The Wall Street Journal's Metropolis blog is reporting that a 19-year-old man was killed today when the remote-controlled helicopter he was flying struck him in the head. A quoted official says the helicopter "scalped" his head, which is horrifying, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.

According to this guide, the tips of remote-controlled helicopter blades spin at 250 mph, making them very dangerous indeed. Deaths from remote-controlled helicopter are rare, but not unheard-of; a Swiss man died earlier this year from a similar accident.

[via WSJ]

The first time I saw Futurama, the long-running (but off-and-on) animated series from Simpsons creator Matt Groening, I was a kid watching it on summer afternoons at my grandmother's house. I don't think I'd ever laughed that hard--not at its colossally influential older cousin The Simpsons, and possibly not at anything since. The show ended its run (again) last night.

Here's the setup, if you haven't seen it (and if you're reading this site, which I assume means you have at least a passing interest in The Future, I'd recommend you give it a shot): a pizza delivery man-child accidentally cryogenically freezes himself in New York on New Year's Eve 1999, then wakes up on New Year's Eve 2999, where he is, uh, also a pizza delivery man-child. Except a space-exploring one.

The show did the only reasonable thing: revel in all the ways the future could be absurd.I bought the DVDs of the show, and would turn on re-runs I had seen more times than I'd like to admit here. I couldn't put my finger on it then, but the show always struck me more than other TV sci-fi, even the more challenging, adult Star Trek, which I'd flip on after Futurama was over.

But I think I understand now why the show mattered to me. While most TV science fiction is an exaggerated metaphor of the creators' ideas--or, at its worst, a sterile attempt at imagining the future--Futurama understood that the future would always subvert our expectations. So the show did the only reasonable thing: revel in all the ways the future could be absurd, wild, poignant, hilarious, bizarre, terrible, wonderful, and so, so close to reality without being a thinly veiled version of the present.

Compare that to the other great works of sci-fi television, and even the most daring of them seem conservative. There are the time-traversing tales of shows like Doctor Who, where the future isn't something we barely make out in the distance, but a malleable tool for the hero. Then there are those works where the future is just a re-imagining of the present. You can find it in The Twilight Zone, where surreal morality plays became metaphors for Cold War-era paranoia. If you're digging for a more recent example, consider Battlestar: Galactica, which is a re-imagining of the Iraq War with Star Wars tropes.

It's not that I don't like these shows--in fact I think The Twilight Zone is one of the greatest shows ever to make it to the small screen--but I also think it's disingenuous to think of them as shows about the future when they're blatantly about the present--and only the present.

Futurama, meanwhile, understood that making a show about the future meant really embracing the uncertainty of the future (without ignoring the past and present). In one episode, the ex of Fry, the show's lead, is cryogenically frozen and wakes up in the future, too. She says she's having trouble "adjusting to all the strange stuff here in the future," when another character replies, "I'm from Mars."

The show's strange sensibility certainly wasn't for everyone. But it was always strange for the right reasons. Consider this snippet of conversation between Fry and his friend and occasional love interest, Leela:

Weird! Funny! And like the best satire, it gets at a truth: our predictions of the future are, more often than not, terrible. You can check out the Popular Science archives for proof. We're not embarrassed! Futurama understood that it's unreasonable to even try to make predictions--that messy uncertainty is the future's only real certainty, so why not own it?

Which ties in perfectly with the herky-jerky trajectory of the show. It aired for a while, got canceled, came back, and now it's gone again--except it may come back on another network, possibly, Matt Groening has said. Or maybe it won't! Who knows.

I haven't seen the series finale yet. But I will, sometime in the future. Maybe.

In 2007, Matt Denton stopped on the side of the road near his home in Hampshire, England, to watch an excavator dig. The machines had fascinated him since childhood, but after years of designing control systems for animatronic Hollywood creatures, Denton saw the shovel-tipped boom through a more imaginative lens. "It was effectively the shape of a leg," he says. "So I started to wonder: Would it be possible to buy six of them and attach them to a chassis?" Four years later, Denton can lumber around in a two-ton, nine-foot-tall robo-walker he calls the Mantis.

Denton, who helped engineer the hippogriff (an eagle-headed flying horse) in the Harry Potter films, had also built walking hexapods for the movies and for fun, but they were no bigger than a radio-controlled toy car. He wanted the Mantis to be the size of an SUV. Unable to afford the project alone, he sketched out a design, used toy excavator arms to construct a scale model, and courted financial backers with the mock-up. No one bit. A few months later, a friend's wealthy father heard about Denton's quixotic mission and, inspired by his vision, agreed to bankroll it.

