even decades attached to a shark; it will be hundreds of dollars cheaper; and it will provide a thousand times the data.

Data, Hammerschlag says, will lead scientists to identify nurseries and hunting grounds for the first time. It will reveal life cycles to determine when the animals are most vulnerable. And with enough of it, conservationists could influence legislators. Without effective legislation, Hammerschlag says, shark populations will surely continue to decline­-and the ocean with them.

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The day I'm supposed to fly from San Francisco to the Bahamas to go shark tagging, I fall ill. The fever's slight, but the cough is the kind that makes your brain rattle in your skull. I manage to let Hammerschlag know I'll miss the plane and try for one the following day. Then I pass out. Twenty-four hours later I wake up and still feel terrible, but I pack my fins, underwater camera, mask and snorkel anyway. I send the crew members of the research vessel an e-mail saying I'll be arriving by seaplane-the ship is already 25 miles north of Nassau. They write back that they'll send a speedboat to pick me up. At the end, they sign off, "Request you bring five cases of beer."

A red-eye brings me to Nassau, where I deplane, pick up the beer-five cases of High Rock-and meet my seaplane pilot, Paul, who is wearing jean cutoffs and no shoes. Paul has lived in the Bahamas his entire life and has been flying nearly half of it. He rests his toes on the aluminum pedals and says, "Once you fly barefoot, you can never live anywhere else."

The vessel has a robotic sub, a six-person helicopter, full dive gear, surfboards, jet skis, and small, medium, and large tender craft.After jamming all the beer inside Paul's tiny plane, I climb in. Paul tells me the research vessel is about 30 minutes away, somewhere between the Berry Islands and Chub Cay. When I first heard that we'd be working from a research vessel, I imagined some grotty live-aboard, given the current state of scientific funding. Not so. The vessel I am flying to meet has a robotic sub, a six-person helicopter, full dive gear, surfboards, Jet Skis, and small, medium, and large tender craft. It also has shag carpet, a hot tub, a bar, an interior design reminiscent of a James Bond set, and a fully uniformed crew, including a chef from Australia. Hammerschlag, it turns out, has some wealthy backers who are willing to let him use their boat. The only stipulation is that passengers sign a nondisclosure agreement. Apparently, the ship's owners would rather not be named.

As we approach the Berry Islands, Paul angles the plane toward the ocean. The stall sensor goes off a split second before its pontoons slap the water. We're at low tide, so the water is only about knee deep. I kick open the door and hop down into the lagoon. After a little while, a zodiac from the research vessel shows up. I begin loading the beer and my luggage into the craft, and I ask the driver, "What did I miss?"

"We just caught a 10-foot hammerhead and two juvenile tiger sharks," he says.

"Where's Neil?" I ask.

"He got cut up pretty bad wrangling the second tiger."

Pretty bad, it turns out, means 15 stitches in his finger and blood everywhere. When I see Hammerschlag on the research vessel, he is wearing a large bandage and looks concerned. "Please don't make a big deal out of my cut," he says. "I grazed my finger on a tooth. It wasn't an attack." He then launches into a volley of shark trivia meant to be comforting. For instance, while shark attacks number 80 a year globally, he says cases of humans biting other humans average an impressive 1,600-and that's just in the state of New York. Also, sharks tend to mistake humans for food in brackish water, not in clear salty water like the Caribbean. And he explains that during the last moments of their attack, sharks don't rely on sight or smell. Instead, they rely on gel-filled electromagnetic sensing pores called the ampullae of Lorenzini for direction. It is because of this sixth sense, Hammerschlag theorizes, that he is standing before me with a bandaged hand. As the crew maneuvered the shark onto the stern, it sensed the whirling metal propeller nearby and twisted violently. Without malice or intent, its tooth-corkscrewed on one side to cut through turtle shells-simply happened upon the soft flesh of his finger. It was not an attack.

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I have time only to drop my baggage by a bunk when I get a tap on my shoulder. It's time to go tagging. I jump on the little boat that will serve as our platform. Scattered over the decks I see spools of lines and giant hooks. It is then that I realize that shark tagging is actually a lot like sport fishing-but with a rodeo at the end. My colleagues on the boat, a combination of shark conservationists and eco-conscious volunteers, would disagree with me. Science and sport are separate, they would say. But it sure does not look like it.

