Done with your lunch? Good, here we go: You may know that implanting feces from healthy people into sick people can treat the deadly gastrointestinal infection caused by the bacterium Clostridium difficile. But Emma Allen-Vercoe and her colleagues at the University of Guelph in Ontario believe that they can improve on this wholesale transplantation strategy. They're working to tailor mixtures of gut microbes for individual patients. Unfortunately, these bacteria are finicky and don't grow well in petri dishes, so her team makes artificial poop.

PopSci: What's the special recipe for fake feces?

Emma Allen-Vercoe: It contains things like the indigestible cellulose that's left after a meal has passed through your digestive tract and down to your distal gut, the end of the line for digestion. It's pretty nasty-looking. It's a brown sludge, it's got lumps of starch, and it's kind of gloopy. It doesn't look or smell very appetizing.

PS: How do you turn that sludge into a fecal transplant?

EAV: Robogut. Robogut is made of six big beakers full of that sludge that are warmed to body temperature. And we add the bacteria from a small amount of human feces. Since oxygen is poison to anaerobic gut bacteria, each vessel is sealed to make it airtight, while sensors monitor temperature and acidity.

PS: What's the worst part about working with synthetic poop?

EAV: Because of regulations, we can't just flush the waste down the toilet. So we have to sterilize it by cooking it at a very high temperature and then throw it out. That means we have to do it at night when no one is there, because the whole building starts to smell like poop.

PS: What's the most surprising thing you've learned from your research?

EAV: That microbes are not the enemy. Within the next 20 years, we'll be moving away from this idea that pathogens cause most disease. We'll be looking at diseases that are brought on by a breakdown in the microbial ecosystem-of an imbalance in the good microbes that already live in your body.

PS: What keeps you up at night?

EAV: Because governments are making it very difficult to get the medical supervision for a fecal transplant, there's this sort of underground culture of people doing them on each other, just getting the information off the Internet and then transplanting without any supervision. With no proper surveillance, they could be doing far more harm than good. I am terrified for them.

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

Meet Phidippus clarus, a common species of jumping spider uncommonly photographed in a portrait style by USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring researcher Sam Droege.

Droege runs a Flickr page with photos of other animals done in a similar style, and they're consistently breathtaking. But look at the eyes on clarus! Plus, those metallic colors are very fashionable.

About 300 million years ago, the supercontinent of Pangaea started to break apart into the continents we live on today. An Italian designer who goes by the name Massimo put Pangaea back together, then added on modern political boundaries, creating the map you see here. Brazil and Nigeria were neighbors, once upon a time.

[Capitan Mas Ideas via Flowing Data]

"It depends on what you mean by dirt," says Milan Pavich, a research geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

"The oldest sedimentary rocks are about 3.9 billion years old-they're in Greenland-and at one time, they were dirt. That's pretty close to the time the Earth formed."

But those rocks are just proof that dirt existed on the planet way back then. The stuff in your backyard is much fresher. "Most of the dirt you see today is from the past two million years," Pavich says. About two million years ago, the planet underwent two major changes that drove the formation of new dirt. Global cooling and drying enlarged the deserts, and dust storms redistributed that dirt around the globe. Meanwhile, glaciers began extending from near the poles, grinding rocks, soil, plants and anything else into dirt as they moved over the land.

Dirt is still being produced all the time, albeit in much lesser quantities. Beneath the soil's surface, rocks constantly react with rainwater or groundwater and slowly grind together to break down into smaller minerals. So in that respect, dirt really isn't that old. Then again, Pavich notes, a lot of what came out of the big bang was essentially dust, which then condensed to form the stars and, later on, planets. "If you think about it," he says, "dirt and its origin are older than the stars."

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

Last month, a study indicated that dolphins call each other by names, of a sort: they have a particular whistle unique to each dolphin, and when a dolphin hears its own whistle-name called, it responds. And now a study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggests that dolphins can remember the names of other dolphins for decades. That'd be useful if you want to grab an old buddy and go conching.

