If you started just before the first dinosaurs appeared, you'd probably be finishing your hike just about now.

Here's how it breaks down: One light-year-the distance light travels in one year, used as the yardstick for interstellar distances-is about 5.9 trillion miles. If you hoofed it at a moderate pace of 20 minutes a mile, it would take you 225 million years to complete your journey (not including stops for meals or the restroom). Even if you hitched a ride on NASA's Mach 9.68 X-43A hypersonic scramjet, the fastest aircraft in the world, it would take about 95,000 years to cover the distance.

You'll need to bring a big bag, too; walking such a distance requires substantial supplies. The average adult burns about 80 calories per mile walked, so you'd need two trillion PowerBars to fuel your trip. You'd also produce a heap of worn-out shoes. The typical pair of sneakers will last you 500 miles, so you'd burn through some 11.8 billion pairs of shoes. And all that effort wouldn't get you very far, astronomically speaking: The closest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.22 light-years away.

This article appeared in the September 2008 issue of Popular Science magazine.

Update: Long John Silver's is actually eliminating all trans fats from its menu by 2014. I originally said the restaurant is only removing trans fats from its non-batter-dipped dishes because I misread the original press release. While transitioning to using all trans fats-free oils, Long John Silver's restaurants will use trans fat-free oils only for non-batter-dipped dishes. But by the time the changeover is finished, everything will be trans fats-free. I apologize for the error. My thanks to Scottie Ellis of RunSwitch PR for the correction.

The fastfood chain Long John Silver's plans to eliminate trans fats from all of its dishes by the end of the year.

This news comes after the lobbying group Center for Science in the Public Interest named a Long John Silver's platter as the unhealthiest restaurant meal in America because of its trans fat content.

Trans fats are a specific type of fat that doctors consider especially harmful to health. They raises people's levels of LDL ("bad") cholesterol while lowering their levels of HDL ("good") cholesterol, so they're associated with a higher risk for heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes. In the American diet, trans fats come almost exclusively from partially hydrogenated oils, which are oils that have undergone an industrial process that makes them stay fresh longer. (Meat and milk products also contain a little bit of trans fat, but not nearly as much as, say, packaged muffins.)

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommends people avoid trans fats as much as possible.

Some jurisdictions, such as California and New York City, have banned trans fats altogether. All the dishes in Long John Silver's restaurants in those places are already trans fat-free.

Despite its lofty ideals, science isn't always impartial and unbiased. Scientists on occasion have fabricated data, or at least tweaked it to suit their needs. They've got a career to make, after all, and boring findings don't bring fame and fortune.

So how often are scientists prone to exaggerating or cherry-picking their results? When it comes to U.S.-based soft sciences, kind of a lot. According to a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, behavioral sciences researchers from the U.S. in particular are more likely to overestimate their findings, compared to researchers from other countries. And it was only in behavioral research--the same "U.S. effect" did not show up in nonbehavioral studies.

Behavioral science encompasses anything that studies the way people (or animals) act and interact in the world, usually through observation. So that covers fields like psychology, sociology and anthropology.

"Behavioral studies have lower methodological consensus and higher noise, making US researchers potentially more likely to express an underlying propensity to report strong and significant findings," the researchers write.

And why do they think U.S. scientists are so prone to exaggeration?

The study's author, Daniele Fanelli, has some more to say about the phenomenon over at Retraction Watch.

The United States and its allies are considering an attack against Syria's government. Such an attack is limited only by the people, aircraft, ships, and vehicles available in the area, so when the U.S. Navy moves more ships into the eastern Mediterranean, it starts to look a little like war.

