Why is progress on gene therapy-the treatment of genetic disorders by giving sick people doses of the healthy genes they lack-so slow? In part, it's because an 18-year-old named Jesse Gelsinger died in 1999 after he received an experimental therapy. In a recent feature, Wired talks with the man who ran the experiment that killed Gelsinger: James Wilson, a gene therapy researcher at the University of Pennsylvania.

Since Gelsinger's death, Wilson has worked to develop safer gene therapies. The therapy Gelsinger took had relied on an andenovirus to deliver carry a healthy outside gene into his own cells. Adenoviruses are able to zip their genetic loads efficiently into human cells, but Gelsinger's body mounted a devastating immune reaction to the adenovirus. So Wilson has been working on turning adeno-associated viruses, which don't kick off the human immune system as strongly, into gene vectors.

The FDA found Wilson had violated many of his obligations as the leader of a clinical trial.Wired covers the science of the two gene delivery systems nicely. Adeno-associated viruses may even be able to cross the blood-brain barrier, which no other vector-including adenoviruses-has ever been found to do. For example, one adeno-associated virus has been shown to carry a gene therapy into the brain once it's been injected into the blood. The Wired feature is definitely worth a read.

Once you're finished, though, don't forget to take a look at some of the legal and ethical discussions that took place after Gelsinger died. The FDA found Wilson had violated many of his obligations as the leader of a clinical trial, including not adequately informing volunteers of their risks and continuing the trial after seeing certain severe reactions in some patients. (Another perspective, from this 2009 retrospective from the Hastings Center, a bioethics research group, argues that all clinical trials are ethically troubled, due to a lack of oversight that would protect human subjects from problematic clinical trial leaders.)

Wired covers the basics of the aftermath of Gelsinger's death, and majormediaoutlets reported on the case widely, at the time. Fourteen years later, however, it's easy to have forgotten some of the details, which are an important case study in the difficulty of ensuring certain clinical trials are ethically clear and fair to the people who volunteer for them.

ArXiv is an online archive that stores hundreds of thousands of scientific papers in physics, mathematics, and other fields. The citations in those papers link to one another, forming a web, but you're not going to see those connections just by sifting through the archive.

So physicist Damien George and Ph.D student Rob Knegjens took it on themselves to create Paperscape, an interactive infographic that beautifully and intuitively charts the papers.

The infographic is a mass of circles. Each circle represents a paper, and the bigger a circle is, the more highly cited it is. The papers are color-coded by discipline--pink for astrophysics, yellow for math, etc.--and papers that share many of the same citations are placed closer together.

Although it's a little tough to make out, there's also an option to map the papers by age. The circles all turn red, and the brighter each circle is, the newer the paper is.

If you're looking to find a specific paper in this, well, good luck--it's not organized to be particularly searchable. But if you want to skim the most cited papers in the archive by clicking around on the biggest circles you can spot, or just want to see how no scientific field is an island, then you can check out the full infographic here.

[PaperScape via Information Aesthetics]

Researchers from the University of California, Riverside have debuted a new transparent cranial implant that could let doctors peek inside the brain without having to drill a new hole in the skull every time--a technique that could allow for easier treatment of neurological diseases.

Lasers have been used effectively to treat brain tumors and epilepsy, but most require making a hole in the skull for the laser to get through to the brain. Thinning the skull with a handheld drill increases its transparency for imaging, but also leaves the brain relatively unprotected, since the thinned bone isn't as strong. The implant could be overlaid on the thinned part of the skull to provide increased protection, circumventing the need for patients to wear protective headgear to prevent brain injury (just imagine if something fell on your recently-thinned skull).

It's made of yttria-stabilized zirconia (YSZ), a ceramic material already used in dental crowns and in hip replacements. The researchers made the usually opaque material transparent using what's called the Current Activated Pressure Assisted Densification (CAPAD), which made the material less porous and more clear.

"This is a crucial first step towards an innovative new concept that would provide a clinically-viable means for optically accessing the brain, on-demand, over large areas, and on a chronically-recurring basis, without need for repeated craniectomies," Devin Binder, an associate professor of biomedical sciences at the University of California, Riverside, said in a press statement.

Before it can be used clinically, the implant will need to be tested to see how the body responds to it over long periods of time--since what works in your tooth might not function the same way in your skull.

The technique is described in a study in Nanomedicine: Nanotechnology, Biology and Medicine.

What happened?
Talk about a hazardous parking job. Last Thursday, Martin Lindsay parked his Jaguar XJ across the street from the curvy 37 story, glass-and-steel skyscraper at 20 Fenchurch Street in London, and walked away. When he came back, his car had melted under the brunt of the sunlight reflecting off the still-under-construction building designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly.

Parked in the "hot spot" where concentrated light bouncing off the curve of the building shines, the Jaguar's paneling and side mirror melted. The developers of the building, nicknamed the "Walkie Talkie" for its distinctive shape, agreed to pay for the damages, which amounted to £946, more than $1,400.

How the heck does a building melt a car?