Jason Bruck, at the University of Chicago, tested 43 bottlenose dolphins of varying ages that have been shuffled around, tank to tank. The dolphins had all lived with each other at some point, but for different lengths of time; some had lived together for a few months, some for years. Some lived together at the time of testing, and some hadn't seen each other for decades.

He recorded all of their individual whistle-names, as well as the whistle-names of a few dolphins that were unfamiliar to his test dolphins. Then he played these whistle-names through an underwater speaker to gauge their reaction. The dolphins responded very obviously to the whistle-names of past friends, approaching the speaker eagerly, hovering around it, sometimes even trying to whistle back at it. But for an unknown dolphin's whistle-name, they showed far less interest.

The dolphins showed a pretty amazing length of memory; one remembered a tankmate from over 20 years prior. "This research shows," he writes in the paper's abstract, "that dolphins have the potential for lifelong memory for each other regardless of relatedness, sex or duration of association." You can currently read the article for free over here.

[via Time]

Inspecting nuclear weapons sites, while an important part of international treaties limiting a nation's number of warheads, can be expensive and tricky, depending on the availability of trained inspectors, the ability of those inspectors to survey facilities unhindered, and the travel budgets for getting inspectors to weapons sites.

In an effort to make its job a bit easier, the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance recently sought public submissions for crowdsourced efforts to support arms control. Since much of inspection is mundane work like making sure a fence is still intact or a closed site is indeed inactive, giving these tasks to private citizens could allow trained inspectors to focus on more complex jobs.

One of the runners-up in the competition is a design by Chip Mappus, a scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Mappus came up with a concept for a game app in which researchers set tasks for players to complete, and then players go out with smartphones to take pictures and log GPS locations.

Players would be rewarded for submitting photos and GPS data with unspecified perks-we'd hope for a system similar to Foursquare with badges for "most sites inspected" or "the mayor of this sketchy warehouse."

Another app idea, by defense consultant Allen Childers, draws inspiration from the "Where's Waldo?" children's books. In Childers' proposed app, civilians take pictures of sites, which are then posted online for other people to look over, scanning for out-of-place missile transporting trailers or other treaty-relevant signs of weapon moving. Inspectors would also have access to these pictures, and could use their trained eyes to spot irregularities and suspicious signs from halfway across the world.

If these apps end up being made, the creators might grab a few tips from this crowdsourced astronomy project.

[Ars Technica]

Making it through British customs with a shipment of knockoff designer duds might be getting a little bit tougher. Scientists at the UK's National Physical Laboratory have devised a way to determine the exact textile makeup of fabrics that look and feel alike with terahertz, a type of radiation between infrared and microwave that can pass through fabric and plastic. The technique could eventually be used to identify textiles and ensure quality control in pretty much any other industry that uses fabric.

Terahertz radiation is currently used in astronomy and has potential applications in biomedical imaging and in surveillance. Terahertz time-domain spectroscopy essentially shoots waves of electromagnetic radiation through a fabric, then measures how the radiation comes out on the other side.

Each type of fabric produces a specific signature based on the way the terahertz radiation waves scatter while passing through it. It's sensitive enough to detect changes in fabrics that might look and feel similar, like natural and synthetic silk or regular wool and the more prized (and costly) Merino variety.

The technique could help prevent fraudulent fashions from making it past the customs official who can't tell the difference between Burberry and plaid, diminishing the £3.5 billion the British fashion industry claims to lose each year because of cheap knockoffs. Customs officers are allowed to seize counterfeit clothing and footwear, but first they need to be able to identify it. Before that can happen, though, a database would need to be created of all the different transmission signatures so that customs officials could match the radiation patterns to the textile. On a broader scale, terahertz spectroscopy could also be used in quality control for any industry that uses fabrics, including sports and medicine.

While useful, this kind of detection likely won't spell certain death for counterfeits. It can only identify differences in fabric type, so a knockoff made with the same fabric would make it through undetected. Plus, fakes made in the country wouldn't have to pass through customs.

The finding is described in Applied Optics.

To show off the capabilities of number-crunching tool Manta, programmer Dave Pacheco explains how he wired a system for recording matches from the Nintendo 64 racing-game classic Mario Kart 64.

