Who are these (other)worldly folks? They're a team of European Space Agency scientists, and they're visiting an extensive underground cave system in Sardinia, Italy.

The team is preparing for the world's most hardcore company trip. Every year, the European Space Agency sends astronauts to chart part of the Sa Grutta cave system for several days. The program lets the astronauts see what it's like to work with one another and be responsible for each other's safety in a challenging environment. This year's trip will begin in September and include trained astronauts from Italy, Canada, the U.S., Japan and Russia.

The photo above shows the program staff during a dry run they performed in June, while the one below shows astronauts during last year's trip.

The program's participants practice space walk protocols and gather samples while they're underground. Last year, the astronaut team discovered a new species of woodlouse, a land-dwelling isopod that's related to crabs, lobsters and shrimp.

[European Space Agency]

In many respects, we view entrepreneurs as successful, self-made men and women. We value their innovation and charitable endeavors. Yet we also associate plenty of negative characteristics with entrepreneurs, stereotyping them as selfish and out to make a profit at whatever cost.

Those who later founded their own companies were more likely as teenagers to have cheated and shoplifted.The profiteering side of entrepreneurship has led some to wonder if there isn't a connection between anti-social behavior and becoming an entrepreneur. A 2009 study from researchers at Arizona State University and the National University of Singapore found a relationship between breaking moderate rules as an adolescent and later entrepreneurship, based on the retrospective self-reports of 165 American men. A larger study has now enhanced that finding, suggesting that there is, in fact, a link between teenage rebellion and entrepreneurship.

The new study from the Journal of Vocational Behavior replicates and expands on previous results by analyzing longitudinal data collected from 1,000 people in a mid-sized Swedish town over a period of 40 years, starting from when they were 10 years old.

Researchers from Germany and Sweden found that indeed, entrepreneurs do have a tendency to display anti-social behavior as teenagers. There wasn't a link between entrepreneurial tendencies and severe crimes, but those who later founded their own companies were more likely as teenagers to have been truant, ignored their parents' rules, cheated and shoplifted minor items, compared with others in the sample.

"We think that it could be the early entrepreneurial spirit," lead author Martin Obschonka of the University of Jena in Germany tells Popular Science. The same urge to innovate, think outside the box, take risks and break rules that helps an entrepreneur later in life might lead them to more destructive behavior as a teenager.

Female entrepreneurship could not be predicted by moderately anti-social teenage behavior.However, the association only held up in the case of male entrepreneurs. Female entrepreneurship could not be predicted by moderately anti-social teenage behavior. The study also analyzed latent anti-social tendencies, i.e. more subtle attitudes that might not be apparent in measures like official criminal data, and found no link between entrepreneurs and anti-social attitudes in adulthood.

So it seems there is a "dark side" to entrepreneurs, but only in a rebellious teenager sneaking out of the house kind of way, not in an all-out criminal mastermind kind of way. You don't grow up wanting to be a creative destructor without a few speed bumps along the way.

Here's one way you could charge electric cars in the future. A South Korean city is testing electric buses that get their charge from cables buried underneath the road.

The cables create magnetic fields that a device on the underside of the buses converts into electricity. (In principle, they're like enormous versions of the induction power that charges toothbrushes and smartphones wirelessly.) The charging works both while the buses are driving and when they're sitting still.

Right now, there are two of the buses and they run back and forth along a central city route that's about seven miles long, or 15 miles round-trip. The Gumi government plans to add 10 more so-called OLEV (Online Electric Vehicle) buses by 2015, according to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. Electrical engineers at the institute developed OLEVs.

Other specs from the institute include that the electromagnetic field that the cables create is weak enough to be safe for pedestrians, according to the institute. The cables also switch on only when they detect that OLEV buses are passing over. Five percent to 15 percent of a roadway needs to have cables in it for the buses to run.

Before deploying the buses, engineers tested the wireless charging on institute campus shuttles and in trams at an amusement park in Seoul.

[Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Korea IT Times]

In the whole of human history thus far, nuclear weapons have been used in anger exactly twice. Sixty-eight years ago today an American B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped Little Boy, the first atomic bomb ever used in war, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Between 90,000 and 166,000 people were killed by the bomb, some in the initial blast and others later through radiation poisoning. The scale of devastation is hard to comprehend.

Mathew Lucas's Hiroshima infographics present the information abstractly. Lucas, a graphic designer based in Macclesfield, England, told Popular Science he "wanted the work to highlight not just the the dropping of the Atom Bomb but the factors leading up to the event, the event itself and the countries involved in the process." The first, above, is a timeline of sorts. Dozens of lines--each representing a historical event leading up to the dropping of the first bomb, from Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of x-rays in 1895 to the first plutonium reprocessing in 1945--all shoot upwards from a single source. This very deliberately mirrors the rising smoke of a mushroom cloud. The second, below, features a line for every person killed by the blast, using the first-obtained casualty figures at respective distances from the blast. These rings also resemble the Enola Gay's targeting reticle.

