A decade and a half after it was first invented, genetically engineered rice may soon grow in farmer's fields for the first time, in the Philippines. Just as some in the U.S. oppose GMO technology, however, so do some Filipinos.

After seeing the BBC's report this week that Philippine scientists are close to submitting golden rice-rice engineered to make vitamin A-for regulatory approval, I looked for local news on the development.

Farmers entered test fields and ripped up 400 experimental plants, Philippine tabloid paper Remate reported yesterday. (It was all over in 15 minutes, Malaya Business Insight reports.)

One of the farmers' worries is the cost of GMO seeds and the privatization of the nation's staple crop, spokesman Bert Autor told Remate. The International Rice Research Institute expects golden rice's price will be the same as regular rice. The rice's inventors and patent-holders arranged for their licenses to be available without royalties.

The protesting farmers uprooted nearly all of the plants in one field so that one field test can't continue, according to a statement from the Philippine Rice Research Institute. Nevertheless, golden rice research in the Philippines will continue, the institute said in another statement.

The farmers also believed that golden rice would be unsafe to eat. Others in the country share their worries. In June, a group called Green Moms held a rally in Quezon City to protest golden rice. Protestors PhilStar talked with were primarily worried about the rice's safety for kids.

Both the farmers and the Green Mom members seemed opposed to genetically engineered food generally. Many major science and health organizations say that just because a food is genetically modified doesn't mean it's unsafe. Groups such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Health Organization support the testing of new GMO plants as they're developed, as each could affect human health differently. Safety tests would be part of the Philippine government's approval process for golden rice, Philippine Rice Research Institute project leader Antonio Alfonso told the BBC.

The Internet is so mind-bogglingly huge that it's tough to grasp exactly how gigantic it is. The site Every Second on the Internet breaks it down, counting out the Tweets, Facebook statuses, and emails (oh lord, you guys, so many emails), then graphing how many of each are sent every single second. Here are just a few that we could fit on a single page, but head over to the main site to see them all.

This robot is putting down roots. Recently at the Living Machines conference in London, researchers from the Italian Institute of Technology debuted a system of robotic roots that can grow and turn in response to stimuli in their environment, just like their live counterparts.

Called the Plantoid project, the prototype aims to mimic the way plants can penetrate and explore the soil with their roots.

Watch it work:

Robotic roots could be used to monitor changes in the soil, with sensors to measure nitrate, pH, water, temperature, and even gravity. Creator Barbara Mazzolai says they could also be used as a medical device. "The ability to bend, grow at low pressure and with low friction while adapting to the surrounding environment could offer a new vision for medical tools," she told New Scientist. Imagine vaguely tentacle shaped sensors growing inside you during surgery. Bleck! But also, awesome.

[New Scientist]

Sally Ride, the first American female astronaut to go to space, will get a posthumous Medal of Freedom, the U.S. White House announced yesterday.

Ride flew aboard the shuttle Challenger in 1983. She had been part of the first class of American astronauts to include women and non-white people. (You can read about her and her colleagues' training in this 1982 issue of Popular Science.) Today, the 2013 class of NASA astronauts is diverse and includes four men and four women.

After her time with NASA, Ride worked as a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego, and founded a company, Sally Ride Science, to encourage girls to pursue science careers. She also served on NASA committees investigating the 1986 Challenger and 2003 Columbia explosions. After the Challenger accident shook Americans' faith in NASA, Ride wrote a now-famous report recommending that the agency focus equally on four goals: monitoring the Earth with satellites, exploring the solar system, establishing a base on the moon and visiting Mars with humans.

She died in 2012 at age 61.

In 1955, days after officials introduced the "new, wonder vaccine" against polio to Roanoke, Virginia, local news station WSLS-TV asked some parents in the street about it. Of the four adults they interviewed, three said they planned to get their children vaccinated. "I do think it's a worthwhile project and I hope it's going to be a success," one woman said.

Another woman, however, seemed a bit more skeptical-a sentiment that some modern parents might recognize. "I think I shall wait until I see some of the results from the other children," she said.

That old footage is now available online, thanks to a new project by the University of Virginia Library. In 2010, the National Endowment for the Humanities gave the library a little more than a quarter of a million dollars to preserve and make digital copies of WSLS-TV broadcasts dating from 1951 to 1971, along with printed anchors' scripts. The library released the archive this week.