Denton asked his friend Josh Lee, a mechanical engineer, to help him build the Mantis. The pair spent the first few weeks studying hydraulic actuators-the artificial muscles that would move the robot's legs. Meanwhile, Denton adapted software to drive the giant hexapod from code he wrote for his toy-size models. He and Lee then drew up plans for the robot's central chassis and six legs, built and tested one appendage, and contracted a fabrication company to make the rest. When the aluminum-and-steel legs arrived at Denton's workshop, however, he realized that some of the holes needed to bolt the pieces together were missing and others were poorly machined. Impatient, Denton spent a week correcting the flaws himself. "We had to make it work," he says.

Although Denton had a working prototype by 2011, the Mantis weighed too much and moved too slowly. To cut its mass by 400 pounds, he removed one of the four joints in each leg. The joints had enabled better mobility on different terrain, but the Mantis moved well enough without them. Denton also streamlined the chassis, which houses the hydraulic system, diesel engine, electronics, and the pilot's chair.

When the moment arrived to drive it, Denton wouldn't climb inside. "I was too scared," he says. To allay his fears, he performed 100 hours of Wi-Fi-enabled testing over six months. His first time out was terrifying, but the Mantis operated as expected, and he slowly grew more comfortable in the cockpit. Now Denton shows off his creation at festivals. Some criticize its slow pace-the Mantis hasn't cracked two miles per hour-and Denton is uncertain if it has a future in movies, construction, or elsewhere. But adolescent spectators understand it instantly. "Kids love it," he says. "They want to get in and stick some lasers on it."

HOW IT WORKS

A. Controls
A pilot selects one of several gait patterns from a touchscreen control panel. One mode designed for rough terrain instructs the robot to pick each leg up before swinging it forward. Manipulating the joystick can direct the machine to creep forward, backward, or crab-walk to the side. Twisting the joystick forces the Mantis to turn in place.

B. Sensing
Once a foot touches the ground, force sensors alert an onboard computer. Only then can the next leg in a walking sequence swing forward. A ball joint in the ankle allows the foot to pivot and plant itself on uneven ground; if the foot meets a ledge, however, another sensor tells the computer to find a more secure spot. Denton hopes to place ultrasonic sensors in each leg so the robot can scan the ground before stepping down.

C. Safety
Should an emergency arise, Denton says, "we have two big red buttons." One sits right next to the pilot in the cockpit, the other at the back of the machine (where one of Denton's friends walks in step with the Mantis, making sure no animal or bystander falls beneath its feet). Both buttons kill the power and freeze the robot where it stands.

TWO MORE RIDEABLE ROBOTS

Artist Scott Parenteau designed his geodesic Walking Pod for shelter and transportation at Burning Man, an annual weeklong festival in Nevada's Black Rock Desert. The 1,800-pound dome crawls on two sets of six legs powered by batteries. Parenteau hopes his "RV art" inspires new mobile-home designs-and perhaps even nomadic colonies on Mars.

In high school, Hajime Sakamoto was so obsessed with humanoid robots in the anime TV series Gundam, he assembled toy models of the machines. Today, the 46-year-old roboticist wants to build a full-size, 59-foot-tall automaton. For now he has made a pair of legs that stand 11.5 feet [above]. Sakamoto hopes to add a torso later this year, climb into the 13-foot-tall walker, and ride around.

WARNING: We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately your safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.

Lillian Steenblik Hwang and Sarah Jacoby also contributed to this report

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

The famous Myers-Briggs personality test doesn't actually reveal much about a person, according to psychologists, but that doesn't mean it isn't a lot of fun. People love to categorize themselves as cryptic-sounding, dichotomous types like INFJ--Introversion Intuition Feeling Judging--or ESTP--Extraversion Sensing Thinking Perceiving. (And then, inexplicably, put their "type" on their online dating profiles, at least in my experience.) So what if we applied those types to things other than people?

"Famous ESFPs [Extraversion, Sensing, Feeling, Perceiving] supposedly include Bill Clinton, Marilyn Monroe, that dead crocodile hunter, and the Waterloo & City Line," Ed Jefferson writes on his blog.

Yep, that's right-the Waterloo & City line, the shortest rail line on the London Underground, is an extrovert. At least according to its Twitter persona.