"Fundamentally it's reflection," Chris Shepherd of the Institute of Physics told the BBC. "If a building creates enough of a curve with a series of flat windows, which act like mirrors, the reflections all converge at one point, focusing and concentrating the light."

A concrete or brick surface diffuses light. Only 10 or 20 percent of the beam of light that hits the building gets reflected, and that light scatters in all directions. By contrast, a glass surface can reflect almost 100 percent of the sunlight that hits it, and can reflect that light back out in one direct beam.

"If you're a car parked on the street, there are situations where you get both the direct sunlight you would always get [from the sky], plus the reflected light off the building," John Frederick, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Chicago, told PopularScience.com. "That must have been enough to put the temperature in that car over the top."

Anyone familiar with solar power plants would have been able to tell the Walkie Talkie's designers that they were going to be generating a lot of heat.So basically, the curves of the Walkie Talkie acted like a magnifying glass to concentrate the light on this one spot--right where Lindsay's car was parked. (Some good pictures of the rays here.) According to Kheir Al-Kodmany, an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, anyone familiar with solar power plants would have been able to tell the Walkie Talkie's designers that they were going to be generating a lot of heat with a southern-facing, concave facade. "The reflection of sun is getting concentrated to a single point because of the shape," he says. "We use that exactly to generate power from solar energy." Since it faces south, on a sunny day, it collects heat all morning and shoots it back at the street below. If it had been a northern-facing facade, it probably wouldn't have been an issue.

Luckily, London isn't a very sunny city, so this won't be as much of a problem as it might be in a desert city like Abu Dhabi. The Walkie Talkie's developers claim this phenomenon will only last for two to three weeks. "The phenomenon is caused by the current elevation of the sun in the sky," they said in a statement.

Still, melting luxury cars is pretty bad press, so presumably they might want to take action before the problem resurfaces at this point next year. The AP reports the developers will be erecting a "temporary scaffold screen at street level" to minimize damage, but at some point, they'll need a more permanent solution. To reduce the glare, Al-Kodmany says that there are coats and films that could still be applied to the glass, though the building might not look the same. "They can still probably retrofit the tower with some of these high tech films that would reduce the glare and reflection," he says. "Of course, they need to consult the architect for aesthetics--it's meant to be aesthetically unique."

Has this been a problem before?

Yes, melted Jaguars are unusual.Yes, though melted Jaguars are unusual. Not long after Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall opened in Los Angeles in 2003, people began to complain that the sunlight reflecting off the building's shiny exterior was making the condos across the street unbearably hot, as well as blinding drivers in nearby traffic. A study from the University of Southern California's School of Architecture noted that on the sidewalk around the building, "freestanding lightweight objects get hot enough to soften plastic." The offending panels of polished stainless steel were sanded down in 2005 to dull the glare.

In 2010, employees at the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas dubbed the south-facing, curved tower the "death ray." Sunlight reflecting off the hotel's glass panes reportedly can melt disposable cups and singed the hair of at least one visitor. The building's designer? Rafael Vinoly--the same architect responsible for London's Walkie Talkie.

More recently, Museum Tower, a condo-filled skyscraper in the arts district of Dallas, has caused major headaches for the art museum across the street with its massive reflection. The Nasher Sculpture Center contends that intense sunlight reflected off Museum Tower is killing the plants in the museum's sculpture garden and ruining exhibits. The museum removed a Picasso painting from display over concerns that direct sunlight would damage it, and at the request of the artist himself, closed down the James Turrell skyspace exhibit that had been designed with the site's pre-condo natural light in mind.

Aren't there some sort of regulations to keep a lid on this?

Not really, according to Duncan Phillips of RWDI, a Canadian engineering consulting firm that has been involved in coming up with solutions to Museum Tower's reflection problem. "[T]here are no definitive standards," he told me via email, though some places, like Singapore, have requirements for how reflective a building's glazing, a shiny coating that can reduce the amount of heat a building absorbs from the sun, can be. But since those requirements usually only take into account the amount of reflection cast at at 90 degree angle from the glass, they don't control for reflected light at other angles. "[T]he way you can experience this is to look at a plate of glass head on…and then slowly move to the side and eventually you will see a highly reflective surface," according to Phillips.

Though the reflected light can create major pockets of heat, glassyskyscrapers are usually thought of as environmentally friendly, because reflecting the sunlight a brick surface would absorb keeps the building cool and air-conditioning costs down. Look at the difference in this thermal image of the reflective Freedom Tower (center) versus the buildings around it:

"As we get more shiny, glassy metal buildings, reflected light will become a bigger deal," Frederick says. "The high reflection is good if you're inside trying to keep intense sunlight out, but if you're outside, you'll be the recipient of that reflected light." He suspects that though shiny buildings could heat up other buildings and objects in their vicinity, the effect is probably pretty small in terms of creating an urban heat island effect, which is when urban buildings and hard surfaces like asphalt trap heat, making cities hotter than their surroundings.

But it's hard to tell how much the light bouncing off one building affects another, since that's not usually something we measure. "The effect of one building on another building in its vicinity is something that never seems to be discussed," Frederick says.

So, can I still park my car under a glass building?