You can keyword search the archive, but the library has highlighted some of the coolest stuff. There are reports on the desegregation of local schools and the Civil Rights movement. And there's a page dedicated to the introduction of the polio vaccine to Roanoke, which served as a distribution center for the shot for most southwestern Virginia counties. The development of a successful polio vaccine was big news throughout the U.S.

Interestingly, the archive shows that at the beginning, scientists didn't know everything about the vaccine they were giving out. A decade after the first Roanokans received shots, a 1965 WSLS-TV broadcast carried the city health commissioner's call for locals to begin or finish their immunization program. Re-immunization was important, he said, "because the length of time a person is protected by either [the Salk or Sabin forms of the vaccine], is still a matter of conjecture." The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommend three or four shots for lifetime protection against polio.

[University of Virginia Library]

Many of us had assumed our feeble Gmail passwords were secure enough to keep prying eyes out of our email accounts. (I used a letter, a number, and a symbol!) But with revelations that the NSA can pretty much demand any email service turn over valuable and private information about our email, more attention has been turning to secure, encrypted email services.

In the past week, two of the most prominent--Lavabit and Secret Circle--have shut down voluntarily rather than be forced to comply with real or potential NSA requests (which are legally binding). Lavabit shut down after, we assume, receiving legal demands for information. Lavabit posted a message saying the creator can't "legally share" what the impetus for shutting it down was, but that he chose that option, along with erasing all his data, rather than submit to government demands. Secret Circle did not receive a requests, but merely "saw the writing on the wall" and voluntarily deleted everything.

So what can you use now?

Email encryption is pretty wonky, but basically it boils down to this: email is basically not secure. There are steps you can take to protect yourself, through both free and paid services, but the U.S. government has shown its willingness to compel even legendary secure email services like Lavabit--which Edward Snowden used for five years--to shut down. If you're truly paranoid, here are your options.

Instant Messaging

Instant messaging, often referred to in security circles as "synchronous communication," is, surprisingly, often more secure than email. The way to go here is with a setup called OTR, or Off The Record Messaging. OTR was set up to provide deniability for metadata, which means that unlike with many less-secure kinds of email, even if somehow you get your hands on a transcript, there's no way to prove exactly who was communicating. Each individual message is highly encrypted using AES keys, which means that any hacker would have to decrypt each message to get the entire conversation--and decrypting one AES key is a task worthy of a team of hackers. OTR is also fairly easy to use; you can get a plugin for popular chat clients like Adium, Pidgin, and IM+ (the latter costs extra).

Back to Email

But, okay, say you need asynchronous communication, meaning you have to send a message and have the receiver open it at some later point. There are ways to make email really difficult to crack, though the fact that the U.S. has the legal authority to demand metadata throws a real wrench into the whole setup. Still! There are still some for-pay email providers (largely based outside the U.S., now) that use powerful security like OpenPGP and public-key encryption, and which swear they won't let the man snoop in your data.

Public-key encryption is an underlying idea beneath most secure digital messaging. Each user has two keys: a public key and a private key. These are mathematically related, though it is essentially impossible to figure out the private key from only the public key. Imagine that you have a box. Only you have the key to open it. But you can send this box, unlocked, to anyone, so it's public, and they can put whatever they want in the box. Then that person locks the box, so now even they can't get it open. They send the locked box back to you, and you open it with your private key. If you want to respond, you've got to do the same with their unlocked box. The major benefit is that you never have to share your key with anyone else.

OpenPGP is software that uses public-key encryption; it's free to use (hence the "open" part) and is available on a wide variety of platforms. It handles the creation and authentication of keys, among other things. PGP stands for "Pretty Good Privacy," which isn't that encouraging, but it's the most widely used cryptographic standard in the world.

GnuPG: GnuPG is a very popular free implementation of OpenPGP. You can use GPG with one of a variety of front-ends as a plugin for encrypting your emails through your choice of email programs, from Apple Mail to Outlook to Gmail. But they require some setup, and there are paid services that will handle it all for you and which offer advanced features like hidden IP addresses, destruction of files after a period, and offsite storage in friendlier countries. And this is a very popular option for those who can figure out how to use them; it's the most popular recommendation on this Slashdot thread, for example.

But! Assuming you're not ready to set up your own email encryption, you want to look for email services that use OpenPGP. Here are some options:

Countermail: Countermail is a paid service which keeps its servers in Sweden. It uses OpenPGP, but also has some advanced options like a hardware USB key, so nobody can even start the email process without inserting a USB drive into the computer. Countermail also does not use any hard drives during the sending of emails--they actually use CDs--so there's no chance of your IP address being logged anywhere. It's not cheap, though; you can buy it in packages, the cheapest of which is 24 months for $100.