Jefferson took tweets from the various lines on the London Underground and ran them through a text analyzer that assigns the author of a small chunk of prose a Myers-Briggs type. All the lines other than the Waterloo & City line (10 in total) were either an ESTJ (a Doer) or an ESTP (a Guardian).

He then took it a step further, analyzing how often the lines tweet per day, and how long those tweets are, and how often they mention other lines or their own line:

Great, so now I feel sorry for a non-sentient subway line I've never even ridden on.

Read more about Jefferson's tube adventures here.

NASA is launching a lunar mission tonight that will sample the moon's atmosphere. Before it departs Earth, however, the spacecraft had to undergo some tests and checks.

In the image above, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer-known as LADEE-gets spin-tested for balance. If its engineers find any imbalances while spinning LADEE at about a revolution a second, they add small weights for counterbalance. LADEE gets spin-tested both with and without its fuel, oxidizer and pressurant.

LADEE is scheduled to launch from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 11:27 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time. Once it reaches the moon, it will take scientific measurements for 100 days, Space.com reports.

In the few minutes after it launches, LADEE should be visible from certain parts of the U.S. East Coast:

(You can find more visibility maps and graphs from the satellite company Orbital.)

If you don't live in a place where LADEE will be visible, or if it's cloudy tonight, you can watch the launch on NASA TV. Live coverage starts at 9:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

In the coming weeks, you might also be able see some posts from LADEE on Instagram, as NASA launched an account today. (This is practically as important/difficult as launching a lunar satellite, right?)

Newly disclosed documents from leaker-on-the-run Edward Snowden reveal that the National Security Agency has been fighting a secret war on encryption...and winning.

We wrote about secure email options a while ago, most of which rely on methods like PGP and GnuPG to keep your communications private. Some of those services, namely the ones based in countries with a less intrusive government, like Switzerland, are still fine to use, but our daily internet lives are also encrypted in ways we don't even realize. If you've seen that little padlock icon in your web browser's address bar, you're using an encryption service. (This comes up for online shopping and banking, among lots of other uses.) Or if you use a popular email service like Gmail, Hotmail, or Outlook--those are automatically encrypted too.

Except, these new documents show that the NSA has, since the mid-'90s, been studiously and aggressively hacking, coercing, and forcing their way into every encryption standard they can find. Sometimes they'll serve as the "editor" of an encryption standard and write themselves a back door, so they can access the communications that use that standard whenever they want. Sometimes they bully, through legal or questionably legal means, American technology companies to either build them a back door or simply hand over the decryption keys.

In the mid-'90s, under President Bill Clinton, the NSA proposed a system called the "Clipper Chip" that would provide a back door to the then-new PGP encryption. The proposal was discussed publicly and rejected roundly, but the NSA appears to have simply embarked on the (wildly expensive, as well) project without telling anyone.

The project, according to the New York Times, is called "Bullrun," and is so secret that this insane, spy-movie quote was necessary: "Unlike some classified information that can be parceled out on a strict 'need to know' basis, one document makes clear that with Bullrun, "there will be NO ‘need to know.'""

For more on this alarming development, head on over to the New York Times.

People dressed in business suits, many of them about my age, began to fill the rows of seats inside a private room at the Proud Bird restaurant near LAX. I was brought, along with a couple of other Loyola Marymount students, by a pretty girl who had approached me earlier that week after our theater class with a vague but intriguing invitation to come with her to check out some sort of money-making opportunity. I was a freshman facing years of tuition and other student costs, so "money-making opportunity" had a nice ring to it.

After everyone had taken their seats, a man wearing an expensive-looking suit came up to the stage to introduce himself and the company we were there to learn about. He took us through a PowerPoint presentation about the company's credentials with the Better Business Bureau and its successful track record in the business of selling legal insurance. He explained the value of these legal insurance plans, which give members 24/7 access to a variety of legal services for a monthly retainer that is a fraction of typical attorney fees.

My initial excitement turned into disillusionment as I began to see the business for what it was.However, the focus of the night's presentation was to share with us the great opportunity the company provides those who want to make easy money while setting their own schedule. He told us about how the residual income he was earning through the company had enabled him, a young man only a few years out of college, to afford an enviable lifestyle, which included living in a waterfront condominium in Marina Del Rey and having all the vacation time he wanted. He explained that this income came every month in the form of overriding commissions he received on the sales made by those whom he recruited into the business-and in turn by those people that his recruits had brought to the business. Several other speakers shared their own triumphant stories of selling and recruiting for the company.

