In 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration will admit military, private, and commercial drones into U.S. airspace. The move could dramatically increase the number of unmanned aircraft shooting through the skies, and with it, the value of the domestic drone economy. The Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International estimates that the new regulations will result in "100,000 jobs created and economic impact of $82 billion" by 2025. For several cities and states across the country, that means one thing: ka-ching.

Take North Dakota, where law enforcement, local government, federal agencies, and universities have already laid the groundwork for the coming drone-volution. The state has the nation's first degree program in unmanned vehicles, at the University of North Dakota; an Air National Guard unit that switched from F-16 fighters to MQ-1 Predator drones a few years ago; and $5 million set aside for drone development if the FAA approves North Dakota as a drone test site. (Several U.S. regions are currently competing to be FAA-designated drone testing sites; six winners will be approved in December.)

To better grasp how the Roughrider state hopes to corner the market on drones, I sat down with Al Palmer, director for the University of North Dakota's Center for UAS Research, Education and Training, at the 2013 Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International convention. Here is how North Dakota is trying to lead the nation in unmanned robots.

1. Invest in drone development.

North Dakota is funding drone development and education on its own, thanks to a tremendous budget surplus ($2 billion predicted in 2013), largely from fracking and horizontal drilling.

That budget surplus means the state can reduce taxes and create income tax credit incentives for research expenditures to make a very business-friendly climate for drone-related startups, Palmer says.

2. Exploit old aviation roots.

Drones, despite their reputation as creepy spy bots, are just a subset of powered flying machines, and humans have been using those since 1903. When the University of North Dakota began its unmanned aviation degree program in 2009, it didn't starting from scratch; the school drew experience from its airplanes program (which began in 1968) and helicopters program (which began in 1981).

The program trains pilots and gives students the skills to create drone-related startups. Field of View is one such startup. Founded by a UND graduate from the school's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Center of Excellence, the company makes drone accessories for agricultural applications.

3. Give drones the dangerous jobs.

Crop dusters, who fly small propeller-powered planes over fields to spray them with pesticide, have the third-highest fatality rate among professions in the U.S., according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Palmer argues that we should give jobs like this to unmanned aircraft. "One day the crop duster is going to get up, fix his eggs and bacon and his toast and his coffee, and then go over to his computer and hit 'L' for launch," Palmer says.

This kind of practical commercial application isn't as exciting as drones that deliver pizza and wedding cakes, but it's low-hanging fruit. Replacing a manned crop duster with an unmanned one that also collects data as it dusts allows small farmers to better use their land, Palmer says.

4. Work with local politicians.

For places that lack police helicopters, small cheap drones offer law enforcement agencies an affordable eye in the sky. But convincing people to feel comfortable with cameras in the sky can be an uphill battle.

To help address this problem, North Dakota implemented an Unmanned Aircraft Systems Research Compliance Committee, which includes first responders, university community members, clergy, and city leadership. Every research project involving the university's drones has to be vetted and approved by the committee. Right now, when law enforcement officials wants to use a drone, they launch the project with the university, if the committee approves. Palmer explains that while many people are comfortable using drones to monitor vehicle crashes, for search and rescue, and for event-specific traffic control, they don't want drones used for police missions like tracking down bank robbers. Working with the community helps prepare the public for a future increasingly filled with flying robots.

If you want to track down meteorite debris, UCL Qatar professor Thilo Rehren explains in a phone interview, you have a couple options: your best bet is to scour for the black chunks of rock in the white plains of Antarctica, "but the second best place to hunt meteorites is the Sahara Desert," where it's relatively easy to find space rocks amid the expansive, light sands. About 5,000 years ago, that's where the Egyptians likely looked.

Rehren and a team of archaeologists have been studying Egyptian jewelry first uncovered from a grave in 1911--specifically, a set of beads from around 3,200 B.C. (The markings on ceramics and other finds at the site indicate the general time period.) The beads don't look like much more than decaying chunks of metal (which they are), but they were ceremoniously strung together on a necklace and wrapped around the deceased inside the tomb.

