The NYC Open Data initiative has dumped a ton of New York public records--school test scores, court districts, even laundromat maps--on one website. But the site is not exactly what you'd call "explorable." A "Showing 10 of 2118" pages, with a next button nearby, looms large on the bottom of the site.

Enter designer Chris Whong, who created a parallel site that serves as a visual guide to all that open data. Whong's site presents assorted branches that break down the data into categories, all viewable on a single page. So hover around the "Social Services" branch, and you'll see dots representing data for homelessness, high school graduation help centers, and more. Here's a close-up:

Click on one of the dots, and it'll take you to the data source on New York's government site. The symbols on the dots represent how the data is tabulated--whether it's a table, map, or something else.

It's still nearly overwhelming (so many dots!) but at least it makes the absolutely monstrous amount of data viewable at a glance. Which is good, since if you look at the visualization for long enough, you'll occasionally find a gem, like this not surprisingly thin map of parking spots in the city.

Check out the full visualization here.

Sony makes great mirrorless cameras and great DSLRs; its NEX-6 mirrorless camera might be the best of its kind ever made, and the full-frame A99 DSLR blew our friends at Popular Photography away. The newly announced A3000 is something we haven't seen before: a mirrorless camera in the shape of a DSLR. Best of both worlds, or a weird misfit in camera purgatory?

DSLRs use a mirror to reflect light into the viewfinder, so you can see the image right through the lens. That requires a fair bit of space, so DSLRs necessarily have a large body--which they fill up with all kinds of goodies, like a separate sensor for autofocus and mounts for big, expensive lenses. Mirrorless cameras don't have the mirror; they tend to be very compact, but they have a few key weaknesses. The tiny size means autofocus is sometimes not quite as good as in DSLRs (though Sony has made huge strides in that department lately), there's not much room for an electronic viewfinder (so you're often restricted to using the screen to frame your shots, like on a cellphone), and they're compatible only with the smaller, more expensive selection of lenses specifically designed for mirrorless cameras. (DSLRs have used the same lens mounts for decades, so if you've got a brand-new Nikon, you can screw on a lens from the 1960s with no problem.)

The A3000 is a mirrorless camera, but it's bigger and thicker than Sony's regular mirrorless line, the NEX series. In fact, it has the shape and color of a Sony DSLR, though it's smaller than even the smallest Sony Alpha DSLR. (The Panasonic GH3 is similar, though much more expensive.) It has an electronic viewfinder, and the shape and button layout may be more comfortable or familiar to those who have used DSLRs in the past. But it uses the more expensive and limited selection of lenses meant for the NEX series, and it has a similar amount of processing power and quality of internals as the NEX-6--though they're used differently.

The A3000 has a 20-megapixel sensor, giving it a higher resolution than the NEX-6 (which has a 16.1-megapixel sensor), but the trick here is that the NEX-6 secretly has a higher megapixel count than it advertises. The extra megapixels are used for an autofocus system, similar to the way it's done in DSLRs (which have historically been much better at autofocusing than mirrorless cameras). The A3000 has no such setup, so its autofocus abilities may not be quite as strong. But given the slightly improved processor, it's likely that the A3000 will have similar image quality (meaning, very good image quality) as the NEX-6.

But the big difference: with a kit lens, the NEX-6 retails for $800. The A3000 will be half that, at only $400. That gives it a pretty amazing ratio of image quality to price; there are plenty of mirrorless cameras in the $400 range, but none have anywhere near the likely image quality and featureset. (That's thanks to the A3000's larger size, which makes it easier to fit in quality components.)

DSLRs, too, are much more expensive; a good entry-level DSLR, like the Canon T4i, also costs $800.

For an in-depth, expert look at the A3000, head on over to our sister site, Popular Photography. We'll definitely be watching; it's one of the more interesting cameras out there, and could be a great, cheap option for anyone looking for a first interchangeable-lens shooter.

At the bottom right corner of the periodic table of elements, there are a handful of boxes that illustrators often color gray. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry leaves out those boxes altogether, so that their periodic table looks a bit gap-toothed. The boxes are for elements that the IUPAC hasn't yet confirmed actually exist.

Now, a new set of experiments backs up the discovery of one of those elements. An international team of physicists has synthesized an element with 115 protons in the GSI accelerator in Germany. This isn't the first time a research group has synthesized the element, which has the temporary name of ununpentium (Latin for one-one-five, plus "-ium.") A team of Russian and U.S. scientists first made ununpentium in the early 2000s and published a paper about it in 2006. However, at the time, the IUPAC didn't consider that enough evidence to officially recognize-or name-ununpentium. The new GSI studies are another step toward official recognition.