Then came the crux of the night's event-the sales pitch. Sign-up forms were distributed, and the main speaker informed us that for only a limited time, those of us present could join in on this exciting opportunity for the low price of $125 and the purchase of a monthly membership. He reminded us that we were all there because we'd been invited by somebody, somebody who'd been getting paid for recruiting us as new members. How hard could it be? That very night, coaxed by the pretty girl's assurances, I signed up to become an associate, thus beginning my brief but memorable experience with this company.

My story is in many ways typical of the methods many multi-level marketing companies use to recruit thousands of college students into their ranks every year. Multi-level marketing (MLM), also known as network marketing, generates income at least in part through the continuous recruitment of new associates into the business of selling a product or service. Often, these newly recruited associates or distributors have to pay considerable start-up costs or purchase large quantities of the products upfront, in addition to covering any business expenses they incur once they join. These businesses generally feature compensation plans that allow participants to earn income through commissions on their own sales as well as overriding commissions on sales made by their "downline"-anyone whom they recruit and anyone those recruits have subsequently recruited. This multi-tiered system of sales and recruitment grows geometrically in theory from one level down to the next, and if perpetuated indefinitely, in a manner resembling a pyramid with an ever-expanding base.

Since the mid-20th century, a multitude of companies employing variations of this business model have established themselves, with some of the better known being Amway, Avon Products, Herbalife, Mary Kay, Tupperware, and Vector Marketing. Associates working for these companies are independent contractors rather than salaried employees, and are generally expected to utilize relationship referrals and word-of-mouth marketing to sell their products directly to consumers.

My new company's way of doing business became even more apparent during my team's first meeting. At a small Internet café near LAX, I met with the pretty girl, our "team leader," and four other new associates to go over our strategy and goals for the week. To start bringing in new people ourselves, the team leader had us each write down a list of personal contacts, whom we would then call. We were to establish contact with as many of our friends and acquaintances as possible using a script very similar to the one pretty girl had interested me with, which began something like Hey [name], I've only got a minute, but I'm working on this really exciting project that I thought you might be interested in …

In the span of a few days, my initial excitement turned into hesitation and eventually disillusionment as I began to see the business for what it was. Once I joined, hardly any mention was made of actually selling the products or services we supposedly offered; it was all about recruitment, recruitment, recruitment. Under pressure from my team leader to try to get my friends involved in this business, I realized that using misleading tactics to get people I knew to make an investment would be necessary if I was going to have any sort of return on mine.

MLMs use business models that seem unsustainable under the laws of mathematics.While the concept of multi-level marketing is nothing new, the pyramid-like structure of this business model is the cause of some controversy. Pyramid schemes are ventures that generate revenue through an endless chain of recruiting new buyers (in this case "distributors"). "My" company seemed to have little interest in the sale of a legitimate product or service to an end consumer. While the sale of a marketable product or service to an end consumer is commonly viewed as the distinguishing aspect between legitimate MLMs and pyramid schemes, there are many who contend that they are one and the same.

Given the many forms of pyramid-structured businesses out there, and the variations amongst them, it is difficult to give an absolute verdict on what is and what is not a pyramid scheme. The Federal Trade Commission has said that a pyramid scheme involves forcing participants to buy more product than they could ever personally sell, and for those sales to occur only within the network of recruited distributors.

But it's hard to draw clear lines, and not just for impressionable students. The most notorious MLM these days, the nutritional supplement company Herbalife, is the subject of an epic showdown between legendary Wall Street investors, who disagree vehemently over whether that publicly traded company is a booming business or a total pyramid-shaped sham.

By its own design, a system driven by the recruitment of new people into an ever-expanding marketing network, if perpetuated successfully, will lead to market saturation-with too many sellers peddling to too few buyers. If a pyramid scheme started by six people who each recruit another six people continues to grow in that fashion, the number of people involved at level 11 will exceed the population of the U.S. Level 13 would contain more than twice as many people as populate the Earth. Well-run franchise businesses, in contrast, limit "membership" to the club of sellers: imagine how much less valuable your McDonald's franchise would be if the company allowed outlets on every block.

Since MLMs use business models that seem unsustainable under the laws of mathematics and the principles of supply and demand, it's no wonder the vast majority of participants-most statistics put this percentage well into the 90s-in recruitment-driven businesses end up walking away with a net financial loss.

