Does your mental health depend on who's paying your psychologist? Clearly not, but a new study has found that psychologists looking at the same evidence will interpret it differently, depending on whom they believed hired them.

Bias in psychologists hired to go to court could have an immense impact on defendants' lives. In many cases, psychological evaluations influence decisions about what sentences people deserve. Was the defendant's crime a one-time thing, punishable by a finite prison sentence, or is she a danger to society who should be locked away forever? Should the defendant go to a rehabilitation program as part of his sentence?

It's already known, of course, that lawyers may choose to call only experts who support their cases. So there's probably a biased sample of psychologists going on the stand in the U.S., anyway. But four psychologists from the University of Virginia and Sam Houston State University wanted to see if a large sample of psychologists, chosen without a side in mind, might also be vulnerable to bias.

The researchers recruited 99 forensic psychologists and psychiatrists, pretending that they wanted help with real cases. (Well, the cases files were real, but the forensic psychologists' evaluations wouldn't have an effect on the real defendants' trials.) The researchers gave each of the forensic experts the same four case files, but told half of them that the defense had hired them, while telling the other half that the prosecution was paying the bills. The cases the experts examined were for violent sexual offenders, whose sentences depend heavily on their perceived likelihood of reoffending.

On average, in most measures, the defense-hired experts came to significantly different conclusions than the prosecution-hired ones. This was using surveys that previous studies have shown work well-that is, a bunch of psychologists assessing someone using the surveys will generally come to the same conclusions-when they're not used in court.

"Most expert witnesses believe they perform their job objectively. These findings suggest this may not be the case," one of the researchers, Daniel Murrie of the University of Virginia, said in a statement. He and his colleagues' work points to a need for scientists to develop ways to reduce this bias, they wrote in a paper they published last week in the journal Psychological Science.

Today, Nintendo made an announcement that caught people off-guard: a new handheld console. The main selling point? In exchange for a $50 price cut, fewer features than Nintendo's other handheld console.

The followup to the company's 3DS, so called because the screen, through an optical illusion, produces 3-D images, is, no joke, the 2DS. It's a 3DS that only produces 2-D images. What's going on here?

For context, you might need to back up a few years, and look at a slightly different line of products. It's almost tough to remember now, but Nintendo's original home console, the Wii, released in 2006, sold incredibly well, besting its competitors, the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It was a device unlike almost anything before it: the standard controller was replaced by something akin to a magic wand, where motion-sensing technology had players whipping the controller around to alter the action on screen. People loved it.

Last year, Nintendo released the Wii's successor, the Wii U. Financially, it's been a debacle. Even today, the original Wii is outselling the Wii U. Then, back in June, as part of an announcement coinciding with the gaming convention E3, Nintendo announced a very safe lineup of games.

The narrative on what went wrong with the Wii U is that it's still too similar to the original Wii for consumers to justify another purchase. So Nintendo's damage-control strategy is to play it conservative, releasing games from already tested franchises, like the Mario series. Now they seem to be doubling down by releasing a cheaper version of its relatively popular 3DS system. If so many people like the 3DS, Nintendo's thinking likely goes, then maybe making a cheaper version will open the market to more people.

Maybe. But between the poorly selling Wii U and the popular 3DS, I'd probably take away the exact opposite: people are clamoring for more risky products from Nintendo, not fewer.

We've been waiting for a while to figure out what practicaluses will come out of Google Glass, besides, of course, making dudes look silly. And aha! A surgeon at The Ohio State University used his Google Glass to beam a colleague into an ACL repair surgery, plus allow medical students to watch the surgery from his particular point of view.

Christopher Kaeding, Ohio State's director of sports medicine, got a hold of the futuristic eyewear through Ismail Nabeel, an assistant professor of general internal medicine at the school. Nabeel was one of the 1,000 elite applicants chosen to participate in the Google Glass Explorer program, and decided to partner with Kaeding to test out his new toy.

Seeing a live feed of a surgery from the surgeon's perspective seems a whole lot more useful to a medical student than observing in-person, where much of the nitty-gritty of the procedure is obscured by the people actually operating on the patient. It could potentially be used by a surgeon to bring up x-ray images or patient reports during an operation, too.

And apparently, it's pretty unobtrusive. Kaeding reported it "seemed very intuitive and fit seamlessly."

Check out the video below for more:

[Ohio State University]

In 1992, Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, a biologist from the Soviet Union, boarded a flight in Almaty, then Kazakhstan's capital, for New York. When Dr. Alibekov—now known as Ken Alibek—sat down with the CIA, he had a terrifying secret to reveal: that bio weapons program the Soviet Union stopped in the 1980's hadn't actually stopped at all. He knew this because he had led Moscow's efforts to develop weapons-grade anthrax. In fact, he said, by 1989—around the time that Western leaders were urging the USSR to halt its secret bioweapons program, known as Biopreparat—the Soviet program had dwarfed the US's by many orders of magnitude. (This is disregarding the possibility that the US was also developing some of these weapons in secret, and, like Russia, still is.)