The final image covers the globe in lines from bomb development sites until they converge on Hiroshima. It's designed to mirror the Uranium-235 atom, which was used in the bomb.

Happy Shark Week! In honor of the One True American Holiday (all other holidays are less true, due to lower shark content), I spent about an hour reading about sharks on Wikipedia. Important findings from a solid morning's research: sharks often have weird names. For example: the birdbeak dogfish. That's a real animal! Ditto the flaccid catshark and, perhaps weirdest of all, the porbeagle, which doesn't sound like a fish at all. Click through for more.

Click to launch the gallery.

This article originally appeared on PopularScience.com August 14, 2012.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people can't patent isolated human genes, which it considers a product of nature, but they can patent something exceptionally similar: cDNA, a synthesized copy from which someone has removed the noncoding parts. Given that fine line, it's not entirely clear how the decision will play out in practice or how it will affect work on nonhuman genes. But it's a hot area of debate.

Earlier this year, Dutch scientists received a patent from their country on the newly discovered MERS virus that killed at least 30 people. The researchers had isolated the virus in their laboratory from a sample sent by a Saudi doctor. The Saudi Ministry of Health protested that the patent would restrict research and lead to more deaths; the World Health Organization (WHO) said it would investigate the legality and take action. But they've got it backward. Patents are one of the best tools for quickly fighting disease.

A patent creates a financial incentive for innovation and discovery. The patent holders get something like a limited-time monopoly on their creation, and they can license full or partial rights to others (including to companies better at commercialization).

Patents also force people to share information about innovations and their commercial potential. U.S. patents are public record and must disclose enough detail for anyone to theoretically replicate the patented thing (although one can't legally replicate it without a license). After 20 years, all that actionable information becomes public domain.

A patent creates a financial incentive for innovation and discovery.Biological patents have already been saving lives for some time. In the 1920s, the researchers who isolated insulin from the pancreas patented it in order to ensure that only trustworthy drug manufacturers could make it. Then they licensed it to the University of Toronto for $1. Later, in 1984, researchers patented HIV.

A 1980 U.S. Supreme Court decision in favor of bio-patents sparked the booming biotech industry we have now. At about the same time, the European patent office decided that patenting biology was illegal. Naturally, start-ups multiplied like crazy in the U.S., not Europe. By 1998, Europe had changed course and encouraged biotech to return.

The Dutch researchers say they grabbed the rights to the new virus to prevent others from hogging them and that they'll forgo profits and share the isolated virus with other researchers for free. (Whoever comes up with a treatment or vaccine would be able to patent that product for themselves.) But the patent system isn't perfect. A greedy patent holder can just as easily stifle innovation by refusing to collaborate. Even then, there's an out: If it's in the public interest, the government can just violate a patent and risk getting sued. For example, after 9/11, anthrax scares prompted federal officials to call for unlicensed production of the treatment Cipro, which was patented by Bayer. (The company later agreed to license it cheaply.)

As viruses mutate, spreading from animals to humans to other humans, we'll always be fighting some deadly new disease. The WHO shouldn't set a precedent of investigating researchers who study microbes. Instead, it should be helping patent holders find the best scientists to collaborate with and advance their research.

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

In a house in rural North Carolina, a rectangular fold-out table is scattered with decades-old lab equipment including a centrifuge, a PCR machine (used to copy DNA), and a gel electrophoresis box that's used for measuring DNA. Animal Collective plays on the computer speakers. In his computer chair, 19-year-old Avery Ashley rolls from his desk to his makeshift lab bench. He's making agar plates to cultivate Escherichia coli-gut bacteria.

Ashley hopes to grow his first batch of glowing bugs, so he can one day bioengineer yeast cells into inexpensive, nutritional and tasty foods. But between the cost of lab equipment and reagents, doing biotechnology experiments isn't cheap. To gain the supplies he needs, Ashley is offering to trade coffee beans he roasts at home for the long list of equipment and materials he needs for his biotechnology experiments.

Does anyone happen to love coffee and order lab reagents?In February, on the DIY biotech forum, Ashley posted, "This is a shot in the dark, but does anyone happen to love coffee and order lab reagents?"

Out of nine people contributing to the thread, three people have made serious inquiries. "Everyone loves coffee so maybe someone would find that a fair deal," he says, "I figured I would give it a go."

At 16, long before he fell in love with molecular biology, Ashley had a fling with coffee, and began importing small shipments of green, unroasted coffee beans from all over the world. He roasted them at home and sold them to friends for a small profit. Now an inspired geneticist, Ashley has created a biotech lab in a spare room in the corner of his house in rural North Carolina.