The post is a little on the wonky side, but more or less, Pacheco's system records what's happening on-screen (through a gadget called an iGrabber) and translates it into numbers. He explains:

The resulting data, which you can check out at a dedicated site for Kartalytics, isn't completely scientific, since it's just the same group of people playing the game, and it doesn't have a lot to say about which strategy will guarantee domination (damn). But the game has a reputation for being punishing, and that's reflected by what Pacheco calls "Keithings," times where a player in first place is jettisoned to fourth place in less than five seconds. Happens quite a bit.

If you're inclined, you can read the details on how to set up the system in the original post here.

[Joyent]

Genetically modified food has all the ingredients to scare the pants off us: Chemicals! Technology! Big ag! The uncertainty of modern development! Like it or not, most of what we eat in the U.S. has been touched (or tainted, depending on your viewpoint) by genetic engineering.

Especially when it comes to corn. As much as 88 percent of corn grown in the U.S. is genetically modified. But is that as bad as anti-GMO activists make it out to be?

Over at Slate, Jon Entine has a scathing critique of Elle magazine's nail-biting feature on genetically modified corn (categorized in the "hair and beauty" section, because, uh, sickness makes you ugly?), in which writer Caitlin Shetterly explores a diagnosis that her years of sickness were the result of an allergy to genetically modified corn.

The problem, Entine points out, is that the science to back up that claim just doesn't exist. "There has not been one study that links the genetically engineered corn or any approved genetically modified food on the market to allergies," one of his sources, plant geneticist Pamela Ronald, told him.

"I quickly discovered that blaming GMO foods for any kind of health problem is controversial in the medical and biotech worlds," Shetterly wrote in her piece, though her piece does little to explain why, beyond the notion that powerful agricultural corporations like Monsanto are preventing research into unknown allergens that might arise from genetic engineering.

Entine goes on:

He also reached out to many of the scientists interviewed in Shetterly's piece, who claimed the piece mischaracterized their statements.

Food scientist Richard Goodman, for example, told Entine "The risks from GM foods are infinitesimally small," though no such viewpoints made it into Elle's pages. "It's all ‘what if, what if, what if' doomsday scenarios. It's like worrying that we might be hit by an asteroid."

While there's certainly a complex story to be told on the subject of GMOs, Elle seems to have passed right by it into conspiracy theory territory.

The full takedown is worth a read. The original feature is here.

I am frequently asked by journalists to recall the most surprising finding of our twin studies. The study of religion and belief in God is the one that always comes to mind, and the results are not easily accepted by many people. Most people can accept diseases or height and even weight being genetically heritable to some extent, but when it comes to our personal beliefs we tend to be more skeptical. For many, the idea that there is a genetic component to our faith--or lack of it--is a stretch too far and damages the concept of self-determination that we hold so dear.

Nevertheless science has shown us clearly that one level of belief in God and overall spirituality is shaped not only by a mix of family environment and upbringing--which is not surprising--but also by our genes. Twin studies conducted around the world in the U.S., the Netherlands and Australia as well as ours in the U.K. show a 40 to 50 percent genetic component to belief in God.

What is striking is that these findings of a genetic basis for belief are consistent even across countries like the U.S. and the U.K., with their huge differences in beliefs and church attendance. For example, in the latest surveys in the U.S., when asked, 61 percent of white Americans say they firmly (ie. without any doubt) believe in God, compared with only 17 percent of firm believers in similar populations in the U.K.--greater than a threefold difference. The opposite scenario of non-belief is also true--only a tiny 3 percent of the U.S. population report being firmly atheist compared with 18 percent in the U.K. As well as belief, participation follows separate trends in the two countries. Some form of weekly church attendance is now nearly three times higher in the U.S. than the U.K.

Skeptics among you might say that the twin studies showing similarity for belief are just reflecting some cultural or family influence that wasn't properly corrected for in the study design. However in one study of adopted twins, the researchers looked at religious belief in a number of adopted twins raised apart. They found exactly the same result--greater similarity in identical twin pairs, even if raised apart. The conclusion is unavoidable: faith is definitely influenced by genes.