One big problem, he added, was that, like the stockpiles of nuclear weapons left in the dust of the Soviet Union, the materials and the expertise needed to make a bioweapon—anthrax, smallpox, cholera, plague, hemorrhagic fevers, and so on—could still be lying about, for sale to the highest bidder. Of those scientists, Alibek told the Times in 1998, ''We have lost control of them."

Today, biologists who worked in the former Soviet Union—like those who responded to a case of the plague across the border in Kyrgyzstan this week—are likely to brush Alibek's fears aside. But they'll also tell you that the fall of the Soviet Union devastated their profession, leaving some once prominent scientists in places like Almaty scrambling for new work. That sense of desperation, underlined by Alibek's defection to the US, has helped pump hundreds of millions of dollars into a Pentagon program to secure not just nuclear materials but chemical and biological ones, in a process by which Washington became, in essence, their highest bidder.

This explains the hulking concrete structure I recently visited at a construction site on the outskirts of Almaty. Set behind trees and concrete and barbed-wire, Kazakhstan's new Central Reference Laboratory will partly replace the aging buildings nearby where the USSR kept some of its finest potential bioweapons—and where scientists study those powerful pathogens today. When it opens in September 2015, the $102-million project laboratory is meant to serve as a Central Asian way station for a global war on dangerous disease. And as a project under that Pentagon program, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, the lab will be built, and some of its early operation funded, by American taxpayers.

The far-flung biological threat reduction lab may look like a strange idea at a time of various sequester outbreaks, but officials say it's an important anti-terror investment, a much-needed upgrade to a facility that has been described as an aging, un-secure relic of the 1950's, and one that the Defense Dept. fears can't keep pace in an era of WMD. 

It's also an investment, they add, in a country where scientists are hungry for more international participation and better facilities—and where the U.S. is keen to keep sensitive materials and knowledge in the right hands and brains. 

"You cannot erase this knowledge from someone’s mind,” said Lt. Col. Charles Carlton, director of the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency office in Kazakhstan. The threat of scientists going rogue, he said, is "a serious concern." "We're doing our best to employ these people. Our hope is that through gainful employment they won't be drawn down other avenues."

There is no hard evidence that bioweapons were pilfered and sold during the 1990s, but Alibek has said that "there are many non-official stocks of smallpox virus," a virus that was officially eradicated in 1980. Western intelligence agencies also estimate that North Korea and Russia currently have the capacity to deploy smallpox as a weapon of mass destruction. (It's worth remembering however that fears in the run-up to the Iraq war about Saddam Hussein getting smallpox from Soviet scientists were unfounded,  despite widely publicized reports by Judy Miller and others.) Other countries suspected of having inadvertently or deliberately retained specimens of the virus include China, Cuba, India, Iran, Israel and Pakistan.

Bakyt B. Atshabar, head of the 60-year-old institute that will run the new lab, the Kazakh Scientific Center of Quarantine and Zoonotic Diseases, is keenly aware of the dangers of weapons development: his father helped diagnose the effects of weapons tests on thousands of people who lived near the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site, in the north of the country.

But to him and other biologists in Almaty, the lab is less about defense strategy and more about developing scientific expertise. Currently the KSCQZD is focused on studying and preventing potentially lethal contagion, like the case of the teenager across the southern border in Kyrgyzstan, who died last week from bubonic plague after eating a barbecued marmot (he was likely bitten by a flea, doctors said). 

Dr. Bakyt B. Atshabar, head of the institute that will manage the Central Reference Lab

"We're looking forward to this becoming a regional training facility focused both on human and animal infections," he said. "Cholera is also one of the major problems in our region, mostly with our numerous southern neighbors." He also cited an incident in July in which Kazakh tourists returned from a trip in Southeast Asia with dengue fever.

Increased trade with its eastern neighbor China also threatens to increase the transmission of disease. "Along with the construction of pipelines," he said, "come rodents and fleas." 

Meanwhile, the country's meager opposition has called the lab a risk to the citizens of Almaty; the city sits in an active seismic zone, and the lab lies just outside town, and not far from a populated suburban neighborhood. Officials have countered that the building is designed to meet the city's highest seismic standards, and will replace what a 2011 US embassy statement said were "older buildings at the institute that are not built to withstand such tremors."

