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Google Doodle Honors Physicist Erwin Schrödinger And His Quantum Cat

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Google Doodle on August 12, 2013

Google

The Nobel prize-winning scientist would have been 126 today.

Erwin Schrödinger, creator of the famous thought experiment in which a cat in a box is simultaneously dead and alive, was born August 12, 1886 1887, in Vienna, Austria. Today, Google celebrates the quantum physicist with a Doodle showing two kitty cats in opposite states of viability.

In 1933, Schrödinger won the Nobel prize in physics for Schrödinger's equation, which describes how the quantum state of a physical system changes with time. His theoretical research has led to many fascinating scientific breakthroughs (like quantum teleportation!)

One version of the Schrödinger's Cat paradox, which is often used as a way to think about quantum mechanics, goes like this: A cat is in a sealed box with a flask of poison and a radioactive substance. If a single atom of the substance decays, the flask shatters and the cat dies. Because an observer has no way of knowing whether the cat has been poisoned, the animal can be thought to be both alive and dead.

Schrödinger died January 4, 1961, at the age of 73.


    



How Cocaine Makes Users Skinny

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Cocaine

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

A new study examines the weird ways cocaine changes people's metabolisms.

Cocaine has long had a reputation for keeping users slim-check out this 1990 article from the Los Angeles Times-and there's some science to back that up, too. Now, a new study of cocaine-addicted men examines how, exactly, cocaine makes users thinner.

Cocaine can fundamentally alter the body's metabolism, the study found. Even though addicts eat more and have altered protein levels that should make them gain weight, they're actually likely to have less body fat than non-addicts.

Knowing this could help doctors manage the weights of those who stop using cocaine, the research team, four neuroscientists from the University of Cambridge in the U.K., wrote a paper they published in the journal Appetite. Many of those who quit cocaine gain a lot of weight and reducing that effect could keep people happier with abstinence and more likely to stay on the wagon.

Cocaine addicts reported eating more calories, fat and carbohydrates. Yet the addicts actually had less body fat than non-addicts.

The research team studied 65 men from around Cambridge. Thirty-five of them were active, addicted cocaine users. On average, they had used cocaine for 15 years in either powdered or freebase form. The rest of the men were matched in age to the addicts, but they had never used cocaine and didn't have any history of substance abuse. The majority of the cocaine users, on the other hand, were also dependent on other substances such as opiates, alcohol and cannabis. Ninety-one percent of the cocaine addicts were dependent on nicotine.

Compared to men who weren't addicted to anything, the cocaine addicts reported eating more calories, fat and carbohydrates. Yet their body mass indices-a measure of people's weights compared to their heights-were the same as non-addicted peers of the same age. The addicts actually had less body fat than non-addicts, while both groups had the same amount of lean body mass. That result was especially striking because tobacco smokers usually have more body fat than non-smokers of the same height and weight, yet cocaine seems to overcome that: Remember, 91 percent of the cocaine users in this study were addicted to tobacco, too.

Cocaine addicts had higher levels of leptin, a protein associated with weight gain and appetite control, than non-addicts. The difference wasn't statistically significant, but it suggests something different is going on in addicts' metabolisms, the Cambridge researchers wrote. Cocaine may interfere with people's ability to store fat, which would explain why addicts are leaner, but also want to eat more fatty foods.


    


This Is Elon Musk's Hyperloop

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Hyperloop Pod Rendering

Elon Musk via BusinessWeek

Billionaire Elon Musk has announced details of Hyperloop, his mysterious high-speed transportation project. There was some of what we expected, and a few surprises, too.

SpaceX/Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk has unveiled details on the Hyperloop, his proposed (and until now mostly mysterious) plan for a railway system that could shoot passengers from Los Angeles to San Francisco in a mere 30 minutes.

It's actually surprisingly close to what some early predictions forecasted: an elevated, low-friction, high-speed track based on pods, which would ferry people, and even cars, long distances at more than 700 miles per hour.

There are at least a few differences, though. The system was expected to run on a Maglev system (similar to that used in bullet trains) but it actually works through air bearings, a system that's similar to the low-friction environment created on a hockey table. (On a conference call, Musk described it as falling somewhere between a completely sealed vacuum and a gigantic version of one of those pneumatic-tube systems mail was sent through in the ol' days.) Musk told Bloomberg BusinessWeek:

The pods will ride on air bearings. The pod produces air, and it's pumped out of little holes on these skis. This is something that is used quite a bit in industry. You can move huge, heavy objects with very low friction, using air bearings. In the consumer sense, people would be familiar with air hockey tables, except in this case the air bearings are being generated by the pod itself, as opposed to the tube.
You don't want the tube to be expensive. Because the tube is so long, you want the expensive stuff to be in the pod.