The conclusion is unavoidable: faith is influenced by genes.To uncover in more detail exactly what part of belief or religion was genetic, an unlikely research partnership was formed between two academic twin experts--Nick Martin, an extrovert atheist Australian, and Lindon Eaves, a British lay preacher originally from Birmingham.

In an attempt to separate the '3 Bs'--belonging, behaving, and believing, the three elements that make up religiosity--they asked a range of questions attempting to get a handle on individual differences in spirituality. They defined this as "the capacity to reach out beyond oneself and discover or make meaning of experience through broadened perspectives and behavior." The scale is based on three main factors: self-forgetfulness, transpersonal identification and mysticism. Questions in the test they designed included:

• "I believe that all life depends on some spiritual order or power that cannot be completely explained"--true or false?
• "Often when I look at an ordinary thing, something wonderful happens--I get the feeling that I am seeing it fresh for the first time"--true or false?

They estimated the heritability of spirituality to be around 40 to 50 percent, which is quite high considering how tricky it is to measure. Other U.S. studies using even more detailed questions in larger numbers have found similar or even stronger genetic influences. These studies demonstrate our variable but innate inherited sense of spirituality, which affects how we perceive the world, ourselves and the universe. This is independent of our formal religious beliefs and practices and, strangely, largely independent of family influence.

The positive feedback and inner reward we get from these spiritual or religious thoughts could also account for some differences. One individual during prayer or meditation may feel a rush of immense joy and fulfillment from the reward centers of the brain (in the hypothalamus), and someone else may feel only the uncomfortable chair and be worrying about the shopping list. While the spiritual side is important for some, others find great comfort in religious practice and attendance.

Studies show that for twins living at home, there is no clear genetic influence or different from their parents in their practice. However, genes start to play a role, once the twins leave the nest.

Elizabeth and Caroline were identical twins who came from an academic middle-class English family with an atheist father and agnostic mother. The sisters were very similar in appearance and character, both admitted to being stubborn, although Elizabeth was the naughtier of the two. At primary school, they both became interested in Christianity and much to their father's surprise and displeasure they were baptized and prayed regularly. Their parents split up soon after and their father left home. They went through the normal teenage tantrums and slowly lost interest in organized religion and prayer.

After school they went to different universities. Caroline quickly rediscovered her faith; she became an even more committed Christian and joined student societies and church groups. Elizabeth began discussions with an Islamic group, initially arguing against religion, read the Quran to dismiss it and then found herself being drawn to and then converted to Islam. Both married and had two kids--Caroline with an English Anglican husband, and Elizabeth with a Pakistani Muslim (from then on she wore the veil--hijab--in public).

After leaving home, children with the right predisposition can often switch religions.As she now says: "I strongly believe that Islam is the one true faith and Christianity is wrong. I endured many taunts and bigotry about my style of dress and beliefs and was often frightened to go outside. I once had to witness my 3-year-old disabled son being spat at." Caroline is similarly strongly opposed to her sister's Islamic views and "her lack of belief in Jesus being the Messiah really upsets me." She has had an easier time socially, but misses being close to her sister and having a drink with her. She says: "I will never forget the fact that she very pointedly refused to sing hyms at my big day--a Christian wedding." Both twins admit being saddened that neither could bear to act as a guardian of the other's children because of their faith, although ironically they have much more in common genetically with each other's children than other aunts and share the some proportion of genes with them.

Sadly their mother, Annie, developed terminal metastatic lung cancer, which had the positive side effect of briefly bring the family back together. The closeness and bonding was short-lived. She admitted: "I was initially bemused and then distressed by their fierce disagreements over faith, which being a self-confessed agnostic I just couldn't relate to. My main hope was to live long enough to see the birth of my two new grandchildren." When, against medical odds, she did, and was still alive nine months later, she had a revelation. "I think I've found God," she told her daughter Caroline as she recounted an epiphany moment she had while out walking. "I felt his presence all around me--a spiritual presence. It's not just because I'm about to die--I'm not afraid of death. But I've changed my mind, there is more to life than just the current one." She died shortly afterward. Annie's genetic predisposition for faith, likely suppressed by her secular surroundings and her dominant atheist husband, may have been the crucial factor that influenced her daughters' uncompromising beliefs.