The vibe was more cultish than corporate.I was completely unaware of all this when, on my first weekend as an associate, I was pressured into attending a full-day, unpaid sales conference in Orange County. Company associates from all over Southern California converged on the convention center in Anaheim to hear from some of the top names in the company. The vibe was more cultish than corporate. As if on cue, those in the congregation would rise, clap, and sit back down before and after every speech, and would listen intently to every word being said as if it contained the key to their success.

Despite my misgivings, I still wanted to believe what I was hearing. I wanted to believe, as it seemed everyone else in the audience did, that the opportunity to achieve success with the company was real-and legitimate. But, within a week of joining and after much deliberation, I finally worked up the nerve to call my team leader to say I was quitting. I promptly mailed in the official forms in order to terminate my membership with the company and have my start-up payment returned before the refund period was over. Though I managed to get back most of my initial $125 dollar investment, many who join MLM companies aren't so lucky.

This spring, I was invited by a friend to an informal sit-down at his buddy's apartment. "I was wondering if you wanted to check out something one of my friends is involved in so I could have your input," his oddly vague text message to me read, "its hard to explain over text sorry." Sure enough, shortly after my friend and I arrived, I found myself among an audience of 15 or so, listening to a presentation on becoming "brand partners" to market a company's energy drinks. After introducing the product, sharing their stories, and explaining the business model to us, the presenters predictably concluded the event by extending us the opportunity to become "brand partners"-with the purchase of $500 or $1,000 worth of product.

These marketers did such a good job in trying to convince us of the legitimacy of their business that by the end of their spiel I could not say with absolute certainly whether this was a scam or not. But this time I was definitely not about to find out.

Darrin Moret is an L.A. native and recent graduate of Loyola Marymount University. This article was republished with permission from Zócalo Public Square.

Here's your latest global warming update: It's still happening. Intense heat is now four times more likely to strike in the U.S. than it was in pre-industrial times, according to a new study from Stanford University researchers.

July 2012 was the hottest month on record in the lower 48 states, and the summer brought the "most severe and extensive drought in at least 25 years," according to the USDA. And it seems summers like last year's are going to become more commonplace, with 2012-esque temps becoming more likely, specifically in the north-central and northeastern United States.

This study follows on the heels of a recently leaked draft of an Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change report, which noted that scientists believe we are experiencing more heat waves because of climate change--which yes, we're still sure humans are causing.

"It's clear that our greenhouse gas emissions have increased the likelihood of some kinds of extremes, and it's clear that we're not optimally adapted to that new climate."As always, we can't point to climate change as the cause of one specificweather event. But it's pretty clear it raises the likelihood of extreme weather, including extreme heat.

"It's clear that our greenhouse gas emissions have increased the likelihood of some kinds of extremes, and it's clear that we're not optimally adapted to that new climate," co-author Noah Diffenbaugh, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science, said in a statement. "Knowing how much our emissions have changed the likelihood of this kind of severe heat event can help us to minimize the impacts of the next heat wave, and to determine the value of avoiding further changes in climate."

The report was part of a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society called "Explaining Extreme Events of 2012 From a Climate Perspective."

[Stanford News]

A female prairie chicken is putting all other summer road trips to shame. Her circular jaunts around Iowa and Missouri added up to 1,180 miles between April and August--more than 200 miles a month.

Bird No. 112, as she's known among the Iowa State University biologists monitoring her via a GPS tracker, was reintroduced to the area from Nebraska by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. The species has mostly disappeared from the region after being driven out by overhunting and the destruction of their habitat by farming.

Here's what her journey looked like:

She travelled through 34 counties and up to 24 miles in a single day, according to the Kansas City Star. "It seems like she was searching for something," researcher Jen Vogel told the Star. Whatever it was, she has since settled down, sticking to one county for most of August.

Sadly, we'll never know how far the other chickens in the program could go. One managed to ditch its transmitter, and the eight others got munched on by predators. Because who doesn't like the taste of chicken?

Now watch this video of the eerie-sounding prairie chicken mating ritual, called "booming."

[Des Moines Register]

Going to space is getting easier all the time. For anyone willing to trade giant piles of ephemeral cash for a few short minutes outside the atmosphere, here is a handy map of all American spaceports, released in February by the Federal Aviation Administration.

While there are more spaceports proposed, the ones that exist at present are in three rough clusters, which I've helpfully named: Pacific Fringe, South by Southwest, and Central and South Atlantic.

Here's what you need to know about these portals to space.