Here are more details:

  • The system would work for places about 900 miles apart or less--any more and supersonic air travel, Musk argues, would be a cheaper solution.
  • Musk specifically uses a L.A.-to-San Francisco route as the proposed system. The Hyperloop would more or less follow along the I-5.
  • In Musk's plan, the Hyperloop could carry 840 passengers per hour, with 70 pods leaving every 30 seconds
  • "[F]or trip comfort and safety, it would be best to travel at high subsonic speeds for a 350 mile journey." Uhh, yes, seems like "high subsonic" (700-plus mph) would be sufficient.
  • Hard to say what construction would be like for this. Presumably, Musk would have to fork over a lot of money to secure building rights along the I-5, which is dominated by farmland. Musk told BusinessWeek that, because the rail system would be elevated, there would be fewer land-rights issues. But that's not going to solve everything, and could considerably increase the price tag.
  • About every 70 miles, an electric motor would provide a boost to the individual pods, shooting them farther along the track. The same system could slow down the pods as they approach their destination, and the energy taken from that could be rerouted to power the next batch of pods.
  • Musk said on the call that it "would feel a lot like being on an airplane"--"like riding on a cushion of air." How? It doesn't accelerate normally, but by banking along the tube, which would mean about a half-g of force.
  • As for risk of crashing, Musk said on the call that shock-absorbing pylons could absorb any earthquakes that could be reasonably anticipated.
  • This is still expensive. Six billion dollars for a system that could carry people and $10 billion for one that could carry cars. (Context: Musk points out that price tag is more than his companies Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and SolarCity spend combined, but a lot less than the proposed California High Speed Rail, which would theoretically be much slower.)
  • Who's going to make this thing, then? Well, Musk has said previously that he would release the plans as an open-source system, and let anyone have at them. On the conference call, he backed away from that slightly, saying he would be likely to build a prototype if no one else steps up. (That's a surprise; he came off pretty firmly against the idea of building this thing himself recently.)
  • On how long it would take: Musk says if a prototype were his top priority, he could get it done in one or two years--but since it won't be (the guy has got a few other companies to run), the prototype could be more like three or four years. Musk estimates it will take seven to 10 years to make the full project a reality. Might be a little early (literally, it's been, like, an hour since the plans were released) to be making estimates that far in the future.

    


The Giant Hurdle For The Internet Of Things

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Anarchy Of Things

Paul Lachine

Can smart devices work in harmony?

Everyone's talking about the Internet of Things, a proposed network of intelligent devices that could one day automate much of the world around us. HVAC and lighting systems would adjust depending on a user's whereabouts. Lawns would know when to water themselves. Meanwhile, product manufacturers have been hastily preparing for this transition. The average household already has 10 connected gizmos, and experts predict that number will jump to 50 by 2022. But making devices and getting them to work in sync are two different tasks. Creating harmony will be the hard part.

Protocols-systems of digital messaging and rules for exchanging those messages-are the glue that binds devices together. For the Web alone, there are at least 50 protocols. Wireless devices interact through a different set of protocols, such as ZigBee, Bluetooth, RFID, and BACnet. And those devices share information with the Web through yet another set of protocols, including 802.15.4e and CoAP.

The result is that the Internet of Things is actually hundreds of smaller, fractured Internets. Devices exist in their own discrete networks, which forces consumers to either choose among them or operate in several at once. Even items that should logically work in tandem-say, smart lightbulbs and a set of Wi-Fi-enabled window blinds-can't. And each device requires its own smartphone app to control.

Items that should logically work in tandem-say, smart lightbulbs and Wi-Fi-enabled window blinds-can't. In the short term, engineers are finding ways around these barriers. Revolv, a home-automation company, sells a hub with seven wireless radios that speak 10 wireless languages. The hub automatically connects to any wireless device on a home's Wi-Fi network, including thermostats, lights, and even garage doors. Smartphone and tablet users can control individual devices or groups of them through the Revolv interface. They can also set up prompts, such as "If I turn on the lights, then reset the thermostat to 71 degrees." People can patch automated systems together themselves too. MakerSwarm, a new authoring tool by Maya Design, is like a roll of duct tape for the Internet of Things; it lets users cue up long chains of commands through multiple devices. For instance, an array of moisture sensors could send a signal to a sprinkler system.

Patched systems may work for a while, but the Internet of Things will need actual standardization to reach its full potential and really change how we live. IBM, Cisco, and other companies are pushing for an open standard for connected devices. The Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol is one option. Facebook uses MQTT for live iOS notifications, but it's flexible and scalable enough to serve as a kind of http for smart devices. With such a standard in place, the billions of wireless devices may finally be able to talk to one another, so we won't have to talk to them at all.

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


    


Is Hair In Food A Health Risk?

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Hair in Food

Getty Images

A dermatologist investigates

Finding a hair in your spaghetti is gross, no question. But it is not, for the most part, a health threat. It's so benign that the Food and Drug Administration in its Food Code guidelines doesn't even place a limit on strands per plate. The FDA has received no reports of people getting ill from ingesting hair found in food.

Here's why you shouldn't worry, explains Maria Colavincenzo, a dermatologist at Northwestern University who specializes in hair: Hair is made of a densely packed protein called keratin, which is chemically inactive in hair and won't cause any problems if digested. It's possible that staph bacteria, which can upset the stomach and bring on a case of diarrhea, could hitch a ride on a strand. But it's very unlikely, Colavincenzo says, that the tiny amount of staph that can hide on a hair or two is enough to lead to gastrointestinal problems.