The beads are the earliest known iron artifacts ever found. So old, in fact, that the beads pre-date iron smelting, where metal is produced from raw ore. That technique is what ushered in the Iron Age, when stronger tools and weapons altered the course of human history. It's long been suspected that iron trinkets from well before the Iron Age came from meteorites, and now it's been confirmed "beyond reasonable doubt," Rehren says. That means iron working was practiced thousands of years before it was widespread.

The beads have been undergoing tests since the 1920s, when archaeologists first did a destructive (!) test that melted down one of the beads to analyze its components. Inside were nickel and cobalt in proportions that suggested the jewelry was made from meteorites. But the analysis was still only suggestive of meteorites--not quite a smoking gun that would prove it.

That changed recently, when advances in technology allowed for more intensive (and not priceless-bead-destroying) tests. Back in May, a different team examining one of the beads from the same set used electron microscopy and computer tomography to confirm the high amounts of nickel in the bead, and also found a crystalline structure called a Widmanstätten pattern, which is found in iron from meteorites.

The final nail in the mystery's coffin, however, is Rehren et. al's work. Using techniques like neutron radiography, where the reactions from neutrons beamed into a sample is picked up in a black-and-white image, the team was able to get a look at not only the surface of the beads, but the interior and its composition. Inside, along with the expected ingredients, they also found something that hadn't been seen before: a tiny, tiny amount of the element germanium. ("We're talking about roughly 1 percent of 1 percent," Rehren says.) Even that minuscule amount of the substance suggests that the jewelry originated from meteorites; germanium isn't found at all in metal from iron smelting.

Neat. And you can look at this finding as the fun, high-tech resolution to an archaeological curio, but when you put it in historical context, it's bigger than that. After these beads were made, it was another 1,500 years before iron smelting was used, and another 500 before iron replaced copper as the dominant metal for tool-making, meaning iron-working was an older profession than expected. It takes a certain level of skill, too, to hammer out sheets of metal and form them into tube shapes like these beads--"You need to invent blacksmithing, basically," Rehren says.

So there were a skilled set of people working with metal hundreds of years before the process became widespread. (Not many, since meteoritic iron is rare, but still some.) Instead of iron-working being completely invented, then, there were likely smiths from generations before who could pass the the technique down to younger workers.

Plus, iron falling out of the sky might have inspired ancient religious beliefs, so imagine how excited they were when they'd figured out how to mimic the process on solid ground.

Measuring the brain's electric signals, a process called electroencephalography (EEG), is a useful way to diagnose seizures and evaluate sleep disorders. Attaching a jumble of electrodes and wires to the scalp, though, is messy, time-consuming and requires a patient to sit still in a lab, so researchers are limited to recording data over a period of only a few hours.

Engineers from Imperial College London hope to give EEG recording a little more flexibility with a device designed to be worn nestled in the outer ear like a hearing aid. It three electrodes record data from within the ear canal, a technique its creators say performs on par with a traditional scalp EEG, but can be used to conveniently record activity over a longer period of time.

The device is limited by the fact that it's best at recording activity from the region it's attached to, the temporal lobe, but an ear-based EEG has other advantages. Having a device that fits right in the ear makes it easier to keep the electrodes in the same spot for accurate readings, and reduces the signal noise created by body movement. The wearer can still hear through it, making it an inconspicuous way to monitor the brain activity of people with recurring issues like daily seizures or microsleeps.

[MIT Technology Review]

Each year, we scour the country for the coolest, strangest, most dangerous college labs we can find. This year's picks include places where you can chase storms, build Mars rovers, and blow things up. Check out the gallery for more.--Eds

Like an especially unruly toddler, young stars tend to be violent. You can see one such example in new images taken by the Altacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)--the "largest astronomical project in existence"--and ESO's New Technology Telescope.

According to a new study, this young star, Herbig-Haro 46/47, is about 1,400 light-years away from Earth. The images show the young star ejecting material at extraordinary velocities. "This system is similar to most isolated low mass stars during their formation and birth," Diego Madrones, a co-author of the study, says in a statement. "But it is also unusual because the outflow impacts the cloud directly on one side of the young star and escapes out of the cloud on the other. This makes it an excellent system for studying the impact of the stellar winds on the parent cloud from which the young star is formed."

