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AGE OF DISCOVERY [SPONSORED ARTICLE]

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Glenfiddich: Age of Discovery

Glenfiddich®

First-fill American oak bourbon barrels gives this single malt its distinctive character

In 1886, with the help of his seven sons and two daughters, William Grant set out to fulfill a lifelong ambition. Together they began building his distillery by hand, and on Christmas Day of 1887, the first drop flowed from the copper stills. Today, Glenfiddich remains independently owned by the fifth generation of the same family. Each generation is driven by both their forefather's vision to craft the finest malt in Speyside and the legacy that they will bestow on future generations.

Continuing in their pioneering spirit, Glenfiddich presents Age of Discovery. This malt, aged exclusively in first-fill bourbon casks for a minimum of 19 years, showcases the exceptional skills of Glenfiddich's expert team of coopers who tend to the barrels and of Glenfiddich's sixth Malt Master, Brian Kinsman.

To learn more about the fascinating world of single malts, visit
GLENFIDDICH.COM

SKILLFULLY CRAFTED. ENJOY RESPONSIBLY.
Glenfiddich® Single Malt Scotch Whisky. 40% alc/vol.
©2013 Imported by William Grant & Sons, New York, NY.

New American oak barrels are used by distilleries in the U.S. to age bourbon and rye. Once these distilleries have aged their whiskey, the casks are shipped to Scotland. The first time we fill the barrels, they are known as first fill barrels. American oak imparts the whisky with compounds such as esters, lactones and phenols. One such compound, known colloquially as whisky lactone, produces a strong coconut flavor in the finished dram. Vanillin, another compound extracted from the oak, unsurprisingly contributes an aroma of vanilla. But because freshly charred oak has high levels of these aromatic compounds, casks made from it can overpower the more delicate flavors of a Speyside malt. Instead, Glenfiddich uses barrels that have already contributed much of the wood's flavoring compounds to American bourbon. The result is a elegantly balanced dram with notes of warm, crunchy toffee, marmalade on toast and a whiff of a fine old orange liqueur, balanced by dry almost smoky notes of oak tannin.


    

In Australian Mines, 50-Foot Robot Trucks Take Dangerous Work From Humans

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How long until there's a Pixar movie?

This Autonomous Hauling System, in use by the British-Australian metals and mining company Rio Tinto Iron Ore, is a series of robotic trucks that load, haul, and dump ore and waste rock at open pit mines. Imagine Google's self-driving cars, except gigantic: each 210-metric-ton truck is 27 feet wide and 51 feet long, and can carry 320 metric tons.

As the above video from Australian animation company Toucan Creative explains, these robot dump trucks have hauled ore in Western Australia since December 2008. Last April, the dump trucks collectively hit a major milestone: 100 million metric tons moved, including work at three different mines.

Although 15 of the dump trucks work in Australia's iron-rich Pilbara region, they are controlled from a Rio Tinto headquarters in Perth, Australia-930 miles away. Key to the trucks' success is their ability to operate 24 hours a day. (Turns out humans, who need to sleep and use the bathroom and stuff, are really inefficient.)

The dump trucks, which communicate wirelessly, navigate using a very precise GPS and can autonomously detect obstacles. They can avoid other vehicles or follow behind them, and are linked to a computer in charge of supervising their actions. Robots overseeing robots!

This is the type of job that is ideal for robots to take over from humans: the work is tedious, exhausting, and dangerous.

The next step? Rio Tinto is currently testing autonomous drills.


    






How Squid Are Inspiring Better Camouflage For Soldiers

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Reef Squid

Wikimedia Commons

A squid-like film can be switched on and off chemically to change how infrared light is reflected.

If there's one thing squid are good at, it's hiding. The mysterious giant squid is one of the most elusive creatures on Earth, and even the common calamari squid can alter its appearance to blend into its surroundings. Harnessing the squid's ability to change its skin could lead to better camouflage for soldiers, according to new research from the University of California, Irvine.

Squid can change the color and even the texture of their skin to make themselves invisible to predators. By combining reflectin, the protein responsible for the squid's change in appearance, with graphene--a conductive, super-thin material made of carbon atoms--the researchers created a film that could hide the wearer from night vision cameras or other infrared detection.

The coating can change how it reflects infrared light based on a chemical signal, or even by a change in humidity. Camouflage clothing could potentially be programmed to switch to "invisible" mode during the night, when humidity is generally higher. The process is detailed in a study online in Advanced Materials.

The military has been interested in harnessing the squid's stealth powers for a while. The Office of Naval Research has granted millions of dollars to nanotechnologists and marine biologists from various institutions to research squid-inspired camouflage since 2009.

"Our long-term goal is to create fabrics that can dynamically alter their texture and color to adapt to their environments," Alon Gorodetsky, an assistant professor of chemical engineering and materials science at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement. "Basically, we're seeking to make shape-shifting clothing--the stuff of science fiction--a reality."

[The Telegraph]


    






Monkeys Understand Basic Forms Of Wealth

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Risky Business

For a monkey, water is wealth.

U.S. Air Force/Senior Airman Kasey Close

When the money is water, "wealthier" monkeys take more risks. Which makes them a decent model for human behavior.

Much like their human cousins, wealthy primates are more likely to monkey around with their money, says a new study on how monkeys perceive wealth and risk.

Currency means little to a rhesus monkey, of course, so to look at how monkeys approach risk-taking, the study examined how they treated a gambling task that rewarded them with a drink. Wealth was measured in terms of water--if a monkey started out thirsty, he or she was "poorer" than a monkey that was sated (as measured by a blood test).