The only real scenario in which hair would pose a threat, she continues, is if you ate a whole head's worth. Large quantities of the stuff can do to your digestion what it does to your shower drain. Ingesting that much could make long clumps of hair, called trichobezoars, form in your stomach and cause abdominal pain and other symptoms.

The truth is, you might have eaten hair today. Food manufacturers use L-cysteine, an amino acid in keratin, to stabilize dough and perk up the taste buds that detect salty, savory flavors. Although some factories derive their L-cysteine synthetically or from duck feathers, others get it from human hair. It's clean, though, thanks to the fact that the manufacturers who use human hair boil it in hydrochloric acid to extract the L-cysteine from the keratin.

Yummy hair derivative aside, there's still that nasty strand stuck in the meatball. The FDA has set many standards for what it defines as "natural or unavoidable defects" in foods, but hair doesn't make the list. And if you think that's icky, there might be something even worse in your spaghetti; the FDA also okays up to two maggots per can of tomatoes.

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


    


How Post-Earth Humans Will Survive In Space [Infographic]

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The Spaceman

Popular Science archives

This diagram from 1963 imagines how future humans will adapt to hostile environments.

"The wheel, the ski, the kayak, the sports car-pure geometry in motion," wrote aviation researchers Toby Freedman and Gerald S. Lindner in the November 1963 issue of Popular Science. "No doubt the engineers of these perfect and symmetrical structures beat their heads against the wall when told they had to squeeze in a passenger." With manned space flight imminent and a nuclear holocaust looming, the two physicians argued that evolution had had its way with humanity long enough; it was time to tackle human frailty with science.

"Instead of modifying the ship, modify the man," Freedman and Lindner declared. Citing a recent successful kidney transplant in England, they suggested that soon humans will opt for prosthetic devices over natural hands and will "exchange their failing hearts and livers the way we change tires after 30,000 miles."

The image above is of course a caricature of these far-sighted ideas. In contrast to a spaceman whose biological functions have been replaced with electronic ones, Freedman and Lindner foresaw a future human who looks mostly normal but is stronger and faster and requires less food and oxygen. "The moment we say some biological adaptation is impossible, we find it somewhere in the animal kingdom," they wrote. "It isn't the science-fiction fantasists who are being unrealistic, but the conservative scientists."

Fifty years later, scientists and engineers still rue the limitations of the human body. The biggest obstacle to high-speed travel, for instance, is the delicacy of our flesh and blood.

But some biologists believe that 3-D printed body parts could eventually produce the kind of optimized human Freedman and Lindner dreamed of in 1963.

Read the full story in the November 1963 issue of Popular Science. See Editor-in-Chief Jacob Ward discuss the limits of the human body on August 17 at the 2013 Nerd Nite Global Festival in Brooklyn, NY.


    


A Map Of The World, Rendered In Spirographs

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Spirograph Map

Rachel Evans

Artist Rachel Evans uses simple tools to make stunning geometric maps.

Artist Rachel Evans uses spirographs, those geometric drawing tools popular with kids, to create colorful world maps like this. After drawing the shapes, she hand-colors them, then cuts them out and pastiches them together until they look like the world. Here's the result: something like a very happy tornado map.

You can check out the process in the video below, and purchase prints of the maps through Evans's site.

[Rachel Evans via Kottke]


    


Study: Soda-Drinking Mice Die Earlier

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Mouse Investigates Sugar Cube

Douglas H. Cornwall, University of Utah

An unusual "semi-natural" lab setup quantifies ill effects in mice drinking the equivalent of three sodas a day.

Well, good thing this never quite happens to humans. Or does it? In an unusual study, a team of biologists raised a bunch of wild mice-not the docile lab mice most scientists use-on a healthy diet, plus a sugar mix that's roughly equivalent to drinking three sodas a day as a human. Then, the scientists stuck their mice in a natural environment where they had to compete against wild mice that hadn't been raised on the sugar water.

The research team found "soda"-drinking female mice had shorter lifespans. Their male counterparts fathered fewer pups, likely because they weren't as good as males raised without sugar water at defending territories.

Soda-drinking female mice had shorter lifespans, and their male counterparts fathered fewer pups.The study is the first to examine, in lab animals, the effects of added sugar intake at levels that are equivalent to what some humans normally consume, say the study's authors, a team of U.S. biologists. Thirteen percent to 25 percent of Americans get a quarter of their daily calories from added sugar, just like the mice in this study. Scientists have vigorously debated the effects of such levels of sugar consumption on human health. Some call added sugar in the diet toxic. The scientific evidence about sugar is still developing, in part because previous animal studies aimed at finding the ill effects of sugar have always given mice and rats much more sugar than humans normally consume.

Wayne Potts, a biologist at the University of Utah and the study's lead scientist, interprets his findings as a warning. "If it makes a mouse sick, then do you want it in your body? At least before we work out the mechanistic basis of that sickness and are able to evaluate whether it's also going on in humans or if it's an mouse-specific phenomenon," he tells Popular Science.

Others are more conservative about linking mouse outcomes to what would happen in humans. "The way mice react to sweetness and sugar is different than humans," Barry Popkin, a nutrition researcher at the University of North Carolina, wrote to us in an email. He added there's no direct way to translate this work into human work.