This infographic, by Farwa Rizwan at Al Arabiya English, looks at the military maneuvers already underway. France and the U.S., with Turkish and UK airbases serving as a staging point, are the nations most likely to act against Syria's government. Until yesterday, when this map was published, the United Kingdom looked ready to intervene, but then its Parliament voted against intervention. I've left every reference to British military assets on the map intact here, but it's unlikely now that the UK will play a direct role. All these countries are allies as part of NATO. Here is what they could bring to an intervention:

Runways and Airplanes

It's hard to conduct a bombing campaign without a place for the warplanes to land. France has an aircraft carrier in the western Mediterranean that could be moved closer; there's a shared U.S./Turkish airbase in Turkey; the UK has an air base in Cyprus, about 160 miles away from Syria; France and the U.S. both have bases in the United Arab Emirates; and the U.S also has bases in Qatar and Bahrain. There are also two American aircraft carriers in the region: the USS Nimitz and the USS Harry Truman, both in the Persian Gulf. It takes about 5 days for a carrier to move between the Suez and the Persian Gulf (provdied Egypt doesn't close the canal), but they might not even need to do that. With mid-air refueling, and with permission from Iraq, American fighters could take off from carriers in the Persian gulf and attack Syria.

The map also shows American F-16s and British Typhoon planes. These are strike aircraft, or known in an earlier era as fighter-bombers. They can fight enemies in the air, as well as attack vehicles, buildings, and troops on the ground.

Submarines and Destroyers

America, France, and the UK all have ships in the Mediterranean Sea ready to strike at Syria, if need be, with cruise missiles. Both ships and subs carry cruise missiles, which can hit targets more than 1,000 miles away. You can read more about cruise missiles, and how they work, here.

Patriot Missiles

Also noted on the map are Patriot missiles, which is a bit of an odd choice. Patriot missiles are anti-ballistic, fired to intercept incoming enemy missiles. Syria has some long range ballistic missiles and last summer threatened to use them against foreign intervention.

Nerds, gather at the dance party! It's time to algorave. Meaning the DJs will be spinning algorithms, not just dropping beats.

At an algorave, DJs compose musical algorithms live to create "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive conditionals," as the cryptic Algorave site explains. (The UK rave act of 1994 defined music as "sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.")

Basically, the DJs use systems for creating algorithmic music, like Impromptu and overtone, that enable them to live-code the sounds thumping out of the speakers.

What does this mean for the dance floor? Not totally sure, but here's how the site puts it:

Just watch what seems to be an algorave in a cafeteria:

[PSFK]

New documents detail the sophisticated, if only partially successful, surveillance technology used to hunt and kill the most wanted terrorist on earth.

Before the Obama administration sent Navy SEALS to raid the Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound, where Osama bin Laden was hiding, assorted government agencies deployed technologies such as stealth drones; satellites that took high-res and infrared images of the compound from space; phone tracking; and a co-opted vaccination program to hunt the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, attacks, according to documents leaked by former government contractor Edward Snowden.

Craig Whitlock and Barton Gellman, writing in the Washington Post, discuss the breadth of the surveillance techniques used:

So U.S. intelligence tried to get creative:

Despite all the advanced technology used in the hunt, intelligence officials only estimated a "40 percent to 60 percent" chance that bin Laden was at the Abbottabad compound. A drone strike or a bombing mission could have destroyed the compound, but it would have left no conclusive evidence that bin Laden had ever been there. Instead, Obama chose to send in Navy SEALs, both to minimize civilian casualties and to confirm that it was, in fact, bin Laden in that compound.

The full article, as well as other details disclosed in a leaked "black budget" from the intelligence community, show how modern technology can track an, ahem, Enemy of the State, but with only like 40 to 60 percent accuracy.

It's well-known that the more adorable and charismatic of the endangered animals get most of the funding. That doesn't mean the cute animals, like the iconic panda, aren't worth saving, but it leaves a lot of the less photogenic but just as important animals out in the cold. Who's interested in saving the Brazilian bald-faced tamarin, which looks like a cross between a rabid monkey and a bat? Or the Komodo dragon, a 10-foot-long murderous lizard that's the embodiment of just about every childhood nightmare you ever had?