Amid the fishing-like gear, sit several buckets and pipes drilled with holes and stuffed with guts. These are called SADs, or shark attractant devices, and they are thrown overboard to bleed all night in the warm sea. There's also a four-foot-long cooler filled with chum: fish heads; rotting barracuda, jack, grouper; and a few gallons of fish blood. I ask Hammerschlag what he calls it, but he doesn't have a name other than "the cooler," which sounds boring. I christen it "the Chum Coffin."

As soon as the hooks are out, we chum. The waters run red with blood and white with chunks of hand-mashed fish from the Chum Coffin, leaving an oily sheen on the surface. A field tech, nicknamed Dirty Curt, warns divers to stay clear of the slick.

"Did anyone explain to Brian how Curt got his nickname?" Virginia Ansaldi, Hammerschlag's lab manager, asks.

"No, and don't tell him," Hammerschlag says. Curt, who looks a bit like Popeye, says, "Please don't call me Dirty Curt."

The process of taking rotten fish steaks and picking off thumb-size bits of meat is called "chunking." It tends to leave the chunker smelling badly. But this afternoon it is our only diversion. We get no bites. As the day grows long, a tropical storm creeps overhead, which punctures the sea with pinpricks of rain. I have no rain jacket, and I am cold. My cough rattles back to life. Dirty Curt calls it a day. We might not have gotten a shark today, but with all the chum we're dumping, we're bound to get some tomorrow, the crew tells me. At the worst, we'll get some the following day-the last day of the expedition. That night, the air conditioning breaks. I sleep on deck, under a towel and a bright moon.

A marine-animal tag is a simple device. It consists of a sturdy outer shell, sensing and communications equipment, and a means to connect the tag to the shark. Some tags transmit their data by satellite link; others quietly log information until they're recovered by fishermen. Some tags measure general location with light readings; others use magnetometers to get a more accurate north-south position and compass headings.

No matter the tag, though, none are particularly high-tech. Satellite communications that move at one bit per second. The kind of processor used in cheap digital wristwatches and discount microwave ovens. You'll find more groundbreaking componentry in your grandfather's cellphone.

If tags are such crude devices, why haven't scientists made better, cheaper, longer-lasting ones? On a breezeless afternoon, while standing on the bow of our tagging boat, I pose this question to Marco Flagg, the designer of the HammerTag. One reason, he says, is that higher-end electronics use more power, and power management is critical at sea. Another, Flagg tells me, is that there isn't a lot of money to be made selling marine-animal tags to scientists, with their high standards and tiny budgets. The economics look even worse when devices last years.

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But economics aren't Flagg's concern. He's a self-taught engineer who makes his money doing contract work for the Special Forces and deep-sea outfits. At the time of the expedition, he is developing underwater positioning systems for submarine war games and an alert system for scientists so fascinated by their surroundings that they don't notice they're about to run out of air. Tags are just a sideline, and he probably never would have started working on them if a 17-foot great white hadn't mauled him 18 years ago.

The attack happened off the central California coast, while Flagg was testing a prototype diver-locator beacon. He was in a kelp forest off Point Lobos about 50 feet down when a set of jaws clamped around his torso. The shark probably would have killed him had it not chipped a tooth on his dive tank and the beacon's metal housing, prompting it to retreat. Flagg managed to get to the boat, where he kept his wetsuit on fearing his guts might fall out, but remarkably, he needed only 15 stitches. When a local shark scientist later interviewed him about the attack, he offhandedly mentioned he needed new tags. Flagg, who had every reason to avoid sharks for the rest of his life, said he'd give it a try.

Since then, Flagg has made various improvements to marine-tag design, but it wasn't until he met Hammerschlag that he felt compelled to rethink tags entirely. Hammerschlag challenged him to create a tag that could outlive a shark. For an engineer, it was a problem in need of solving.