The image you see here is a combination of radio observations from ALMA and shorter wavelength visible light observations from ESO's NTT. ALMA snapped this image while the array was still under construction. Nevertheless, the array provided much sharper images than what other telescopes could provide, as well as images that allow scientists to observe the speed with which the material that the star expels travels through space. ALMA can also obtain such observations in less time--this one took just five hours, while other telescopes would have taken 10 times longer.

Click here to enter the gallery

Our Earth can be a violent, desperate place. Sometimes it's nice to take a broader view and be reminded the blue marble can also be a beautiful place to live. Astronaut Karen Nyberg joined the International Space Station as a flight engineer for Expedition 35 back in May. Picking up where former ISS denizen Chris Hadfield left off, Nyberg has taken to social media to share some amazing images from above Earth's atmosphere.

From an inside look at space living (with boards such as "Science in Space" and "Hair and Space") to breathtaking views of our home planet, Nyberg's Pinterest page is a goldmine of space photos. Here are our nine favorites.

Contrary to what some anti-drug campaigns will have you believe, dropping acid probably isn't going to make you depressed or psychotic. In fact, psychedelics might actually be associated with better mental health, a new study finds.

Two neuroscientists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology looked at associations between lifetime psychedelic use and mental health with data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in the United States. More than 13 percent of the 130,152 randomly selected survey respondents reported they had used psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline and peyote at least once in their life. The study found that psychedelic use wasn't significantly associated with serious psychological distress, receiving or needing mental health treatment or psychiatric symptoms.

The study didn't find any evidence for LSD flashbacks or hallucinations.Psychedelic users were likely to be younger, unmarried, and male, when compared to non-users. They were likely to have used a whole range of illicit drugs, and to have said they enjoy risk-taking. But they were not more likely to have lasting depression, anxiety or psychosis as a result of their drug use. Nor did the study find any evidence for LSD flashbacks or hallucinations.

The researchers did find some associations between psychedelic use and a lower rate of mental health issues, including lower rates of psychological distress, mental health treatment and psychiatric medication prescription. But, caveat: The associations were statistically fairly weak, and because it was a retrospective survey study, they couldn't determine whether it was a causal effect. "[T]hese results might reflect beneficial effects of psychedelic use, relatively better initial mental health among people who use psychedelics, or chance "false positive" findings," they write. Furthermore, they "cannot exclude the possibility that use of psychedelics might have a negative effect on mental health for some individuals or groups, perhaps counterbalanced at a population level by a positive effect on mental health in others," according to the study.

"Everything has some potential for negative effects, but psychedelic use is overall considered to pose a very low risk to the individual and to society," clinical psychologist and co-author Pål-Ørjan Johansen said in a press statement. "Psychedelics can elicit temporary feelings of anxiety and confusion, but accidents leading to serious injury are extremely rare."

LSD and psilocybin could have potential as treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder.These results are consistent with previous research showing that psychedelic use isn't generally dangerous, and can actually have several therapeutic applications. Studies have shown drugs like LSD and psilocybin could have potential as treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety and alcoholism.

The study appears in PLOS ONE this week.

What debate? A recent draft of an international consensus report offers stronger-than-ever evidence that global warming is driven by human activity. The report also adjusts its expectations for important climate change effects such as how much sea levels will rise, while admitting the difficulty in estimating what will happen to individual cities in the age of climate change.

Reuters recently got a hold of a draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's next report, the first stage of which is due in September. The panel, which includes hundreds of experts and is open to members of the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization, periodically summarizes the worldwide scientific consensus on climate change. It's more than 2,000 pages long.

The panel's estimates for future warming are important to policymakers. They drive decisions about what do to prepare towns and nations for rising sea levels, more extreme weather and other effects from climate change. Governments around the world have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions based on the panel's findings, The New York Times reports. (The Times got a look at a draft after Reuters did.)