"I would say this could take just about anything," Dan Erbach, an engineer from AECOM, the contractor overseeing the project, said during a tour of the site, which is currently a set of bulking concrete stacked three and four stories high, set atop a remediated field. "There's more than twice as much strength in this building than any other building in the city." (The building's seismic standard was the result of an intervention by the government, which placed new requirements on the project before construction began in 2011. That pushed the initial completion date back a year to September 2015.)

From a security and safety perspective, the new lab represents a giant leap. When documentarian Simon Reeve visited the existing facility in 2006, he saw Soviet-era buildings and security measures not likely to intimidate a determined terrorist—or a scientist—from sneaking some anthrax or plague out into the wild. Small locks on fridges were all that kept deadly vials from a fast escape. 

From "Meet the Stans" by Simon Reeve

"We're not that far from places where terrorists groups are living relatively openly," Reeve said. "They would love to break in here, they would love to get hold of this stuff."

Breaches of security and competance have been a problem at U.S. biodefense labs for decades. Texas is a particular hotspot. In 2002, a renowned professor at Texas Tech was alleged to have lied about thirty vials of plague that went missing at his lab. In two separate incidents at Texas A&M in 2006, university officials failed to tell the Center for Disease Control after biodefense researchers were infected with brucella and Q fever, which has been researched as a weapon. In March, when a sample of Guanarito, a Venezualan virus, went missing at the Gavalston National Laboratory, officials cautiously blamed the apparently missing amount on a clerical error, but the incident is under investigation by the FBI. 

The Almaty lab will be outfitted with safety features like double-door access zones and special containment hoods, enough to qualify it under U.S. Centers for Disease Control standards as a level 3 biosafety lab, or BSL-3 (the highest level is BSL-4). Only a fraction of the lab will be dedicated to lethal dieases and certified at BSL-3; most of the other labs at the 87,000 square foot building will be BSL-2, for the non-lethal variety.

But plague is already a focus of work at the existing lab in Almaty because it occurs naturally in nearly 40 percent of the country. (The KSCQZD began life in 1949 as the Central Asian Anti-Plague Scientific Research Institute.) Though it's often spread by fleas, depending on lung infections or sanitary conditions, it also can be spread in the air, through direct contact, or by contaminated undercooked food. Until June 2007, plague was one of the three epidemic diseases required to be reported to the World Health Organization, along with cholera and yellow fever. The case in Kyrgystan last week underscored the regional danger of its spread among humans; there are about 3,000 cases per year.

"We will evaluate the scale of contacts, likely natural carriers of the disease, such as rivers," Zhandarbek Bekshin, an official at Kazakhstan's Ministry of Health, said. No border crossings have been closed, local media reported, but over one hundred people who came into contact with the teenager were hospitalized.

Climate change is also a concern at the lab. Because climate effects how plague spreads, studying the disease "can also be used as an indicator of changes to the natural environment," Dr. Atshabar said.

For the US, however, the project is rooted in global security, and fits with its now decades-long collaboration with Kazakhstan in controlling weapons of mass destruction. In 1991 President Nazerbayev oversaw the dismantling and return to Russia of its nuclear weapons. But the country still maintains a store of pathogens that were once cherished by the Soviet military.

The secret Biopreparat program came into sharp focus in 2001, when a former Soviet official explained to a Moscow newspaper the suspected basis of an outbreak of smallpox that sickened ten people and killed three in a community on the Aral Sea: they were the accidental victims of a Soviet military field test at a bioweapons facility based on a nearby island, he said. 

Because some of those sickened had already been vaccinated against smallpox, the incident raised questions about the ability of vaccines to protect against state-designed bioweapons. 

With another smaller lab at a military base in the town of Otar, in western Kazakhstan on the Caspian Sea, and a flurry of similar projects in the works—in Russia, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Ukraine, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—the Pentagon hopes its Defense Threat Reduction Agency can also establish a regional early warning system for infections and outbreaks. (As the U.S. weighed responses to Syria's use of chemical weapons this week, DTRA announced more grants for research into sensing and tracking WMD.) 

Is it possible, as some Russian critics have alleged, that labs like this could serve as brain trusts and storehouses for weapons research, for either the US or their home countries? "Russia sees this as... a powerful offensive potential," Gennady Onishchenko, the Chief Sanitary Inspector of Russia—a kind of Surgeon General—told reporters in July.

Washington denies that these reference labs and the secret research at the historic home of American bioweapons, at the US Army base at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have anything to do with offensive weapons, that they meet the standards of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC), and that their work will eventually be made public.

Funding for the $103 million construction project in Kazakhstan, and much of the lab's operations in its early years, will come from the Dept. of Defense, which envisions it as playing a central role in monitoring pathogen outbreaks, a strategy that received new funding after the anthrax attacks in 2001. Last year, the White House announced a program that consolidated these efforts under the banner of "biosurveillance."