Only in his second semester at Southeastern Community College, Avery intends to major in genetics.

"I just thought that it would be cool to be able to do this stuff at home, and that thought led me to do some Google searches which led to the realization that I could."

Does anyone happen to love coffee and order lab reagents?Ashley found support at the DIY biotech forum online, where he advertised his trade. Ashley will trade $6 worth of coffee for $10 worth of lab equipment. "I can roast as much or as little as you like," he says, "Every pound would be roasted to order the day of shipment."

So far, no deals have gone through. But, Ashley remains optimistic. "I'm not sure if this is viable for anyone," he says, "but why not ask, right?"

"I certainly don't want it to seem like I'm asking for a handout," Ashley says. "I'm simply offering my services in return for yours."

Nona Griffin reports on DIYbio and bioart. She was most recently a science fellow at the Eugene Lang College of the New School for Liberal Arts. Follow her on Twitter.

After years of White House initiatives, news reports and controversial healthy-eating laws, maybe finally something stuck.

In a new analysis of data from 2008 to 2011, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the proportion of low-income preschoolers who are obese has dropped in 18 states and the U.S. Virgin Islands. The changes are small-even the most dramatic was less than 3 percentage points-but statistically significant.

In addition, in 21 states and territories, there was no significant change in the number of obese preschoolers. In Colorado, Tennessee and Pennsylvania, obesity rates rose. (The new analysis didn't include all American states.)

The obesity rate downturn is a bit of good news after decades of recorded rises. Previous reports had found instances of declining obesity rates in individual cities, but this is the first to find a decreasing trend in so many states and in very young children, CDC director Tom Frieden told Time magazine.

In their report, the CDC researchers said that obesity prevention programs should continue.

Keeping kids from becoming obese may help the American population stay healthier in adulthood. Overweight and obese preschoolers are much more likely than their healthy-weight peers to become overweight or obese as adults. Obesity in adulthood is associated with a higher risk for stroke and heart disease.

The new data came from a system the government has for recording the heights and weights of kids who rely on federal nutrition programs. It included 11.6 million low-income kids aged 2 to 4 years.

CDC scientists aren't sure why these decreases have occurred and the study wasn't set up to measure that. In their report, however, they speculated on some possible reasons. State nutrition and exercise programs could have made a difference, they wrote. Changes to WIC, the federal nutrition program that supports low-income pregnant women and mothers of young kids, could have helped, they said. And there's been a national trend toward breastfeeding more, which helps kids gain weight at a healthful rate.

People who have an inflated sense of superiority about being an American are more likely to have negative attitudes toward undocumented immigrants from countries like Mexico, Cuba and Guatemala, according to a new study from the University of Texas at Arlington.

It found that a combination of group-level narcissism, or feeling an inflated sense of superiority on a collective level, combined with strong national in-group identification-when a person's identity hinges on being part of a group like Americans-may cause negative attitudes towards undocumented Latino immigrants.

"When you look at the rhetoric surrounding undocumented, Latino immigrants in the United States, the perspectives vary widely-from those who characterize undocumented immigrants as criminals to those who support expanding full citizenship rights," lead author Patricia Lyons says in a press statement. "We were interested in understanding how and why attitudes varied so widely from a psychological perspective."

Basically, group narcissists (people who agreed with statements like "If America ruled the world it would be a better place" and "America is the best country in the world") were more likely to express negative attitudes about immigrants, as measured by a survey. Interestingly, people with strong in-group identification but low levels of group narcissism did not hold particularly negative attitudes.

Narcissism is characterized by not only high self-esteem, but the need to constantly feed that self-esteem with the admiration and praise of others. Group narcissism leads to feelings of superiority and entitlement, as well as the need for praise for the collective group, not just on a personal level. It's also associated with hostility toward other groups when that superiority seems threatened. The researchers suggest that perceived threats to jobs, resources or even the cultural norms of a country could be behind strong anti-immigrant feelings.

A somewhat disturbing tidbit from the study:

The study appears in the August issue of Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences.

[Phys.org]

Choosing the right university can seem like the most important decision of your life. And picking the right major and program is only half the battle. There's also the fact that for many students higher education is about expanding more than just the mind. It's also about expanding your repertoire of objects you can successfully make into a bong.

In that vein, the Princeton Review just released its 2014 list of top party schools (and top sober schools). Contrary to popular lore, these party schools aren't just for the dumb jocks of the world. So we cross-referenced the list of great party schools with a list of top-notch science programs, from U.S. News & World Report's 2010 listings of best science grad schools.* Empirical data: Nerds love a good party, too.