Where did this religious fervor come from? Neither had religious parents, and it is unlikely that the school alone could have had such an influence. Other twin studies have shown that after leaving home, children with the right predisposition can often switch religions, and that which form they then choose is not down to the genes but to life events or some mysterious unknown force.

This article was excerpted with permission from Identically Different: Why We Can Change Our Genes Copyright © 2012 by Tim Spector. Published in 2013 by The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc. www.overlookpress.com. All rights reserved. Tim Spector is Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at King's College London and a consultant physician at Guy's and St. Thomas' Hospital. He set up the Twins UK register in 1993, the largest of its kind in the world, which he continues to direct. He has appeared in numerous television documentaries and is often interviewed by the media on his team's research.

Each year, graduates from London's Royal College of Art--the U.K.'s preeminent art school--show off projects at the SustainRCA Show. The idea is to give the spotlight to innovative concepts and prototypes that will help us as we hurtle toward a warmer, more crowded, energy-hungry world. Pretty much anything pre-apocalypse (or maybe even post-apocalypse!) is fair game. You can read more about the show here, and we've put together seven awesome projects for your perusal, including a hand-powered washing machine, a landmine-removal kit, and more.

In the world of chip design, there's one spec people typically care about most: speed. But as demand for mobility increases, efficiency has become as important a quality as any. In the Intel 4th-Generation Core Processors, engineers rethought the way components communicate to create the world's most efficient and powerful laptop chips. The processors, which began appearing in devices this summer, should run 10 to 15 percent faster than their predecessors and can extend a device's battery life by two hours-the biggest bump in Intel's history.

MORE ON BOARD

The more components a chip has, the more room manufacturers have to install larger batteries in their devices. Intel shrank the platform controller hub-a traffic cop that routes data to RAM, graphic cards, and hard drives-and moved it from the motherboard onto the chip.

SMARTER STANDBY

The new chips support an "active idle" mode, in which programs keep running (receiving e-mails and tweets or streaming music) while the laptop is closed. Visual processes, such as graphics, stop, allowing some devices to run for up to 13 days.

SHARED DATA

Previously, if the central processing unit (CPU) needed to work on something that the graphics processor (GPU) had loaded-say, a piece of game code-it would have had to make a copy. On some chip models, the CPU and GPU share the same cache, so they won't waste energy copying data.

LOW-VOLTAGE MEMORY

Intel engineers designed the chips to work with the RAM commonly used in phones and tablets (known as LPDDR3 RAM). The memory runs at 1.2 volts; the typical PC RAM needs 1.5 volts.

WATTAGE DROP

Depending on the chip, power consumption bottoms out between six and 11.5 watts. The average laptop processor, by comparison, can gobble as much as 35 watts.

INTEL U- AND Y-SERIES CORE PROCESSOR

Processor cores: 2
Clock speed: From 1.3Ghz

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

The U.S. National Security Agency remains at the center of controversy this summer, nine weeks after The Guardian and the Washington Post broke the news about its PRISM online data-mining program. While the many additional spying scandals that have come to light since then have all been technically legal, they're really weird-because the NSA's actual job is to monitor foreign communications.

How does the agency rationalize its spying on U.S. citizens? Here are five tricky justifications.

1. The NSA plays "three degrees of Kevin Bacon."

When the NSA has a suspect, it can collect information three degrees away from that person. This means it can look at the suspects' phone records, the phone records of everyone the suspect called (1 degree), the phone records of everyone they called (2 degrees), and finally the phone records of everyone they called (3 degrees).

The justification: Terrorists are probably friends with other terrorists.

The result: The NSA can cast a crazy broad net! This reporter has 260 contacts in his phone book. Assuming all my contacts have about that many people as well, one degree away is 67,000 people. Two degrees? 17,576,000 folks. By three degrees, the NSA could have collected phone records on 4,569,760,000. That's, um, billions. It's unlikely the NSA is actually collecting this information, but a limit of three degrees from a suspect is no limit at all.