Why do we say that people "synthesized" or "made" ununpentium, instead of saying people "found" it? Well, like other super-heavy elements, ununpentium can only exist when people perform experiments to create it. It's an entirely synthetic element (ununpentium : elements :: polyester : fabrics?). You can't just cook it up in any lab, either. The creation of elements heavier than uranium, which is the heaviest element to occur naturally on Earth and contains 92 protons, requires fusion reactions, nuclear reactions, or other highly specialized chemistry. Before ununpentium, the GSI accelerator had created six synthetic elements with more protons than uranium.

To make ununpentium, the team of physicists working at GSI bombarded a thin film of americium-another synthetic element, with 95 protons-with calcium ions, which have 20 protons each. The bombardment fuses the nuclei of the americium atoms with the nuclei of the calcium atoms to make a new, single, 115-proton nucleus. (See the very educational GIF on GSI's "new elements" webpage.) Like all super-heavy, synthetic elements, ununpentium decays quickly. Atoms of ununpentium that researchers made for the 2006 announcement lasted just 30 to 80 milliseconds.

According to Lund University in Sweden, IUPAC members will now review the new confirmation of the 2006 work and decide whether it's enough to merit official recognition for ununpentium. Lund researchers led the recent ununpentium experiments done at GSI. Meanwhile, the Lund team has published its findings in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Besides confirming cool theories in chemistry, work on synthetic elements helps researchers learn more about the process of fission in general, according to the U.S.' Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. You're unlikely to see ununpentium in even the most advanced gizmos of the future, however. So far, scientists have found practical applications only for synthetic elements with 100 or so protons or fewer.

Kepler 78b is an Earth-sized exoplanet not too far from us--only about 700 light-years away. But don't bother getting your hopes up about settling there, because Kepler 78b is one of the most aggressively unpleasant planets ever discovered (a competitive category, to be sure): its surface is covered with seas of boiling lava and it completes its orbit around its star in a whiplash-inducing 8.5 hours.

Researchers at MIT discovered the exoplanet while indulging an experiment: how close can a planet be to its star? Kepler 78b is about 40 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun; in fact, Kepler 78b's orbit is only three times larger than the circumference of the star it's orbiting! (Earth's orbit is more than 215 times larger than the circumference of our sun, for comparison.)

To find the planet, the team pored over research from NASA's Kepler telescope, analyzing the tiny dips in light visible from stars, indicating that a planet might be passing in front. This particular star is younger than ours, and rotating twice as fast, which may have some influence on how Kepler 78b is able to exist. Not that Kepler 78b is a pleasant place; the researchers believe it's made of some highly dense material, but that its surface is about 5,000° F and covered in oceans of boiling lava. Oh, and it completes its year in about as long as you complete one (relatively light!) day of work. It's one of the fastest orbits ever detected.

The discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal, but you can read more about it here.

Hello, mind control! Researchers at the University of Washington say they've created the first non-invasive brain interface between two humans--i.e., they've basically achieved telepathy.

Previous work has allowed basic communication between two brains, but this is the first time it's been shown in two humans. In February, a Duke University team managed to link the brains of two rats, one in North Carolina and one in Brazil, to solve basic puzzles together. Then, earlier this summer, Harvard University researchers demonstrated a brain-to-brain interface between a human and a rat, allowing a man to control the rat's tail with his mind.

Here, Rajesh Rao, a UW computer science and engineering professor, used his thoughts to control the actions of Andrea Stucco, a research assistant professor in the school's psychology department. Rao wore an EEG cap that read his brain's electrical activity, while Stucco had a transcranial magnetic stimulation coil, which can stimulate brain activity, placed over his left motor cortex, the region of the brain that controls hand movement. A code translated brain signals from the EEG into commands for the brain.

Rao imagined moving his right hand (without actually moving it) to click the "fire" button that would shoot a cannon in a video game. Across campus, Stucco, who wasn't looking at the computer screen in his lab where the video game was unfolding, involuntarily moved his right hand and pushed the space bar on his keyboard to fire the cannon, as if experiencing a nervous tic.

"This was basically a one-way flow of information from my brain to his," Rao said. "The next step is having a more equitable two-way conversation directly between the two brains."