“DOD’s involvement in biosurveillance goes back probably before DOD to the Revolutionary War,” Andrew C. Weber, assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical and biological defense programs, told American Forces Press Service last year. “We didn’t call it biosurveillance then, but monitoring and understanding infectious disease has always been our priority, because for much of our history, we’ve been a global force.”

As the former director of the two-decade old Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program (or "Nunn-Lugar" for short), Weber has paid special attention to Central Asia. After he spent much of the 1990s helping the U.S. remove weapons-grade uranium from the former Soviet Union under Nunn-Lugar, he was instrumental in creating Central Reference Laboratories in Almaty and elsewhere in the region. 

An English-language editorial in Pravda in July referenced Weber's role as something that should "promp[t] serious reflection." Responding to a US State Department report that Russia was possibly pursuing bioweapons research, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow noted that it "gives impression that the US, despite the changes occurring in the world, still remains in the grip of cold war propaganda." 

Kazakh officials meanwhile underscored that the lab, which operates under Kazakhstan's Ministry of Health, was not connected to Soviet defense research. But historically, scientists at the USSR's anti-plague institutes—including the one that will run the new Almaty lab—were also involved in a secret project to design vaccines for pathogens that had been modified by the military program that Dr. Alibek, the defector, once ran.

On the sunny day earlier this month when we visited the site, however, the conversation was focused on saving lives through cooperation, not the opposite. The hope is that labs like this will simply encourage more international scientific relationships, the kind that build cultural trust, and the kind upon which science thrives. 

Despite "typical intergovernmental issues," Carlton and other officials expressed optimism about the collaboration. "I never like to refer to this as the former Soviet Union. That was in the past. In the military, it's been a sea change in our mentality.

"Kazakhstan has come so far in terms of government organization, and understanding the threat and the problem," he added. "This is a country that willingly said, we want to get rid of this threat and take the lead. Kazakhstan has opened up as an exemplar around the world."

This story was reported as part of an International Reporting Project fellowship. It was republished with permission from Motherboard. Follow Alex Pasternack on Twitter 

NOW: INSTAGRAM PHOTO BOOTH

Alexander Morris lugged a camera around everywhere during high school, making him the unofficial class photographer. Even after he graduated last year, his alma mater in Antrim, Northern Ireland, asked him to document its 2013 prom. Morris couldn't resist. In addition to traditional shots, the organizers wanted a photo booth. Rather than spend money he didn't have to rent one or hire an assistant to man a camera, Morris built a stylish booth that could run itself.

The compact and fully automated system fits inside a rounded wooden box, which Morris made to resemble the cartoonish logo of Instagram, the popular photo-sharing service. The contraption's brain is an Arduino microcontroller. Morris wired a circuit to it so that when a prom-goer presses a big red button, the Arduino starts a 10-second countdown on an LED clock. When the clock reaches zero, two flashguns fire, and the shutter of a digital SLR camera takes four snapshots. Then the images load onto a 15-inch monitor so users can review them.

The booth was such a success that Morris is working on an upgrade: a highly portable, battery-powered model that uploads photos to the Web. He's also designing a translucent plastic exterior that can light up in a rainbow of hues. "It acts like a second photographer working for me," Morris says. "One that I don't have to pay."

THEN: POCKET CAMERA

In July 1932, Popular Science told readers how to build a cheap, palm-size camera comparable to then-popular Kodak box cameras. The device recorded photos on standard movie film that was cut in half, placed in a wooden chamber, and wound around a spool. The plans also called for a fixed-focus Brownie box-camera lens. Wowed by its size and convenience, editors wrote that amateur photographers would "appreciate the value of owning a high-grade miniature camera."

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

First, a disclaimer: Selling your organs is illegal in the United States. It's also very dangerous. Handing off an organ is risky enough when done in a top hospital, even more so if you're doing it for cash in a back alley. No, really: Don't do this. OK? OK.

There are many organs one can theoretically do without, or for which there's a backup. Most folks can spare a kidney, a portion of their liver, a lung, some intestines, and an eyeball, and still live a long life. That said, donating a lung, a piece of liver or a section of intestines is a very complicated surgery, so it's not done frequently on the black market. And no one's going to make much cash on an eyeball. "In the U.S., there's a fairly steady supply of donated corneas from corpses," says Sean Fitzpatrick, director of public affairs at the New England Organ Bank. "There's pretty much no market demand for eyes." Giving up a kidney, though, is a relatively simple surgery that has netted desperate people a few bucks.

No one's going to make much cash on an eyeball. Now, black-market organ dealers don't do a great job of filing taxes, but here are some prices based on rumored deals and reports from the World Heath Organization. In India, a kidney fetches around $20,000. In China, buyers will pay $40,000 or more. A good, healthy kidney from Israel goes for $160,000.