Flagg began by rethinking the power source. Marine-tag makers have typically eschewed the use of photovoltaics, opting instead for batteries. The assumption was that sharks don't surface long enough to make use of solar panels. Flagg tested this notion by attaching a solar-powered tag to his back and diving to 100 feet. To his pleasant surprise, he found that his panels still charged effectively in as little as 2 percent of the surface light.

With a new power source in hand, Flagg turned to energy management. He reduced power consumption by 90 percent by better controlling sensor activity and satellite transmissions. Paired with a backup battery that can last two years without recharging, the improved tag, he calculated, could last 50 years, perhaps longer.

Because his new tag was so much more energy-efficient, Flagg could add new sensors, allowing scientists to gather multiple data streams at once, including precise depth, acceleration along three axes, highly accurate location information, and water temperature. He also tweaked the transmission system. The HammerTag can send daily reports whenever it makes a satellite connection, but it also has a failsafe. When it senses that a shark is no longer moving and has reached an unsurvivable depth, it assumes the shark is dead, and a small explosive charge separates the tag from the body. The tag then floats to the surface and transmits a final batch of data.

Even with the improvements, Flagg reduced the price of his tag dramatically. While commercial devices with less capability and a shorter lifetime can cost up to $5,000, the final HammerTag will cost about $2,500. The lower the cost, Flagg argues, the higher the rate of adoption and the more shark data scientists will have.

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Over the course of the second day, we troll different spots, most of which are shallow enough that I can see straight to the sea-grass-covered bottom. When the shallows turn up nothing, we try our luck at the edge of a 6,000-foot trench. We tell stories to pass the hours. Ansaldi recalls the time in Hawaii when she had to stomp barefoot on the carcass of a rancid tuna to create a paste for chumming. Dirty Curt is busy plotting. He says the current will take the bait into the deeper water. "In 30 minutes, we should have a shark," he says. But as anglers know, predictions are a dangerous business. No sharks appear.

Something bites our line, and the buoy takes off. The boat goes from lethargic to frantic. I get ready to jump in the water.The crew chums more aggressively. I help Ansaldi haul the Chum Coffin onto the rail of the boat, where she dumps a few gallons of blood directly into the sea. Austin Gallagher, one of Hammerschlag's PhD candidates, is bailing fish over the stern so furiously that he slips and falls headlong into a crimson pool of gore. No matter how much bait we spread, though, our hooks go unnoticed.

That night, I hear crew members whispering to each other about their bad fortune. Dirty Curt comes up to me and says, "We haven't caught a thing in the last two days, and the only thing that's changed is you."

"Well, for surfers, not finding sharks is the best luck you can have," I say, laughing weakly. Dirty Curt just stares.

When I board the tagging boat, I find that Dirty Curt has been considering my luck too and has fashioned me a charm: a necklace of monofilament looped through the eyes of a rotting rock hind grouper. He hands it to me roughly. "Don't come within 50 feet of the boat without this necklace," he says. I figure I'll do just about anything to see a shark at this point, so I throw it on. Grease and blood begin to soak into my expedition T-shirt.

We chum valiantly all day, but with four hours of sunlight left, we're still coming up empty. The sharks are elsewhere. We motor the boat into a channel between Chub and Bird Cays known for its fast current. Dirty Curt says we may catch sharks as they funnel through the hourglass waterway.

Almost immediately, something bites our line, and the buoy takes off at a furious pace. The boat goes from lethargic to frantic in a matter of seconds, with everyone madly assembling gear. My job is to photograph the tagging from the ocean, providing a shark's-eye view of the event. I take off the fish head, change into my neoprene rash guard, and get ready to jump in the water. We motor into position, and Dirty Curt begins to reel in the hook, but there's no resistance. It comes up empty.

Dirty Curt looks slowly around the boat. He sees the fish head hanging from a post.
Hammerschlag, speechless, points a finger at me, and Dirty Curt yells, "No one told you to take the fish head off!"

I can feel every sullen crew member looking at my neck. I don't say anything-I just slip the necklace back on. I smell like a Chinatown fish market, and I wish this day would end.
The awkward moment is broken by the radio. "Berry Island Club here," it squelches. A radio operator from a dock a few hundred feet away has been watching us fish. "If you're looking for sharks, down current there's a local hammerhead that shows up when we clean our fish," he says.