One day, the researchers would like to develop technology that could allow a person who can't speak to communicate their needs, for instance. But a true mind meld is still the work of science fiction. It can only interpret very simple brain signals, and this experiment occurred under ideal conditions with equipment that no one wants to strap on outside the lab. And no, you can't control someone's body against their will, Rao says. But maybe one day?

[University of Washington News]

There is no one right way to eat for everyone.

We are all different and what works for one person may not work for the next.

I personally advocate consumption of both animals and plants and I think there is plenty of evidence that this is a reasonable way to eat.

However, I often get comments from vegans who think that people should eliminate all animal foods.

They frequently say that I'm giving out dangerous advice, that I must be corrupt and sponsored by the meat and dairy industry, or that I'm simply misinformed and need to read The China Study.

Really… I have nothing against vegans or vegetarians.

If you want to eat in this way for whatever reason and you are feeling good and improving your health, then great! Keep on doing what you're doing.

But I do have a serious problem when proponents of this diet are using lies and fear mongering to try and convince everyone else to eat in the same way.

I'm tired of having to constantly defend my position regarding animal foods, so I decided to summarize what I think are the key problems with vegan diets.

Here are 5 reasons why I think vegan (as in no animal foods at all) diets are a bad idea…

1. Vegans are deficient in many important nutrients.

Humans are omnivores. We function best eating both animals and plants.

There are some nutrients that can only be gotten from plants (like Vitamin C) and others that can only be gotten from animals.

Vitamin B12 is a water soluble vitamin that is involved in the function of every cell in the body.

It is particularly important in the formation of blood and the function of the brain.

Because B12 is critical for life and isn't found in any amount in plants (except some types of algae), it is by far the most important nutrient that vegans must be concerned with.

In fact, B12 deficiency is very common in vegans, one study showing that a whopping 92% of vegans are deficient in this critical nutrient (1).

But B12 is just the tip of the iceberg… there are other lesser known nutrients that are only found in animal foods and are critical for optimal function of the body.

Here are a few examples:

• Animal protein contains all the essential amino acids in the right ratios. It is important for muscle mass and bone health, to name a few. Vegans don't get any animal protein, which can have negative effects on body composition (2, 3, 4, 5).
• Creatine helps form an energy reservoir in cells. Studies show that vegetarians are deficient in creatine, which has harmful effects on muscle and brain function (6, 7, 8).
• Carnosine is protective against various degenerative processes in the body and may protect against aging. It is found only in animal foods (9, 10, 11).
• Docosahexaenoic Acid (DHA) is the most active form of Omega-3 fatty acids in the body and primarily found in animal foods. The plant form of Omega-3s, ALA, is inefficiently converted to DHA in the body (12, 13, 14).

Two other nutrients that have been demonized by vegan proponents are saturated fat and cholesterol.

Cholesterol is a crucial molecule in the body and is part of every cell membrane. It is also used to make steroid hormones like testosterone. Studies show that saturated fat intake correlates with increased testosterone levels (15).

Not surprisingly, vegans and vegetarians have much lower testosterone levels than meat eaters (16, 17, 18, 19).

Bottom line: Vegans are deficient in many important nutrients, including Vitamin B12 and Creatine. Studies show that vegans have much lower testosterone levels than their meat-eating counterparts.

2. There are no studies showing that they're better than other diets.

Despite what vegan proponents often claim, there are no controlled trials showing that these diets are any better than other diets.

They often claim that low-carb, high-fat diets (the opposite of vegan diets) are dangerous and that the evidence clearly shows vegan diets to be superior.

I disagree.

This has actually been studied in a high quality randomized controlled trial (the gold standard of science).

The A to Z study compared the Atkins (low-carb, high-fat) diet to the Ornish (low-fat, near-vegan) diet (20).

This study clearly shows that the Atkins diet causes greater improvements in pretty much all health markers, although not all of them were statistically significant:

• The Atkins group lost more weight, 10.4 lbs, while the Ornish group lost only 5.6 lbs.
• The Atkins group had greater decreases in blood pressure.
• The Atkins group had greater increases in HDL (the "good") cholesterol.
• The Atkins group had greater decreases in Triglycerides. They went down by 29.3 mg/dL on Atkins, only 14.9 mg/dL on Ornish.
• Then the Atkins dieters were about twice as likely to make it to the end of the study, indicating that the Atkins diet was easier to follow.