Does your parking space look like it's basking in a weirdly bright, ethereal glow? Does the building have a very shiny concave part? If that's the case, then no, you probably shouldn't park your nice car (or anything with plastic parts) there, in the gleam of concentrated sunlight reflecting off it. Especially not if it seems unusually warm in that patch of sunlight, and especially not around noon, when the sun is at its strongest.

Even if you wanted to, the city of London has cordoned off three parking spaces around the Walkie Talkie's death ray to prevent anyone else's Jag from melting. Still, anyone dumb enough to park their bike on that stretch of sidewalk might be in for a melted seat.

This may be a picture of Turkey, but if you squint, it also kind of looks like a turkey with a white head and a brown tail, right?

The image, captured by Japan's ALOS satellite in 2010, shows the Anatolian peninsula, the Asian part of Turkey, after a dry summer left a thick layer of salt from Lake Tersakan (left) and Lake Tuz (right) exposed.

The white of the salt is so intense that Earth-observing satellites use it to white balance their sensors. Half the salt eaten in Turkey comes from Lake Tuz, one of the largest saltwater lakes in the world. In Turkish, Tuz Gölü means "Salt Lake."

[ESA]

Yesterday, Amazon announced the new MatchBook service, which offers a deeply discounted Kindle version of a book when you buy a new copy of the physical version. It's something people have been calling for for a while; why not toss in a digital version, which is essentially free to create and distribute? And it's not just new books--if you've ever bought a qualifying book from Amazon, even all the way back in 1995, when the site launched, you can get a digital edition for somewhere between $3 and free.

But we got to thinking: this service sounds great for padding out your bookshelves, but might it have a more negative effect on the environment? After all, won't this encourage people who would normally buy relatively environmentally-friendly digital books to spend a couple extra bucks for a physical copy they don't even need?

The move to ebooks in the past few years has been a victory, overall, for the environment. Printed books are surprisingly awful in this respect; we all sort of assume that that much paper can't be great for the environment, but the actual amount of carbon dioxide emissions is shocking.

This study from CleanTech estimates that reading three paper books per month for four years--a total of 144 books--will result in 1.074 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. The EPA estimates that regular use of a car results in about 5.1 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, so, using some very tricky math, that means that over that same four-year period, a car will let loose with 20.4 metric tons of emissions. The books may only be 1/20th of the car, but I'd bet that's more than you expected.

The least environmentally friendly part of the bookmaking process isn't necessarily the loss of trees. Much of the wood used to make the pulp that's turned into paper is actually byproducts of wood used to make other items--a cobbled-together mush of regular wood, woodchips, sawdust, and other wood detritus. The trees themselves aren't of one type; partly by virtue of paper's origin in castoffs, and partly because it doesn't much matter what kind of wood pulp you use, paper is made from a mix of softwood and hardwood, big trees and small trees, all kinds of stuff. Conservatree estimates that it takes about 24 trees to make one ton of non-recycled printing paper--but of course some is usually recycled these days, and some is from sustainable sources like bamboo.

The real problem with physical books is in creation and transportation. It takes a lot of energy to cut down trees, process them into pulp, strain them, press them, heat them, print them, and bind them, and then it takes even more to ship them all over the world.

The Kindle, on the other hand, requires a lot more nasty stuff to get made--mostly mining for materials for the battery and screen, and factory emissions from production--but after that's done, the environmental cost of each book you read on a Kindle is near zero. (Near-zero and not zero, because operating the servers that wirelessly deliver the ebooks uses a little bit of energy.) Slate estimated back in 2010 that by the time you've read your 23rd book on the Kindle, you've gotten yourself equal to the environmental cost of reading physical books--so everything after that is gravy. (The environmental cost of disposal is something else entirely, but let's leave that alone for now.)

Kindle ebooks are now more successful than physical books, according to Amazon itself (which never releases specific Kindle sales numbers). Amazon said about a year ago that for every 100 books sold on its site, 114 ebooks were sold. That includes books available in print but not digitally, and doesn't include free ebooks (books that are old enough to be in the public domain, like the Sherlock Holmes books, are easily and legally found for free.) Book sales are finally recovering from the crash felt in 2008; in 2012, total book sales in the U.S. rose 6.2 percent from the year before. That's modest, but the explosion of ebook sales isn't; in that same 2011-2012 period, sales of ebooks more than doubled. We're shifting from a culture of print reading to a culture of digital reading.

So if more people are buying digital than physical books, it's safe to say that the tide is turning, and, in general, our book-reading habits are getting more and more environmentally friendly. Great! But people still like having physical books, because they look nice and impressive on bookshelves, even if we prefer buying (and, possibly, reading) digitally.

If we assume that there are lots of people who have been buying digitally but would also like a hard copy (which, judging by the enthusiasm on Twitter, there are), then we can also conclude that MatchBook will also lead to more demand for physical books. A person who usually buys physical books now has a bonus; that person can spend a couple bucks and snag a digital copy, which has a minimal environmental impact.