So without further ado, we present the Top 5 Schools For People Who Want To Rage After They Leave The Lab:

5. University of California, Santa Barbara

Party ranking: #2
Science ranking: Physics #9

We're thinking weekends at UCSB are all beachfront parties with Jell-O-shot-rocket launchers. If that's not a thing yet, work on it. Theoretical physics doesn't make for great keg conversation, but these guys are probably whizzes at beer pong.

4. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Party Ranking: #3
Science ranking:
Chemistry #6
Computer Science #6

U of I, located deep in the Midwestern heart of Illinois, has some big science programs, and some even bigger ragers. With a grand total of 95 fraternity and sorority chapters, it's got one of the largest Greek scenes in the country. And surely, with such a good computer science program, those frat houses are stocked with a robot bartender or two. Or 11.

3. Penn State University

Party ranking: #9
Science ranking: Earth Sciences #6
Statistics #20
Physics #20

Who knew Penn State was hiding a bunch of Earth science geniuses behind all that football swagger? We're guessing it's all pep rallies and tipsy geological sampling on this campus. And those physics majors. We won't claim causation here, but what we seem to be seeing here is that physics majors like to party. Or good parties lead to good physics? Someone run some stats on that.

2. University of Texas at Austin

Party ranking: #15
Science ranking:Chemistry #12
Computer Science #9
Earth Sciences #11
Math #15
Physics #15

UT-Austin placed on so many rankings, it's hard to decide what to make fun of. Chemistry and partying do seem to go hand in hand, according to these lists. But I guess we already knew chemistry could lead to too much fun.

1. University of Wisconsin-Madison

Party ranking: #8
Science ranking: Chemistry #9
Computer Science #12
Statistics #15
Earth Sciences #16
Math #17
Physics #17
Biological Sciences #19

Talk about well-rounded. Our No. 1 nerd-party school, UW-Madison, is on pretty much any list you can think of. Are these the most balanced kids ever, or is it just that with 42,000-plus students running around, this school can be a little of everything? Either way, we know it's got to be inundated with sheer nerdom. Rage on, fellow nerdlings!

As for the sober sciencers, it looks like your best (and only) option is Cal Tech, home of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. No drinks near the rovers!

California Institute of Technology

Sober ranking: #17
Science ranking:
Chemistry #1
Earth Sciences #1
Physics #1
Biological Sciences #5
Math #7
Computer Science #11

Not the best at staying sober (that distinction goes to Brigham Young University), but the best at a lot of other things. Guess that counts for something.

* Yes, our comparison data is slightly less than scientific. When push came to shove, we chose partying.

A team of virus researchers is set to perform studies on H7N9 that may make the bird flu more resistant to drugs and more easily transmitted between humans. The scientists announced their plans today in two major science journals, Nature and Science.

H7N9 first arose in eastern China this spring. Since then, it has killed 43 people and sickened 90 more. The outbreak is now under control, but the research team says the virus could gain traction again this winter flu season, so they want to do so-called gain-of-function studies to learn more about the virus quickly.

Gain-of-function studies are controversial. While it's normal for international scientists to study disease outbreaks intensely, gain-of-function studies take it another step by making epidemic pathogens more dangerous, if only within labs. When scientists wanted to publish the first gain-of-function studies of H5N1 avian flu in 2011, public outcry led them to stop further studies for more than a year.

In short, it's a question of whether the risk is worth the knowledge we gain about epidemic flus. Opponents worry that the ability-added viruses could escape from labs by accident and infect people. They also worry that terrorists could use published papers about the studies as recipes for bioweapons.

Proponents say the studies offer information that experiments on viruses in their natural state don't. For example, researchers will test how many changes are needed to make H7N9 spread more easily than it currently does, to help them predict whether such a change is likely to happen naturally. "If only a few mutations are needed, the risk may be greater than if many changes are required," Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a pathologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wrote to Popular Science in an email.

Safely done gain-of-function studies "will improve pandemic preparedness," John McCauley, the director of the World Health Organization's flu research center, said in a statement.

The latest gain-of-function studies face tougher oversight than before. U.S. health agencies announced today that they've set up a new level of review for any H7N9 studies that would make the virus easily transmissible in droplets carried in the air-the kind of invisible droplets that people make when the cough or sneeze, for example. U.S. agencies would be the primary funders of any gain-of-function H7N9 studies.

Prior to this announcement, researchers from all over the world performed many studies on H7N9 in its natural state. They've sequencing the virus' genetic material, tracked how it's transmitted and observed what happens to ferrets-a lab animal often used for flu studies-infected with the virus.

In one of the latest pieces of H7N9 research, scientists in China reported yesterday that they've found the first evidence that H7N9 is able to spread between people. The World Health Organization has said it thought this likely happened in isolated cases, but scientists had previously only seen proof of the virus moving from infected birds to people. H7N9 still seems to have a tough time spreading between people, as the sick man the Chinese scientists studied passed it only to his daughter, who tended to him, but not any of his dozens of close acquaintances. H7N9's difficulty in passing between people has helped keep it from spreading further and becoming a pandemic.