Pacific Fringe

In the Pacific Ocean are two launch sites: the first is Sea Launch Platform, which was originally a shared Norwegian, Russian, Ukrainian, and American venture. Following a 2009 bankruptcy, the Russian company Energia took over as majority owner. The U.S. still uses this site to launch commercial satellites into space.

Alaska also boasts two spaceports. The Kodiak Launch Complex specializes in putting satellites into orbit around the poles, and the Poker Flat Research Range, owned by University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute, launches rockets full of scientific instruments to take measurements high in the atmosphere.

In addition to two Air Force bases (Vandenberg and Edwards) that double as experimental test sites, California has a pair of spaceports named, inventively, California Spaceport and Mojave Air and Space Port. These are exciting! Mojave saw the first successful privately funded commercial spaceflight, with Space Ship One in 2004. California was also home to Space Authority, which "technically, [had] no authority over anything." It then dissolved, having actually no authority over anything.

On Kwajalein Atoll & Wake Island, the Reagan Test Site tries out missiles and missile defenses. It also monitors satellites, but it seems like a stretch to call it a spaceport.

South by Southwest

New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma all have spaceports, with New Mexico weirdly dominant in this region for the first time ever. The Land of Enchantment boasts Spaceport America, which sometimes sends tourists into space. It also had a really bizarre christening with a rappelling Richard Branson:

The White Sands Missile range is where all sorts of big, fast, explode-y things get tested, sometimes near space. Also, if you go to White Sands you can see the first-ever nuclear weapon test site. It is... not terribly exciting.

In Oklahoma, there is the Oklahoma Spaceport. Its website looks rather Geocities and may just might be on the way out. That's okay-a ghost spaceport is kind of awesome, too.

Texas has the launch site for Blue Origin, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos's private space venture. Right now it's a test site, but maybe in the future it will be a proper place for tourist trips to the edge of space and back.

Central and South Atlantic

Virginia has two spaceports, the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport (MARS, guys, get it?), and NASA's Wallops Flight Facility. MARS sends rockets into space and has a hilarious "ZeroGravity, ZeroTax" tax incentive going for it. Wallops launches rockets for NASA (including tonight's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, which will orbit the moon and collect information about, yup, the moon's atmosphere).

Florida is home of the Space Coast, with Cape Canaveral Spaceport, NASA's Kennedy Space Center, and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station all sharing the "3, 2, 1" area code since 1999. This area is best known hosting the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s, and the Space Shuttle program in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

In 2010, the FAA approved Jacksonville's Cecil Field Spaceport.

Right now, we are in a transitory stage of space flight. Scientific research and military testing still dominate spaceports, with commercial satellite launches also a major part of the modern space industry. Space tourism, from companies like Virgin Galactic and maybe Blue Origin, promise a new future, albeit at a price currently beyond the means of basically everyone.

New spaceports and programs like Space X show that there's room for innovation. Giant bureaucratic tomes like the FAA's "2011 U.S. Commercial Space Transportation Developments and Concepts: Vehicles, Technologies, and Spaceports," indicate we are so close to this future it's already possible for government to make it boring, which, paradoxically, is pretty exciting.

[Singularity Hub]

Well, this is what you bought that new telescope camera for, right?

NASA is releasing, for free, a bit of software that allows those with telescopes to detect planets outside our solar system. You'll need a digital imaging instrument for your telescope called a charge-coupled device, plus software to go with it. NASA lists what operating systems you'll need.

Even those living in big cities should be able to see a few exoplanets. "We've successfully used the program at the University of Maryland Observatory in College Park, which is located within the beltway of Washington, D.C., and we have pretty miserable light pollution compared to some of the big professional observatories," the program's lead developer, Brett Morris, said in a statement. Those living in less light polluted areas will be able to scan even more stars for exoplanets.
The new software is called the Open Source differential photometry Code for Accelerating Amateur Research, or OSCAAR for short. OSCAAR measures changes in the brightness of stars. When exoplanets pass between their stars and Earth, they reduce the amount of light that reaches Earth. OSCAAR accounts for the distortion of light that occurs in the Earth's atmosphere and for changes in light that may occur because there are clouds overhead.

Those who use OSCAAR will likely find giant gas planets orbiting close to their stars. Hot. (Literally.) That's because such planets are large enough to cause enough change in their stars' light for amateur equipment to detect. Also, because they're close to their stars, their orbits are small, swift and measurable over the course of one night.