This is great news. Book publishing is progressing, environmentally (we're making no claims about the feel of a printed book in the hand here). But Amazon's MatchBook service is a step backwards. Someone who usually buys digital books may now opt for the physical + digital bundle, meaning that their environmental impact goes way up. The price difference will likely be small. Khaled Hosseini's new book, one of the biggest sellers of 2013, sells on Amazon, at the time of writing, for $14.87 for the hardcover and $10.99 for the Kindle version. Assuming that the digital tie-in is expensive, at $2.99, that means that the digital-only package (which, from the stats, is what most people would buy) is $10.99, but you can have a nice hardcover tossed in for $6.88 extra. And that's the most it could possibly cost! Under seven bucks for a hardcover? Sure, why not? And for lots of books, that could be even less--maybe a couple of dollars, maybe nothing at all. It's very enticing, which is why Amazon's offering it in the first place.

This isn't an outright criticism; this is a nice service from the consumer perspective. I personally prefer reading on my Kindle; it's small and light and the screen lights up and it holds a bazillion books. But I also like quietly boasting about the books I read, because I am awful, and so I will probably spring for the couple-dollar premium to get the digital/physical bundle. It's a friendly deal in the economic sense; readers get something for cheap, publishers and authors and retailers (well, Amazon, the singular retailer) gets more money. But it could also put a dent in the progress we've made environmentally.

In 2012, a shocking 69 percent of American high-school graduates failed to meet college-readiness benchmarks in science. And in a 2010 paper about math and science achievement, the U.S. ranked last out of the eight countries studied (including England, South Korea, and Hungary). So not only are we unsuccessfully teaching basic knowledge to our kids, but many other nations have figured out how to do it better than us, too. There is no doubt about it: The way the U.S. teaches science simply doesn't work.

The good news is that a new approach to education could turn these embarrassing statistics around. For the past two years, 26 state governments have collaborated with teachers to develop The Next Generation Science Standards for grades K-12. The standards reflect 20 years of research that show that people learn better through experiences than through memorization. Educators have known this for a while: A 2005 National Research Council report found that teaching is more successful when students are aware of how they learn. A report the council published two years later, written by a committee of 18 science-education experts, concluded that current science-instruction methods are outdated because they significantly underestimate children's ability to think in a sophisticated way.

How will the implementation of these standards change the classroom? Students will memorize fewer facts; instead, they'll work to better understand key concepts by asking questions and designing experiments to find the answers. In other words, since scientists don't just sit around memorizing stuff, students shouldn't either. Here's an example of how the new approach will play out: Today, instructors might teach the phases of the moon by showing students photos and demonstrating with a model of Earth and the moon. Under the new standards, students would be shown pictures and then build their own models and discuss with classmates why the moon seems to change shape in the sky. They might get their models wrong at first, just like real scientists. But that's how people learn best.

Since scientists don't just sit around memorizing stuff, students shouldn't either.The new standards will create some challenges-for instance, educators will need to adopt a more flexible teaching style. But the effort will be worth it. The standards will create better scientists and engineers, and-perhaps just as important-they'll benefit even students who pursue nonscientific careers. Everyone is a science consumer. We must constantly evaluate new information that affects our lives, whether it's the latest news story on a nutrition study or a report on the psychology behind gun violence. Citizens vote for ballot measures and legislators that influence scientific research and policy, too. Although all 26 states are required to consider the standards, only a handful (including Rhode Island and Kansas) have officially instituted them so far. Those that don't are doing a disservice to their students and, in the long term, hurting all of us. Every state in the union needs to get on board.

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

The combination of smartphone and camera has been sometimes awkward; we've seen cameras with phone capabilities stapled on, and we've seen phones with absurdly overpowered lenses attached. The value of combining the image quality of a standalone camera (with its optical lenses and big sensor) with a smartphone (with its big screen, easy navigation, internet connectivity, and sharing/editing tools) is obvious, but nobody's quite cracked it yet. Sony's newest attempt is one of the oddest: they've basically taken their top-of-the-line RX100 camera and chopped off the screen, viewfinder, and most of the body. That leaves us with a cylindrical gadget that looks like a lens, which, as the new QX100, syncs wirelessly with your phone. You can clip it onto your phone to use the phone's screen as a viewfinder, and it beams photos right to it. It's actually a really cool idea! Read more about it over at Popular Photography.

Just over a century ago, Europe embarked on the first of two ugly, horrendous, horribly violent world wars. Since 1945, despite half of a century of nuclear standoff, multiple smaller conflicts, and the birth of dozens of new nations out of the dying bodies of empires, big wars don't seem to happen any more. Author Steve Pinker, in The Better Angels Of Our Nature, argues that war is declining, killing fewer people, and no longer how nations choose to resolve conflicts. Bear Braumoeller, a political science professor at Ohio State University, disagrees, seeing the recent trend as more statistical anomaly than historical fact. On August 29, he presented a paper arguing this at the American Political Science Association conference in Chicago. Nations, the paper says, are just as likely to go to war as they have always been. We caught up with Braumoeller to learn more:

Popular Science: How long has this debate [about whether war is in decline] been going on in political science?

Bear Braumoeller: About 10 years ago John Mueller wrote a book about war in decline. For a long time his was a minority position until Pinker's book popularized it.