Put simply, the Atkins diet had several important advantages while the Ornish diet performed poorly for all health markers measured.

Now, there are some studies showing health benefits and lower mortality in vegetarians and vegans, such as the Seventh-Day Adventist Studies (21, 22).

The problem with these studies is that they are so-called observational studies. These types of studies can only demonstrate correlation, not causation.

The vegetarians are probably healthier because they are more health conscious overall, eat more vegetables, are less likely to smoke, more likely to exercise, etc. It has nothing to do with avoiding animal foods.

In another study of 10,000 individuals, where both the vegetarians and non-vegetarians were health conscious, there was no difference in mortality between groups (23).

One controlled trial showed that a vegan diet was more effective against diabetes than the official diet recommended by the American Diabetes Association (24).

However, a low-carb diet has also been studied for this purpose and led to much more powerful beneficial effects (25).

A vegan diet may be better than the typical low-fat diet recommended by the mainstream nutrition organizations, but pretty much any diet fits that description.

Bottom line: Despite all the propaganda, there isn't any evidence that vegan diets are any better than other diets. Most of the studies are observational in nature.

3. Proponents of vegan diets use lies and fear mongering to promote their cause.

Some vegan proponents aren't very honest when they try to convince others of the virtues of the vegan diet.

They actively use lies and fear mongering to scare people away from fat and animal foods.

Despite all the propaganda, there really isn't any evidence that meat, eggs, or animal-derived nutrients like saturated fat and cholesterol cause harm.

People who promote vegan diets should be more honest and not use scare tactics and lies to make people feel guilty about eating animal foods, which are perfectly healthy (if unprocessed and naturally fed).

I'd also like to briefly mention The China Study… which is the holy bible of veganism and apparently "proves" that vegan diets are the way to go.

This was an observational study performed by a scientist who was madly in love with his theories. He cherry picked the data from the study to support his conclusions and ignored the data that didn't fit.

The main findings of the China study have been thoroughly debunked.

I recommend you look at these two critiques:

• Denise Minger: The China Study - Fact or Fallacy
• Chris Masterjohn: What Dr. Campbell Won't Tell You About The China Study

Also… a new study from China came out very recently, directly contradicting the findings of the China study.

According to this study, men eating red meat had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and women eating red meat had a lower risk of cancer (26).

Bottom line: Vegan proponents often use fear mongering and scare tactics in order to convince people not to eat animal foods. They frequently cite The China Study as evidence, which has been thoroughly debunked.

4. Vegan diets may work in the short term, for other reasons.

If you look at vegan message boards, you will quickly find stories of people who have seen amazing health benefits on a vegan diet.

I've got no reason to believe that these people are lying.

But it's important to keep in mind that this is anecdotal evidence, which isn't science.

You will find the same kinds of success stories for pretty much any diet.

Then you'll also find tons of people saying they got terrible results on a vegan diet.

Personally, I think that vegan diets can have health benefits for a lot of people… at least in the short term, before the nutrient deficiencies kick in (which can be partly circumvented by supplementation).

However, I don't think this has anything to do with avoiding animal foods!

Vegan diets don't just recommend that people avoid animal foods. They also recommend that people avoid added sugars, refined carbohydrates, processed vegetable oils and trans fats.

Then they suggest that people stop smoking and start exercising. There are so many confounders here that can easily explain all the beneficial effects.

These are extremely unhealthy foods, that's something the vegans and I agree on. I personally think that avoiding these foods is what is causing the apparent benefits.

I am 100% certain that a plant-based diet that includes at least a little bit of animals (the occasional whole egg or fatty fish, for example) will be much healthier in the long-term than a diet that eliminates animal foods completely.

Bottom line: Vegan diets also recommend that people shun added sugar, refined carbohydrates, vegetable oils and trans fats. This is probably the reason for any health benefits, not the removal of unprocessed animal foods.

5. There is NO health reason to completely avoid animal foods.

Humans have been eating meat for hundreds of thousands (or millions) of years.

We evolved this way.

Our bodies are perfectly capable of digesting, absorbing and making full use of the many beneficial nutrients found in animal foods.

It is true that processed meat causes harm and that it's disgusting the way "conventionally raised" animals are treated these days.

However, animals that are fed natural diets (like grass-fed cows) and given access to the outdoors are completely different.

Even though processed meat causes harm, which is supported by many studies, the same does NOT apply to natural, unprocessed meat.