In previous years, the panel's reports established that global warming is unequivocally happening. The latest draft indicates that the panel is surer than ever that humans are the primary cause. A large majority of scientists have long believed that global warming is human-caused. In recent years, though, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has nudged its certainty level upward from 90 percent in 2007 to 95 percent in the latest draft, Reuters reports.

While climate change deniers often challenge the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, most scientists consider the panel conservative. The panel has made a high-profile mistake in the past. In its 2007 report, it said the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. Later, the panel found that claim was speculative and wasn't backed by peer-reviewed science.

Here are other highlights, as Reuters and The New York Times report them:

• Are we already seeing the effects of climate change? The new draft says yes. Scientists are surer that the Earth has experienced more heat waves caused by global warming.
• Since the international panel published its last report in 2007, scientists around the world have published more studies and stronger science on future sea level rise. Thus, the panel adjusted its expectation for the upper limit for how high that rise will likely be. It now expects rises between about 1 to 3 feet (29 to 82 centimeters) by the end of the century. Its 2007 estimate was about 7 inches to 2 feet.
• Even as scientists become more sure that the world is warming overall, they're still having a hard time predicting exactly what will happen to individual places. That makes it difficult for lawmakers to ready their towns and countries.
• Scientists may be less sure about how much climate change has contributed to other events. Compared to the panel's 2007 report, the latest report finds it's less certain that people are already experiencing climate change-driven tropical cyclones and droughts.
• Some details in the report may still change this fall. The draft is scheduled for further discussion and revisions, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change spokesperson Jonathan Lynn told the BBC. In the past, however, such late drafts have not changed much after final discussion, The New York Times reports.

Suicide was responsible for more deaths than motor vehicle crashes were in 2009, but it's not always easy for doctors to tell when someone is at risk. A new study from the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Indianapolis VA Medical Center has identified a series of biomarkers that could help identify those at risk for suicide with something as simple as a blood test.

Researchers have been looking to biomarkers--traceable biological characteristics, like a certain molecule or gene in the body--that could indicate that a person is at a greater risk for suicide. As of right now, a few different potential biomarkers for suicidal thoughts and behavior have been studied, but none are being used in psychiatric practice yet.

To discover potential changes in gene expression associated with suicidal thoughts, researchers looked at a group of 75 men they were already following as part of a longitudinal study on bipolar disorder. Over the course of multiple lab visits, nine of the men went from having no sign of suicidal thoughts at all to having significant suicidal thoughts. By looking at what changed in their blood and comparing it to the blood of demographically similar men who died from suicide, the researchers were able to pinpoint six likely biomarkers.

"If you ask someone who is intent on committing suicide, they might not tell you [of their intentions]," explains co-author Alexander Niculescu, an associate professor of psychiatry and medical neuroscience at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Niculescu and his colleagues narrowed the list of potential biomarkers with something called Convergent Functional Genomics.

"It's kind of like Google page rank--the more links to a page, the higher it gets prioritized in your search list," Niculescu says. "Same thing with this approach." For the candidate genes in this study, more independent lines of evidence meant a higher likelihood that the gene would be a biomarker for suicide. They cross-matched the biomarkers they found with previous studies to see if other scientists had found additional links to that gene expression and suicide.

Once the researchers had identified six likely biomarkers, they studied a group of 42 bipolar men and a group of 46 schizophrenic men to see if the biomarkers could predict whether the men would be hospitalized for reasons related to suicide. "Indeed those markers did predict hospitalization for suicide," Niculescu says, though the effect wasn't as strong among the schizophrenic group. This indicates the biomarkers may be able to predict suicide risk even years later.

The strongest biomarker they found was the level of an enzyme called SAT1 in the blood. Previous studies have looked for suicide biomarkers in cerebrospinal fluid, but taking spinal fluid is a painful and arduous process. Other studies have pointed to brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, a type of protein involved in neuron growth, as a likely suicide biomarker.

This study was limited by the fact that its sample was a very small, specific group of subjects--all nine were Caucasian men. The results will need to be expanded to a larger and more demographically diverse set of people.