Popular Science: The catchiest line from your paper is that it will take 150 years to know if the trend is holding. What's some more background on that?

Braumoeller: Some of this literature points to "the long peace" of post-World War II. Obviously we haven't stopped fighting wars entirely, so what they're referring to is the absence of really really big wars like World War I and World War II. Those wars would have to be absent for like 70 to 75 more years for us to have confidence that there's been a change in the baseline rate of really really big wars.

We need a big enough sample to rule out the historical average, which is about one or two big wars per century.

That's sort of a separate question from how we know whether there are trends in warfare in general. We need to understand that war and peace are both stochastic processes. We need a big enough sample to rule out the historical average, which is about one or two big wars per century. We just haven't had enough time since World War I and World War II to rule out the possibility that nothing's changed.

Popular Science: So it seems to me like big wars are a relatively rare event, so a slightly longer time between them is well within the statistical norm, rather than evidence of a trend away from them. Are human events that subject to chance? Is it entirely fair to be treating it as a matter of probability?

Braumoeller: Think of it like a coke machine that gives you your coke sometimes and sometimes it doesn't give you your coke. The output looks like random chance, to the people who are pushing things and trying to get drinks out. Inside the machine, everything is mechanical. But as observers, we can't see that internal detail, so it just looks like probability, even though it isn't.

An example I use is that we didn't go to war in the Cuban Missile Crisis. That came down to one person's decision not to use nuclear weapons on a Russian submarine. That person's decision probably wasn't a matter of probability, but everything else was in place.

There are structural factors that predispose a system or a collection of states to start fighting each other, and those causes are deeper than the actual territorial dispute that's the spark, say.

Popular Science: You have this measure called "warlikeness" that you use.

Braumoeller: Here's the trick. I'm taking a look at the number of uses of force. When you use force, you're rolling the dice; no idea how long or involved the war is going to be. So what I'm looking at is uses of force over time. And that's a problem, because the number of opportunities to use force over time has changed. For one thing, we have more countries than we used to have. For another, not all those countries are relevant to one another. In pairs like Bolivia & Botswana, what happens in Bolivia is pretty irrelevant to what happens in Botswana, and vice versa.

I'm trying to control for the opportunity to go to war, so I can capture a pure measure of the willingness to go to war.

Popular Science: There are models that eliminate pairs based on distance. How do you narrow the pairs?

Braumoeller: In the paper there are two methods. The most conservative is continuity--the country has be adjacent to, or have a sea border of no more than 150 miles, another in order for the pairing to be considered politically relevant. That's a really strict rule--the U.S. is politically relevant to far more countries than that.

The other end of the spectrum, the measure that I came up with, uses a statistical measure to create a continuous spectrum of political relevance, based on distance and the capabilities of the strongest country. Lots of countries are highly politically relevant to the U.S., the U.K. is more of a regional player with some potential for farther-flung interests, Egypt is very much a regional player, and Chile, hardly any countries are politically relevant to it.

Popular Science: It seems like this data, starting in the 1500s, covers a time when there were fewer countries but they were bigger ones. How much does country size factor into this?

Braumoeller: When you've got a small number of big states facing off against each other, for one thing they're stronger, and once those empires and big states break up into smaller countries, those smaller parts are weaker, and many of them are further apart. The fact that we've gone from a small number of large countries to a big number of smaller, weaker countries means that the opportunity for countries to fight each other has declined.

Popular Science: Why the focus on the major wars? There's clearly been wars fought since World War II, so why talk about the big wars?

Braumoeller: Only because "The Long Peace" after World War II is something that's occasionally cited by people as evidence that major war is going away. I think the real heart of the evidence is in the trends and uses of force, controlling for distance and political relevant. It's more of a brush burning exercise. The argument is out there that, after 70 years of peace, we don't have to worry about war any more. Both war and peace can be treated as stochastic processes. We don't really have enough evidence yet to claim that.

It's easy to say that 70 years of peace is not an unusual stretch of peace between world wars. The harder question is "how long will we have to wait before we can say this with reasonable certainty?" and I think the answer "150 years" is going to surprise a lot of people.

I think the answer "150 years" is going to surprise a lot of people

Popular Science: Where would you like to see research on this go from here?

Braumoeller: I am turning it into a book. The main motivation for this is that we study wars and conflict using data to the best of our ability. And, obviously, I think this is worth doing, because this is what I do for a living, but we ought to be able to come up with a concrete answer about whether or not war is on the increase or decrease or if the frequency of warfare is even changing. That ought to be something that we as a discipline should be able to do. If we can't even do that, we should probably hang up our hats and go do something else.

After a user on the Chinese social media site Weibo posted about seeing flying robots with the SF Express logo, the delivery company admitted that it has begun trials of package-delivery drones in the city of Dongguan in southeast China.

This isn't the first drone delivery news out of China, but unlike InCake's attempted drone cake delivery service in Shanghai, the SF Express operation has received the go-ahead from local police.