2. The NSA hides behind metadata.

The voice part of phone calls is strictly protected legally. The metadata, or peripheral information of a call, isn't. This includes the number dialed, the number doing the calling, the duration of the call, and, if applicable, the cell tower that picked up the signal. These data points are all deemed the property of the telephone company that carries the call.

The justification: The NSA can use this legally available information to quickly catch criminals. Most recently, the agency collected this data from Verizon right after the April 19 bombings at the Boston Marathon.

The result: Your phone company is legally obligated to hand your phone records (which can be surprisingly revealing) over to the government when it asks.

3. The NSA asks for information companies already have.

PRISM, the major online spying program revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, is a giant interface and archive for information already collected online by social media and other companies.

The justification: PRISM doesn't directly monitor activity online, but instead serves as a repository for information requested by the government from companies like Google or Facebook. It's a needle-in-the-haystack approach to finding terrorists, in which the NSA tries to find more needles by adding as much hay as possible.

The result: The hay is tons of private information about American citizens.

4. The NSA sifts through everything that crosses the border.

When electronic communications like emails and text messages cross the border, NSA computers scan them in an effort to gather information about foreigners under surveillance.

The justification: The NSA needs to keep tabs on foreign individuals the government has decided to track.

The result: The NSA is reading your emails and texts.

5. The NSA assumes you're foreign until proven otherwise.

The NSA tries to determine whether communication is foreign through strategies like matching known phone numbers against an internal database. Whenever an attempt to determine one way or another fails, the program assumes the person in question is foreign and continues unabated.

The justification: It's the agency's job to monitor foreign threats.

The result: You're not a U.S. citizen, sometimes.

We've all sucked down a milkshake so quickly that it causes a sudden headache-the dreaded brain freeze. But . . . milkshake. Tasty. Must. Drink. Could chugging the rest of that shake cause lasting brain damage?

First, let's get one thing straight. "This condition is referred to as an ‘ice-cream headache,' " says Stacey Gray, a sinus surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. "It's a very technical term." Although there's no published paper saying as much, a milkshake slurped too quickly probably does not actually lower brain temperature. Besides, Gray says, the temporary pain can't do any harm because it has nothing to do with the brain.

There are two schools of thought on what causes the ice-cream headache. The drink may chill the air in your sinuses and cause the blood vessels in the nasal cavity near your forehead to constrict, creating pain similar to a migraine. Or perhaps it touches off a branch of the trigeminal nerve in your mouth, triggering a pain response in the nerve that's responsible for facial sensation.

The condition has not drawn research funding from the National Institutes of Health, so no one has performed the simple experiment that Gray says would settle things once and for all. "You could block the nerve with an injection of lidocaine, cool the area, and if it still happens it's probably a circulatory-system thing," she says. "But no one seems that interested."

Even if a cold drink was able to temporarily chill your brain a few degrees, it wouldn't be a big deal. Neurosurgeons including Johns Hopkins Hospital's Rafael Tamargo often take the brain from its cozy resting range of between 98.6˚F and 100.4˚ all the way down to 64˚. "There are situations, particularly for correcting blood-vessel problems like an aneurysm, where we cool the brain in order to stop circulation to an area to perform our work safely," he says. When the brain is chilled to 68˚, its metabolism and electrical activity drop to 15 percent; surgeons reduce it to 64˚for good measure.

"Even if the patient wasn't anesthetized, at that temperature they would be in a noninteractive state, unable to sense stimuli or produce a response," Tamargo says. "But once you warm the brain up, it picks right up from where it left off. It's not harmful at all." So whether your brain is frozen or not, if you can handle a little pain, slurp away.

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

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The Mugar Memorial Library at Boston University is hosting an exhibit of artifacts from the American Civil War. The show, up until the end of August, was designed to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. For those of you who can't make it to Boston in the next couple weeks, we've assembled a small sampling of items on display. They address a range of intriguing questions about the war, not least of which is this: Were Abraham Lincoln's hands really that big? Yes, yes they were.