Don't expect to pocket all that dough, though. "The person giving up the organ only gets a fraction of the fee," says Sally Satel, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute think tank who studies the prices paid by legal and illegal organ-donor operations. After the organ broker-the guy who sets up your kidney-for-cash transaction-takes his cut, he needs to pay for travel, the surgeon, medical supplies and a few "look-the-other-way" payoffs. Most people get $1,000 to $10,000 for their kidney (probably much less than you were hoping for).

The best bet is to wait until compensation for organs is legalized in the U.S.-the Organ Trafficking Prohibition Act of 2009 would allow payment to donors, but it stalled in Congress-because there's certainly a market for kidneys. Last summer, a man offering one of his for $100,000 (plus medical expenses) on Craigslist received several offers until the Web site removed his post. And you could probably hold out for even more. In 1999, before eBay delisted a kidney put up for auction, bidders drove the price up to $5.75 million.

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

Click to launch the photo gallery.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in southeast Louisiana. The Category 3 storm flooded 80 percent of the city of New Orleans and killed at least 1,836 people in the U.S. Eight years later, residents of destroyed neighborhoods are still struggling to rebuild.

As sad as it is to admit, most disaster-prone regions have had to learn from tragedy in order to improve their defenses against natural destruction. We've collected early examples such technology from the Popular Sciencearchives.

We begin in the fall of 1919, just after World War I, when dirigibles glided across national forests in search of fires. After the war, scores of airplanes and zeppelins were commissioned to join horseback-riding firefighters to extinguish the flames consuming our trees. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, Japan was about to suffer an earthquake that would kill an estimated 140,000 people. After the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and tsunami destroyed Tokyo and Yokohama, scientists collaborated to devise methods that would reduce the body count in future disasters. Japanese scientists simulated earthquakes on scale models of buildings to see what kind of engineering held up, while an American professor proposed installing ball bearings within houses for stabilization.

Meanwhile, laypeople did everything they could to protect themselves from disasters. One architect built a teardrop-shaped "hurricane house" that turned with the wind during a storm, while businesses sold the all-steel cyclone cellar, which could be delivered in one piece, no assembly required. Simply dig a hole in your front yard, embed the cellar below, and hop in when the winds begin to stir.

See more technologies by browsing through our gallery.

This is Brent. Brent is a 37-year-old chimpanzee who lives at Chimp Haven, a sanctuary in Keithville, La. According to popular opinion, he's also the greatest chimpanzee artist America has to offer.

Brent's painting won first place in the Humane Society of the United State's Chimpanzee Art Contest, garnering the most public votes during the online voting period, which ended last week. Sanctuaries for chimps retired from medical research or the entertainment industry use painting to keep their primate friends entertained.

All six of the chimp sanctuaries that submitted a work of chimp-created art received a $500 grant. As a top winner, Brent earned his sanctuary an additional $10,000 grant from the Humane Society. What's his secret? Well, some might say it's his unorthodox style. A true avant-garde artist, he only paints with his tongue.

Cheetah, a former lab chimp, got a little extra love--in addition to placing second in the public voting portion of the contest, his artwork was the chosen favorite of famed chimpanzee researcher Jane Goodall.

Third place went to Ripley, a former actor who now lives in at the Center for Great Apes in Florida.

Keep an eye out--the contest masterpieces will go up for auction on eBay at some point soon, according to the Humane Society. The money will go to the North American Primate Sanctuary Alliance.

The rover Curiosity, our best friend on Mars, has always had the ability to pilot itself around its new home. But for its first year away from Earth, it's been piloted remotely by humans here on its birth planet. That just changed: this Tuesday, Curiosity officially drove itself for the very first time.

Curiosity has an autonomous navigation system that visually analyzes the terrain in front of it. Here's how it works, from NASA's press release:

The autonav was flipped on because the remote operators couldn't quite see the terrain directly in front of the rover; they knew they wanted Curiosity to go from point A to point B, but what lay in between was unclear. So Curiosity got to drive herself--NASA refers to Curiosity as a "she"--for the very first time.

Right now Curiosity is on its way to Mount Sharp, the highest peak within the Gale Crater, where Curiosity landed. The trip could take anywhere from nine months to a year, at which point Curiosity will do some scientific testing on the mountain.

You can read more about the trip over at NASA's site.

The Obama administration is considering what sort of military action to take, if any, against the government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, which stands accused of using chemical weapons against its own people. The most likely option: a cruise missile strike against assorted military and government sites, like the presidential palace and chemical munitions facilities. Here's a primer on cruise missiles.