This article originally appeared on Salon.com.

Since Nebraska first jump-started the trend back in 2010, close to a dozen state legislatures across the country have passed laws banning abortion at 20 weeks. Most of these restrictions are given grave-sounding titles like the "Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act," or some near-identical riff on the words "fetal," "pain" and "protection." All of them, no matter what they're called, rest on the stated premise that a fetus can experience pain at 20 weeks, and that this is a sufficient justification to ban all abortions after this gestational stage.

But "fetal pain" in the popular discourse is a nebulous concept, one that lawmakers like Jodie Laubenberg, Trent Franks and others haven't much bothered to define or help ground in available medical evidence.

Probably because there really isn't any. The limited research used to support such claims has been refuted as pseudoscience by both the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. (Not to mention smaller studies from researchers at Harvard University, University College London and elsewhere.)

"We know a lot about embryology [in the field]. The way that a fetus grows and develops hasn't changed and never will," Dr. Anne Davis, a second-trimester abortion provider, associate professor of clinical obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University Medical Center, and consulting medical director at Physicians for Reproductive Health, told Salon. "And what we know in terms of the brain and the nervous system in a fetus is that the part of the brain that perceives pain is not connected to the part of the body that receives pain signals until about 26 weeks from the last menstrual period, which is about 24 weeks from conception."

Because the neural structures necessary to feel pain have not yet developed, any observable responses to stimuli at this gestational stage - like the fetal "flinching" during an amniocentesis - are reflexive, not experiential. Which is to say, the fetus at 20 weeks can't actually feel anything at all. Which is to say, the fundamental justification for these laws is a really big, really popular lie.

"That's just where the science is. You can have an opinion about that, but it doesn't change the information," Davis says. "Science is not going to get the brain to connect faster." (Neither, it should be noted, will the hoping, wishing or foot-stomping of politicians like Marco Rubio and his anti-choice contemporaries.)

And yet, despite ample research debunking claims about fetal pain, the political narrative arguing otherwise continues to dominate. Facts about embryology and the science of gestational development are often ignored outright or framed as somehow extraneous to the debates taking place, and reproductive rights opponents have been wildly successful in selling these bans as emotional issues - that support for them should come from the gut, not from thick tomes of medical facts.

And, at least superficially, their framing seems to be working. According to recent survey, a narrow majority of Americans claim to support these bans, and, troublingly, the pseudoscience behind fetal pain has also begun to crop up in the examination room among women seeking abortions.

"Patients are now asking me about fetal pain. This was not happening 15 years ago," Davis says. "When you're sitting in your office with a woman who is 22 weeks into a pregnancy with a severe fetal anomaly - she's depressed, she's stressed and now she's worried, ‘Is my baby going to feel pain?' It's just another thing these women have to struggle with. And why? These are created concerns. They are not based in science, they are based in politics."

And it's the life experiences and medical needs of these women, unfortunately, that are all too often left out of the debate. Most people don't know - and don't want to know - why women have abortions at or after 20 weeks, which account for approximately 1.5 percent of all abortions.

The reasons why vary, though they are never simple, as Davis knows quite well.

"A patient of mine - already a mother to a young child, really happy about the pregnancy, husband is really happy about the pregnancy - went in for her first ultrasound and was told everything was fine." But when the patient came back at 18 weeks for a follow-up, Davis says, her doctors told her to brace for difficult news. The fetus' heart was not developing normally, and would require multiple operations to fix. Still, after meeting with a pediatric cardiologist to discuss what it would mean to raise a baby with chronic health condition, the couple decided to continue with the pregnancy.

Then came their 20-week checkup.

The heart condition had gotten worse, and the latest scans picked up new information: a systemic problem had emerged, affecting other organs in the body. The outcome was dire. After a week of painful discussions within their family, the couple decided to terminate the pregnancy - at 21 weeks.

Fetal conditions like this, though rare, Davis says, are not diagnosable earlier in the pregnancy. "You cannot see this stuff in the first trimester. A woman could be in there every day up until 18 weeks getting ultrasounds and a doctor still wouldn't be able to catch these issues any earlier."

Which is exactly why medical discretion is so important, and why it's so crucial that lawmakers allow doctors to be doctors - medical experts who know how to serve the best interests of their patients. But laws like Texas' 20-week ban eliminate a physician's ability to be adaptive to the unique circumstances of their patients' health. Instead, nominal exceptions for the health and life of the mother in these laws can make otherwise safe abortions dangerous by forcing doctors to wait until their patient's condition deteriorates before they can legally act to terminate a pregnancy and save their lives.