Mice react to sweetness and sugar differently than humans do.Either way, the experimental setup was fascinating and unusual. Potts and his colleagues got 156 mice and split them up into two equal groups. One of the groups began drinking a 50-50 fructose-sucrose mix as soon as they were weaned from their mothers' milk. At that age, they're "kind of teenage mice," says James Ruff, a graduate student in Potts' lab who is the lead author in the new study, published today in the journal Nature Communications. The 50-50 mix is meant to approximate high fructose corn syrup, a common added sugar in sodas.

The other mouse group didn't get the added sugar mix. Both groups ate mouse food with a healthy balance of the nutrients they need. When the mice became adults, Potts, Ruff and their colleagues put the animals in a pen with optimal and sub-optimal nesting boxes and let them compete for mates and nests. Most lab mice never see such an environment their whole lives. Instead, they live in individual cages.

The biologists followed the mice's fates for 32 weeks, nearly their entire lifespans, which runs to about a year, Ruff says.

From this Darwinian pen, the biologists found that the female sugar-mix mice were twice as likely to die during the study. The male mice didn't have different lifespans, no matter their diet. But the males who drank the sugar mix controlled 26 percent fewer territories and fathered 25 percent fewer pups than the males that ate mouse chow and drank a cornstarch mix in place of the sugar water.

The study was not set up to answer why the males fathered fewer pups or why the females died earlier. "The problem may be in the cardiovascular system, muscular system, reproductive system," Ruff says. "They use all of their systems to successfully compete." Thus, it's difficult to know whether these things could happen in other animals, including humans, that consume equivalent amounts of added sugar. Instead, the study offers a holistic view that Potts believes helps researchers detect small effects that would be difficult to find otherwise. Potts thinks there haven't been other papers on the effects of moderate sugar consumption in mice not because other scientists haven't tried such experiments, but because they then didn't find any interesting differences.

What's next? Ruff and Potts, who trained as an evolutionary ecologist, have already used what they call their "semi-natural" environment to quantify the effects of inbreeding on evolutionary fitness. (In case you're curious, mice born of first-cousin parents are about 30 percent less fit than non-inbred mice.) Now, they're interested in testing pharmaceuticals. Many medicines that seem promising in lab animals turn out not to work when tested in humans. Ruff hopes that their environment could better catch medicines that don't work before they move onto human trials.


    







Why Some Words Sound Fat

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Caramel Ice Cream

Lotus Head via Wikimedia Commons

Doesn't caramel ice cream sound heavy? Where vowel sounds come from in the mouth influences how we think about a word.

Which sounds better, an ice cream called Frish, or an ice cream called Frosh? In an NYU study, people rated the ice cream Frosh as smoother, creamier and richer. Except both ice creams were hypothetical flavors, and participants judged them solely based on how they sounded in a press release, without ever having tasted either. So why did one sound better than the other?

This is the result of what linguists call sound symbolism, the association between the sounds that make up a word and the word's meaning. In many languages, words made up of front vowels--sounds made with the tongue high in the front of the mouth, like teeny--tend to indicate small, light things. Words like thin, little or crispy. Whereas vowels that form with the tongue lower in the back of the mouth are used in words with big, heavy meanings--gargantuan, bold, humongous.

Dan Jurafsky, a linguistics professor at Stanford University who teaches a course on the language of food, looked at the way ice cream manufacturers name their flavors, and found that most names, like Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge and Cookie Dough, use back vowels. Cracker brands, on the other hand--a lighter, thinner food--have front vowel names lie Cheez-It, Triscuit and Ritz.

One theory of why front vowels sound light and back vowels heavy is called the Frequency Code. It says that because front vowels have a higher pitch, we have learned to associate them with small things. Small animals like birds make high-pitched noises, while larger animals like bears or lions make deeper sounds, so early humans may have learned to associate pitch and size that way.

[Stanford Alumni Magazine]


    






In 165-Million-Year-Old Fossil, Evidence That Fur Predates Mammals

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Megaconus

Illustration by April Isch

Meet Megaconus mammaliaformis, a furry proto-mammal and, in the words of one researcher, "your great-great-grand uncle 165 million years removed."

Meet Megaconus mammaliaformis, a 165-million-year-old proto-mammal recently discovered in Inner Mongolia, China. This squirrel-sized dude evolved long before the rise of modern mammals, but the hair and fur residue found preserved in its fossil indicate that those traits existed even back in the Jurassic era.

Hair and fur have generally been considered unique to mammals, so it's exciting to find that they could have been around even before the first mammals arrived on the evolutionary scene. This bolsters the 2006 finding of one other pre-mammalian fossil with fur, the only other hairy ancestor we've discovered.

Megaconus probably ambled around with a gait similar to a modern rock hyrax or an armadillo, and had teeth similar to modern rodents. On its heels, it had a long, perhaps poisonous spur, like male platypuses do now.

"Megaconus confirms that many modern mammalian biological functions related to skin and integument had already evolved before the rise of modern mammals," says Zhe-Xi Luo, one of the fossil's discoverers and a professor of organismal biology and anatomy at the University of Chicago.

Some of its other features, though, differentiate it from today's mammals. A middle ear still attached to the jaw is more reminiscent of reptiles, and the structures of its anklebones and vertebrae look very similar to other mammal-like reptiles.