Following the tip, we drift a mile down and drop anchor on a sandy shallow bottom. It is our last fishing spot on the trip. We have only a bit of sunlight left before the expedition's end, but it seems that everyone's just about given up. I know I have.

Hammerschlag says he would like to have other kinds of data as well. He is considering a tag that would turn on a video camera when it senses sudden acceleration. Scientists could sit in their offices while watching sharks devour a school of smaller fish. It would be an entirely new way to see the ocean.

Even current tags, which might report as few as five or six location blips a month, have revealed their share of surprises. Scientists have found that hammerheads roam hundreds of miles northeast of their predicted range. Great whites, it seems, can dive nearly half a mile down and also occasionally gather in a place between Hawaii and California known as the shark café. For scientists working to protect sharks and the oceans along with them, this kind of data is invaluable. After all, how can they protect what they don't understand?

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With an hour of light left on the last day of tagging, the team is already packing its gear, resigned to yet another sharkless afternoon. Hammerschlag tries to put a brave face on things. Even when we don't find sharks, he says, that's data. "Apex predators are rare," Gallagher echoes. "And becoming more so. They're usually found away from mankind, and so it takes more and more gear to find them."

As we exchange conciliatory banter, waiting out the day, I look up to see Hammerschlag staring at the horizon. I can't see exactly what he's looking at, just that his eyes are tracking something. Then he jumps up and yells the single word we've all been waiting to hear, "Shark!"

The buoy is running, but faster than before. Water is spraying off the float as it rips through the chop. Ansaldi and Gallagher pull in the other lines so they won't tangle. Flagg gets tagging gear ready, including a mini harpoon the size of a leather awl. Dirty Curt readies a lasso made of braided metal for the front of the shark and a rope lasso for the tail.

From a distance of about 10 yards, Hammerschlag identifies our catch as a black-tipped reef shark. It moves erratically, one minute drifting, exhausted, the next thrashing against its invisible foe. Everyone is rushing around.

I ask whether it's time to take off the fish head, but no one listens to me. I look at the lashings, which seem solid, toss off my charm, and jump into the water. I don't know what compels me to do so. Perhaps it's a sense of duty. Perhaps it's just an excuse to get rid of my foul-smelling necklace.

I spend a few seconds treading water and calming my breath and make three or four spins to scan the blue beneath me for more sharks, which I assume must be everywhere. I can't see any, other than the one we have on the line.

Hammerschlag jumps up and yells the single word we've all been waiting to hear, "Shark!"The shark is perfect, in the scientific sense. It's old enough and big enough for tagging but young enough that it has no scars from battles with fishermen or prey. I am just feet from it, floating face-to-face with one of nature's most fearsome creatures. Its jaw hangs open, and I can see row upon row of teeth. As the crew reels the animal toward the boat, I move in to touch it but stop. I feel ashamed, as if I'm grabbing for a trophy that does not belong to me. I'm not a scientist. I'm not helping the species survive. What right do I have to lay a hand on this perfect form?

Standing on the stern, Curt expertly lassoes the shark, settling the noose just behind the dorsal and pectoral fins. Slowly, he and another researcher draw the shark toward the stern of the boat, tying the lasso to the boat once the shark is close enough. Someone puts a piece of PVC pipe attached to a water pump into the shark's mouth, and oxygenated water begins to gush over its gills.

There is an urgency to the work. When tagging, scientists not only need to land a shark, they have to do so in such a quick and artful manner that the animal feels little stress. Too much strain can exhaust a shark. It might swim off only to die a few days later.

With practiced precision, silent and focused and smiling faintly, Ansaldi and Gallagher use a syringe to draw a vial of blood from a hidden vein, filling it up with blood as red as yours or mine. They also clip a piece of fin as a sample for genetic testing and drill a small hole in the dorsal fin, so they can attach the tag with a zip tie.

And then they're done. Hammerschlag signals me to get out of the water, and the team works together to loosen the lines and push the shark back into the water. It swims off under the satellite eye of science.