The monkeys were for the most part, slightly averse to risk, but they were even less willing to take risks when they were thirsty. Monkeys that were "richer" in hydration took bigger gambles--much like human investors. This is contrary to the findings of some previous research on animals. One study found that birds take more risks when they're hungry (food being another indicator of animal wealth).

"We found that monkeys are capable of rational decision-making, just like humans, after training, and we found their risk attitudes are also similar to those of humans," University of Sydney economist Agnieszka Tymula, one of the study's authors, told ABC Science. The researchers suggest that biologically, the mechanisms behind our relationship to wealth and risk be similar to those found in monkeys, and could have evolved long before we started using actual currency. "It seems likely that the biological mechanisms that mediate changes in risk attitudes with wealth evolved around satiety mechanisms rather than around mortgages," they write.

The full study is published online in PNAS.

[via Phys.org]


    






Follow A Queen Bee On Her Maiden Mating Flight

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Get the bees'-eye view.


Queen honeybees mate just once in their lives, within weeks of emerging as an adult from the little honeycomb cells in which they grew. Their mating flights may be the only time they ever leave their hive. But at least they seem to make the most of it: They mate in mid-air, at about 20 feet above the ground, with seven to 15 drones. Boom chicka wow wow.

More Than Honey, a recent documentary about the death of domestic honeybee hives around the world, includes the amazing bees'-eye video of this flight above.

More Than Honey is in theaters now in the U.K. It's already had its run in the U.S., showing in New York in June and in Los Angeles in August. It'll be out on DVD October 21 and available on iTunes October 28.


    






Truman Show Syndrome: Why People Think They're Living In A Reality Show

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The Truman Show

Paramount Pictures

Sufferers of the "Truman Show" syndrome imagine a world where everyone is watching them. And they're just barely wrong.

What do you do when delusions and paranoia look an awful lot like the real world?

That's at least one question raised by a New Yorker article out this week on the "Truman Show" syndrome (pay-walled online, but worth shelling out the money for a print version), where people are convinced they've somehow woken up famous, the stars of a worldwide reality TV show. The name comes from the 1998 film, where that exact thing happens to Jim Carrey.

The author, Andrew Marantz, tells the story of Nick Lotz, who suffers from the delusions:

Suddenly, Lotz solved the puzzle of his life. Since starting college, he had been the star of a reality-TV show. The network had kept the cameras hidden, as in "Candid Camera" and "Punk'd." That night was supposed to be the finale. All he had to do was call his father, who'd find him in the crowd, lead him onstage, and present him with a check for a million dollars. Lotz took out his cell phone, but he was too strung out to place the call. It was too late--he'd missed his chance to make the cameras turn off.

"Truman Show" syndrome is a new phenomenon, but delusions of its type are not. People have always imagined things that aren't real--our culture just changes what those things are. Marantz explains:

Shifts in technology have caused the content of delusions to change over the years: in the nineteen-forties, the Japanese controlled American minds with radio waves; in the fifties, the Soviets accomplished this with satellites; in the seventies, the C.I.A. implanted computer chips into people's brains.

And today's delusion-fuel? Take your pick of the Kardashian sisters, then compound it with a dose of the latest NSA revelations. The resulting delusions aren't real, but they certainly aren't random: they're a half-skip past reality, a snippet of the world taken and blown out of proportion.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the go-to psychiatric illness index, once characterized delusions into two categories: the bizarre and nonbizarre, which were respectively described as impossible and possible but false. "'I am dead,' is bizarre," Marantz writes."'Millions of strangers are obsessed with me' is nonbizarre (and, for Ryan Gosling, nondelusional)." But the DSM-5, the latest version of the book, had to walk back that distinction. As it should have: In a world where the government really does have the capability to broadly and furtively spy on its citizens, it's suddenly delusional to not think Big Brother is watching. In a world where a tweet can almost instantly be read by millions, becoming famous seems more and more plausible.

So the "Truman Show" syndrome cases are as much a story about the exterior world (culture and technology) as the interior one (the mind). People can deride delusions as complete mental fabrications, but the truth is often more nuanced, a subtle cause-and-effect between a culture and a single person.

With that in mind, hopefully it's not too much to add another cultural touchstone that sums things up nicely. Author Joseph Heller wrote in Catch-22, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you."

[New Yorker]


    






Why You Love Your Parents' Music

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The Beatles In America

Wikimedia Commons

We have a "reminiscence bump" for the music our parents liked in their 20s--which they probably played around the house when we were kids.

People can often remember things from early in life better than more recent events, in what's called the "reminiscence bump." Other than explaining BuzzFeed's obsession with the '90s, it could also be the reason we have an emotional connection to music from when our parents were young--songs that were popular before we were even born-- as a recent psychology study claims.

Researchers from Cornell University and the University of California, Santa Cruz gathered 62 college-aged subjects and made them listen to two songs from the top of the Billboard charts for every year between 1955 and 2009. The participants were also asked how they felt when listening to the songs and in what context they remembered hearing the songs before--like whether they remembered listening to them with their parents.

As you might expect, they remembered more personal memories for songs that were popular when they were in their early 20s, rather than for ones that came out shortly after they were born. But they also showed a major increase in memory, recognition and emotional connection for songs that were popular when their parents were in their early 20s in the '80s. They seemed to be particularly attached to the songs their parents liked back in the day--which could be a reminiscence bump for the music that might have played around their house when they were kids, the researchers suggest. (Or maybe they just have the warm fuzzies about Thriller.)