"We cannot say that Megaconus is our direct ancestor, but it certainly looks like a great-great-grand uncle 165 million years removed," Luo says.

The paper detailing the discovery can be found in Nature.

[UChicago News]


    






This Baby Panda Reuniting With Her Mom Is The Best Thing You'll See On The Internet Today

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Yuanzai

Taipei Zoo on Facebook

Don't worry, Yuan Yuan. We'd probably have a hard time picking a baby up at first, too.

After being separated for a month, a panda mom and her newborn baby got reunited last week in the Taipei Zoo. The Associated Press posted a video… you don't even have to read any more. Just watch it:

Zookeepers put the cub in an incubator after she was born so they could take care of a leg injury, the Taipei Times reports. Keepers also worried the mom, named Yuan Yuan, might injure or even eat the cub, the Associated Press reports. Since last week, however, the pandas' human caretakers have slowly given mom and baby more time together. The cub is set to open her eyes this week and zookeepers want her first image of the world to be her mom, Focus Taiwan News Channel reports.

The cub was born on July 6, the result of a round of artificial insemination between mom Yuan Yuan and dad Tuan Tuan. China gave the two adult pandas to Taiwan in a diplomatic gesture in 2008. For now, the baby is called Yuanzai, Chinese for "Yuan's child," but the zoo will hold a naming contest for her, AFP reports.


    






This Is How NASA Will 3-D Print In Space [Video]

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Spare tools on-demand

Earlier this summer, we told you about NASA's plans to send a 3-D printer aboard the International Space Station next year. In the video here, NASA officials explain why that's a huge deal.

A considerable amount of storage space on flights goes to odds and ends that can break or go missing (which means replacement parts need to be sent up on the next trip). A 3-D printer would let astronauts only print the stuff they need, when they need it. What kind of stuff? Well, anything, really. The agency explains that an on-board 3-D printer could be loaded with blueprints at takeoff, but could also have plans beamed from Earth to the Space Station.

3-D printing space hardware company Made In Space is designing a special printer for space flights, and has already tested a version on zero-gravity parabolic flights, which induce weightlessness without actually being in space.

No word yet on whether pizza will be one of the printing options.


    






Test Drive: The 2013 Audi RS5 Coupe Quattro S Tronic

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2013 Audi RS5

Audi

While Mercedes-Benz and BMW have been selling their top-of-the-line ubercars under their respective AMG and M banners for the last few decades in the states, fellow Teuton Audi, for marketing reasons unknown, has only been intermittently selling the baddest of its bad boys in the U.S.

Audi's S models are more than enough in terms of power and speed for most drivers, but the company's RS cars offer a whole lot more oomph. The RS designation represents the top of the Audi range in terms of speed, performance and, a trait that makes the hearts of car buyers in this realm go pitter-patter, rarity.

What's New

While the Audi A5 has been around since 2007 and the RS5 has been sold overseas since 2010, the $80,000-plus RS5 is brand new for the American market for 2013. Building off the rock solid A5/S5 platform, the in house Audi team that produces all the special high performance cars, quattro GmbH, has rejiggered the RS5, adding a whole slew of performance parts like a 4.2-liter direct-injected V-8 with 450 hp and 317 lb-ft of torque, a seven-speed S tronic dual-clutch transmission for quicker shifts, suspension upgrades and a newly developed self-locking crown gear center differential with a standard 40:60 rear-biased ratio for enhanced performance and handling capabilities. They also added Audi Connect with its Google integration and the ability to turn your car into a mobile wi-fi hot spot.

The Drive

Being one of the lucky few who lives in Southern California, with its perfect weather and bountiful roads, I took off in the RS5 and headed up the 101 into the hills above Santa Barbara. At freeway speeds, the RS5 is responsive to throttle and steering inputs but doesn't have that obtrusive, gut-rattling ride associated with some high performance coupes. That might be due to the standard Audi Drive Select feature with its three different modes-comfort, auto, and dynamic- that lets the driver customize the steering, throttle, transmission and exhaust sound for an over the top sporty driving experience, a leisurely Sunday drive or everywhere in between.

On the freeway, I'm no hero, so comfort mode works fine for me, but dipping onto a side road and switching to Dynamic mode you really being to feel the RS5's speed and power. Audi says the RS5 goes from 0 to 60 in just 4.5 seconds and has an electronically governed top speed of 174 miles an hour. With fast shifts between gears, a taut drive and the mellifluous sounds of the wonderful naturally aspirated V-8 growling like a California Grizzly Bear under the hood ribbons of roads disappear and a smile comes across my face. This RS5 is a hoot to drive.

What's Good

The drive, well, it's the stuff dreams are made of. The cabin has a fit and finish befitting a car in the class and price and we really can get behind Google integration in every car. The Audi MMI system is intuitive and my Samsung Model S III worked flawlessly over Bluetooth.

What's Bad

In a case of too much of a good thing, while I love the sounds of the engine noise and feel of the road, the RS5 is occasionally too loud and overbearing on anything but the smoothest of roads due to the optional 20" performance tires, a happy medium in a daily drive should have been reached. Also, the pricing seems out of line. I think Audi should have simplified the pricing structure and made all of the options standard except for the optional $6000 high-performance ceramic front brake package, which may be overkill for this car.