The eventual goal is to be able to test psychiatric patients for these biomarkers, but Niculescu says "these markers by themselves are not exclusively going to determine if somebody is suicidal." Other clinical and risk factors would need to be taken into account, since not every high-risk patient will necessarily commit suicide, but being able to intervene with counseling or hospitalization when someone is at great risk could save lives. "A million people worldwide die each year from suicide," Niculescu says. "It''s a preventable tragedy if we have the right tools."

The full study is published online in Molecular Psychiatry.

"Everything about it would be bad," says Mark Hammergren, an astronomer at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, beginning with your attempt to scoop it up. Despite the fact that white dwarfs are fairly common throughout the universe, the nearest is 8.6 light-years away. Let's assume, though, that you've spent 8.6 years in your light-speed car and that the radiation and heat emanating from the star didn't kill you on your approach. White dwarfs are extremely dense stars, and their surface gravity is about 100,000 times as strong as Earth's. "You'd have to get your sample-which would be very hard to carve out-without falling onto the star and getting flattened into a plasma," Hammergren says. "And even then, the high pressure would cause the hydrogen atoms in your body to fuse into helium." (This type of reaction, by the way, is what triggers a hydrogen bomb.)

It would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth.Then you'd have to worry about confinement. Freeing the sample from its superdense, high-pressure home and bringing it to Earth's relatively low-pressure environment would cause it to expand explosively without proper containment. But if it didn't blow up in your face-or vaporize your face, since the stuff's temperature ranges between 10,000˚ and 100,000˚F-and you somehow got it to your kitchen table, you'd be hard-pressed to feed yourself: A single teaspoon would weigh in excess of five tons. "You'd pop it into your mouth and it would fall unimpeded through your body, carve a channel through your gut, come out through your nether regions, and burrow a hole toward the center of the Earth," Hammergren says. "The good news is that it's not quite dense enough to have a strong enough gravitational field to rip you apart from the inside out."

It probably wouldn't be worth the trouble anyway, Hammergren laments. White dwarfs are mostly helium or carbon, so your teaspoonful would taste like a whiff of flavorless helium gas or a lick of coal. But if you're desperate for a taste of star, you don't really need to travel 8.6 light-years-your fridge is full of the stuff. Most of the elements that make up our bodies and everything around us were formed in the cores of stars and then belched out into the universe over billions of years. Basically everything you eat was once part of a star. Might we recommend some star fruit?

This article originally appeared in the November 2009 issue of Popular Science magazine.

The Department of Defense's research arm, DARPA, already has a lot of things on its wish list this year, but go ahead and add one more: a computer with the same brain capabilities as a mammal.

DARPA wants to build a machine that would be based on the neocortex, the (large) part of the human brain involved in higher functions like motor control, language, sensory activity and thought processes. The agency has put out a Request For Information on research of a "Cortical Processor" that they could use for analysis and detecting anomalies in large, complex data sets. In short, they want to basically build a version of an artificial human brain, one with temporal and spatial recognition that can solve "extraordinarily difficult recognition problems in real-time."

"The cortical computational model should be fault tolerant to gaps in data, massively parallel, extremely power efficient, and highly scalable. It should also have minimal arithmetic precision requirements, and allow ultra-dense, low power implementations," the request states. And what will DARPA do with that? It's not entirely clear, and the agency may not be totally sure itself. The research call asks developers to come up with potential new applications for this type of system.

DARPA has already made inroads on creating brain-like computing systems through their SyNAPSE (Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics) program, a biologically inspired computing project. In the third phase of SyNAPSE, DARPA-funded IBM researchers recently debuted a new brain-based computer chip called True North that mimics the organization and function of the brain with "neurosynaptic cores" that emulate neurons.

One day, DARPA would like to be able to build a machine that can think, sense and understand its environment, and find patterns and associations like the human mind does, with the brain's small size and energy efficiency. Eventually this would also them to build robots with intelligence levels similar to mice or cats.