A smaller reminiscence bump also appeared for music of the 1960s, which could possibly be a result of listening to music with grandparents… or maybe everyone just likes the Beatles. The jury's still out. The researchers have launched an online survey to continue studying how people feel about music from the past century. Because maybe science will prove that music from the '60s is just like, objectively better. Or something.

The study appears online in the journal Psychological Science.


    






Here's What Happened At Today's Apple Event

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iPhone 5S

Apple

Here, you will find a clean place to learn about these cellphones. They're just cellphones.

Today in California, Apple introduced two new cellphones, both of which look very nice! On Apple announcement days, the internet can get very loud and aggressive with hype about these products which will alternately change your life or flop and ruin Apple's stock, so here you will find a clean place to learn about these cellphones. They're just cellphones.

The iPhone 5S is the newest "flagship" iPhone, which means it's the fastest and most expensive. It's the one pictured up top there, gleaming dully with the sheen of recently unearthed fool's gold. It is largely the same as last year's iPhone 5; a little faster, a few new features here and there, but mostly the same. That's good! The "old" iPhone is a very good phone.

The iPhone 5S is available in three colors. One of them is gold. This is a divisive color for a company like Apple, which has been operating in shades of grey for about a decade. Buy it if you like it! Whatever!

The 5S has a faster processor and a new camera, with a bigger sensor. A bigger sensor is good; it means better pictures in low-light, for reasons that really aren't very important. It also has a ring around the home button, which is actually a capacitive fingerprint reader. You can use that to unlock your phone. Some have voiced concern about this. The concern is that this will link your fingerprints to your digital life, and that it could enable hostile groups (like, say, the U.S. government) to create a massive database of prints without having to go through proper legal channels. Apple says the fingerprints are encrypted, never uploaded anywhere, and can only be used by Apple itself for things like unlocking your phone or signing into accounts.

The iPhone 5S will cost $200 for a version with 16GB of storage, for songs or videos or photos or apps, or you can pay $300 for 32GB or $400 for 64GB. It'll be out on September 20th.

The iPhone 5C is the replacement for the iPhone 5. Apple usually just introduces one phone and then makes last year's model the budget version. This year they're not doing that; they're introducing a new phone at the same price as last year's phone would have been. I don't know why.

The iPhone 5C has all the same internal stuff as last year's iPhone 5. The case is different; this year it's bright shiny plastic instead of aluminum. It's also thicker and heavier than the iPhone 5. I don't know why Apple decided to do this instead of just making the iPhone 5 cheaper. But it looks nice.

The iPhone 5C costs $100 or $200, depending on how much storage space you get (16GB or 32GB). You probably shouldn't buy it, though; when you get a new phone, you're signing a commitment to pay for two years of expensive monthly service in order to get that phone for that discounted price (phones actually cost about $750). Given that you're paying a few thousand dollars over two years, you should just get the "flagship" phone. It'll feel newer longer, and it'll cost you barely anything extra per month. You can get the iPhone 5C on September 13th, if you want.

iOS 7 is the new operating system used by the iPhone. Like, PCs use Windows, and Macs use Mac OSX, and Android phones use Android. Along those same lines, iPhones use iOS. This new version is very different visually from older versions; it's brighter and more colorful and "flatter," which in a design sense means things don't look like real-world items, nor do they have shadows. Like a notebook-type app won't have yellow paper and blue lines anymore; that's what real-world paper looks like. Instead it'll probably just be white. This is trendy right now--proponents say that it's more honest, that digital things don't need to look like physical things, that they can be cleaner and simpler and more functional.

There are also new features, like you can swipe up from the bottom of the screen, no matter what you're doing on the phone, to change little things like whether your Wi-Fi is on or off, or how loud your phone is. And there are some flashier ways to do things like switch between apps; you double-tap the home button, and then you see these big thumbnails of all your open apps. You can swipe along them and tap them to switch to them and open them. It's not a new idea, but it's better than what there was before.

iOS 7 has been out in beta for awhile already. Beta is when people who might make apps for a phone get an early, unfinished version, so they can test their apps out properly. But a lot of people who are just enthusiasts pretend to be app-makers so they can play with the early version. So you might have seen this around. Or you might not have! Anyway, it'll be out soon, and even if you have an older iPhone, you'll be able to download it. It's really pretty, and will make your phone feel new, which is fun. We're not sure exactly when you'll be able to do that, though.

Those are the iPhones! Have a nice day.


    







Microphone Turns Your Fingertip Into A Speaker

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Sound Wave

wikimedia commons

Touch your finger to someone's ear, and they'll hear your recorded message whispering to them.

Turn your body into another kind of wonderland: A new invention from Disney Research lets you record messages to your friends that they can hear only if you touch your finger to their ears. That is, your finger and your friend's ear together form a speaker that lets your friend hear your message.

The trick depends on a special microphone that Disney Research engineers invented. Named Ishin-Den-Shin for the Japanese term for "tacit understanding," the microphone records sounds and then renders them into a high-voltage, low-current, inaudible signal. The only way to hear the sound is to have someone hold the microphone and touch his or her finger to your ear. The sound is also able to move through more than one body, so if Alice is holding the microphone, Bobby can touch Alice's shoulder and Christy's ear to transmit the message to Christy. You can watch the Ishin-Den-Shin at work in a video from Disney Research.