Bitmessage: Bitmessage is a newish service, created in the style of Bitcoin. It also uses public-key encryption, but when you send an email, it mixes it with all other emails being sent, which makes it pretty much impossible for anyone in the middle to figure out from where the email was sent. They also don't have any information as to the receiver of the email, so each individual message contains the data from every other message that's also going through Bitmessage. The receiver's key, however, only retrieves the message that was intended for his or her inbox. Messages are also not archived; to keep from having a bazillion old emails floating around, being downloaded all the time, messages are deleted after two days. It's completely decentralized, which might make it the best option for those who fear the government. Who is the government going to issue a request to? There's nobody in charge!

NeoMailbox: Based in Switzerland, NeoMailbox is a traditional paid service like Countermail. It uses OpenPGP encryption, but also has some nice features, like the option to choose your own domain or use an unlimited amount of disposable email addresses. It also might be the easiest to use; it plugs into lots of existing mail services like Thunderbird, Outlook, and even has an Android app. Depending on how much storage you need, NeoMailbox ranges from $50 a year (1GB) to $110 a year (10GB).

Hushmail: Hushmail is perhaps the best-known alternative to Lavabit and Secret Circle. It's also available for free, at least for some basic features, which is pretty nice. For free, you get OpenPGP encryption, 25MB of storage, any domain you want, and a nice web-based service. For a little extra you can more storage and your IP address hidden. But Hushmail has been controversial; it's based in Vancouver, and has previously handed over records when requested by the British Columbia government. Hushmail says it won't respond to foreign demands, but I'd recommend one of the other services instead, just in case.

Another interesting possibility is Pond, an asynchronous communication service that has its messages expire a week after they're opened, with no exceptions. It isn't ready yet, though; its creator says "Dear God, please don't use Pond for anything real yet." But it's promising.

$600,000: the funding the National Institutes of Health has awarded to bioprinting projects since 2007. See how 3-D printed body parts will revolutionize medicine.

20,000: the number of cow cells used to make the first lab-grown beef patty

$15,000: the money this team hopes to raise for a campaign to get rid of mean people via natural selection

1,397: the number of known asteroids that could potentially end the world

$350: the shipping cost for a $1.15 million Andy Warhol painting (you can now buy fine art on Amazon)

$250 million: the money Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos paid to buy the Washington Post

20 tons: the weight of each of the seven mirrors in the new Giant Magellan Telescope, which will display the far reaches of the universe at 10 times the resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope

2015: the year NASA will begin the first twins health study in space

13 feet: the diameter of a crazy underground machine that will hopefully detect dark matter

30 microns: the thickness of a new Mona Lisa replica created by researchers at Georgia Tech (that's just one-third the width of a human hair!)

2 million years: the age of the dirt in your backyard

$20: the price to print an instant copy of your key from a photo

19,500 tons: the size of the new Izumo, Japan's biggest warship since WWII

70,000: the rough number of images the Curiosity rover has sent back to Earth during its first year on Mars

Sanjay Gupta, neurosurgeon and CNN's chief medical correspondent, is officially down with weed. In an article for CNN, the well-known medical personality apologized for dismissing the scientific value of medical marijuana research.

"It doesn't have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works," he wrote. "We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that."

Gupta, who changed his mind while in the process of making documentary on the subject, "WEED," found in a search of medical studies from the past year that only 6 percent investigated potential benefits of the drug, rather than its harms.

What he failed to mention is that it's impressive that there are even that many, since scientists who study marijuana's potential medicinal properties have to wade through an enormous amount of federal red tape to do so, and they're not always successful.

Marijuana is currently classified as a Schedule I substance by the federal government, meaning according to the government, it has no medical value. That makes in quite difficult for scientists to study any potential medical uses, since human medical trials require permissions from federal agencies like the Department of Health and Human Services, the FDA, and, when it comes to illegal substances, the DEA.

"With 20 states already approving it, I think advocacy has already been demonstrated," Lyle Craker, a horticulturist who directs the Medicinal Plant Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told PopularScience.com. He didn't seem particularly fazed by Gupta's announcement.

That's because Craker has been trying for more than a decade to establish a research farm to grow marijuana for medical researchers, only to be denied repeatedly by federal authorities. He petitioned for a review of the DEA's rejection of his application for a license to start the farm, but was denied in April.