[Network World]

Groklaw is one of our favorite blogs; it's a discussion and dissection of the intersection of technology and the law, focusing on open source but also on antitrust and patent law and all kinds of other things we care about. And today the founder and chief writer, Pamela Jones, announced that she's shutting down Groklaw for good, citing concerns over government surveillance.

"They tell us that if you send or receive an email from outside the US, it will be read. If it's encrypted, they keep it for five years, presumably in the hopes of tech advancing to be able to decrypt it against your will and without your knowledge. Groklaw has readers all over the world," writes Jones, presumably talking about Gmail, which retains encrypted emails. "There is no way to do Groklaw without email," she continues, though she doesn't elaborate (presumably this is how she communicates with sources and legal advisers who like to remain anonymous). She says she is personally switching to Kolab, a Swiss email company, but that her "personal decision is to get off of the Internet to the degree it's possible."

Kolab does not offer encryption, but it's a paid service that keeps all data in Switzerland, which is somewhat of a haven for privacy (the country, according to Kolab, wiretapped only 20 times in 2012, which is basically nothing compared to the U.S.). Kolab says it complies with Swiss requests, but only Swiss, and vows to publicize it if it ever receives one.

It's an odd choice, to shut the site down completely; there are plenty of secure email services out there, as Jones knows, considering she's switching to one. The motivation seems less about concerns that her personal email will be read than total disgust that the state of privacy and the law has come to this. "What I do know is it's not possible to be fully human if you are being surveilled 24/7," she writes. Jones is semi-famously private; she writes as merely "PJ." "I originally wanted to stay anonymous, in a sense, by just saying PJ. Eventually media attention and other factors made it impossible to remain just PJ but I would have if I could have. I have no desire to be famous, for one thing," she once wrote.

We'll miss Groklaw if it's truly gone, but if this shutdown, along with Lavabit's, is an early sign of mass revolt against surveillance, perhaps it'll have some positive effect after all. Groklaw will remain online as a resource, but will not update with new posts.

Today is Earth Overshoot Day. Happy Earth Overshoot Day! Except, well, we don't much feel like celebrating.

That's because Earth Overshoot Day is the day each year when we've consumed natural resources at a rate beyond which our planet can replenish, and have produced more waste than can be reabsorbed, according to the Global Footprint Network, a think tank based in the U.S., Switzerland, and Belgium.

The holiday was originally conceived of by Andrew Simms, of the U.K. think tank New Economics Foundation. This year, it falls on August 20, two days (or three, depending on the calculations) earlier than it came last year, following a relatively steady trend since 2001: falling about three days earlier each year. (Humanity first went into overshoot in 1970; that year, Earth Overshoot Day fell on December 29.)

The cause for our unsustainable consumption is multi-pronged. We have a growing population (now at more than 7.1 billion, and according to the World Popular Clock, the net gain is one person every 13 seconds) with growing demands for products and services that create more waste, and use more resources. At our current rate of global consumption and waste production, the level of resources required to support us is about 1.5 Earths. The Global Footprint Network says we are on track to needing two Earths before we reach the middle of the century.

Today, according to the Global Footprint Network, more than 80 percent of the world's population lives in countries that use more than their ecosystems can renew. Some of the bigger offenders: Japan consumes 7.1 Japans worth of resources; Italy, four; and Egypt, 2.4. China's ecological footprint is the largest (they would need 2.5 Chinas to accommodate their population)--though the per capita footprint is smaller than many European or North American countries.

To calculate the date, the Global Footprint Network figures out how many days of a particular year the Earth's biocapacity can provide for the total ecological footprint. So, world biocapacity divided by world ecological footprint times 365 equals Earth Overshoot Day. The think tank calculates biocapacity by looking at the amount of productive area (both land and sea) available to provide resources and to absorb wastes under the constraints of current technology and management practices. A country has an ecological reserve if its footprint is smaller than its biocapacity, and likewise, if its footprint exceeds biocapacity, it is an ecological debtor.

The Global Footprint Network notes that the date is an approximation. The precision of the exact date is limited by aggregated country datasets, but still shows that humans are using the Earth at a rate that is unsustainable, year after year. To read about more environmental holidays, go here.