That's where the Ugly Animal Preservation Society comes in. It's an awareness campaign that uses comedy to bring attention to animals like the pig-nosed frog, pictured above, which may otherwise have trouble getting funding. The UAPS holds live events, where a combination of London comics and scientists discuss one ugly endangered animal of their choice. At the end of the show, the audience votes to decide which of those animals will become the mascot for each individual chapter of the UAPS. They don't seem to be directly donating money; instead, the aim is to raise awareness, with the hopes that it will eventually lead to donations elsewhere.

It's led by Simon Watt, a biologist who's best known for public speaking, and has gotten a bit of attention over in the UK, appearing at the Edinburgh International Science Festival. You can read more about the efforts here.

[via Treehugger]

Back in April, we called on Popular Science readers to submit their best project ideas in the #CrowdGrant Challenge. By the time we closed the gates for entries, two dozen stood above the rest -- and 45 days of crowdfunding ensued.

Well, funding ends tonight -- Friday, Aug. 30 -- at 11:59pm EDT. That means only a few hours remain to make our hardworking finalists' dreams become realities.

We've already seen a couple of them come true, including Project Reach for the Stars, which will send K-12 classroom experiments to the edge of space, and Consider the Facts, an effort to engage people in deliberative thinking using a story about an Earth-threatening asteroid. But nearly two dozen other cool projects have yet to hit 100 percent funding.

Here are some of the projects that are resonating the most with readers:

• Elcano - an open-source effort to make any vehicle autonomous
• Maverick Engine-Generator - a newly designed combustion engine and linear generator
• Don't Sleep With Mean People - a scientifically informed peace movement
• Biobulb - a lightbulb powered by bacteria
• Teachers in Space - an effort to send a student project to the International Space Station
• Gravity Development Board - do-it-yourself electronics hardware rated for the harsh environment of space
• Swyboard - a device that functions both as a slender tablet and computer keyboard
• Dual-Axis Solar Tracker - an effort to turn the town of Greensburg, Kansas green with solar energy

For the full list of projects, visit popsci.com/crowdgrant -- and help our finalists do something amazing.

Follow the conversation or spread the word about #CrowdGrant projects on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.

4 millimeters: the size of a three-dimensional, self-organizing model of a developing human brain grown in a lab using stem cells

10 octillion: the number of two-megaton nuclear bombs that would need to explode simultaneously to match the sound of a supernova

225 million years: the time it would take to walk a light-year

8.5 hours: the length of a year on this nightmare exoplanet covered in boiling lava

115: the number of protons in the nucleus of ununpentium, the temporary name for the newly discovered superheavy element 115

200,000 pounds: the record amount of thrust generated in a recent NASA test of the largest 3-D printed rocket part ever

$160,000: about how much cash you could get for one of your kidneys in Israel

$10,000: the grant money a 37-year-old chimpanzee won for his sanctuary in a recent chimp art contest (he painted the work below with his tongue)

25: the number of children and adults sickened in a recent measles outbreak traced to a Texas megachurch, the pastor of which had previously criticized vaccines

$102 million: the cost of a high-tech bubonic plague lab the Pentagon is building in Kazakhstan

50,000: the number of signatures needed for a petition to name storms after climate change deniers (the petition had 59,124 as of this writing)

36: the number of square segments, each made from four bony plates, in a seahorse's uncrushable tail. Researchers hope to use this squishable armor to build an awesome robotic arm.

$3,500: the funding this DIY team needs to build a circuit board that would let anyone make any car robotic

25: the number of people who will be the next Steve Jobs

Summer in New York City, bless its big, appley urban heart, can be miserable. The city is basically a floating oven. Urban heat islands, New York among them, are metropolitan areas that--due to fewer trees and more dark, heat-holding pavement--are much hotter than surrounding rural areas.

The average difference between surface temperatures in a developed versus a rural area is 18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the EPA. On a hot summer day in the city, dry surfaces like pavements and roofs can be up to 90 degrees hotter than the air temperature! And when the heat gets trapped in the atmosphere, the city doesn't cool off at night--heat from the urban infrastructure continues to be released in the air, making it even hotter after sunset. Yay, humans, making the world more miserable.