Craker was working in association with the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit that sponsors medical research into the therapeutic properties of psychedelics and marijuana. Brad Burge, the association's communications director, said of Gupta's announcement, "He's one of the smartest rats on a sinking ship of medical marijuana science deniers-first one to the lifeboats."

He lauded Gupta for being willing to switch positions, and expressed hope that others might follow suit. "When well-known, respected doctors have the courage to change their minds about medical marijuana, it makes it easier for others in positions of power to follow suit," he told me via email. "If patients are lucky Dr. Gupta's gutsy admission will show regulators that even after decades of denial, it's never too late to change their tune."

"Of course, any real research is still restricted," Craker says. Even if marijuana is approved on the state level, the fact that it's illegal federally puts a huge damper on research. "As far as federally approved research, nothing is going on that I'm aware of, except for Mississippi [where the National Institute on Drug Abuse grows marijuana for its research] and a study going on in California."

For a period of 11 years, the state of California funded clinical research into medical marijuana through the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at the University of California, San Diego. A series of small human trials found cannabis to be effective in treating pain in patients with multiple sclerosis and HIV. Their final study ended last year. Unfortunately, the state's financial woes mean that the research isn't likely to be funded in the near future.

"Obviously it can be done," says Igor Grant, a professor at UCSD and the center's director. "We've conducted the studies, but I think an ordinary researcher without the support of the state would be hard pressed to do it. It's just a difficult and cumbersome process."

For now, the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research has put its experimental work on hold indefinitely. "We would like to in the future seek federal support," Grant says, "but at this time I think the federal position is not really supportive of this kind of endeavor."

Gupta may have balked at how few medical marijuana studies he found, but it's unlikely that the number of studies of marijuana as a medical therapy will be going up anytime soon. From the standpoint of the scientists who try to deal exclusively in empirical data, that's holding us back from knowing for sure what marijuana can do, either good or bad. "We've gone down this path of damming this plant material and which from all lay evidence has helped a lot of people," Craker explains. "I think it should be investigated on real clinical trials and see what happens. It needs to be approached scientifically, not with lay evidence."

And for any studies that do make it into clinical trials, Gupta wrote that he promises "to do my part to help, genuinely and honestly, fill the remaining void in our knowledge."

Read Gupta's whole piece here.

The belief that optimism can keep you alive-or at least stave off cancer-gained traction after the release of a study in the Lancet medical journal in 1979. The study followed six dozen recovering breast-cancer patients for five years. Researchers found that those who responded to their situation with a "fighting spirit" fared better-longer survival, fewer signs of residual cancer-than those who had feelings of "helplessness" or "hopelessness." Subsequent studies seemed to corroborate the result, and the benefits of optimism crept into medical doctrine.

Rather pessimistically, a few recent large-scale meta-analyses (reviews of multiple studies) have found a lack of convincing evidence that optimism really extends the lives of cancer patients. Neither positive emotions like fighting spirit nor the absence of negative ones such as helplessness or hopelessness reliably predict a better outcome. "There will always be new claims, and if people look for associations, they can find them," says James Coyne, director of the Behavioral Oncology Program at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Coyne gives one explanation for the earlier results: "If you're healthy, and if you're living in conditions that make you healthy, then you'll probably be happier."

Despite the lack of definitive data, the belief in the power of positive thinking has become so widespread that it might actually be doing harm. Cancer patients may feel inclined to act upbeat even when they're distraught, hide their despair instead of seeking solace or treatment, or blame themselves if their disease progresses. In fact, this sort of pressure could even complicate future scientific studies of positive thinking, since it's hard to know if a patient truly has a fighting spirit, or if she's just pretending because she knows that's how patients are "supposed" to act.

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.

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

Last week, an autopsy revealed that Cullen Finnerty, a former college quarterback who in May went missing in the woods of Lake County, Michigan, had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, the degenerative brain disease at the forefront of the debate over connections between head injuries, professional football and brain damage.

CTE is associated with memory issues, speech abnormalities, and behavior and personality changes. The problem is, some scientists still doubt whether or not the disease even exists. A controversial new study from the Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society suggests that it may not be its own unique neurodegenerative disorder, and that the cognitive impairments of football players don't look very different from those experienced by the general population.

Christopher Randolph, the study's first author and a professor of neurology at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago, says we don't yet have adequate research to draw direct connections between football and neurological issues.