This absolutely awesome all-electric car, created by engineers at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, can fold itself completely in half when parking. Inspired by a certain leprosy-carrying mammal, the Armadillo-T seats two adults and has a top speed of 37 miles per hour.

The video is probably all of the future you can handle in one day:

By folding up its rear half, the 992-pound prototype shrinks from its original length of 110 inches down to just 65 inches. Once a driver has gotten the car near the desired parking space, he or she can get out and use a smartphone to activate "Transformer Mode" (my coinage, someone should pay me for this stuff) and then remotely steer the folded car the rest of the way into the spot. So cool.

A 13.6 kWh lithium-ion battery pack powers four in-wheel motors. By putting the motors inside the wheels, the designers freed up space in the car for people. It charges in 10 minutes and can drive about 62 miles on a full battery. Cameras in place of side mirrors reduce blind spots.

The Armadillo-T would be ideal for urban car-sharing and near-distance travel within tourist areas or large buildings, says lead researcher In-Soo Suh, associate professor of the Graduate School for Green Transportation at KAIST. This thing will totally tide us over while we wait for our flying car.

SpaceX, billionaire Elon Musk's private spaceflight company, appears to be on a hiring spree. On its careers page, the company--which currently employs more than 3,000 people--lists nearly 200 open positions. The page is up to date, SpaceX spokeswoman Hannah Post tells Popular Science.

Many of the openings are for different types of engineers, but there's room for everyone from a line cook to a space suit engineer. New college grads might be happy to know there are four types of positions explicitly aimed at them.

The aerospace industry is a major employer in the U.S. (though prone to boom-bust cycles). Take heavyweights like Northrop Grumman, which employs about 70,000, and Boeing, which employs more than 170,000. As private spaceflight gains ground, smaller companies such as SpaceX are adding even more jobs to the industry.

About a dozen of the new SpaceX positions are related to the company's Dragon craft, which brings cargo to and from the International Space Station. In 2012, the Dragon became the first non-government-built craft to exchange cargo in space. The company is now working on tweaking the Dragon to send humans to space, according to its website.

So what else does it take to send private ships to space? Check out some of the surprising positions SpaceX is looking to fill, plus their job requirements:

Visual Coordinator

The visual coordinator has to "maintain on a daily basis [the] pristine aesthetic appearance of company corporate headquarters." He or she also "takes an active role in selecting furniture, décor, and interior details."

Crane Technician Assistant

Besides a minimum of two years in the crane service industry and a willingness to work overtime, SpaceX helpfully specifies that it wants someone with "no fear of heights" and "great hand skills."

General Helper

This job is exactly what it sounds like. The general helper would do everything from repairing machinery to landscaping to carpentry. He or she would need to know how to operate small power equipment, fix plumbing, install lights and more. Hats off to anyone who has all these skills.

Space Suit Design Engineer

Looks like SpaceX wants its own suits. The space suit design engineer would work with the Dragon crew systems team. He or she would design, analyze and test suit ideas. Applicants need at least a bachelor's degree and two years of experience in structural or composite hardware engineering.

Because of its cloudless skies and favorable latitude, the Rub' al-Khali desert in the United Arab Emirates is a good home for the world's largest operational concentrated solar plant, the eight-month-old Shams 1. Its 258,048 parabolic mirrors reflect sunlight to heat water into steam to turn a turbine, generating 100 megawatts. But in addition to plenty of high-intensity sunlight, there's also plenty of, well, sand, and if the mirrors get too dusty, the plant's efficiency dramatically decreases. That means a lot of cleaning. Special trucks take three days to clean the nearly seven million square feet of mirror surface area. Scrubbing happens after the sun sets, and it's almost entirely automatic. The operator pulls up to a row of mirrors and pushes a button to extend the truck's robotic arms. Radar sensors detect how close the mirrors are to the arms, which stretch accordingly. Then, the operator turns on the water, sets the brushes spinning, and drives at about two miles per hour, polishing away.

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