What are cruise missiles?
Cruise missiles are fast-moving, guided bombs that soar at a very low trajectory, parallel to the ground. They are distinct from regular (non-cruise) missiles primarily because they go really far. They are also distinct from drones, because they do not have on-the-ground pilots--instead, they fly a pre-set path--and you can only use them once. Germany used the first cruise missile in World War II. Called V-1s, after Vergeltung, the German word for retribution, they were fired from sites in northern France and aimed at London. The idea behind the V-1, which is the core idea behind all cruise missiles since, is to attack from far away without needing a pilot to control it.

How do cruise missiles work?

All cruise missiles have an internal guidance system, though the types vary. The Tomahawk cruise missile, which the U.S. Navy has deployed since 1984, uses a system called "Terrain Contour Matching," where an altimeter and an inertia detector plot the flight path against a pre-loaded terrain contour map. Later versions of the Tomahawk also use GPS, and there are other guidance systems that some cruise missiles use.

Cruise missiles all have basically the same parts: an engine, often a jet with an air intake, propels the missile through the air. There's a spot for fuel, and a spot for the warhead, or explosive carried inside. Both cruise missiles pictured below were designed to carry nuclear warheads, but most cruise missiles, and all that have actually been used in war, carry conventional, non-nuclear explosives. The front end of a cruise missile usually has a guidance system. Cruise missiles, with wings and engines, often resemble pilot-less planes.

Cruise missiles can be launched by airplanes, submarines, ships, or from launching vehicles on land. Besides the United States, more than 70 nations have cruise missiles.

Has the United States used cruise missiles before?

Oh, yeah. If the drone is the signature weapon of the 2000s and 2010s, cruise missiles were the go-to in the 1990s. Deadly, launched from far away, and without a pilot on board, they promised to destroy enemies without risking American casualties. Here are three American cruise missile strikes from the 1990s:

In 1993, Kuwaiti authorities foiled a plot by Iraqi Intelligence services to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush. In retaliation, President Bill Clinton ordered the firing of 23 cruise missiles at Iraqi intelligence headquarters. In 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike against the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries plant in Sudan, under the assumption that it was a chemical weapons plant. Also in 1998, Clinton ordered troops to fire cruise missiles at Osama bin Laden in the Khost province of Afghanistan. Both of these 1998 attempts were retaliation for the bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa.

What were the consequences?

Following the 1993 strike, Iraq and the United States existed in a state of simmering hostility for the next decade. America (together with the United Kingdom and, for some of the time, France) imposed a "no-fly-zone" over the country, to prevent Iraqi's government from attacking Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south. The no-fly-zone was deeply problematic: Iraqi anti-air missiles occasionally fired at American aircraft overhead, and Americans bombed Iraqi anti-air missile sites in return. It only ended with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Tensions and violence in Iraq persist to this day.

The El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries destroyed by the United States in 1998 was in fact actually just a pharmaceutical plant. The ruins were left untouched and now serve as a shrine to American incompetence.

The cruise missile strike in Khost failed to kill Osama bin Laden; a mission that would take 13 more years, a ground invasion of Afghanistan, a decade-long man-hunt, and a special kill team of Navy SEALS to complete. From the National Security Archives, there is also evidence that "the strikes not only failed to hurt Osama bin Laden but ultimately may have brought al-Qaeda and the Taliban closer politically and ideologically."

What are cruise missiles' limitations?

A 2000 report by the U.S. Air Force on Tomahawk cruise missiles notes several limitations:

Since then, cruise missile guidance systems have improved, but the overall limitations of the weapon system remain. The weapon requires good intelligence and good maps to hit the target. It also needs the enemy to stay in one, relatively vulnerable place.

Will the U.S. use cruise missiles in Syria?

It's not entirely clear. More certain is that idea that drones won't be used. Drones are great at tracking individuals from safe skies. But Syria's government has anti-aircraft weapons, which can easily shoot down drones. Cruise missiles, instead, fly faster, hit harder, and instead of hunting individuals take aim at big, fixed targets like military bases or palaces. Also, the United States has a lot of cruise missiles near Syria, and very few available drones.

Several publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal expect the U.S. to use cruise missiles if the Obama administration does order strikes. Anonymous senior U.S. officials told NBC that a three-day cruise missile barrage against the Assad regime is possible. Of course, there's no guarantee that strikes will happen at all. Yesterday, President Obama said he had not made a decision on whether to intervene in Syria.

Launching cruise missiles feels like a strong military action for a president to take, but it's very unlikely to be a decisive one.

In an interview with the BBC, a Microsoft executive described as the corporate vice-president for Skype confirmed that Microsoft is working on 3-D chatting for the video-chat service. Not only that, but Mark Gillett, the executive, says they're pretty far along!

"We have it in the lab, we know how to make it work and we're looking at the ecosystem of devices and their capability to support it in order to make a decision when we might think about bringing something like that to market," he told the BBC.