Bodies are able to transmit sounds as electrical signals, Trevor Cox, an acoustic engineer at the University of Salford in the U.K., explained to the BBC. Cox also told the BBC that using a system like Ishin-Den-Shin probably feels pretty magical.

So what is Disney planning to do with this new magic? It's not immediately clear. Disney Research makes a lot of neat things that aren't immediately practical, such as devices that turn potted plants into touch-controlled devices. (I tried one such "control orchid" at SIGGRAPH 2012 and wavered constantly between "This is cool" and "This is weirdly useless.") But you never know when findings in one field will translate to another, and we hear playing around is the best way to learn.

[Disney Research via BBC]


    






FYI: How Do You Dispose Of Chemical Weapons?

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Syrian Soldier In Gas Mask

H. H. Deffner, via Wikimedia Commons

As the international community debates what should be done with Syria's chemical weapons program, here is a look at what chemical weapons are, and what it takes to safely dispose of them.

In the midst of a particularly brutal civil war, international attention focused on the Syrian government's use of chemical weapons against civilians. With a potential deal on the table for Russia to take and store Syria's chemical weapons, here is a look at what chemical weapons are, and what it takes to safely dispose of them.

What are chemical weapons?

Broadly, a chemical weapon is a toxic chemical delivered by an explosion, such as a bomb, artillery shell, or missile. Chemical weapons injure and kill people through horrific reactions including choking, nerve damage, blood poisoning, and blistering.

The first chemical weapons, used in World War I, were gases released from canisters. Today, chemical weapons are typically liquids carried in bombs or shells. The chemicals, like sulfur mustards (commonly called mustard gas) or sarin, are dispersed in the air like a mist. Technically, this means they aren't gases; they're liquid aerosol, with droplets carried through the air.

When have chemical weapons been used?

World War I saw the first major use of chemical weapons, with 124,000 metric tons of chemical agent unleashed by nations including the UK, Germany, and France.

‘There's no easy solution, there's no pixie dust, magic vaporization portal.'Before World War II, Italy used chemical weapons in Ethiopia, and during World War II, Japan used them in China.

Throughout the Cold War, both the Soviet Union and the United States developed and stockpiled chemical weapons. While the United States never used them in war, a declassified CIA document alleges Soviet use during their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan.

Egypt was the first country to use chemical weapons in war after World War II. Egypt joined a civil war in Yemen in 1963, where the Egyptian militarty dropped sulfur mustard bombs on enemy troops sheltering in mountain caves.

Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein used sulfur mustards and the nerve agent Tabun against Iran in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war, and against the Kurdish people in northern Iraq in 1988.

Chemical weapons appear to have been used against civilians in the ongoing Syrian Civil War, between the dictatorial regime of Bashar al Assad and a loose collection of rebel groups. Syria's chemical weapons stockpile predates the recent conflict. Following a series of military defeats in war against Israel, the Syrian government began amassing sulfur mustards, sarin, and VX (a nerve agent). Syria could have acquired its first chemical weapons as early as 1973, and publicly admitted to a stockpile in 2012; a foreign ministry spokesman said the weapons would only be used against foreign intervention.

Isn't there a treaty banning chemical weapons?

There is! In fact, there have been several. The first treaty banning chemical weapons actually predates their use. At the 1899 Hague Convention, signatories agreed to not use "Asphyxiating or Deleterious Gases." Germany, France, and the UK broke this agreement during WWI.

Currently, chemical weapons are banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, a treaty adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations that took effect in 1997. It bans the creation and use of chemical weapons, mandates their destruction, and encourages international cooperation in chemistry and the chemical trades. Five countries have not signed the treaty: Angola, North Korea, Egypt, South Sudan, and Syria.

The convention is fairly strict about what counts as a chemical weapon. Agent Orange, a herbicide and defoliant used by the United States in the Vietnam War, does not count as a chemical weapon under the rules of the treaty, despite the fact that it has been linked to cancer, heart disease, and birth defects.

How do militaries dispose of chemical weapons?

Al Mauroni, director of the USAF counterproliferation center in Alabama and author of Chemical Demilitarization: Public Policy Aspects, tells Popular Science that disposal depends on how the weapon was designed:

There's storage in ton containers, where a bulk agent is stored in a metal container with a spigot on it, and then there's munition-filled chemical weapons. These were not meant to be disposed; it was kind of a design oversight, if you will. [With America's chemical weapon carrying M55 rockets] no one thought about breaking them open, draining the chemical agents, and safely disposing them. Everyone thought you were going to shoot them. That's how you get rid of them.

There are two major ways to dispose of chemical weapons: incineration and neutralization. Incineration uses a tremendous amount of heat to turn the toxic chemical into mostly ash, water vapor, and carbon dioxide. Neutralization breaks the chemical agent down using water and a caustic compound, like sodium hyrdoxide. Both ways generate a waste product: incineration generates ash, and neutralization leaves a large amount of liquid waste that must be stored or further processed.

Can disposal be done on the battlefield?

It can be, though not without some problems. Mauroni describes a process used in Iraq in 1991. "We'd come across a bunch of rockets, and you suspect there might be some chemicals in them," he says. "The field expedient way, if you're in a hurry, is to blow it up in place." Army Explosive Ordinance Demolition teams would use a 10-to-1 ratio of explosives to suspected chemical weapons.