"You have a lady who ruptures her membranes - there's no way she's going to get to 24 weeks," Davis says. "But just looking at her now? She has normal vitals. So what do you tell her [in a state with a 20-week ban]? ‘You have to sit in the hospital and wait until you get very sick. Then we can end the pregnancy.'

"If you did that under any other circumstance it would be wild negligence. If you had a patient that you knew was going to get an infection and did nothing, what kind of doctor would you be?"

But that is precisely what these laws do - force doctors to choose between breaking the law or saving a patient's life. It's a lose-lose situation that is becoming frighteningly more common.

But the reproductive rights movement's greatest weapon against such legislation - and anti-choice activists trying to control the narrative on abortion care in the United States - is the truth, Davis says.

"Real situations in real life are very different than what we're hearing from politicians. The whole debate - the way the whole thing is framed - is very shaming to patients. Let's bring respect back into it. Treat people with respect. Have compassion for patients. Do what's right for them."

But mostly, she says, it's about letting doctors be doctors, and keeping politics out of it.

"Let us do our jobs. Let us take care of our patients."

Katie McDonough is an assistant editor for Salon, focusing on lifestyle. Follow her on Twitter @kmcdonovgh or email her at kmcdonough@salon.com. MORE KATIE MCDONOUGH.

How do you document a war zone without putting even more lives at risk? One way is to observe from a distance, which is what a team of researchers has been doing to catalog the ongoing civil war in Syria.

For 10 months, ending in May, the American Association for the Advancement of Science used images beamed back from satellite company DigitalGlobe to gather data on the damage in Aleppo. Aleppo is Syria's largest city, and it's been the site of some of the bloodiest conflict between rebels and government loyalists. There were a mere nine images retrieved from three orbiting satellites during that time, but those images do tell a story: the damage in the city is widespread, but certainly not evenly distributed. Here you can see before and after photos of the damage:

During the study, 713 "incidents of destruction," places where buildings and infrastructure had been damaged, were observed and mapped. In areas controlled by the government, only six incidents occurred. The rest of the incidents happened in places under rebel control, contested areas, Kurdish-controlled areas (also contested), or weren't definitively on either side's control or being contested. (You can see the distribution in the map at top.) The distribution lends credence to reports that government forces have been bombarding rebel-controlled areas with long-range weapons like missiles.

The researchers admit the study has limitations, like the satellites not being able to make out damage in areas with a dense amount of buildings, but even accounting for that, the damage (at least what's viewable from satellites) seems one-sided.

[AAAS]

The Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT) will be one of the largest telescopes ever made, and will allow scientists to observe distant realms in unprecedented detail. It will display the far reaches of the universe at 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope, and will also be able to measure the spectra of these distant objects. The GMT, located in Chile's Atacama Desert, will be completed in about 10 years and will require extraordinary precision and care.

Seven "perfect mirrors"-20 tons of glass in each-will be enclosed in a structure the height of a 22-story building. The quality of both the mirrors and their calibration is immensely important and challenging: "We have to make this optic precise enough so that when the light travels 5, 10 billion light-years and comes and hits our telescope, we don't scramble and lose that information that's traveled so long," explains the director of GMT, Dr. Pat McCarthy.

This new video shows the extreme precision with which the telescope is currently being constructed:

The GMT team knows the telescope will prove its worth. Dr. Wendy Freedman, chairman of GMT, predicts: "We will witness, directly, the first galaxies forming, the first supernovae forming, the first black holes forming, and see how the universe that we're living in now... came to be."

Twitter isn't as much a micro-blogging site anymore as it is a data pool. It can tell us what's happening during an emergency, how people are feeling about national news events, and even the difference between a geek and a nerd. Mined for the right keywords, it can also tell you where people are getting sick.

As a post doc at the University of Rochester, Adam Sadilek, now a data scientist for Google, built nEmesis, a machine learning system that tracks where people tweet about food poisoning.

The system flagged relevant stomach and food-related updates from a pool of 3.8 million million tweets posted between January and April in New York City, then human eyes (recruited through Amazon's Mechanical Turk) determined the 6,000 that seemed most indicative of food poisoning so that nEmesis could learn what data to look for. Tweets that contained phrases like "throw up," "pepto-bismol" or "my tummy hurts" were flagged as being related to foodborne illness (and to the tweeter being a total whiner).

The health scores nEmesis assigned to restaurants based on the number of tweeters who fell ill after visiting came close to the scores food inspectors had submitted to the city's health department. The program can then color-code restaurants based on the likelihood of getting food poisoning from eating there.

Social media over-sharers will no doubt feel vindicated. There is a reason to tweet about your every cough and tummy grumble. It's providing data to science!

nEmesis (paper here) will be presented at the Conference on Human Computation & Crowdsourcing in November.