After wandering around in New York City during a particularly hot summer day, artist Nickolay Lamm decided to turn a thermal eye on the urban landscape. He rented a thermal camera and documented the invisible heat in action. (He explains the project further in a StorageFront.com blog.)

Here's what that top view, looking at the Jersey City skyline from Manhattan, looks like to the naked eye:

Makes you wanna take a swim, right? Across the river, Lady Liberty is having a bit of a hot flash:

The mouth of hel--uh, Times Square:

Compare how hot the people in Times Square are compared to these people walking around in the shade (at bottom left):

You can see part of the Freedom Tower in the middle there, looking cool as a cucumber. Newer buildings that reflect solar radiation reduce the heat island effect.

This set of buildings looks pretty cool and innocuous, right?

NOPE.

But the reflective metallic parts of the Chrysler Building roof are almost invisible, they're so cool.

The statue of Mercury atop Grand Central is feeling the heat, though. Sorry bud.

Thank god summer is almost over.

Here's a twist on knowing thy heart. A startup is looking to manufacture a wristband that recognizes its wearer by his or her heartbeat. The wristband, called Nymi, then communicates with wearers' other devices-laptops, tablets, smartphones-to unlock them when their owners pick them up.

The wristband isn't ready for sale yet. Its creators, part of a small Toronto-based company called Bionym, are now taking pre-orders for $79. Bionym plans to ship Nymis in 2014. Once ready, the wristband will come with the ability to unlock PCs, Macs, and iPhone and Android phones and tablets, Karl Martin, Bionym's CEO, tells Popular Science.

It's not clear yet exactly how accurate Nymi (Martin pronounced it "NIM-mi") will be, nor how convenient it will be to use. But it is a very cool combination of technologies: It not only IDs who's wearing it by his or heartbeat, it also recognizes gestures and its distance from different electronic devices.

Here's how it works. When wearers put the Nymi on, sensors in the wristband will take the person's ECG. That's the measurement that hospitals take when they measure people's heartbeats. Although all healthy hearts make roughly the same spiky shapes in an ECG sensor, there are enough differences in the graph to tell different people apart, several years of research has found.

The Nymi takes its wearers' heartbeat just once, when they put the wristband on. Then, as long as they wear the wristband, the Nymi is able to communicate with and unlock any devices with which it's registered. If people take their Nymi off, it won't work anymore until it takes another ECG measurement. That prevents others from being able to use a lost or stolen Nymi.

In the future, Martin and his colleagues are hoping other app developers will make programs that will let Nymi do more than what Bionym will build in. A video* Bionym produced shows some possibilities. Unlocking a car door with a gesture, unlocking a hotel room door, turning on the TV to the wearer's last-watched program-those are all things Nymi will be prepared to do, given the right app.

"Anywhere I use a password or a PIN or even a physical key or a key card, these are all places where I'm providing my identity and I can provide it in a seamless way with Nymi," Martin says.

Although I asked, I didn't get to try the Nymi, see a live demo of it, or see it in its current, prototype form. Right now, the Nymi doesn't look like it does in the video because Bionym is still developing it. The company didn't want photos of it to get out that don't reflect what it would look like in its final form, Martin says. He showed me a non-working model of what their final product will be like over Skype. The design is minimal--it's just a black wristband with a button on top.

When I asked independent researchers if they had any concerns about Nymi, the one thing they brought up was that it's not clear how accurate the wristband will be at identifying users. Bionym worked with the University of Toronto to test Nymi's ECG-IDing accuracy in more than 1,000 people, Martin says. They've found Nymi is comparable to fingerprint recognition and more accurate than facial recognition. They will test its accuracy further this fall.

However, such results aren't published yet in the peer-reviewed literature. What has been published indicates it's "premature" to say an ECG identification scheme can compare to fingerprints and facial recognition, says Kevin Bowyer, the chair of the computer science department at the University of Notre Dame.