Unprocessed red meat, which has been demonized in the past, really doesn't have any association with cardiovascular disease, diabetes or the risk of death (27, 28).

It has only a very weak link with an increased risk of cancer and this is probably caused by excessive cooking, not the meat itself (29, 30, 31).

Saturated fat has also never been proven to lead to heart disease. A study of almost 350 thousand individuals found literally no association between saturated fat consumption and cardiovascular disease (32, 33, 34).

Studies on eggs show no effect either. Multiple long-term studies have been conducted on egg consumption, which are very rich in cholesterol, and found no negative effects (35, 36).

The thing is that animal foods… meat, fish, eggs and dairy products for those who can tolerate them, are extremely nutritious.

They are loaded with high quality protein, healthy fats, vitamins, minerals and various lesser known nutrients that have important effects on health.

There may be ethical or religious reasons not to eat animals… I get it. But there is no scientifically valid health reason to completely eliminate animal foods.

Take home message

At the end of the day, the optimal diet for any one person depends on a lot of things.

This includes age, gender, activity levels, current metabolic health, food culture and personal preference.

Vegan diets may be appropriate for some people, not others. Different strokes for different folks.

If you want to eat a vegan diet, then make sure to be prudent about your diet. Take the necessary supplements and read some of the books by the vegan docs, I'm sure they at least know how to safely apply a vegan diet.

If you're getting results, feeling good and are managing to stick to your healthy lifestyle, then that's great. If it ain't broken, don't fix it.

But don't use fear mongering and scare tactics to persuade people to join your cause and scare them away from perfectly healthy animal foods. That ain't cool.

This article was republished with permission from Authority Nutrition.

It's no secret healthcare procedures often cost way more in the U.S. than they do in other countries. Healthcare costs also vary incredibly across different regions within the U.S. How much?

Well, according to this interactive infographic of hospital pricing data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, going to the hospital for chest pain in Newark, N.J., will cost an average of $37,217, and up to more than $81,000. Compare that with the national average of $17,359. That blue section of the graph above is the range of prices Medicare/Medicaid pays hospitals for that particular medical diagnosis. Compare that to South Bend, Ind., where the average pricing for a chest pain visit is $12,223.

Beehive Media, a data visualization and design company, created the interactive graphic as part of a competition put on by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to visualize hospital price data. Another view shows different hospitals in the region, their individual prices and how they fall on the CMS's Hospital Value Based Purchasing Total Performance Score--green dots mean good and cheap, while red dots mean lower quality and expensive. Gray is neutral.

See the costs of more procedures and diagnoses and play with it yourself here.

[Visually]

The most annoying aspect of recycling-and one of the biggest hurdles to its widespread adoption-is having to separate paper, glass, and plastic before they hit the curb. New recycling machines are changing that. With single-stream recycling, recyclables go into one bin, which a truck delivers to a materials-recovery facility, such as Willimantic Waste Paper in Willimantic, Connecticut. There, a largely automated system of conveyor belts, screens, magnets, and lasers separates materials so that they can be sold to metal and plastic recyclers and paper mills.

Of the 570 recycling facilities in the U.S., 240 now have single-stream operations, according to Eileen Berenyi, of the solid-waste research-and-consulting firm Governmental Advisory Associates. While the system isn't perfect-its high-speed operation can lead to contamination from broken glass-the simplicity of it means households actually recycle more. "If people want a higher recycling rate, it has to be convenient," says Chaz Miller, of the National Solid Wastes Management Association. "And I think the technology is only going to improve."

1) Tipping floor
Dump trucks deliver mixed recyclables to the facility and pile them on the floor. The driver checks to make sure no oversize objects, such as a car engine, are in the mix.

2) Drum feeder
A mechanical claw grabs a handful of material from the tipping floor and drops it into a spinning drum, which evenly distributes the recyclables onto a conveyor belt.

3) Initial sorters
Workers extract plastic bags, coat hangers, and other items that might jam up the line, as well as anything that won't fit through the sorter.

4) Large star screens
A series of offset star-shaped discs called star screens-originally invented by the Dutch in the 1950s for sorting tulip bulbs-lift out corrugated cardboard. Smaller items fall through the screens and continue down the conveyor belt.

5) Second sorters
As the material travels away from the star screens, human workers positioned along the line remove smaller contaminants. "This is where we pull out people's wallets," says John DeVivo, a co-owner of Willimantic Waste Paper.