"[This] 14-foot tiger made frequent dives during the night to over 1,000 feet, including one massive dive to 1,300 feet lasting two hours, during which the shark was twisting, only returning to the surface to plunge to the depths again and perform the same behavior," Hammerschlag tells me by phone. "Who knows what it was doing? Perhaps it was battling in the night with other sharks. I can't say."

Brian Lam is based in Honolulu. He is still scared but no longer terrified of sharks.

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Popular Science. See the rest of the magazine here.

A cathedral in Saskatoon, Saskatechewan recently installed stained glass windows embedded with solar panels that will connect to the local electrical grid. "Lux Gloria" is one of several large-scale glass installations created by Toronto-based artist Sarah Hall. The collection is designed to blend the aesthetics of hand-painted, colored glass with the Earth-saving functionality of solar panels.

The artwork has silver, trapezoidal solar cells of a various sizes sandwiched between layers of colored glass. To achieve the transparent, reflective effect, Hall added dichroic glass to the back of the panels.

Once fully connected, "Lux Gloria" is expected to provide about 2,500 kilowatt-hours of energy annually, the equivalent of about a third of the amount used by a typical Saskatoon home. The energy will primarily power the cathedral, but if there's any juice left over, it'll be fed directly into the power grid.

Hall began installing solar-stained windows in 2005. Thus far she has four in Canada and two in the United States. However, "Lux Gloria" is the first to be connected to an electrical distribution network and incorporated into the building's existing structure making it the first building-integrated photovoltaic system.

[CBC.ca]

A few transplants out of the 28,000 performed every year involve the same organ spending time in more than two bodies. The most common scenario arises when a patient in the late stages of a disease receives a new liver or kidney as a last-ditch effort to keep him alive. If he dies shortly after, and the new organ wasn't the cause, re-transplanting may be an option.

There are a few good reasons, however, why donated organs aren't often re-gifted. If the organ is coming from someone who was so sick that he needed a new organ, it probably lived a pretty rough second life. What's more, dying involves the entire body shutting down. "The trauma of dying can injure an organ," says Robert Montgomery, the director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center at Johns Hopkins University. "And then the second person dies, and the organ is taken out again. That's more injury." But the main problem with playing hot potato with an organ is the scar tissue that forms on it within weeks after the first surgery. That tissue must be removed before a second transplant, and doing so can injure the organ too much to make it worth re-donating.

But don't worry: Organs that are suitable for re-transplantation rarely spend much time in the first recipient, which means less time for scar tissue to form. So if you're getting a third-hand kidney, chances are it's almost as good as almost new.

This article originally appeared in the September 2010 issue of Popular Science magazine.

Nearly 15 years after its invention, farmers in the Philippines could start growing golden rice within a year, the BBC reports. But much depends on what national regulators will say after Filipino scientists submit their rice samples for approval in a few weeks.

Golden rice, which is genetically modified to produce vitamin A, has had a tortuous journey from lab to field. Soon after its invention, media reports billed it as a savior for kids in developing countries suffering from vitamin A deficiency, the number-one cause of preventable blindness in children worldwide. At the same time, however, genetic engineering opponents such as Greenpeace launched campaigns against the technology. Consistent opposition against genetically modified crops has delayed every step of golden rice's development, as Science magazine reported in 2008.

Golden rice continues to see opposition in the Philippines. Opponents worry that the rice will cross-pollinate with non-modified plants, which they say has unknown consequences. (The BBC report cites worries that the modified rice will threaten "the nation's food security," but it's unclear if that means cross-pollination may cause non-modified rice to die or what.) Opponents also say there are better ways of relieving vitamin A deficiency, such as encouraging farmers to grow and eat other vegetables. The Philippine government's campaigns to fortify flour, instant noodles and other staples have already dramatically reduced vitamin A deficiency in the country.

Philippine governmental authorities will evaluate the rice's "food safety, feed safety, environmental safety, safety to humans, safety to animals, all these are considered," Antonio Alfonso, the lead scientist for the Philippine Rice Research Institute, told the BBC. The Philippine Rice Research Institute is a branch of the International Rice Research Institute, which studies golden rice. The government has no official position on the high-tech grain, the BBC reports.