The Price

MSRP starts at $68,900. Our test model had almost every option, save the $6,000 ceramic front brakes. Options included Audi MMI Navigation package at $3,550, a Titanium package that includes bigger wheels and tires at $2,500, a Sports exhaust system for better performance and sound at $1,000, a special Misano Red pearl paint job at $475 and a Destination charge of $895 for a total of $77,320 roughly inline with the Mercedes-Benz C63 and the BMW M3.

The Verdict

The grand Teutonic battle for the hearts and wallets of the ubercar buyer is like something out of a Wagner Opera with Audi playing the part of Brynhildr. It ain't over until the fat lady sings and Audi, better later than never to the party, sings pretty darn loud with the RS5. Viking helmet not included.

Jon Alain Guzik, is the resident car freak at PopularScience.com and can be tweeted at @jaguzik. For more of his car reviews, please go to DriveApart.com.


    






A Light Bulb Powered By Bacteria

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The Biobulb

AnaElise Beckman, Alexandra Cohn, and Michael Zaiken/Wisconsin Institute for Discovery

Three college students are building an electricity-free light bulb for the masses.


We've all basked in the glow of different light bulbs: incandescent, fluorescent, halogen, neon, LED, and more. But a lamp that harbors living, light-emitting bacteria -- a biological bulb, if you will -- is something radically different from what's available on the market today.

Three undergraduate students from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, hope to change that with the help of crowdfunding.

The young scientists, who are finalists in the Popular Science #CrowdGrant Challenge, recently launched a crowdfunding campaign for a kit that anyone can use to make a Biobulb.

"The Biobulb is essentially a closed ecosystem in a jar," says biochemistry major Michael Zaiken in the team's video pitch. "It's going to contain several different species of microorganisms, and each organism plays a role in the recycling of vital nutrients that each of the other microbes need to survive."

The kit's key ingredient will be a genetically engineered species of Escherichia coli bacteria. These microbes live inside the intestines of humans and other animals, and they don't normally glow in the dark. But Zaiken and his two teammates, Alexandra Cohn (a genetics and philosophy double-major) and AnaElise Beckman (a neurobiology and anthropology double-major), plan to insert a loop of DNA into E. coli that will allow the bacteria to bioluminesce like jellyfish, fireflies, squid, or some other light-producing lifeform.

Electricity won't power the bulb. The genetically modified E. coli plus a growth media, microbes that use ambient light to create food and recycle waste, and a bulb should be able to glow and recharge repeatedly, perhaps for days or months. (Sort of like a glowing version of those aquatic ecosystems sealed into glass spheres that you see in airline catalogs.)

Biobulb isn't available yet; the team still needs to study the best genes, kit ingredients, and caretaking methods. One of the current challenges is finding a way to keep the DNA that codes for bioluminescence inside the E. coli as the cells replicate. "Right now we are looking at a couple of strategies to keep the [bioluminescence] genes stable over long periods of time," Zaiken says on the Biobulb project's RocketHub page.

More than delivering a cool product, Cohn hopes the crowdfunding project will cast a positive light on the field of synthetic biology. "Many people don't understand what exactly synthetic biology is," she says.

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


    






Why Chinese Kids Are Terrible At Spelling Bees

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Spelling Bee

From a 2010 production of the musical "The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee"

Indiana Insider Blog

Globalization brings texting and spelling bees to China, with unfortunate results.

Taking a cue from the U.S., China's state-run CCTV has started hosting spelling bees. Sounds fun, right? Except they've started to find that Chinese kids and adults are actually pretty bad at recalling how to write in Chinese.

Seventy percent of teenage spelling bee contestants and 90 percent of adults in the audience couldn't remember how to write "toad," a common character, Want China Times reports.

Chinese people have long noticed the effects of technology on their writing, as University of Pennsylvania language researcher Victor Mair blogged in 2010. It's always been difficult even for highly educated adults to recall how to write certain Chinese characters, but typing and texting undermine the daily practice that helped them keep up. (Whether remembering fewer characters is a cultural tragedy or just natural progress is up for debate.)

Nearly all Chinese typing and texting programs ask users to type the pinyin-China's standard Romanization system-for the character they want. The program then offers a list of possible characters for that Romanization and you select the correct one. It's much easier to recognize a character from a short list than to recall every small stroke that goes into writing it. Some programs do exist that ask users to begin sketching characters, which could help people better recall the correct pen strokes, but those are rare.

Last year, a team of linguists studied Chinese schoolchildren and found that 28 percent were severely behind in reading, an increase from single-digit percentages in the 1990s. Those kids who typed the most often were more likely to be behind in reading in school.

Maybe if spelling bees catch on, kids will get excited about remembering more characters. Meanwhile, last winter, when I talked with the research team that studied schoolkids, lead scientist Li-Hai Tan suggested kids don't learn pinyin-based typing until they're past elementary school.

[Language Log]


    







Coconut Husks Make For A Stronger, Lighter Paddleboard

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NSP Coco Mat Paddleboard

Coconut husks contain the planet's second most common organic material, lignin. Found in the cell walls of wood and woody plants, lignin adds rigidity, resists fire and microbes, and absorbs ultraviolet rays. Woven together, the fibers protect a coconut's fruit in falls of up to 80 feet.