3-D, in the past few years, has had an explosion and then a quick fade. Everything from TVs to movies to portable gaming systems has had a 3-D release, but the tech, besides the Nintendo 3DS, never really caught on with consumers. There's very little 3-D content out there aside from blockbuster movies, and the few attempts at 3-D channels seem to be dying as well.

But it's still a fun, futuristic tech, and we haven't given up hope for 3-D to produce some really cool experiences. Chatting is one that makes perfect sense; Microsoft, which owns Skype, also makes what's now the world's most popular depth sensor, in the Kinect. 3-D chatting requires multiple cameras to capture the subject from multiple angles, as well as a special display and, at the moment, special glasses to view 3-D content, but it seems like Microsoft is willing to put in the work to figure out that particular puzzle.

We'll keep an eye out--in lieu of true holographic chat, 3-D seems pretty fun!

[via BBC]

Since their debut 13 years ago, in-car night-vision systems, which identify pedestrians approaching a roadway, have arguably made driving safer. But they come with a pretty big blind spot: animals. Each year, drivers in the U.S. strike about a million deer, causing 27,000 human injuries and $3.5 billion in damage. This fall, Swedish safety-system company Auto­liv and Mercedes-Benz will roll out Night View Assist Plus on the 2014 S-Class. The system identifies people but also picks out cows, moose, horses, deer, camels, and even wild boar.
One reason the upgrade took five years is that recognizing animals is much more difficult than recognizing people. Species vary widely in size and shape, have profiles that change drastically when they turn, and move differently. (Humans, by comparison, have more or less the same shape and move in the same way.) To train the system, Autoliv cataloged thousands of animals across five continents.

Night View Assist Plus merges data from two cameras to create an illuminated view of what's ahead. When an animal or pedestrian nears a roadway, the system highlights it on an in-dash display, and, if danger is imminent, sounds an alarm and pre-charges the car's brakes. There's one feature U.S. regulators have yet to approve, though: In the European version, a spotlight shines a tracking beam onto live obstacles in the road, making them almost impossible to miss.

2014 Mercedes S-Class

0-60: 4.8 seconds
Horsepower: 455
Price: not set

This article originally appeared in the September 2013 issue of Popular Science.

These eyeball-y robots, created by a consortium of European researchers, are designed to learn how to navigate dynamic human environments without running into people, knocking things over, or getting stuck. The "Lindas," as they've been dubbed, will soon work alongside humans in two complex environments: as monitors in an Austrian nursing home and security guards in an office.

The project is called STRANDS, which is a half-cronym for "Spatio-Temporal Representations and Activities for Cognitive Control in Long-Term Scenarios." Translated out of technobabble, that means the robots will learn how humans change environments over time.

Nursing homes and office security are both ideal places to test this, it turns out. Both spaces are largely static, and any unusual change is something people responsible for elder care or security want to note. That gives the robots a simple environment for learning, and with an expected lesson time of at least 120 days, the robots will autonomously build an understanding of how the space changes over time. Ultimately, this means robots that can adapt to humans and human spaces.

Which is great. I'd hate to have another office drone complaining about someone moving their cheese.

Watched a video of the Linda bots below:

At 6:10am on August 29, 2005, the eye of Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Buras-Triumph, La., going on to devastate much of the Gulf Coast. In a report only a few months later, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) called it one of the strongest storms to hit the U.S. coast in the last 100 years.

Katrina didn't start out that way. After entering the Gulf of Mexico, it intensified rapidly, going from a Category 1 hurricane when it passed through southern Florida on August 25, 2005, then gaining momentum and jumping from a Category 3 all the way up to Category 5 status over the span of about a day later that weekend.

Thanks to evolving technology, including better satellite data and faster computers, as well as an increasing knowledge of what actually goes on inside a hurricane, the computational models we use to predict hurricanes have gotten much better. Meteorologists have gotten reasonably good at figuring out where a tropical cyclone is headed. What we're not so good at is figuring out how strong it's going to be when it gets there.

It's not a straight mass equation, where you say solve for x and that's the answer.Hurricane prediction involves a number of different computer-generated models. Each is a little bit different, and has different strengths. "It's not a straight mass equation, where you say solve for x and that's the answer," explains John Cangialosi, a hurricane specialist at NOAA's National Hurricane Center. "There are a lot of assumptions being made. There is no exact answer."

Current models are fairly accurate at forecasting the track of a hurricane--that is, where it's going to go. For this, we can use global dynamical models, which take real-time atmospheric data from all over the world and solve physics equations to predict what will happen next.

"We can come within 80 miles or so. That's actually pretty good," says Cary Mock, a geography professor at the University of South Carolina.