Japan yesterday unveiled the largest ship in its fleet since World War II. The 19,500-ton Izumo can carry up to 14 helicopters.

Because Japan's constitutionprohibits it from building up a military beyond what's necessary for self-defense, the country is referring to its new helicopter carrier as a "helicopter destroyer" (carrier ships are capable of attacking coastal cities; destroyers are limited to fighting at sea).

Izumo is larger and can carry three more helicopters than the Hyuga-class helicopter destroyers, the previous largest ships in Japan's fleet. For comparison, both are only a fraction of the size of a fully loaded American Nimitz-class carrier, which weighs in a 97,000 tons.

The Izumo's ability to transport helicopters quickly over water will be crucial to rescue missions and disaster relief. But that doesn't mean the Izumo lacks military capability, as helicopters are useful for anti-submarine warfare and bring great surveillance powers to Japan's military.

Of course, helicopters aren't what make this news, really. There's one fighter currently in production that might work from a helicopter carrier, and that possibility is getting a lot of attention from people worried about strained relations between Japan and China. The big question about the Izumo is whether or not it can carry the vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) variant of the F-35B Joint Strike Fighter.

In the past, helicopter-like VTOL V-22 Ospreys have successfully landed on Japan's smaller Hyuga-class helicopter carriers, but it's unclear whether the Izumo could launch an F-35B. To take off vertically, the F-35B sends exhaust from its jet engines straight down, which lifts the plane and also melts the helicopter landing pad. (The U.S. Marine Corp is reinforcing helicopter landing pads in preparation for this technology.) Plus, a carrier needs large, strong elevators to lift a craft like the F-35B from hangar to deck, and again, it's uncertain whether the Izumo's elevators would be up for the task.

Watch video of the unveiling below:

Whether or not crustaceans like crabs and lobsters can feel pain remains a hot-button issue. After all, humans regularly do things like boil them alive, a process that leaves some people feeling a bit unsettled as their dinner rattles around in the pot in what sure sounds like death throes.

According to Robert Elwood, a professor of animal behavior at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the evidence strongly suggests crustaceans do actually experience pain, contrary to some previous work. Elwood has been conducting a plethora of experiments probing whether or not crustaceans can actually feel pain, or whether they simply respond to a stimulus like an electric shock reflexively, and announced the finding at the Behavior 2013 conference in Newcastle, UK today.

Elwood and his colleagues have experimented to see whether crabs can learn from electric shocks. In one experiment, crabs were more likely to relocate when they received electric shocks inside their shelter than when they did not receive any shocks. In another, hermit crabs shocked while inside a type of shell they tend to prefer were quicker to move into new shells when presented with the opportunity.

Yet as Zen Faulkes, a University of Texas-Pan American invertebrate neuroethologist, pointed out in a blog earlier this year, it's hard to determine if electric shocks are painful for crustaceans in the same way they are for us. Crabs have been known to rip off their own injured limbs, for example, which would be almost unthinkably painful for a human. Electric shocks also provide a completely different kind of stimulus than being immersed in boiling water, so there's a possibility the results might not translate to that seemingly cruel action.

It does seem to call into question the Crustastun, a supposedly trauma-free, compassionate method of knocking off crustaceans within a few seconds--via electrocution, which in light of Elwood's research doesn't seem so trauma-free after all. Zen, for his part, suggests using ice as an anesthetic for your soon-to-be-delicious meal.

Elwood conceded that "assessing pain is difficult, even within humans," according to Nature, but told conference attendees there is "clear, long-term motivational change [in these experiments] that is entirely consistent with the idea of pain." From his research, he concludes that crustaceans should be protected from the kind of "extreme procedures" they are currently subjected to -- things we wouldn't do to mice, such as lobsters having their legs removed while still alive or crabs being kept tightly bound for days before being sold.

[Nature]

The words that consistently pop up in published literature can tell us a lot about individual and cultural trends and values. Are people talking about their emotions more? Are people feeling depressed?

Patricia Greenfield, a psychology professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, decided to use word frequency patterns to identify how people's values have shifted over time from the sociological concepts of gemeinschaft (translated from German as community, reflecting a rural society with a subsistence economy) and gesellschaft (translated as society, reflecting an urban, wealthy, technological culture).

By analyzing word frequency data from more than a million books published in the United States and Britain between 1800 and 2000, using Google Books Ngram Viewer, Greenfield found that our language has slowly shifted to focus on individualism and material gain. We now use more individual-focused words like "get" and "choose," rather than group-focused words like "give" and "obliged."

Greenfield was looking for more than a simple change in slang or word preference, so she also looked at data from synonyms and related words to see if they underwent the same usage changes. For example, for "choose" and "obliged" she also looked at usages of "decision" and "duty."