[BBC]

Just four data points from a location-tracking cellphone were enough to reveal the identities of 95 percent of people in a recent study. Is that a problem for you? This new Kickstarter campaign offers a solution: a signal-proof phone case called Off Pocket.

Off Pocket, created by Brooklyn-based technologist Adam Harvey and fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield, blocks your phone's cellular, Wi-Fi, and GPS signals.

Why not just turn the phone off? What appears to be "off" on a phone might not be a pure off state. As Electronic Frontier Foundation technologist Seth Schoen explained to The New York Times, "These modes often allow the device to wake up autonomously if certain conditions are met, such as pressing a certain key or even receiving certain data over the Internet on a wired Ethernet connection." Spooky.

The Off Pocket prevents this because it is essentially an electric field-blocking Faraday cage. Often used to protect electrical equipment from lightning strikes, Faraday cages are an enclosure of metal or metal mesh. Besides guarding against lightning, Faraday cages also block the radio waves that cellphones use to communicate. A weak Faraday cage can be formed using an empty soup can and a piece of aluminum foil. (In a pinch, cocktail shakers also make a decent Faraday cages, but they're hard to carry around in a pocket.)

Off Pocket isn't the only attempt to convert the signal-blocking utility of a Faraday cage into a phone accessory. The aptly-named Faraday Bag line of accessories by British data recovery company Disklabs includes pouches to shield cell phones from signals, as well as laptop-sized options. Though now discontinued, "My Phone Is Off For You" was a commercially available handkerchief sewn with silver fibers. The handkerchief designers now sell a signal-blocking pouch called Blokket, which is available from the Museum of Modern Art's online store.

You can pre-order the Off Pocket pouch via Kickstarter for $75.

Here's a video from the creators of Off Pocket:

Amazon today opened up a new subsection of the site: Amazon Art. And this isn't for dorm-room copies of that Pink Floyd poster with the naked ladies: Amazon is partnering with legit galleries to sell originals from Warhol, Dali, Hirst, Rockwell, and more.

Amazon has lately been branching out into new areas of selling; pretty much anything you can buy, Amazon wants you to buy it from them. Hence Amazon Fresh, the FreshDirect-like grocery delivery service (currently only available in Los Angeles and Seattle), and now Amazon Art. Amazon Art is working with more than 1,500 galleries across the world to sell, it says, more than 40,000 pieces of art. Those galleries include Paddle8 in New York, Holden Luntz in Miami, McLoughlin Gallery in San Francisco, Modernbook in San Francisco, and Catherine Person Gallery in Seattle, to name a few in the States.

The selling works pretty much like any other Amazon third-party retailer; Amazon handles the listing and processing, but the galleries take care of the shipping. And shipping a fine work of art is a bit more complicated than a 48-pack of toilet paper, so you're not going to be getting free two-day shipping from Amazon Prime here. This lovely Chagall lithograph will cost you $250 in shipping, for example.

There's also a cool little option that shows you how the painting would look in a room. It's helpful, but for something this expensive, we wonder if a small JPG image on a website is enough to get a potential collector to pull the trigger. Amazon Arts's main competitor seems to be Artsy, a smaller startup backed by big names like Google's Eric Schmidt and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. But Artsy's main goal is discovery; it wants to help you figure out what you want, and connect you with smaller artists. Amazon Arts seems to be leaning on bigger artist names and higher-value works, at least so far. Still, it's almost certainly the most convenient way to blow a million dollars on a painting from your cellphone. Check it out here.

I wanted to hate the Speedform, a new running shoe from the Baltimore-based athletic apparel manufacturer Under Armour. It's an unusual shoe, not least for the much-advertised fact that it was manufactured in a bra factory rather than a typical sneaker factory. The pair I was sent has a piercing blue upper with an eye-searing red-orange sole, toe dividers (not separate toes, but visible outlines of toes), are meant to be worn either barefoot or with socks, and costs $120.

I do not look kindly upon showy neon workout wear. Working out is when I'm at my least attractive; I'm sweating and straining through basic exercises, bouncing and flailing, my body the rough shape and texture of a bag of Jello-O, so I'm trying to keep things as quiet and unobtrusive as I can. The last thing I want is to draw attention to myself. I usually work out in a pair of $40 New Balance sneakers. They're black.