It was a design oversight. No one thought about safe disposal.The heat from the explosives will destroy almost all of the chemical agent in the weapons, and the "very, very low concentration" of whatever wasn't destroyed was dispersed in the air, hopefully harmlessly. There is a chance, however, that this dispersal was one of the many factors behind Gulf War Syndrome, an illness seen in veterans of the Persian Gulf War.

How does the U.S. Army dispose of chemical weapons?

The Army has a mobile chemical weapons disposal unit. The United States has nine chemical weapons sites where America's stockpile of chemical weapons is being disposed. While the mobile site is getting press related to Syria, Mauroni thinks it has a more mundane purpose. Two disposal sites, one in Pueblo, Colo., and another in Richmond, Ky., are both under construction, and, Mauroni says, "they both have leakers" in their stored chemical weapons, so "the mobile unit goes out to neutralize the chemical agent."

So if the chemical gets burnt, what about the metal shell it was in?

Mauroni explains: "You have to thermally decontaminate the metal. You can't get the heat high enough to vaporize metal, but what you can do is heat up the metal munitions and burn the tonnage that comes with it. Once that's done, the metal scrap can be sold to industry." The thermal decontamination is done at extremely high temperatures.

Are some chemical weapons easier to destroy than other?

There are precursor chemicals, which are the components used to make a chemical weapon that aren't the weapon itself yet, and those are easier to dispose, because they might have industrial applications and can be sold to companies. For the weapons themselves?

"As far as sarin, mustard, or VX goes, they all have challenges," says Mauroni. Sarin can evaporate when handled. Mustard and VX can spill into the soil, which then means the soil has to be dug up and cleaned. But other than that, it's basically the same process: they all go into a tank for neutralization or an incinerator the same way.

What countries have experience disposing of chemical weapons?

The countries that have the most experience getting rid of chemical weapons are the United States and Russia, owing to their massive Cold War chemical weapons stockpiles. According to Mauroni, Russia had 40,000 tons at its peak, while the United States amassed around 30,000 tons. Both nations have used incineration and neutralization to dispose of chemical agents on a large scale.

Has a country besides Syria ever given up its chemical weapons to another for disposal?

Yes! One good example is Albania, which had 16 metric tons of chemical weapons that they gave to the United States for disposal. Destruction was completed in 2007 and cost $48 million.

How long does it take to clean up a chemical weapons site?

Years, more likely decades, depending on the size of the program. In 1986, Congress passed a law mandating destruction of chemical weapons in the United States, and while a tremendous amount of the stockpile has been destroyed, the work will continue well into the next decade, with the last site set to start disposal in 2020.

What's the bottom line on chemical weapons disposal?

"There's no easy solution, there's no pixie dust, magic vaporization portal," says Mauroni,

Any way you cut it, you're going to have waste. The bottom line is: can it be done safely and effectively? Absolutely, especially when you pour $2 billion per disposal site. When money is no object, you can certainly make it safe enough for the surrounding community. You take your time, you do it slowly, it will get done.

Disposal in Syria presents significant problems: "You can't do it slowly, you can't do it safely," Mauroni says. "There's going to be an obvious security risk the whole time you're trying to dispose of these things. It's going to get very expensive, very challenging to maintain security, to move chemical weapons and destroy them."


    






The Oral History Of September 11, Told By Its Photographers

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New Yorkers On 9/11

Gulnara Samoilova/AP via American Photo

Two years ago, our friends at American Photo released an expansive, four-part oral history of the September 11 attacks, told through the eyes and lenses of the photographers who documented the day. "This taxi driver was looking over my shoulder and started screaming, 'He's got it,'" one photographer says about capturing the moment the second plane hit. "As if that mattered. As if what happened in front of us wasn't real until it was actually captured." You can read all four parts here.


    






Big Pic: A Flaming Soyuz Spacecraft Carries Three Astronauts Home

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Earthward Bound

NASA/Bill Ingalls

After 166 days in space, three astronauts return from the International Space Station.

Just before 11 p.m. Eastern Time last night, three members of the International Space Station's Expedition 36 returned to solid ground. NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, along with Russian Federal Space Agency cosmonauts Pavel Vinogradov and Alexander Misurkin touched down in their Soyuz TMA-08M spacecraft in a remote stretch of central Kazakhstan near the town of Zhezkazgan.

Over the course of their 166 days in space, they orbited Earth 2,656 times and traveled more than 70 million miles. And then wafted gently back to the surface with the assistance of this giant hot-air-balloon-looking contraption. And by "gently" I mean "led by a great ball of fire caused by the friction of atmospheric re-entry."

[NASA]


    






FYI: Can Snakes Really Be Charmed By Music?

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Snake Charmer

John Downer/Getty Images

No. The charm has nothing to do with the music and everything to do with the charmer waving a pungi, a reed instrument carved out of a gourd, in the snake's face. Snakes don't have external ears and can perceive little more than low-frequency rumbles. But when they see something threatening, they rise up in a defensive pose. "The movement of the snake is completely keyed in on the guy playing the toodley thing," says Robert Drewes, chairman of the department of herpetology (the study of amphibians and reptiles) at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. "He sways, the snake sways."

Drewes studies how animals respond to their own calls; his specialty is frogs. Frogs have very good ears, which makes sense, since airborne sound is vital to their procreation: A croaking male calls out to a female. Every call of every frog species is distinct, and Drewes can walk blindfolded into a patch of Kenya's Arabuko-Sokoke forest and identify 15 different species by listening to their calls. Female frogs have inner ears that are attuned only to the call of their species. He likes a deep, rich pitch, and when he plays the saxophone, he prefers his alto and tenor to his soprano. Although when he travels to Africa, he brings a soprano. "I hate the damn thing, but it fits in my bag," he says. What do the frogs think of his playing? "I can't answer that," he says. "The guy who really knows this stuff is Bernie Krause."