Words like "choose" and "get" have increased in relative frequency over time, an uptick Greenfield attributes to the historical shift from living in more spread out, rural places to living in a more urban, individualistic environment with an emphasis on materialism. As materialistic word frequency increased, the concurrent decline in words like "obliged" and "give" might indicate a departure from rural life that revolved around greater social responsibility.

"Get" usage took a little dip during World War II and the civil rights movement, suggesting a possible decline in self-interest in favor of the collective good during those times.

Nonetheless, other signs indicate that these days, we're largely looking out for No. 1, and perhaps bucking more traditional societal structures. Since 1800, words like "self," "unique" and "individual" have been increasing in relative frequency, while "authority," "obedience," "belong" and "pray" have been on the decline.

"This research shows that there has been a two-century-long historical shift toward individualistic psychological functioning adapted to an urban environment and away from psychological functioning adapted to a rural environment," Greenfield said in a statement. "The currently discussed rise in individualism is not something recent but has been going on for centuries as we moved from a predominantly rural, low-tech society to a predominantly urban, high-tech society."

Next, Greenfield hopes to replicate her findings with Google Books data in other languages, including Spanish, Russian and Chinese.

The study appears in the August 8 issue of Psychological Science.

You hear myths of old-school locksmiths who are so in tune with their trade, they're able to copy a key just from looking at a photo of it. The old-school-looking guys I talked with at one local shop said they couldn't do that, but now there's an app that can. KeyMe, the company that brought robot locksmiths to New York, has launched an iPhone app that is able to generate coded instructions that any locksmith can read, and make a copy of your key anywhere in the world.

The coded instructions are short and sweet. There's one line that tells the smith which blank to start with. There's a second line that's a series of numbers--say "3,1,4,1,6"--that tells the smith at what depth to cut the key's teeth.

Now, if you're ever locked out of your house, "you can walk into a mom and pop locksmith and give them instructions to make your key," says KeyMe founder Greg Marsh.

Just as with the KeyMe robot kiosks, you must have the foresight to snap a picture of your key and store it in KeyMe's cloud database before you accidentally lock yourself out. Simply storing your key's instructions is free. KeyMe charges $9.99 to retrieve the instructions when needed, and then you'll pay whatever your local locksmith charges to cut the new key. (Those in New York City may also use their app-stored data to make a key at a KeyMe kiosk.) Overall, the total cost should be an order of magnitude less than the $100 that New York City area locksmiths usually charge to let people in after they've locked themselves out.

The app also lets you share your key's instructions with someone else-perhaps a new roommate.

The app is only available for Apple devices. "Android is on our radar, but it will not be super soon," Marsh says.

I tried the app yesterday with Marsh looking on. You must take a picture of your key with the app, following its exact instructions, for it to work. You can't use any old picture of your key. That ensures that any key copiers must sign up for the app with a verified email address and credit card and must have physical possession of the key.

The app's user instructions, which include putting the key on a white piece of paper and taking two pictures from a certain distance, help generate photos that the app's software is able to "see" and understand. After all, the app must measure the depths of all of the key's teeth in the photo and distinguish the teeth from shadows or the background. Crumbs on the paper can confuse the app, as can putting the key on a shiny surface, such as a tabletop, instead of a piece of paper.

I found the app easy to follow and soon had a digital copy of my front door key stored. I mail-ordered a physical copy, too, for $4.99. (Printing an instant copy direct from a KeyMe kiosk is $20.)

Marsh and his engineering team aren't the first to demonstrate they're able to automatically copy a key from a digital photo. Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, made a splash in 2008 when they wrote software that could recreate the instructions to make a key from a photo of the key taken 200 feet away.

Benjamin Laxton, who worked on that software as a graduate student, tells Popular Science he's not surprised someone has thought of a commercial product using computer vision to copy keys. After publishing a paper on his work, he even got calls from people who wanted help turning his idea into a product. "It seemed like it was going to happen at some point," says Laxton, who now works on computer vision software for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Having an app like KeyMe in the world doesn't necessarily make your keys much less secure, Laxton says. "Before this app or before the paper we wrote, it was entirely possible for a skilled individual to make a copy of a key after only having it for a short period of time," he says. "This lowers the bar, I guess, a bit more."

People should be aware this technology exists and be careful of leaving keys lying around, he says.

After generating the instructions for making my front door key in the KeyMe app running on Marsh's iPhone, I wrote the code down in a notebook and took it to a locksmith close to the Popular Science office, Elite Locksmith on East 33rd Street. The instructions looked like a jumble of letters and numbers to me, but the two men working there said they would be able to cut a key from it. They would charge more for such a job-"probably like ten bucks," one locksmith says, rather than their usual $2.50. The extra charge is for the extra work it takes to look up the different teeth depths and cut the key by hand.

One of the smiths pointed to the code in my notebook and said, "You should keep that in case you ever lose your key."