Because they travel by air, drones are an attractive option for delivering small packages in crowded urban areas with badly congested roads. The Dongguan metro area, with a population of almost 8 million and a strong, export-driven economy, is an ideal test site for such a program.

The drones themselves are octorotors (picture a cartoon drawing of a squashed spider) with eight limbs extending from a central body. According to local news sites, each drone can carry up to 6.6 pounds and fly at an elevation of about 330 feet. It's unknown how far the battery-powered drone can fly.

Lighter than 7 pounds is not a lot of cargo; the drone can't even carry a complete paperback set of Harry Potter (that's a standard unit of weight, right?) so I wouldn't expect it to replace 18 wheelers just yet. But that is a lot of elevation! The drone could deliver a couple paperbacks almost to the top of a 33-story building.

Express delivery by drone, even of small packages and over short distances, means this is much less of a gimmick than other drone delivery services, like a Domino's pizza delivery in England or a dry cleaner's drone in Philadelphia. When could the U.S. start testing services like this? At the earliest, 2015, when the Federal Aviation Administration approves six states as test sites for drones.

Here's hoping they come stateside soon. Free shipping is cool, but I'd be way more excited about a package delivered onto my balcony by a robot.

It took seven years and 20 researchers, but a team at the University of Alberta have finally, using all available state-of-the-art equipment, figured out the chemical composition of human urine. This also means there's a good chance that somebody has replied to the question "so what do you do?" with "I've been looking at urine for the past seven years."

According to David Wishart, the senior scientist on the project, medical textbooks list anywhere from 50-100 chemical compounds in urine, and standard urine tests (like when you pee into a cup to test for drug use) only check for six or seven compounds. But this study used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry and liquid chromatography to find over 3,000 different chemical compounds.

Even better, the project has resulted in a freely available database of all these compounds, which will be updated as new technology reveals more compounds. Here's the description, from the database:

There's lots of potential reasons why we'd want to know exactly what's going on in our urine; it can help us understand how our diet affects our waste management system, and how our bodies process food and liquid. And once we've figured that stuff out, we can use simple, non-invasive urine tests to check for all kinds of illnesses that might typically require a less pleasant blood test or other kind of test. Wishart notes that urine tests could be used to test for different kinds of cancer, for celiac disease, pneumonia, and lots more.

"Urine is an incredibly complex biofluid. We had no idea there could be so many different compounds going into our toilets," said Wishart pithily.

The study was published today in the journal PLoS One.

Scientists from the Harvard University and the University of Michigan have developed a way to image brain tumors to reveal exactly where the tumor cells end and the healthy tissue begins, a technique that could help guide doctors during surgery.

The technique, called stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy, works through analyzing the spectrum of light that emerges when the brain is hit by a non-invasive laser. It senses the vibrations in chemical bonds, distinguishing healthy tissue from dense tumor tissue by showing the amount of lipids and proteins in cells--lipids appeared green, while proteins were blue. Protein-rich tumors showed up bright blue.

When operating to remove brain tumors, surgeons can't always tell if they've removed all of the offending tumor. "They have an MRI image, and they know what needs to be removed, but the question is: Where do you stop?" Harvard chemistry professor Xiaoliang Sunney Xie explains. "A very experienced surgeon may be able to discern between brain tissue and a tumor based on subtle color differences, but many surgeons, I believe, will find this technology a useful guide."

The researchers used SRS microscopy to image tumors in live mice during brain surgery, as well as in brain tissue removed from a patient with glioblastoma multiforme, an extra-lethal type of brain tumor. They were able to create 30 new images per second, enough to look at what's going on in real time.

While the idea has potential, to be useful in surgery the system needs to become more portable. The research team is now working on building a handheld probe that would be about the size of a toothbrush.

The full study appears on the cover of Science Translational Medicine this week.

In a first for robot kind, Kirobo, the Japanese robot astronaut that arrived at the International Space Station last month, has spoken to Earth. Kirobo, a 13-inch-tall android, will be at the ISS for about 18 months.

"On August 21, 2013, a robot took one small step toward a brighter future for all," he said, before going on to wish Earth a good morning.

Kirobo speaks Japanese, and is capable of voice and emotion recognition and natural language processing. He'll be chatting with Japanese astronaut Koichi Wakata when the future ISS commander arrives at the station later this year.

[Engadget]

The Dash, created by Dash Robotics, is an insect-inspired simple robot kit that runs like the fastest, most rectangular cockroach ever. There's a crowdfunding campaign and beta test, with 27 days left to get one of the first 1,000 robots available.

Dash stands for "Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod," which is a great forced acronym for "six-legged robot that recovers when it falls." It was first developed in 2009 by a team of students working at UC Berekley's biomimetics lab, which focuses on designing machines that imitate animals.

Dash's springy body can keep it running even after a fall from over 90 feet, and it can run straight at 1.5 meters per second, up to a mile. After years of development, the robot is entering a beta testing stage.

Made largely of cardboard and plastic, the key to the robot is a special polymer layer sandwiched between layers of cardboard, giving the body something of an organic flexibility while still remaining cheap to produce. Dash's creators say the $65 kit can be assembled in about an hour, and an already-assembled version can be ordered for $100.