***
There's not sufficient evidence to justify the assumption that CTE exists.CTE is typically only diagnosed in dead brains, during autopsy, as was the case with Finnerty. Earlier this year, a breakthrough study scanned the brains of five (still living) former players and found a buildup of an abnormal protein called tau, in patterns consistent with those found in CTE-diagnosed brains during autopsy.

However, Randolph says that doesn't necessarily point to football-related cognitive impairment. "The question really is, does having tau in your brain mean anything?" he told PopularScience.com. "There's not sufficient evidence to justify the assumption that CTE exists at this point." 

***
This isn't the first study to question the validity of CTE diagnoses. An Australian study from April of this year also expressed skepticism. "At present, there are no published epidemiological, cross-sectional or prospective studies relating to modern CTE," the researchers wrote. "[T]he speculation that repeated concussion or subconcussive impacts cause CTE remains unproven."

In Randolph's study, a group of 513 former players and their spouses completed a health questionnaire to determine whether they were exhibiting signs of mild cognitive impairment--issues in memory and cognitive functioning that would be noticeable to an observer, but haven't progressed to the point of getting in the way of daily life. Studies of cognitive impairment often focus on the responses of a spouse or family member, since people with cognitive issues might not be aware of the extent to which they are impaired. Later, 41 players who were identified as being probable cases for mild cognitive impairment came into the lab to undergo in-person testing, including MRI scanning to rule out the possibility that the impairment was caused by something like a tumor, and neuropsychological testing to look for patterns in language, memory and attention issues. 

The study found that retired NFL players had a higher incidence of mild cognitive impairment than the general population--35 percent of the spouse-reported sample exhibited signs of clinically significant impairment, compared to a previously published rate of 5 percent prevalence for men under 75. "This is certainly suggestive of the possibility that there is an increased incidence of late-life cognitive impairment in retired NFL players," the researchers write, but they also warn that since there was no control group available to compare with, it's too early to draw conclusions in this realm. 

Significantly, the study also found that former football players' conditions didn't look very different from anyone else with the same level of cognitive impairment due to, say, Alzheimer's. This suggests that CTE might not be its own, unique disease, according to Randolph. "Different neurodegenerative diseases have very different cognitive profiles," he says. Though they all involve some sort of cognitive impairment, diseases like Huntington's, Alzheimer's and Progressive supranuclear palsy (PST) differ in the patterns of degeneration they cause.

**
 
Chris Nowinski is a co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy at the Boston University School of Medicine. He calls it "preposterous" that Randolph's study concluded CTE might not be its own disease because the retired football players had impairments similar to those of other patients with mild cognitive impairment.

It's like saying, 'Cancer is found in lots of different places. It could be in the brain, it could be in the liver, so it's just cancer. There's no reason to distinguish between the two.'"This paper shows a lack of understanding of neuropathology," he says. The finding that retired football players showed similar attention and memory problems to people with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is to be expected, according to him. "We know that the MCI population and the CTE population both have damage in the medial temporal lobe and the frontal lobe. The difference is where the damage is outside of those areas."

"All along folks have been saying the differences are behavioral and executive. That those are the things they didn't test, that's the most clear and surprising flaw in the study," he explains. "'It's like saying, 'Well, cancer is found in lots of different places. It could be in the brain, it could be in the liver, so it's just cancer. There's no reason to distinguish between the two.'"

Still, "no one disagrees that there needs to be a lot more done on CTE," Nowinski says.

But even if CTE might not be a disease in its own right, as this paper argues, the potential link between football and brain damage hasn't been disproven. Football players might still be at higher risks for Alzheimer's or another neurodegenerative disease. To start, Randolph advocates a random, controlled epidemiological study that could more definitively say whether or not cognitive impairment has a higher prevalence among retired NFL players than the general population. 

The European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter snapped this radar image of the red planet's southern highlands, using its Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding instrument.

This image captures about 3,467 miles of Mars. The south polar ice cap appears just left of center, and the dip at the far right is the Hellas Basin, a 1,400-mile-wide circular impact crater thought to have formed when an asteroid hit the planet 4 billion years ago.

Mars Express began orbiting Mars in December 2003. Its mission, among other things, is to take high-resolution images of the entire surface of the planet. Last year, the orbiter sent back 3-D images showing a Martian mountain range covered in carbon dioxide frost.