These global models are good at figuring out where things are generally heading, but they don't have the resolution to tell you much about the hurricane itself. For instance, they can't predict very well when a storm like Katrina will suddenly intensify. "It can't really tell you how strong the hurricane is even at the current time," Cangialosi says.

When it comes to modeling the intensity of a particular storm, we tend to turn to less sophisticated statistical models. They compare basic information from the current storm, like location and time of year, to historic storm behavior, and spit out an averaged prediction. Cangialosi says a statistical model is "not trying to resolve and model what this storm is going to do, but it will tell us… a storm in this location and this environment, on average it will do this." They're quicker to run and don't require as much data or computational power.

It's still somewhat mysterious. We observe them, but we don't actually understand them to a large factor.There are more complex forecast models, and they are generally more accurate than their simple counterparts. "I'm amazed we can shove a whole world's worth of weather data into a computer," Mock says. "We couldn't do that 15 years ago." One drawback: they can take hours to run on a supercomputer. So when storms pop up or change quickly, researchers have to rely on quicker statistical models that can crunch the numbers fast.

Another reason we can't run more accurate, dynamic models on the intensity of hurricanes is that we don't entirely understand how hurricanes function. "It's still somewhat mysterious," Cangialosi says. "We observe them, but we don't actually understand them to a large factor."

For example, it was only recently that we learned that the wall around the hurricane's eye can deteriorate, and a new one will form around it. This can affect the intensity of the hurricane, but not always in the same way. Sometimes it makes the hurricane stronger, sometimes weaker. "Those are the things we can't quite model. We can't take into account all the dynamics of the eye wall," Mock says.

That's why hurricane forecasting still relies not just on a computer crunching numbers, but on human intervention--an actual forecaster who looks at the details of the storm and determines whether the model seems to be painting an accurate picture that makes sense based on the conditions. And that's why sometimes, a storm predicted to be a doozy barely seems like a blip in the radar, or vice versa.

We have begun to learn a little bit more about hurricane dynamics by flying planes into the eye of the storm. Besides sounding badass (INTO THE STORM, FOR SCIENCE!), sending aircraft straight to the source to drop weather balloons and sensors to collect data on aspects like wind direction, pressure, water vapor can help us learn more about how storms work.

Who hasn't sat on the couch at the end of a marathon gaming session and wondered what it would be like to make a game rather than just play one? With Pixel Press, anyone can do both-no coding required. The app, which debuts on iOS later this year, converts simple marks on paper into a playable videogame.

The Pixel Press team invented a sketchable language for game design. Armed with custom graph paper and a small glossary of shorthand-lines, Xs, slashes-users draw games, which the app then scans and converts into an actual, playable videogame level. For example, the app reads a blacked-out square as a power-up marker, and Xs on a platform as spikes. It takes less than 30 seconds for the app to convert the marks; once that's done, players add colors and textures.
At launch, the system will make only Mario-style sideways-scrolling games, but the developers at Pixel Press already have a prototype to create puzzles-and they're also planning racing and adventure games.

Pixel Press

Platform: iOS
Price: $10
Available: Winter 2013

This article originally appeared in the September 2013 issue of Popular Science.

When you blow air across the top of a straw dipped in soda, liquid rises up the tube. This might seem strange, but a Venturi pump-named after the Italian physicist who invented it-takes advantage of the same effect, simply by virtue of its shape.

Any high-velocity, high-pressure jet of liquid or gas creates suction in its wake. As molecules zoom by, nearby material rushes in to fill the void. So if you force a jet through a constricted section of tubing, you can make a pump with no moving parts.

Most Venturi pumps use three openings: one for the jet, one for suction, and the last as an exit. The devices are great for shallow-water wells in rural areas because they require no electricity, motors, or bearings to work at the bottom of the well. Plus, a metal Venturi pump can last decades in water.

The pumps can also mix dissimilar materials. A jet of gas can suck up liquid, so you can use compressed air, a pump, and a garden hose, for instance, to empty a flooded basement. Another example: the "Vinturi," a funnel-like contraption that mixes air into wine as it's poured (for anyone who thinks aerating wine makes it taste better).
My favorite trick is to turn a garden-hose-variety Venturi pump into a flamethrower. Instead of using water, I attach a tank of pure oxygen and blow it through. The gas can suck up powdered spices and convert them into sparkling pillars of fire. Pretty much any fine organic powder burns, thanks to a large flammable surface area; I've succeeded with cinnamon, garlic, black pepper,
onion, cumin, powdered sugar, and even bread flour. About the only disappointment in my kitchen was chili powder, which makes a pathetic little flame. So much for extra heat.

Warning: Mixing flammable powders with pure oxygen is dangerous, and blowouts occurred with this setup. Do not attempt.

This article originally appeared in the September 2013 issue of Popular Science.