Are you handy with coding? OSCAAR is prepared to detect other astronomical phenomena that have to do with changing light levels, such as variable stars or asteroids that present differently-sized sides to Earth, which makes them give off differing amounts of light. NASA is releasing OSCAAR's code on Github so users are able to change the code to detect other cool causes of starlight variation.

[NASA]

A new study indicates that human babies are born with an innate preference for certain sounds. That makes sense in the most common case--the voices of parents. It's in the baby's best interest to be engaged with those sounds! But what about non-human primates?

The study, carried out by researchers at Northwestern University, tested 72 infants between the ages of three and six months. It's difficult to tell whether babies are engaged mentally; they don't have much in the way of communication or cognitive faculties at that age. The standard measurement for engagement is, instead, eye focus: where they look and for how long indicates more cognition.

In the experiment, the babies were shown a series of similar shapes--all dinosaurs--and then presented with a choice: another dinosaur, or a fish. While this is going on, audio is played in the background. That audio was either the high-pitched baby-talk from a parent, a similarly high-pitched chatter from a blue-eyed black lemur, human voices played backwards, or an array of mechanical noises. If the baby, when presented with the choice of a dinosaur or fish, chose to focus on the dinosaur, that was taken to indicate a higher level of cognitive engagement. That's because to focus on the dinosaur means the baby is completing a pattern and understanding the categorization of visual stimuli--indicating that it's thinking, as much as a baby can think.

Note: the above lemur is an indri, not a blue-eyed black lemur. But the calls are not dissimilar.

The two artificial noises (the backwards voice and the mechanical noises) both resulted in minimal engagement. But, among the three-month-olds, the voices of human parents and of the lemur resulted in a similar high level of engagement. "They were doing some much fancier cognitive dancing during the lemur and human vocalization than in the case of backward speech or tones," the study's lead researcher told NBC News.

The six-month-olds, on the other hand, showed a preference for the human voices but hardly any difference between the lemur and the artificial noises. This is assumed to be a combination of higher levels of cognitive development and the simple fact that the six-month-old has spent much more time around human voices, getting comfortable and familiar with them. The researchers think the study shows that humans are born with an instinctive inclination to listen to primates--not just humans, but other primates as well.

[via NBC News]

Remember this map of all the waterways in the U.S. from earlier this summer? Now there's something even more fun: An interactive app that lets you not only see the waterways, but trace them to their source (or to their end, if it suits you better).

Streamer, a visualization from the National Atlas, shows almost all the streams in the U.S., or at least the ones large enough to see at a one to 1 million scale, meaning each inch of map corresponds to about 15.8 miles of land.

It gives you a look at how far water travels from some sources, and how short a distance another nearby waterway might stretch. There's something especially satisfying about clicking a stream that dumps into a million different veins of water, or shoots its way across multiple states to empty into the ocean. Case in point: Hitting the coronary artery of American waterways, the Mississippi River, illuminates connections over the entirety of the middle of the country:

Or here's a zoom-in of a more localized upstream search from my hometown in dry Southern California:

There's an option to toggle between a satellite map and white terrain map as your base, over which the blue lines of creeks and rivers are drawn. The terrain map is brighter so a bit easier to read, but the satellite option gives you a better sense of the divides between desert, mountains and forests.

It's a little bit wonky (sometimes you have to hit "clear map" before clicking from one stream to another, for example, and it's super intuitive to navigate. Green lines delineate between regions--the Upper Mississippi, the Texas Gulf, etc.--which isn't always easy to tell from a zoomed-in perspective. You have to zoom into select waterways, though, and I spent a lot of time mindlessly clicking until it grabbed ahold of something to trace.

Still. Waterways! They connect us all. Play with it here.

Late last year, gamers started chipping away at a digital cube. The creator of this cube, designer Peter Molyneux, promised a "life-changing" gift to the person who chipped away the last piece. Come May, a normal-seeming dude named Bryan did indeed remove the last piece, and inside was--well, Peter Molyneux, in a way.

The gift was a video, explaining that the winner would be the god of a new online game, called "Godus." He would influence events in the game. He would change the digital world.

That sounds like a potentially engaging concept for a game, although some are approaching with caution, since Molyneux has a lengthy history of under-delivering: games like Black & White and Fable were hyped as medium-altering works, and ended up just being so-so. (There's even a parody Twitter account that's just barely a parody.) Still, at least he's trying something different in an industry that can be creatively stagnant at times.

Anyway! I mention that so you can be primed for this terrific Q-and-A with the always great gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Molyneux explains the upcoming game, and its already unintended real-life consequences, like how players are sending gifts to their future game-god to get on his good side before the game is even released.