Claire Benoist

Plus, it takes fewer toxic materials to produce

While biking near his home in Thailand, Paolo Cechetti noticed a man weaving raw coconut-husk fibers into bags. Cechetti, an engineer at the water-sports-equipment manufacturer Cobra International, is always hunting for techniques to make surfboards stronger and lighter. Typically that translates into a spin on a carbon-fiber-based core, but Cechetti decided to try using coconut fiber instead. The new Coco Mat core, which is now used in boards from Australian brand NSP, is stronger than carbon fiber-and more sustainable.

Designers begin to build the boards by separating and cleaning the coconut-husk fibers by hand. Next, they lay them out randomly, sandwich the layer of strands in fiberglass, and insert a polystyrene core. Finally, they place the construction into a vacuum mold and inject epoxy. Coconut fibers absorb less epoxy than other materials do, which reduces the weight of the board by as much as 30 percent. It also eliminates up to 40 percent of toxic materials from the process.

NSP Coco Mat Paddleboard

Length: 10.2 feet
Weight: 25.6 pounds
Price:From $1,325

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


    






Electric Car Price Guide: Every 2013-2014 Plug-In Car, With Specs

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The 2013 Smart Fortwo Electric Drive

It's a hot topic whenever anyone mentions electric cars: pricing. Many electric cars are more expensive than their regular counterparts, though naturally they cost less to run too.

But what do today's electric and plug-in cars actually cost? We've gathered together each plug-in car on sale today in one place. Every vehicle here shows the manufacturer's suggested retail price, plus any mandatory destination and handling fees.

The prices do not include any local or federal tax incentives or rebates--so many cars here may be available cheaper, for those eligible for specific credits or rebates. All MPGe figures refer solely to the cars' electric efficiency.

Click here to enter the gallery.

This article, written by Antony Ingram, was originally published on Green Car Reports, a publishing partner of Popular Science. Follow GreenCarReports on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

More from Green Car Reports:
Elon Musk's Hyperloop: 30 Minutes In Windowless 800-MPH Pod?
Half Of All Electric Cars Are Sold In 5 Cities; Can You Name Them?
Tesla Takes The Lead On Dumping Door Mirrors For Video Cameras


    






Watch Lab-Grown Heart Tissue Beat On Its Own [Video]

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Human Heart

Patrick J. Lynch via Wikimedia Commons

Be still my heart.

A team of scientists from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine has created lab-grown human heart tissue that can beat on its own, according to a new study in Nature Communications.

In 2008, a University of Minnesota study showed that the original cells from a rat heart could be completely flushed out of the heart's external structure in a process called decellularization, then replaced by newborn rat cells to regenerate a working heart. A similar process has now allowed Pitt scientists to grow working human heart tissue within the decellurized structure of a mouse heart.

Using various enzymes and special cleansing detergents, the researchers stripped a mouse heart of all its cells to create a scaffold for induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), adult human cells that are reprogrammed to act like embryonic cells. They treated the iPS cells taken from a skin biopsy to become multipotential cardiovascular progenitor (MCP) cells, the precursor cells that can become any of the three types of cells found in the heart.

"Nobody has tried using these MCPs for heart regeneration before," said Lei Yang, an assistant professor of developmental biology at Pitt. After a period of a few weeks, the human cells had repopulated the mouse heart, and it began beating at a rate of 40 to 50 beats per minute. That's a little slow, though not by much. A typical resting heart rate for an an adult is between 60 and 80 bpm, though anything above 50 bpm is still considered normal.

Watch it beat:

This could eventually lead to personalized organ transplants, or even just a great way to study in the lab the way they human heart develops or how it responds to drugs.

Next, Yang wants to try to make just a patch of human heart tissue, which could be used to replace only regions of the heart that have been damaged by something like a heart attack. He told PopularScience.com via email that he hopes to test heart tissue patches in animals within the next few years.

The study came out in the Aug. 13 issue of Nature Communications.


    






Watch This Bicycle Go 80 MPH

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Probably not do-it-yourself


Tom Donhou, a bicycle builder based in Hackney, London, just went 80 mph on a bike. As a point of reference: You or I might hit 30 mph, tops, on a flat surface; a professional might max out at about 45 mph. But to get anywhere over that speed, you need a bike explicitly designed to go really freaking fast.

And Donhou did this not on some absurdly over-engineered bike; Donhou just consulted a few friends in the business, built the bike, turned his old Ford Zephyr into a pace car/wind screen, and pedaled hard. "This is all new to me. It's been a total learning curve," he says.

Here's how he did it:

Power: Normal bikes typically have chainrings with 20-50 teeth. A larger chainring makes it harder to get going initially, but allows you to reach much higher speeds-you get much more torque with a bigger chainring. The chainring on Donhou's bike has 104 teeth, and was custom-built to guarantee that the chain stayed aligned at high speeds.