Bowyer does agree the product has potential for some yet-unimagined applications. "I haven't seen this combination of heartbeat and gesture sensing and proximity sensing before," he says. "There's a chance someone will figure out something really interesting that you could do with this."

*The preponderance of butt shots in this video confused me at first, but then I realized they were trying to show the wristband. Enjoy!

Popular Science's history isn't all flying cars and geodesic domes. Readers of the past liked to have fun, too! Unfortunately, their opportunities to do so, as far as we can tell, were somewhat limited.

See the gallery.

An 1892 issue of the magazine spells out the purpose of games, in case you didn't know: "They afford needful relaxation to the mind, pleasant diversions to the invalid and afflicted, promoting acquaintance and fellowship."

Here are 10 games that range from mildly exciting to about as fun as sorting laundry (literally--see "Wash Day" from 1931). Nearly all of these articles came with DIY instructions. Would you still play Scrabble if you had to carve each piece yourself?

This article originally appeared on PopularScience.com February 10, 2012.

Can I buy the moon?

For now at least, the moon is like the sea: everyone can use it, but no one can own it. In 1967 the U.S. and the Soviet Union negotiated the Outer Space Treaty, which states that no nation can own a piece of the moon or an asteroid. "You have a right to go up and take the lunar soil, but you don't have any right to draw a square on the surface of the moon and say, ‘That square is mine,'" says Stephen E. Doyle, a retired lawyer who served as NASA's Deputy Director of Internal Affairs. If the Space Settlement Institute-which lobbies for private industry to develop land on other planets-has its way, new laws will allow space colonists to stake moon claims and start a colony.

Alan Wasser, the Space Settlement Institute's chairman, says that a private company should build a "spaceline," similar to an airline, between the Earth and moon. And because a corporation is not a nation, the Outer Space Treaty would not apply. Corporations have settled new worlds before. The London Company was a joint stock enterprise that established the Jamestown Settlement in 1607,providing transportation to pioneers in return for seven years of labor in America, where they cultivated tobacco and other crops for the company's profit.

Wasser says that land ownership-and the promise of profits based on it-is a necessary incentive to invest in space settlement. He is lobbying for legislation that would commit the U.S. government to honor future moon claims. But anyone can buy a deed to land on the moon right now. The Lunar Registry ("Earth's leading lunar real-estate agency") sells such deeds on its website for about $20 an acre. Doyle says that some kind of lunar governing body is necessary to recognize and enforce property rights, but no such body exists. So as it stands, the claims are not much more than fancy pieces of paper.

Doyle says that future moon settlers could look to the Antarctic Treaty, which designates the continent as a scientific preserve and prohibits military activity or mining; 28 countries maintain research stations subject to review by the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs, which oversees best practices of scientific research on the continent. "Anybody who understands the implications of imposing a national law on celestial bodies," Doyle says, "understands we are better to treat it like Antarctica and the high seas than we are to treat it like Manhattan." If not, he says, we would "take all the problems and contests we've had on the surface of the Earth for 5,000 years and extend them to outer space."

Have a science question you've always wondered about? Send an email to fyi@popsci.com

This article originally appeared on PopularScience.com September 1, 2011.

All these psychedelic colors don't look too impressive in the bottle. That's because they come from a film of soap, which Pennsylvanian Linden Gledhill made with a machine and then photographed.

The colors come entirely from the interference of light that enters the soap film and then reflects off of either one of the two layers of the soap's lipid bilayer. Different colors correspond to different thicknesses of soap layers. For some of the photos, Gledhill also aimed a precise, pulsing stream of ion wind at the soap film to make trippy patterns.

Gledhill is a researcher at GlaxoSmithKline. He produces photographs for fun and commercially. In the past, we've admired his microscope photographs of crystals of food coloring.

Click here to enter the gallery. All the silly photo titles are my fault, not Gledhill's.