6) Medium star screens
Three smaller star screens lift out different grades of paper, which makes up two thirds of recycled material at Willimantic Waste Paper. Plastic, glass, and aluminum fall through the screens and roll back down onto the main belt.

7) Glass sorter
Glass, which is heavier than plastic and aluminum, falls through the star screens and lands in bins below. A separate system of conveyors moves the material to a different area on-site, where it's ground into a coarse sand for shipment to glass recyclers.

8) Magnetic metal sorter
A 3,900-gauss magnet passes above the conveyor and attracts anything magnetic-usually only 4 percent of the total recyclable material.

9) Eddy current separator
A magnetic field induces electrons in aluminum to create a magnetic field of their own, known as an eddy field. By interacting with the machine's magnetic field, the eddy field pushes aluminum off the main conveyor onto another one.

10) Infrared lasers
At this point, only plastic remains. Infrared laser beams shine on the plastic items, and a sensor detects the signatures of different grades of plastic. Strategic puffs of air separate the recyclable and nonrecyclable kinds into different bins.

11) Baler
Every 70 seconds, the last machine on the conveyor belt makes a bale of recycled paper, plastic, cardboard, or metal. A single bale of paper is five feet by four feet by three feet and weighs approximately one ton.

12) Landfill
Whatever items are left-jar lids, shoes, Happy Meal toys-go into a landfill. In Willimantic Waste Paper's single-stream system, that's about 5 percent of the material it collects.

STATS

2.4: Tons of carbon dioxide kept out of the atmosphere per ton of solid waste recycled, whether by single-stream or otherwise.

One third: Fraction of municipal solid waste in the U.S. that's currently recycled.

100 million: Number of U.S. residents served by single-stream recycling programs.

92: Percentage recycling rates increased when Florida's Miami-Dade County implemented single-stream recycling in 2008.

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

Observing a star up close (putting aside for a moment how you'd get there or withstand its heat) is probably like sitting beside an enormous silent fire. Sounds-which are simply pressure variations in a medium such as air or water-can't propagate in the vacuum of space, so the roiling surface of a star would make an impression on the eyes, but not the ears.

A supernova would sound like 10 octillion two-megaton nuclear bombs exploding.A supernova, however, just might be the most brutal concert in the universe. When a star explodes, the massive detonation expels stellar material far into space, and that matter could theoretically provide a medium through which sound vibrations might travel. Assuming you survived the blast-the initial shock wave would travel up to 20,000 miles per second and carry 1044 joules of energy-it would sound like "10 octillion two-megaton thermonuclear devices detonated simultaneously," says Charles Liu, an astrophysicist at the City University of New York College of Staten Island. "When those guts hit your eardrums, you'll hear it. That is, as long as your eardrums stay attached."

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

Fifty years ago today, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Somewhere around the 30th anniversary of the speech, my parents bought me Microsoft's Encyclopedia Encarta on CD-ROM. There, I listened to an audio file of the speech for the first time. I had just learned about the U.S. Civil Rights Movement in elementary school. I sat frozen with wonder in front of my family's 1990s PC, feeling the urgency in King's voice just as Americans did only a generation ago. It was the first time I felt so close to history.

Now, changing times and technology have made such primary sources even more accessible. While we hope you consider visiting your local community centers, museums and libraries to learn about the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, there are some very cool things you can now see without ever leaving your house.

For an overview of the entire march, the U.S. National Archives has made a slideshow of historical photos of the march, many of them overlaid on Google Street View screenshots of the same locations today.

Staff members at the Library of Congress recently digitized more than 30 contact sheets taken by U.S. News & World Report photojournalists throughout the march. Contact sheets show the entire series of photos a photographer took, so the new digital files include many previously unpublished pictures. And, as the Library of Congress' Prints & Photos blog points out, it's interesting to see the shots that came immediately before and after iconic images, such as the photo the U.S. News & World Report chose for its cover story on the march.

The Library of Congress also has individual, full-size March on Washington photos from the U.S. News & World Report. The newspaper has made all such photos taken by staff photographers free to use, so go ahead and reproduce these if you like them.

Hope that gets you started. For pointers to more digital archives, check out this blog post from the Library of Congress.

In NASA's latest exploration of combining 3-D printing and space travel, the agency ran tests on the largest ever 3-D printed rocket engine component at the Marshall Space Flight Center.