It is bizarre. Can't wait to see the game when it's released.

[Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

£946: the money the developers of a curved glass building in London paid to Martin Lindsay after reflected light from the skyscraper melted his Jaguar XJ

18 to 27 degrees Fahrenheit: the average increase in surface temperature when moving from a rural area to a city

244 meters: the height of the unoccupied space in the world's tallest building, the 828-meter Burj Khalifa (turns out many of our tallest skyscrapers are hiding lots of vanity height)

3 to 8 hours: the time it takes to 3-D print your own invisibility cloak

118: the number of Large Hadron Colliders you'd need in order to test what would happen if every element on the periodic table came into contact simultaneously

$65: the price of a simple kit to build your own cockroach-like robot that runs 5 feet a second and can survive 90-foot falls

30: the number of pictures per second this new laser technique creates to show surgeons exactly where tumors end and brains begin

7 years: the time it took 20 researchers to finally figure out the chemical composition of human urine

$79: the pre-order price of a wristband that uses your distinct heartbeat to unlock your devices

1.63 inches: the size of the LCD screen on Samsung's new Galaxy Gear smartwatch

6.6 pounds: the max weight these new package-delivery drones in China can carry

$180: the price of the Adidas Springblade running shoes, which contain plastic springs to help runners go faster

69 percent: the portion of American high-school graduates that failed to meet college-readiness benchmarks in science in 2012 (here's how to fix U.S. science education)

It's not the mosquito's fault. Malaria is actually caused by the Plasmodium family of parasites, which is carried unwittingly by mosquitoes. And these parasites are tricky foes. Come up with a treatment or vaccine and the few that survive will still breed. But Johns Hopkins biologist Rhoel Dinglasan thinks he may have a way around that: vaccinating mosquitoes instead.

Dinglasan's team has found that Plasmodium-at a crucial stage in its life cycle-needs to bind to a protein in the mosquito's gut called AnAPN1. If you block this protein, you block transmission to humans. But how do you treat a mosquito? A teensy needle and steady hands? No. Here's the clever part: You give people a vaccine against AnAPN1, turning them into living mosquito-treatment factories for years; their immune systems produce antibodies against AnAPN1. When mosquitoes bite vaccinated people, they'll suck up the antibodies, which block AnAPN1 so that the mosquitoes can no longer pass along the disease. In lab tests, Dinglasan has shown that the antibodies can indeed make mosquitoes benign-although no less annoying.

A. VACCINATE

Give someone the vaccine against the mosquito-gut protein AnAPN1.

B. MANUFACTURE

The person's immune system produces antibodies against AnAPN1 in his blood.

C. BITE

A mosquito ingests the antibodies, which bind to AnAPN1 and block the malaria-causing parasite Plasmodium.

D. PREVENT

Plasmodium can't live in the mosquito gut and, therefore, can't be transmitted to people.

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

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are trying to answer an odd puzzle: why can't firefighters hear the super-loud emergency alarms they carry with them in emergency situations?

Firefighters, by the nature of their job, find themselves in life-threatening situations regularly. They carry a device called a Personal Alert Safety System, or PASS, just in case. The PASS is a motion-triggered alarm, attached to the harness that keeps their oxygen tank on. If the firefighter, and thus the PASS, doesn't move for 5 seconds straight, the alarm begins beeping loudly. If it's not addressed, it soon goes into alarm mode, screeching at about 95 decibels to alert other firefighters in the area. That's very loud, but firefighters report that it doesn't really work well, for the odd reason that they can't hear it in a burning building.

There are a few reasons for that: there's a lot of chaos in a burning building, there can be noises from elsewhere, it's dark and uncomfortable and frantic, and firefighters wear a lot of headgear. All of that is easy to understand as a reason why the alarms aren't audible. But there's another reason, too.

Sound travels faster in hot air than cold air. And burning buildings have pockets of very hot air and pockets of typical room-temperature air, and it's not predictable where those pockets will be. That means the sound is actually bending and distorting in there, so it can seem as if sound is coming from different places, making an alert chirp maybe not the best way to locate someone.

The researchers are working on a new version of PASS--perhaps merely making it louder would help, or maybe they need to change the pitch or tone of the sound, or maybe it's time to abandon sound altogether! What if GPS is a better way to locate people? So the team is trying first to figure out what the best option is for an alarm system, which will then go into the new device.

Read more over at KUT News.