The Gardiner's Seychelles frog is one of the smallest amphibians in the world, measuring less than half an inch long. But their extreme tininess isn't the only curious thing about them. As a new study shows, this species of frog has no eardrum and no middle ear--and yet it can croak and hear other croaks. How is this possible?

A team of scientists from a variety of French universities set out to unravel the mystery of the tiny frog. Frogs don't have ears in the same way that mammals do, with an external cartilaginous sounding board; instead, their eardrums are directly on the skin. But the Gardiner's Seychelles frog doesn't even have that.

First, the scientists had to figure out if the frogs could even hear, so they recorded calls from other frogs and played them through speakers. The test frogs responded, indicating that they can indeed hear. But x-rays showed that the frog's bones weren't conducting the sound (as our own jawbones do), nor were the muscles or organs of the frog. So the scientists hit the computers and ran a simulation: what if the frog's mouth was directing the sound to the inner ear, a cavity within the frog's skull that hosts reverberated noises. And it worked! The math showed that this method could indeed allow the frog to "hear."

It's not the first frog to hear with something besides an eardrum; back in 2001, a team of scientists found frogs that hear through their lungs. But this is the first we've seen that uses its mouth (at least, we think it does).

The evolution of eardrums dates to the separation of Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent; the scientists suspect that the frog is a holdover from that time, unchanged due to its isolation on a few islands in the Seychelles, off the coast of Madagascar. By studying the Gardiner's Seychelles frog, they're hoping to gain some insight into what animals were like in Gondwana, and what made them different from more recently evolved animals.

When I imagined Bill Nye dancing with the stars, I assumed he'd be in space. Alas, the Science Guy will be joining the cast of ABC's never-ending show for its upcoming 17th season. The man apparently loves a good swing dance.

I'll be shakin' it on #DWTS this season with the wonderful @TyneStecklein. I can already feel the burn...

— Bill Nye (@TheScienceGuy) September 4, 2013

Sounds like a pretty foolproof way to boost ratings to me. Skip to about :43 in this video to see Nye get his groove on, because it's beautiful:

The real question: Will he become BFFs with his cast mate Snooki? Will they… have a dance off?

[CNN]

The Galaxy Gear is a connected wristband, essentially a watch with a small LCD screen and lots of smartphone-like gadgetry stuffed inside. It's not a new idea, but this is by far the biggest push from a major company to get what's called the "wearable" genre off the ground.

Smartwatches are designed to be a bridge between you and your smartphone. The idea is that for very quick checks, like reading text messages or seeing if you have new calls or emails, you don't need to fish your phone out of your pocket. Instead, your watch syncs wirelessly with your phone, so you can just glance at your wrist for this kind of thing.

There have been a few before; Sony has already shown off its second-generation smartwatch, though Sam Biddle at Gizmodo called the first-generation "maybe the worst thing Sony has ever made." Then there's the massive-earning Kickstarter success-story, the Pebble watch, which has had a mediocre reception. But Samsung's Galaxy is a little different.

The Galaxy Gear has a 1.63-inch Super AMOLED screen--that makes it a large watch, but a small gadget--and 4GB of storage. It syncs with either Android or iOS phones via Bluetooth (if your phone has NFC, you can use that to make the syncing easier). Interestingly, Samsung is bringing a whole mess of apps to the table right away: there are offerings from big names in app development like Evernote, Runkeeper, and Pocket who will offer some functionality on launch. (It'll also have the Vivino Wine Scanner app, which "allows you to take a photo of any wine and get to know all about it instantly." OK!) It's also got a pedometer so it can compete with other watch-like fitness trackers like our favorite in that category, the Basis Band.

It also has a 1.9-megapixel camera, which is unexpected; you can use it to record photos or videos, right from your wrist. And it has speakers and a microphone in it, so you can do that James-Bondian thing where you make a phone call by talking into your wrist.

The Galaxy Gear will go on sale for $299 starting later this month--pricey, compared to the competition (the Pebble sells for $150, though it doesn't have as much fancy tech stuff in it), and also considering you need a smartphone to use it.