The first version of the robot, called the Alpha Dash, only runs in straight lines. The next version, called Beta Dash, will work with Arduinos, a popular open-source single-board microcontroller, and will be steerable. Both versions come with gyroscopic sensors, visible light and infrared sensors, LED lights, and electronic ports for expansion. The creators are developing a mobile app to control Dash robots over Bluetooth.

Right now, it might just be a fast robotic cockroach that can fall 90 feet. If the crowdfunding project goes well, it will be a fast robotic cockroach that can fall 90 feet and then chase people around a quad while being remotely controlled by smartphone app.

Watch it fall over and over again in the video below:

Supertall skyscrapers aren't necessarily built to fit as many people inside as possible--sometimes they're just aiming to be, well, really tall. Large portions of these buildings are designed to increase height, but remain unoccupied. Wasteful!

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, a not-for-profit organization that tracks the world's skyscrapers, just released some data on that subject. Surprise! Some really tall buildings don't need to be so tall.

The CTBUH uses the term "vanity spires" to describe tops of buildings where a ton of extra height is added, even though that space isn't used for people. By unused height, here are the 10 buildings with the most ridiculous spires:

So the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world at nearly 830 meters, has 244 meters of unoccupied space. To put that in context, as the CTBUH does, if that 244 meters were itself a building, it would be the 11th tallest in Europe.

Here, meanwhile, are those buildings broken down geographically:

Pretty crazy, right? But it's also not new. Think about classic skyscrapers like the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, which were similarly designed with big spires. You might notice that the skyscrapers with the largest vanity spires were all built fairly recently--the oldest is from 1999--but there are also just more supertall buildings being erected. It would take a little more math to say buildings like this are on the rise, so to speak.

It's also not clear how these spires change the buildings' environmental footprints, although we know at least one of them listed above, the Bank of America Tower in New York, has some pretty serious efficiency issues.

One of the study's authors, CTBUH's Daniel Safarik, wrote in an email to PopularScience.com that "we did not explicitly look at how vanity height affects environmental footprint for this study, but that is clearly one of the most vital issues implied by the findings." Just having the title of "tallest" is a draw for a building, he says--it matters less what all that space is used for. So what to do? "If [a tallest building] criteria were based on 'highest occupied floor,' in theory, there would be less of an incentive to have the 'vanity height,'" Safarik writes.

Until that changes, more buildings may add vanity height just to top other structures. Or maybe we can keep things the way they are, and just have a skyscraper where you can't go above the lobby.

You can check out more data from CTBUH here.

[Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat]

Cure Down syndrome with a single injection? Well, maybe--if you're a mouse. A team of scientists from John Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health have cured newborn mice of Down syndrome by injecting them with a drug that stimulates what's called the Sonic Hedgehog pathway (so-named because in flies, a lack of the Hedgehog signaling protein causes embryos to become prickly, hedgehog-like balls).

People with Down syndrome usually have smaller brain volumes than control groups, including significantly smaller cerebellums, a portion of the brain involved in motor control. The researchers, led by Roger Reeves of the John Hopkins University School of Medicine, treated newborn mice that had been genetically engineered to have Down syndrome-like characteristics with a small molecule called SAG.

After a single injection of SAG on the day the mice were born, their cerebellums developed normally into adulthood. It improved their behavior, too: Mice treated with SAG performed just as well as normal mice on a memory and learning test.

But the drug is a long way from becoming a human cure. The Hedgehog pathway plays an important role when it comes to brain development, so fiddling with it could have unintended consequences. It's possible enhancing the biochemical events that lead to growth in the brain would cause issues elsewhere in the body, like potentially raising the risk of cancer.

"Down syndrome is very complex, and nobody thinks there's going to be a silver bullet that normalizes cognition," Reeves said in a statement. "Multiple approaches will be needed."

The study appears in ABC.net.au]

A music video from a Norwegian duo called Ylvis is primed to, as the kids marketers say, "go viral," because it is catchy and weird and foreign and about animals. The lyrics are simple: Bård Ylvisåker and Vegard Ylvisåker, the folks behind Ylvis, describe the vocalizations of various common animals, from cats to dogs to ducks to cows, and then in the pre-chorus, wonder what sound the fox makes. The chorus then suggests a few possibilities, like "Gering-ding-ding-ding-dingeringeding" and "Wa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pow." Good suggestions, Bård Ylvisåker and Vegard Ylvisåker! But I think we can come up with something slightly more scientifically accurate, and also watch lots of videos of foxes while we do it.

So! In Norway, where Ylvis is from, there are two species of fox: the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) and the red fox (Vulpes vulpes). Here in the States, we have a few others, like the gray fox and the kit fox. All species of fox have a pretty wide variety of vocalizations, just as dogs and cats do. It's simple to reduce, say, a dog's vocalizations to "bark," but as any owner knows, dogs can yelp, whine, howl, growl, and make all kinds of other sounds. Foxes aren't quite as varied in their vocalizations as dogs, but they're still capable of making lots of different sounds.