Krause is a musician and "soundscape ecologist" who has recorded with Stevie Wonder, the Doors and George Harrison (Krause worked on Harrison's album Electronic Sound, which credits Harrison's cat for performing on one side). "Some musicians have played music to killer whales or dolphins," he says, "and what happens is initially the critters that are being subjected to this appear to be curious and want to know what it is, where it's coming from." In 1985 he was part of a team that coaxed a lost humpback whale out of the Sacramento River delta with field recordings of other humpbacks feeding.

Krause says that although animals seem to respond to what we call music, how can we know what they think? "Birds bob their heads to beats, bonobos played keyboard with Peter Gabriel," he says, "but we're ascribing our attributes to animals. Show me animals appearing to enjoy music that aren't captive, that aren't looking for something to alleviate the boredom." Krause says that we learned our music from the natural world, and in a few small pockets of the globe, groups of humans still sing with nature rather than to it. The Kaluli in Papua New Guinea, he says, "mix their voices in with the sounds of the forest, which is how we first learned polyphony"-singing with more than one voice. Snake charming also may have begun this way, singing and dancing with the snake. But that was thousands of years ago, before we knew snakes couldn't even hear that toodley thing.

This article originally appeared in the December 2011 issue of Popular Science magazine.


    






How Dealerships Forced Tesla Motors' Business Model Out Of Texas

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2013 Tesla Model S
Want to buy a Model S from the dealer? If you're in Texas, you're out of luck. Here's why.

Tesla Motors is the car company behind the electric Model S, of which we are fans. But along with cars, the company is also trying to innovative on the business-side, skirting the traditional third-party dealerships that act as middlemen between car companies and consumers. Instead of buying a Model S from a dealership, you can get it directly from Tesla. Unless you're in Texas, that is. If you're in Texas, you're hosed.

Texas residents can still get a car from Tesla--they'll just have to order it from out of state, and in the meantime deal with hog-tied Tesla showrooms that will show cars but can't even give potential owners a test drive. Why's that? In short, because dealerships have a lot of cash and a vested interest in the status quo, according to a new report from non-profit group Texans For Public Justice. Acting as the go-between for companies and consumers is how dealerships make their money, and if legislators repeal or loosen laws, the dealerships cede some ground. Tesla is the only car manufacturer using this business model. Plus, compared to other electric cars, and even compared to dinosaur-fossil guzzlers in its class, the Model S is selling well, making it all the more of a threat.

Elon Musk, Tesla Motors founder and seemingly very busy billionaire, had enough sway with legislators in Austin to push other bills through, including two that would allow another of his companies, SpaceX, a place to put a rocket-launch site. But a relatively innocuous bill that would allow Tesla to sell its cars directly from the company was killed. As the report notes, "Employees in Tesla car galleries in Austin and Houston are legally prohibited from offering visitors a test drive, quoting them a price or even directing them to Tesla's website." (Emphasis on that completely bonkers last clause mine.)

This battle is being waged in other states, too, like New York and North Carolina, but Texas has some of the most dealership-friendly laws in the country, and in 2012, dealership lobbyists spent more than $2.5 million in Texas elections, and another $750,000 on lobbying. Musk, meanwhile, spent $7,500 on campaign contributions (which were more likely for the SpaceX legislation), then another estimated $255,000 to $565,000 on lobbyists. As the report notes, 60 percent of current lawmakers are getting checks cut by dealership interests. If you're a lawmaker not so concerned with consumer interests, you can do the math.

You can read the full PDF report here.


    






Spying On Thunderstorms From Space [Video]

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Red Sprite Seen From The ISS

If you look very closely just above the bright thunderstorm at the right, you can see a flash of red--a red sprite.

ISS Expedition 31 Crew, NASA

The International Space Station takes a look at the other side of the storm.

NASA wants to know what's up with thunderstorms. Not the flashy bits--the thunder, the lightning, yada yada. Pretty, but we see that all the time. NASA, as usual, is aiming its sights a little higher, on what's happening above the clouds.

With a new experiment on the International Space Station, called "Firestation," (please read the name with this soundtrack), the space agency will be exploring what's going on with things like dark lightning (terrestrial gamma-ray flashes)--bursts of gamma radiation released within a storm cloud--and the colorful types of lightning known as red sprites and blue jets and elves.

Firestation involves a bunch of sensors mounted on the ISS that will look--through radio, optical and gamma wave detection--at the links between regular ol' lightning, dark lightning, jets of antimatter and the red and blue flashes that shoot out of the tops of clouds. It'll run for a year, observing thousands of thunderstorms, around 50 strokes of lightning a day, and hopefully be able to tell us more about the mysterious phenomena in the upper reaches of the clouds. Firestation is set to be up and running sometime this month.


    







Irradiated Seeds Combat World's Most Serious Wheat Disease

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Wheat Stem Rust-Resistant Plants Grow at Eldoret University in Kenya

Greg Webb / IAEA

In Kenya, two new varieties of wheat are resistant to a fungus that defeated even Norman Borlaug's resistant plants.