Stability: The frame is built from Columbus MAX tubes: steel ellipses strong enough to significantly minimize the wobbles you get when you're going really, really fast. Also key for stability is a low center of gravity, so Donhou placed the huge chainring as low as he could on the bike. Lastly, at absurdly high speeds, tires are prone to jumping off their rims. (Yikes.) After consulting some experts, he chose tubular tires, as opposed to clincher tires, to avoid that fate. Tubular tires are glued directly to the rim; clinchers just hook on.

Aerodynamics: The purpose of the pace car is to rule out most aerodynamic concerns; to block the wind for the biker. Donhou added wooden extensions to the car to create a little wind-free haven for him to slip into. Still, two aerodynamic considerations remained pertinent. First, Donhou had to be sure his body was low enough to be completely immersed in the hollow; hence, the custom low-hanging, A-frame handlebars. Next, since the Zephyr isn't low enough to the ground to block the tires from wind and drag, Donhou had to choose his wheels based on their aerodynamics.

He didn't beat the bicycle speed record. That was set back in 1995 by Fred Rompelberg at an absurd 167 mph, with a dragster pace car and an elongated, expensive bike instead of the clunky Zephyr and a nearly normal-looking bike. Donhou and the bike can technically reach at least 102 mph, as indoor tests on rollers prove, but the record wasn't the goal.

Who knows what Donhou will do down the line, though-from the looks of it, he's hooked on going fast.


    






Why Some Coral Reefs Might Survive Climate Change

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Red Reefer

A gorgonian fan (Subergorgia suberosa) in the Great Barrier Reef.

Michael Aw/Getty Images

But it's not going to be easy for many species

The world is clobbering coral reefs, home to 25 percent of all marine species. Agricultural runoff pollutes the water around them; coastal developments tear them up; overfishing kills their inhabitants; and carbon dioxide emissions make the oceans too hot and acidic. In a provocative op-ed for the New York Times last year, Roger Bradbury, an ecologist at Australian National University, declared that reefs are "zombie ecosystems . . . on a trajectory to collapse within a human generation." The slightly more hopeful consensus statement from last summer's International Coral Reef Symposium (ICRS), attended by 2,000 scientists, noted that while 25 to 30 percent of the world's reefs were already "severely degraded," they could still be saved through "global action to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, and via improved local protection."

There's an emerging third scenario, though, one positioned between those of the doomsayers and the relative optimists, and it's the most controversial and least publicly discussed. It forecasts a world in which governments create marine sanctuaries but don't manage to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. Scientists in this camp hypothesize that reefs of the future won't be the same as those of today-they'll become fewer, with fewer species-but they might just adapt and survive.

Reefs aren't all dying off at the same rate. A small minority are doing a little better and appear especially resilient through some combination of genetics, favorable water conditions, natural defenses, and conservation strategies.

Consider the reefs of Kaneohe Bay, Oahu. Because of unusual water circulation, the bay is more acidic and a few degrees warmer than the regional norm. This is a climate-change-like scenario that most Hawaiian coral won't confront until midway through the 21st century or later-and yet, as the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology's Christopher Jury reported at the ICRS conference, "growth is strong and reef development robust." Over the past few years, Jury has come to believe that coral may in fact be able to adapt, at least somewhat, to future increases in temperature and acidity. But barring any action to reduce carbon emissions, he says, "things still look very, very bad for coral reefs."

Another positive story comes from the Line Islands in the central Pacific Ocean. The reefs there that aren't exposed to local human impact (such as runoff and overfishing) are, as you would expect, in excellent shape compared with others nearby. What's more surprising: The protected coral seem better equipped to survive global warming and an acidifying ocean, the same way that a previously healthy person has a better chance of fighting off a serious infection than someone who's already sickly. All told, scientists have measured up to 80 percent live coral cover in the protected reefs, versus about 20 percent in others.

Coral may be able to adapt, at least somewhat, to future increases in temperature and acidity.The battered coral of Moorea, French Polynesia, meanwhile, also demonstrate how protected reefs are better equipped to withstand big threats. The outer reefs were almost completely destroyed after an assault by ravenous starfish in 2008 and by a violent 2010 cyclone. (Cyclones appear to be increasing in size as the climate changes.) But some healthy reefs closest to shore now serve as nurseries for young fish (that are protected by local regulations from overfishing), which grow up and move to the outer reef. There, they gobble up algae that would otherwise block new coral from growing, says Andrew Brooks, a scientist at the Moorea Coral Reef Long-Term Ecological Research site.

Some coral may even be able to fight back on their own. Onshore on Moorea, professors Bob Carpenter and Peter Edmunds of California State University, Northridge, pump large tanks containing living coral with various levels of acidity-boosting carbon dioxide. One might expect that in the harshest conditions, the coral would not only stop growing but that their calcium carbonate skeletons would begin to dissolve. Instead, the scientists observed in 2011 that although coral growth slowed as acidity increased, it never stopped entirely, even in their worst-case scenario. The coral even appeared to be bulking up their tissue. And the researchers learned that not all species are created equal. Pocillopora damicornis, a variety of branching coral that is common throughout the South Pacific, barely slowed its growth at all.

These various snippets of good news about reefs are the exception, not the rule, but some scientists say the resilient coral offer the most constructive insights for the future. By examining the survival secrets of the winners, we can put conservation money where it will have its biggest impact.

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


    






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