The red fox, which is the most common species of fox worldwide (and almost certainly the fox variety Ylvis is talking about; there are only about 120 arctic foxes left in Norway), is highly vocal. Foxes are canids, like dogs and wolves, but are not closely related to either; in fact, they hunt more like cats, with a low-to-the-ground stalking posture, and bite hard with sharp, thin teeth to kill prey (dogs and wolves tend to have duller, larger teeth and use a "clamp and shake" method to kill). In vocalizations, too, foxes aren't entirely like dogs.

The most commonly heard red fox vocalizations are a quick series of barks, and a scream-y variation on a howl. All fox vocalizations are higher-pitched than dog vocalizations, partly because foxes are much smaller. The barks are a sort of ow-wow-wow-wow, but very high-pitched, almost yippy. It's commonly mistaken for an owl hooting. That bark sequence is thought to be an identification system; studies indicate that foxes can tell each other apart by this call.

The scream-y howl is most often heard during the breeding season, in the springtime. It is...horrible. A shrill, hoarse scream of anguish, it sounds more than anything like a human baby undergoing some kind of physical torture. It's thought that this call is used by vixens (female foxes) to lure male foxes to them for mating, though males have been found to make this sound occasionally as well.

The bark and scream and very loud, so they're often heard, but most other fox vocalizations are quiet and used for communication between individuals in close proximity. The most unusual is called "gekkering;" it's a guttural chattering with occasional yelps and howls, like an ack-ack-ack-ackawoooo-ack-ack-ack. Gekkering is heard amongst adults in aggressive encounters (of which there are many; red foxes are highly territorial) and also amongst young kits playing (or play-fighting). There's also the alarm call, which up close sounds like a cough but from afar sounds like a sharp bark, and is mostly used by fox parents to alert youngsters to danger.

Red foxes, unlike other familiar canids like the gray wolf and coyote, do not form packs. When kits are young, they and the mother may form a small family unit, but in general, foxes are solitary. Still, they sometimes inhabit the same territory, and so have a social hierarchy which requires communication. Submissive foxes, when greeting dominant foxes, will sometimes emit piercing whines, which can elevate in volume and become shrieks. Foxes communicate with kits largely with body gestures, but also make huffing and coughing noises, and sometimes brief clucks, like a casual, short form of gekkering.

That's what sound the fox makes! But equally interesting is why most people don't know what sound the fox makes. It's a widespread, enormously successful and adaptive species, living worldwide, in all sorts of climates, in forests, on mountains, in suburbs and sometimes even cities. Americans and Europeans are very familiar with the red fox. And unlike, say, a raccoon, it's a highly vocal animal. So how come we have no idea what it sounds like?

One major reason is that it's a wild animal. The children's toys that teach the sounds of animals focus on domestic animals, mostly livestock. Pig, cow, sheep, rooster, duck, horse--these are farm animals, which, in America's collective agrarian past, were members of the household. You'll notice that on this toy you won't see any of the most common North American wild animals--no raccoons, no coyotes, no deer, no robins, no hawks, and no foxes. What sound does the deer make? Hell if I know.

Another reason might be that fox noises are easily mistaken for other animals. The common yow-wow-wow-wow sounds more like an owl than a canid, and the scream-howl sounds less like a fox than the soundtrack to a nightmare. And foxes are nocturnal hunters, which means we're asleep when they're making most of their noises.

Then there's the other problem. Foxes are common and cute, they feature in myths and we have gone to extreme lengths to make them our pets, but the noises they make are sort of...awful. The red fox does not have a mellifluous voice; even when it's happy, it mostly sounds like it's being strangled. It would be awkward to teach your young child that the cow goes moo, the frog goes croak, and the fox goes YAAGGAGHHGHHHHHHAHHHH!!!!!

But! Now you know. The fox goes yow-wow-wow, ack-ack-ackawoo-ack, and YAAGGAGHHGHHHHHHAHHHH!!!!!.

Cushioned sneakers can help athletes jump higher-a compressed sole returns energy vertically. Adidas has now developed a shoe that could also help runners go faster. Sixteen slanted plastic springs on the sole of the Springblade return a runner's energy horizontally, providing extra forward momentum. Engineers tuned each spring independently, optimizing thickness, height, and orientation to match the role it plays in a stride. Compared with footsteps taken on standard soles, those on Springblade should have measurably more forward propulsion.

Landing

In a running stride, a person's heel hits the ground with a force equal to three times his body weight. To absorb the impact, the single spring on the Springblade's heel is thicker than the others. It's also as wide as the foot, which helps the shoe grip the ground.

Transition

As the foot rolls forward, the springs-arranged in pairs for balance-compress, storing energy. The arch doesn't take the same impact as the heel and toes, so these springs are thinner and can squeeze further, gathering even more energy.

Push-off

When a runner's forward momentum takes over, the heel begins to peel off the ground. That's when the springs-from back to front-decompress and release energy. At this point in the stride, leg muscles generate thrust too, which puts about 2.5 times a person's weight on the ball of the foot. Like those at the heel, the springs here are beefier to prevent slipping.

Adidas Springblade

Blades: 16
Weight: 12.8 ounces
Prices: $180

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