The engine part was a complex subscale injector, similar in size to those that power small rocket engines. When an engine is firing, the injector delivers propellants, which provides power and thrust to get the rocket off the ground. NASA tested the component on August 22; it helped the engine generate a record 200,000 pounds of thrust. And the conditions were grueling, conducted at pressures of up to 1,400 pounds per square inch and at nearly 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Working with NASA, a rapid prototyping company called Directed Manufacturing printed the rocket part using a process called selective laser melting, which creates 3-D objects by building up layers of nickel-chromium alloy powder. Whereas previous injector models have been made of 115 parts, this 3-D printed version is made of just two, which saves on cost. The production process also took much less time-under a month for 3-D printing, whereas traditional injectors sometimes take six months and cost twice as much.

NASA wanted to test a component that was complex and vital to the functioning of the rocket engine, as well as something that comes into direct contact with the extreme heat. It helps that the injector is also very similar to traditional versions that have undergone testing.

The agency says it is looking at 3-D printing as a way to quickly and cheaply replace engine parts for human missions to deep space, including to Mars and asteroids.

In July, NASA completed a successful test of a smaller 3-D printed rocket injector. The 3-D printed injectors showed no difference in performance from traditionally manufactured ones. In the coming days, engineers will perform computer scans and other inspections on the injector tested last week.

"This successful test of a 3-D printed rocket injector brings NASA significantly closer to proving this innovative technology can be used to reduce the cost of flight hardware," said Chris Singer, the director of the Engineering Directorate at the Marshall Center, in a statement.

The first 3-D printed part to be hot-fire tested on a NASA engine system was an exhaust port cover made at the Marshall Center and tested at the Stennis Center. And NASA is looking beyond printing engine parts. The space agency is working with Made in Space to develop and test a 3-D printer for the International Space Station, which would print tools as needed, and they're also looking at printing food for long-duration missions.

See a video of the test below:

Researchers from the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna, Austria, have grown a three-dimensional, self-organizing model of a developing human brain in the lab using stem cells. Besides just being cool (brains in petri dishes!), the system could be used to model neurological diseases in an actual human brain, rather than in an animal model that may not develop in exactly the same way.

The cerebral organoid, as its creators have dubbed it, resembles the early developing regions of a human brain, with distinct regions like the dorsal cortex, the ventral forebrain and even an immature retina. This is the most complex in vitro human brain tissue so far. It has the beginning signs of cortical layers, though it can't develop the full complexity of a six-layer human cortex.

The scientists were able to grow their organoids from both embryonic stem cells and the less-controversial induced pluripotent stem cells, which can be derived from the skin or blood cells of adult humans. Most of the organoids grew to about 3 or 4 millimeters, about the size of an embryonic human brain at roughly nine weeks, and could survive up to a year in a spinning bioreactor (to circulate nutrients and oxygen).

Though it looks very similar to early-development brain tissue and has active neurons, the organization isn't quite the same as in naturally developing tissue. "The parts are correctly organized, but not put together," Juergen Knoblich, who coordinated the study, explained in a press conference. He describes it as "a car where you have an engine, you have the wheels--but the engine is on the roof…that car would never drive, but you could still take that car and analyze how an engine works."

We've been able to grow other organ tissue in the lab with stem cells, like livers and heart tissue. Unlike with other lab-grown tissue, though, synthetic brain transplants or patches aren't really on the horizon here. The brain is just too complex, for one, and the lack of circulatory system makes it difficult to get enough nutrients and oxygen to the organoid tissue to grow it any larger than 4 millimeters.

But even though they're not exactly put together like human brains, cerebral organoids could be used to analyze diseases like microcephaly, a neurodevelopmental disorder that results in severely small brains. "Recent work has shown development of human brain is very fundamentally different from the development of the mouse brain," Knoblich said, and certain diseases like microcephaly have been hard to replicate in mice. "Our system is very useful for us as developmental biologists. It allows us to study the human-specific features of brain development." Eventually he would like to be able to model disorders like schizophrenia or autism.

The paper appears in Nature this week.

Let's just say this up front: this design concept, for a Roomba-like vacuum army, is pretty out-there. But, man, I want to believe.

The idea, from Korean designer Juan Lee, is for a set of eight remote-controlled balls that roll around your house. The balls are stored in a dust bucket that's covered in a layer of gel, and when the balls are released, they wrap themselves in some of the gel. The balls then roll through the room, and dust and debris stick to the gel. Once the little 'bots have reached every nook and cranny, they return to the dust pan home base, where the gel is stripped from them and the dust is collected in a removable tray.