Kenyan farmers last week got a first look at two new varieties of wheat that are resistant to the number-one threat to worldwide wheat production. They got to see resistant and non-resistant wheat side by side in fields. The Kenyan government is also giving away the first batch of seeds-six metric tons of it-to seed producers, in hopes their fields will serve as visual persuasion to their neighbors to try the new stuff.

"Wheat stem rust has the ability to turn a healthy-looking crop only one week away from harvest into a tangle of black stems," Liang Qu, the director of the Joint FAO/IAEA Programme, tells Popular Science. "They can see the difference."

The story of how that wheat got made is a peek into the constant, worldwide fight against crop diseases. The new plants are designed to combat wheat stem rust, a fungus that used to take out a fifth of the U.S.' wheat crop at once during epidemics through the 1950s. (The rust no longer appears in the U.S.) Norman Borlaug, the so-called "father of the Green Revolution" and the winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, once nearly eradicated wheat stem rust by developing resistant wheat varieties. But a generation later, Borlaug's wheats don't work anymore. The rust has evolved. And as well as the new Kenyan wheats work now, stem rust will evolve again.

In 1999, scientists first confirmed there was a new type of wheat stem rust that infected Borlaug's resistant wheats. They called the new rust Ug99, after its confirmation year and country, Uganda. Since then, the rust, which moves through the air, has spread to Africa and the Middle East. It affects 37 percent of all the wheat grown in the world, the International Atomic Energy Agency estimates. Left untreated, it kills 70 percent to 100 percent of a field. Experts worry it may reach the European bread basket, as well as China and India.

Liang's program, a collaboration between the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization and the International Atomic Energy Agency, supported the Kenyan researcher who developed the new wheats. The International Atomic Energy Agency may be best known for dealing with nuclear disasters such as the Fukushima reactor meltdown, but it also works on crop science techniques that use radiation.

To make rust-resistant wheats, Miriam Kinyua, a researcher at Eldoret University in Kenya, sent wheat seeds popular with Kenyan farmers to the FAO/IAEA joint laboratories. There, the seeds got blasted with a tiny bit of radiation, enough to damage their DNA. That created a pool of seeds with different random mutations, any of which might resist Ug99 just by happenstance. Kinyua then grew and tested the seeds for their Ug99 resistance, ultimately coming up with two types of wheats that worked. The entire process is like a sped-up version of evolution, which works on random mutations that naturally appear in populations. Crop scientists have used this technique, called mutation breeding, since the 1940s.

Mutation breeding is not considered genetic engineering, which puts genes from one species into another species. Genetic engineering can be a quick and targeted way to come up with new crops, but the FAO/IAEA Joint Programme doesn't use it because the IAEA focuses on radiation technologies. "We're not saying countries should not take advantage of GMO techniques also," IAEA spokesman Greg Webb says. "Our job here is to help countries take advantage of nuclear techniques."

Mutation breeding is quick, easy and cheap to do, Liang adds. The entire Ug99 resistance breeding program took four years.

For small-scale Kenyan farmers, planting new varieties of wheat is a better strategy than using fungicides, which are prohibitively expensive. With these seeds, farmers only have to purchase or trade for them once. After their first plantings, they may keep some of the grains to plant as next year's crops.

The FAO and the IAEA are pretty excited about these new wheats. They've put out press releases. They're working on spreading the word in Kenya. From Kenya, other countries may get the seeds through trade. But researchers aren't resting yet-nor can they ever. That's because they expect that wheat stem rust will eventually evolve resistance to these new wheats, at which point they'll have to create a whole new wheat variety to combat that rust. The new wheats likely will work for three to five years, Liang estimates. "We have to keep an eye out," he says.


    






This Guy Mapped His Heart Rate During 'Game Of Thrones' [Infographic]

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Heart Rate During Game Of Thrones

Virostatiq

Vertigo-inducing peaks and valley during the "red wedding" scene? Yep. Looks about right.

If you've even watched a few episodes of the HBO series Game of Thrones, you know it is an abusive, heart-hardening show. As soon as you get attached, whoops, your favorite character is dead, and you promise yourself you'll never love again--it'll only lead to more heartache, after all. But then, you slowly come to realize, maybe this other character will give you new hope--but, nope, wait, they're also dead. Or are they??? No. They are dead.

Anyway, someone did some science on this, hooking himself up to an Arduino and PulseSensor, then monitoring his heart rate through the recent episode "Rains Of Castamere" and overlapping it with still images. Now I will spoil the episode, so please avert your gaze if you haven't seen it.

Two of the main characters are killed off at a wedding (called the "red wedding") toward the end of the episode. And look at that spike! We can only infer the accompanying tears from the graph here.

[Virostatiq]


    






The Double Life Of A Frog-Loving Spy

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Spying On Frogs

Thomas Wydra via Wikimedia Commons

Nature gets down and dirty with the legacy of a prolific amphibian researcher/spook.

This has all the makings of a grand tale: A spy leading a double life. An exotic locale. And…an obsession with frogs? It turns out prolific amphibian researcher Edward Taylor, who died in 1978, led quite the life.

"The elder herpetologist had logged 23 years in the field over his lifetime, collecting more than 75,000 specimens around the world, and naming hundreds of new species," Brendan Borrell writes in Nature. And yet, that isn't the most interesting part of his legacy: "He was a racist curmudgeon beset by paranoia - possibly a result of his mysterious double life as a spy for the US government."