DeviantART user lexinator117 created this scale-map comparing the sizes of nerd- and pop-culture touchstones. Now we finally know: American Godzilla is lesser creatively and physically than its Japanese counterpart. I've also either been seriously overestimating the size of the AT-AT walkers from Star Wars, or seriously underestimating the size of the Sydney Opera House.

Here's the key, from smallest to largest:

[lexinator117 via Flowing Data]

Missed the peak of the Perseid meteor shower last night, or just want to compare shots? Check out these lovely photos, shared by folks in several places throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

The Perseids occur annually from July to August, peaking one night in August. They're debris from the Swift-Tuttle comet. Most pieces are more than 1,000 years old. When the Earth passes through the comet's dust trail, any bits of ice and dust that get caught in the Earth's atmosphere disintegrate, creating the streaks you see. Humans have observed the shower for at least 2,000 years, according to NASA.

PHOTO GALLERY:

Click here to enter the gallery

Good news, Anthony Weiner? New research suggests that the more social media posts about a political figure, the greater the number of votes the candidate will get at the polls.

In politics, all Twitter publicity is good publicity, according to a study presented today at the American Sociological Association's annual meeting. The percentage of tweets mentioning Congressional candidates in 2010 and 2012 races correlated positively with the percentage of votes those candidates received, the researchers from Indiana University Bloomington found.

They analyzed 537 million tweets collected by IU's Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research, which has the largest sample of tweets in the world compiled for academic study, and found that more mentions of any kind on Twitter (either lauding or bashing the candidate) meant more votes, possibly because stronger candidates attract attention from both sides. "Specifically, individuals may be more likely to attack or discuss disliked candidates who are perceived as being strong or as having a high likelihood of winning," the researchers write. In other words, you tweet about the candidates that you think could win, whether that prospect delights or terrifies you. (How tweets about a candidate's really weird personal life play into this they do not say, though.)

The study determined that social media can be a reliable source of data about political behavior.

"Think of this as a measurement of buzz," one of the study's authors, sociologist Fabio Rojas, said in a press statement. "Even if you don't like somebody, you would only talk about them [SIC] if they're important."

Husband-and-wife duo Charles and Ray Eames were two of the most influential designers of the 20th century, making progress in fields as diverse as furniture design, architecture, and film. In 1957 they were at the height of their popularity, when they made a simple machine with one function: not to have any function.

The "Do-Nothing Machine" was a brightly colored, solar-powered whirligig with multiple spinning parts. That's it. Here it is in action:

Rather than having any utilitarian purpose, the machine was an ode to originality and wonder (and it looks appropriately child-like). But even without any function in mind, the machine was still innovative: it was a solar-powered machine well before others like it were in vogue.

[LIFE]

North Korea leader Kim Jong-Un has given his approval to the first smartphone made in the hermit country, according to the official North Korea news ("news") agency. Except, uh, maybe it was just made in China and hastily packaged at a North Korean facility? Looks like the phone runs on the Android operating system, but there are still so many questions! Like, will it compete with this North Korea-produced tablet? One of the scant details provided by Kim Jong-Un is that "their camera function has high pixels." [Shanghaiist]

You probably know that you can't tickle yourself. And although you might be able to tickle a total stranger, your brain also strongly discourages you from doing something so socially awkward. These facts offer insight into tickling's evolutionary purpose, says Robert R. Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of the book Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. Tickling, he says, is partly a mechanism for social bonding between close companions and helps forge relationships between family members and friends.

Laughter in response to tickling kicks in during the first few months of life. "It's one of the first forms of communication between babies and their caregivers," Provine says. Parents learn to tickle a baby only as long as she laughs in response. When the baby starts fussing instead, they stop. The face-to-face activity also opens the door for other interactions.

Children enthusiastically tickle one another, which some scientists say not only inspires peer bonding but might help hone reflexes and self- defense skills. In 1984 psychiatrist Donald Black of the University of Iowa noted that many ticklish parts of the body, such as the neck and the ribs, are also the most vulnerable in combat. He inferred that children learn to protect those parts during tickle fights, a relatively safe activity.

Tickling while horsing around may have also given rise to laughter itself. "The ‘ha ha' of human laughter almost certainly evolved from the ‘pant pant' of rough-and-tumble human play," says Provine, who bases that conclusion on observations of panting among tickle-battling apes such as chimpanzees and orangutans.

In adulthood, tickling trails off around the age of 40. At that point, the fun stops; for reasons unknown, tickling seems to be mainly for the young.

This article originally appeared in the January 2011 issue of Popular Science magazine.