Improbable? Yeah, maybe. But as Lee points out in a post on Electrolux Design Lab, where the design is a semi-finalist in a contest, it's not a totally unprecedented idea. The gel and balls are more or less already made. First, there's magnetic putty available that, with some reworking, could work similarly to the gel:

Meanwhile, the ball is a lot like Sphero, a recently released, remote-controlled robo-ball:

Loading similar robots with GPS, and putting room-scanning technology in the dust pan, would allow the mechanical cleaners to map a room and efficiently clean it without missing any spots.

Even if the project doesn't get made, though at least we'll have a pretty good blueprint for how to clean stuff on our moon bases one day.

[Electrolux Design Lab via Yanko Design]

'A normal, healthy wolf would not have done what happened here.'

How close can something get to your face before you blink? That's basically the method scientists use to determine "defensive peripersonal space," the safety bubble of personal space around the body. When something potentially threatening enters that bubble, we instinctively want to defend ourselves.

According to new research, for most people, that personal bubble is about 20 to 40 centimeters away from the face. The more anxious you are, though, the bigger safety bubble you want.

Scientists from the Department of Neuroscience, Physiology and Pharmacology at University College London monitored 15 subjects as they held their own hands in front of their faces at distances of 4, 20, 40 and 60 centimeters. An electrical stimulus applied to a nerve in each subject's wrist prompted a blink, a subconscious defensive response, the intensity of which was measured by electrodes on the surface of the eyelid. The larger the reflex response, the more dangerous the person perceived the stimulus.

In this case, people who scored higher on an anxiety test reacted more strongly to stimuli 20 centimeters away from their face, compared to less anxious participants. The researchers hypothesize that more anxious individuals possibly perceive threats as closer than non-anxious individuals do. But of course, with this small of a sample size, it's hard to say anything with great certainty.

"This finding is the first objective measure of the size of the area surrounding the face that each individual considers at high-risk," lead author Giandomenico Iannetti said. The authors suggest that this could be used to develop measurement tests for people's ability to assess risks, especially in potentially dangerous professions like firefighting.

For the full study, see The Journal of Neuroscience.

Sometimes it's kind of fun to look at a friend's older relatives, to guess how he'll age. In a new study, astronomers have done something like that by examining an 8.2 billion-year-old star for clues as to what our own 4.6 billion-year-old sun will be like in the future.

The astronomers also examined the 2.9 billion-year-old, sun-like star 18 Scorpii to gather insight into what our own sun might've looked like at that age. The two stars allowed astronomers to guess how the chemical content of the sun changes over time. Meanwhile, a look at the older star's chemical composition suggests it may host a solar system of rocky planets, just like the sun does.

The older and younger stars are called "solar twins" because of their similarity to Earth's sun. Astronomers have found a handful of solar twins in the past. They have similar masses, temperatures and chemical compositions as the sun. HIP 102152, the older star in this study, is the oldest solar twin found yet. It has a similar surface gravity as the sun, and is 54 Kelvin cooler than the sun.* It has a chemical composition that's the most like the Earth's of any solar twin ever discovered.

An international team of astronomers studied 18 Scorpii and HIP 102152 using the Very Large Telescope at the European Southern Observatory's Cerro Paranal, Chile, facility. The scientists used a spectrograph to examine the colors of light that the stars emit. From the light, they calculated the chemical compositions and other properties of the stars.

They found that, like the sun, HIP 102152 has low amounts of elements that are common in meteors and the Earth. That suggests that in the star's past, rocky planets locked up those elements as they formed in a dust ring around the star. Today, HIP 102152 may be surrounded by terrestrial (as opposed to gas giant) planets.

The astronomers' chemical studies also bolstered the hypothesis that sun-like stars lose lithium as they age. Lithium, like hydrogen and helium, is an element that was created at the Big Bang. Astronomers had previously noticed that younger solar twins had more lithium than the sun, but weren't sure if the stars' lithium content had to do with their age.

"We have found that HIP 102152 has very low levels of lithium," Tala Wanda Monroe, an astronomer at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, said in a statement. "We can now be certain that stars somehow destroy their lithium as they age and that the sun's lithium content appears to be normal for its age." Scientists aren't sure yet how a star destroys its own lithium.

Monroe and her colleagues will publish their work in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

*In my original post, I stated HIP 102152's temperature incorrectly. Thanks to commenter Drewpers for the correction.

[European Southern Observatory]