And yet I found the Speedform excellent. Not perfect, and not suitable as an all-around exercise shoe--but for running, they're the best sneakers I've used.

The Speedform, says Under Armour, had the benefit of a three-year development cycle--about twice as long as most sneakers. The team was separate from Under Armour's other shoe development teams, and tasked with reinventing the entire process. Most other sneakers are made in pretty much the same way as footwear has been made for centuries: a sole, a tongue, a heel, a toe, and an arch, all sewn together. With those three years, Under Armour could axe all of that and come up with something new. The Speedform's upper is all a single piece of fabric, constructed of a custom-made material that Under Armour wouldn't tell me much about, for fear of other companies stealing the concept. (That fear is also why they refused to tell me which Chinese bra factory actually produced the shoe.) The fabric is sort of like neoprene, but very breathable thanks to holes poked through the entire body. "There's no collar stuffed full of foam or a sock liner or anything like that," says Kevin Fallon, Under Armour's creative director of innovation. That's most evident in the heel cup: when you look down into the shoe, you don't see an insole and an attached upper with a curved stiff piece of fabric around the heel: it's just one seamless curved space for your heel to sit. It looks more like an especially firm sock than a shoe, on the inside.

Slipping them on feels like a sock, too; somewhere between a regular fabric sock and those rubber AquaSox you wear as a kid when wading through creeks at summer camp. The upper fits snugly around your feet, but doesn't offer much structure in the way I'm used to. The only support, other than the natural shape of the neoprene-ish upper, is a small piece of clear hard rubber on the outside of the back of the shoe, near the Achilles tendon. There's no support whatsoever on the sides of the shoes: these are designed to keep you supported while you run straight ahead, and nothing else.

The sole is pretty standard lightweight foam, a bit spongier than most. The bottom traces the lines of the metatarsal bones in your feet, with little rubber bits on the heel and the toes.

The top of the shoe has toe-notches. These immediately bring to mind barefoot-style shoes like the Vibram Five Fingers, but whereas on the Vibrams they serve a theoretical purpose (to allow the toes to grip the ground individually), in the Speedforms they're entirely aesthetic. Barefoot-style shoes are designed to offer minimal protection, only for the bottom of the foot, to force runners to run in a certain way. They have no "drop," which is the difference in height between the height of the sole at the heel and at the toe. Proponents of barefoot, barefoot-style, and zero-drop running believe it's more natural and healthier to have no drop at all; they say a drop encourages "heel-striking," in which the first impact and most of the weight lands on the heel. But when running with a barefoot-style shoe, the forefront has much more natural muscle and fat padding, encouraging you to land there instead. (It also gives you a shortened, odd-looking stride, but proponents say it's a healthier one.) Recent studies have indicated that, at least among endurance runners, heel-striking can lead to knee problems. In typical running shoes, with a significant drop, there's lots and lots of padding in the heel area, making it comfortable to land on the heel.

So! The toe notches on the Speedform would suggest that these are barefoot-style shoes; we associate visible toes with barefoot-style shoes. But the Speedforms are not barefoot-style shoes at all, nor could they be described as "minimalist," the marketing word for zero-drop. Typical running shoes have about a 12-15mm drop, which allows for a comfortable rolling heel-strike stride (which most of us have). The Speedform is not a zero-drop shoe, but it is sort of in-between. "It's kind of a transition shoe; not a typical 12mm drop, but not zero either," says Fallon. "We think there's a market for zero drop, but not everyone can step right into those." The Speedform has a 6mm drop, which I found, coming from a shoe with a 12mm drop, very comfortable.

Anyway, the toe notches do nothing. "The toes are a guided fit," says Fallon. This means they do nothing. My toes didn't even really line up with the indentations in the shoe; mostly they just increased my embarrassment to be seen in ultra-garish running shoes by about 100 percent. I think whoever's in charge of design just decided that visible toes are showy and trendy and stuck them in there to grab the coattails of Vibram.