His extensive career obsessively cataloging new species of frogs, lizards and snakes, mostly in the Philippines, took precedent over anything else in his life, Borrell describes. "'I named about 500 species,' he would later tell a reporter, 'but I can't always remember the names of my own children.' His wife, Hazel, could not bear his long absences, and they divorced in 1925."

But Taylor still found some time for "extracurricular" activities:

As he trotted around the globe, Taylor seemed to be conducting field work in conflict zones and, in his memoirs, he alluded to duties outside science. While working for the fisheries department in Manila, he helped to investigate the murder of an Englishman, traded tips with the Swedish secret service and scouted for mercury that could be used in munitions during the First World War. On his river journeys, he occasionally noticed Japanese people, and warned the local governor that they were 'spying out of the land'.
But the true nature of Taylor's work is finally coming into focus as intelligence records are declassified and research materials surface. They reveal that Taylor was indeed a spy, and that he continued to do intelligence work after the First World War, when he was sent to Siberia. His official purpose was to join the Red Cross to stop a typhus epidemic, but he was also gathering information on the Communist revolt in Russia and, later, the fate of grand duchess Anastasia, daughter of murdered tsar Nicholas II.

In the midst of his forays into espionage, he managed to describe dozens of new species. Many of his specimens, stored in the Philippine Bureau of Science, were destroyed during the U.S. attack on Manilla during World War II. Taxonomists are still arguing over whether all the specimens he declared as new species were actually new to science, or just slightly different examples of another species.

Read the whole sordid tale--spies, frogs and all--over at Nature.


    






Simulation Predicts How Robots Will One Day Walk

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Cheetah Robot

This robot's motions resemble a cheetah's, and it clocked in as the fastest.

Courtesy Creative Machines lab, cornell university

Or crawl. Or squirm.

How will robots of the future get around? Some say tank treads. Some say legs and feet. But nobody knows for sure, and that's why researchers at Cornell University designed a computer program to figure it out. The software simulates evolution. Robots begin as blocks of muscle, tissue, and bone, then natural selection kicks in: The fastest bots in each generation have offspring and are more likely to move on to the next round. The slower ones die out. Here are five of the most memorable variations from 175,000 generations.

KEY

Muscle 1 = Red
Muscle 2 = Green
Muscle 3 = Purple
Muscle 4 = Blue

1. SPRINTER

The bend in its L-shaped body serves as a pivot point, which extends and contracts in a powerful, muscular stride.

2. GALLOPER

This bot was one of the first to develop long legs with bone, which give it the stability to run much like a horse.

3. INCHER

No legs here-this one's almost all soft tissue, and it creeps forward. While not very fast, it seldom falls over thanks to its wide, stable base.

4. KNUCKLER

Robots relying on their front limbs to walk were rarely viable. The Knuckler survived. Its arms swing to lift its body off the ground, the same way a gorilla charges.

5. FLAILER

With so many descendants, you're going to wind up with a couple of flukes. This legless bot vigorously (and pathetically) shakes its arms to scooch forward.

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


    






Orangutans Announce Their Travel Plans A Day In Advance

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Flanged Male Orangutan

Samuel Luna via Wikimedia Commons

In the wild, male apes can plan ahead where they'll be going, and they keep their female friends apprised.

We often think of the ability to plan for the future as a uniquely human attribute. Recent studies have suggested that our primate cousins might be able to plan for certain occasions, as well (like the mischievous chimp who stockpiled stones that he could later hurl at zoo visitors) but whether they use this ability in the wild is harder to show. A new study from the Anthropological Institute and Museum at the University of Zurich indicates that wild great apes do, in fact, plan hours in advance, and announce their plans to their friends.

Anthropologist Carel va Shaik tracked the ability of male orangutans to plan their travels in Indonesia through what's called a "long call," a spontaneous cry certain males-the ones that develop large cheek pads, called flanged males-emit throughout the day. "It's a very loud booming vocalization that lasts up to four minutes-usually one to two-that goes like woop woop woop. We call them pulses." These male orangutans call in the direction they plan to travel up to a day in advance, he found, with the flanges acting like nature's bullhorn to focus the call in one direction.

"Basically, they're telling their female audience where they're going," he explains. Orangutans are more solitary than other apes, and most males live out of sight from other orangutans. The orangutans make these spontaneous long calls, which can be heard from up to a kilometer away, three or four times a day. Orangutans can recognize the voices of different individuals based on the call, and female orangutans seem to remain in earshot of the dominant male in the population.

‘They're telling their female audience where they're going'"Instead of shaking his head or turning his body around in all directions, which is what you would expect or what other species do, he looks in one direction very rigidly," van Shaik, a professor at the University of Zurich, told Popular Science. The direction the male called in correlated with the direction he would move in over the next day or so. "Instead of broadcasting, it's narrowcasting."

What's especially cool about the travel update is how long it can occur before the orangutan actually sets off. "When it's predicting their travel direction, it's predicting it for hours and hours in advance," van Shaik says. "When [the male orangutan] makes a night nest, he calls in a particular direction, lies on his nest, sleeps for 12 hours. At the end of the next day, he still travels in that direction-he could have forgotten it by then."

Van Shaik thinks this ability to plan probably extends to all great apes, a family that includes chimps, gorillas, orangutans and bonobos, but it's a tough thing to prove. "You have to be lucky that they open the window, so to speak, to let you into their minds," he says. "I'm sure they all plan; the question is whether you can show it." Next, he wants to study whether the orangutans call again to announce a change in their planned direction.

The study appears in PLOS ONE this week.


    






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