But despite that, the shoes manage to do something no other pair of athletic shoes I've tried does: they disappear while running. They're so light--less than 6 ounces--that you barely feel them, so you never feel like you're hauling around $120 worth of rubber and fabric and research and development. Lighter is always better! They may not be minimalist, but I didn't much notice that I was wearing shoes at all. I use them barefoot, as do many of the team that developed them, though you can wear socks if you want. They feel like incredibly comfortable socks themselves; the neoprene-like material hugs your feet up to the ankle, and there's no gap between your foot and the shoe anywhere to be found. They don't slide around, they don't feel too tight.

The texture of the bottom of the inner part of the shoe, where the insole would be if the shoe had an insole, is just a touch rough for my liking. The first two times I ran, I developed a small blister on the outside of the smallest toe on my left foot. Not great, but the last time I got new shoes, I developed giant repulsive blisters in about six different places, so the Speedform is still doing pretty well.

The shoes aren't good all-around shoes. "We're focusing on running for the immediate future," Fallon says. When I tell him I'd played tennis in the Speedforms, he kind of chuckles and says he wouldn't really recommend I try it again. And I won't; the super-flexible neoprene-like upper is snug, but tennis is a game of lunging back and forth, putting tons of pressure on the ankles--you need ankle support in your shoes. I was totally unable to change directions without feeling like my foot was about to slide off the sole entirely. Tennis + Speedform feels like a recipe for a sprained ankle to me.

They're not cheap, at $120, but they're no more expensive than other cutting-edge shoes like the Nike Flyknit ($130) or the Adidas Springblade ($180). If running is just one part of your overall workout, and you don't want to invest in multiple pairs of athletic shoes, these definitely aren't for you. But for that one task of running, I really like them; they fit better than any running shoes I've ever tried, and there are some genuinely new ideas that make other shoes feel inadequate. They feel good enough that I'll even overlook the toe notches and the neon to use them in public.

Science has done a good job of documenting the great divide between liberals and conservatives on the issue of climate change. Severalstudies have found that watching conservative media outlets, particularly Fox News, makes viewers less likely to accept that global warming is occurring or that it's caused by human activity.

A recent study from the journal Public Understanding of Science probes the underlying factors behind this, finding that conservative media like Fox News undermines viewers' trust in scientists, leading to weaker beliefs in the science of global warming.

Led by University of Arizona communication professor Jay Hmielowski, the paper explains that "different media outlets help to cue audiences as to whether a particular institution or set of institutional actors, such as scientists, share a person's values and are thus trustworthy." These cues come from both the direct reporting the outlet does on scientific data and controversies, as well as the way those stories are framed to, say, give more weight to climate skeptics' views.

The study polled a nationally representative panel of 2,497 people in the U.S. in 2008, and re-interviewed 1,036 of them in 2011, asking about things like media use, global warming beliefs and trust in climate scientists. "[C]onservative media use decreases trust in scientists which, in turn, decreases certainty that global warming is happening," the researchers found. "By contrast, use of non-conservative media increases trust in scientists, which, in turn, increases certainty that global warming is happening."

People use trust as a heuristic, a cognitive shortcut that makes it easier to judge complex issues like climate change. Because many people don't have an intimate knowledge of climate-change science themselves, they chose to listen to information from the experts they feel they can trust. And when media accounts portray the scientists who study climate change in a certain light, it affects the trust people place in them.

Since Fox News "airs significantly more stories that question the existence of human-caused climate change than stories that accept these scientific claims," as the paper notes, that negatively affects whether or not its viewers believe in human-driven climate change.

Previousstudies had also found that political ideology affects the degree to which people trust scientists. Liberals, for the most part, are more trusting of scientists than their conservative counterparts.

The researchers note that this effect has broader implications for political polarization. "The increasing fragmentation of audiences across diverse media outlets likely inhibits consensus-building and compromise on important issues," they conclude.

But, as Mother Jones points out, it could be a chicken-or-the-egg kind of situation. Conservatives have been losing faith in science since before Fox News launched in 1996. The models used in the study only measured change in trust and beliefs as a result of media use, so the researchers believe it is not just a case of people who already don't trust scientists tuning into conservative news, but they acknowledge some self-selection bias could be involved.

[Mother Jones]