Why, hello there, Saturn. Those rings are looking pretty sharp this morning.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft snapped this near-infrared image of the sixth planet on June 15. You're seeing the planet from its sunlit side, from about 657,000 miles (1.1 million kilometers) away. When Saturn is closest to Earth, it is about 746 million miles (1.2 billion kilometers) away. Every pixel in the full-size NASA image represents 37 miles.

Cassini has captured several impressive images in its lifetime. Previously, it caught sight of an enormous, years-old hurricane at Saturn's north pole. It's also seen a huge river of hydrocarbons on the surface of Titan.

Recent data from the mission suggests that another one of Saturn's moons, Dione, could have an underground ocean. Astronomers had previously found that the Saturnian moons Enceladus and Titan may have water.

[NASA]

Last night were the Ig Nobel Prizes, the most important of Nobel Prize ceremonies. The ceremony honors the year's strangest--but also very good!--scientific research, in 10 different categories. Past winners have included research on remote-controlled whale snot retrieval and the physics of why you don't spill your coffee. So how did this year stack up?

Oh, man. Some real gems. Here they are:

MEDICINE PRIZE

For: "assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients who are mice."

Reference: "Auditory stimulation of opera music induced prolongation of murine cardiac allograft survival and maintained generation of regulatory CD4+CD25+ cells," Masateru Uchiyama, Xiangyuan Jin, Qi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Bashuda and Masanori Niimi, Journal of Cardiothoracic Surgery, vol. 7, no. 26, epub. March 23, 2012.

[Ed note: It had an effect, actually.]

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE

For: "confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive."

Reference: "'Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beer Holder': People Who Think They Are Drunk Also Think They Are Attractive," Laurent Bègue, Brad J. Bushman, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, Medhi Ourabah, British Journal of Psychology, epub May 15, 2012.

[Ed note: Ha, Beer Holder.]

JOINT PRIZE IN BIOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY

For: "discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way."

Reference: "Dung Beetles Use the Milky Way for Orientation," Marie Dacke, Emily Baird, Marcus Byrne, Clarke H. Scholtz, Eric J. Warrant, Current Biology, epub January 24, 2013. The authors, at Lund University, Sweden, the University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and the University of Pretoria

[Ed note: We wrote about this study! It rules.]

SAFETY ENGINEERING PRIZE

For: "inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers - the system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the encapsulated hijacker through the airplane's specially-installed bomb bay doors, whence he parachutes to earth, where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival."

Reference: US Patent #3811643, Gustano A. Pizzo, "anti hijacking system for aircraft", May 21, 1972.

[Ed note: ???]

PHYSICS PRIZE

For: "for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond - if those people and that pond were on the moon."

Reference: "Humans Running in Place on Water at Simulated Reduced Gravity," Alberto E. Minetti, Yuri P. Ivanenko, Germana Cappellini, Nadia Dominici, Francesco Lacquaniti, PLoS ONE, vol. 7, no. 7, 2012, e37300.

[Ed note: But that would be awesome, right?]

CHEMISTRY PRIZE

For: "discovering that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is even more complicated than scientists previously realized."

Reference: "Plant Biochemistry: An Onion Enzyme that Makes the Eyes Water," S. Imai, N. Tsuge, M. Tomotake, Y. Nagatome, H. Sawada, T. Nagata and H. Kumagai, Nature, vol. 419, no. 6908, October 2002, p. 685.

[Ed note: Also in that study: Can we create a super onion that doesn't make our eyes water?]

ARCHAEOLOGY PRIZE

For: "parboiling a dead shrew, and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything excreted during subsequent days - all so they could see which bones would dissolve inside the human digestive system, and which bones would not."

Reference: "Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton," Peter W. Stahl and Brian D. Crandall, Journal of Archaeological Science, vol. 22, November 1995, pp. 789-97.

[Ed note: Om nom.]

PEACE PRIZE

(To the president of Belarus) For: "making it illegal to applaud in public, AND to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding."

[Ed note: Also existing is banned. Stop. You're doing it right now. Stop.]

PROBABILITY PRIZE

For: "making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and Second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again."

Reference: "Are Cows More Likely to Lie Down the Longer They Stand?" Bert J. Tolkamp, Marie J. Haskell, Fritha M. Langford, David J. Roberts, Colin A. Morgan, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, vol. 124, nos. 1-2, 2010, pp. 1-10.

[Ed note: If cow tipping were real this could be significantly more complicated.]

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE

For: "the medical techniques described in their report "Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam" - techniques which they recommend, except in cases where the amputated penis had been partially eaten by a duck."

Reference: "Surgical Management of an Epidemic of Penile Amputations in Siam," by Kasian Bhanganada, Tu Chayavatana, Chumporn Pongnumkul, Anunt Tonmukayakul, Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn, Krit Komaratal, and Henry Wilde, American Journal of Surgery, 1983, no. 146, pp. 376-382.

[Ed note: Okay then! Until next year, friends.]

You can watch last night's ceremony here. There were people dressed as mice and also an opera.

There may be more sadists lurking in our midst than we'd like to think, according to a new study from the University of British Columbia and the University of Texas at El Paso. After offering a group of college students the chance to play exterminator and kill live bugs, researchers found "acts of apparent cruelty" and evidence of "everyday sadism"-a less pathological variety of deriving pleasure from being cruel.

More than 70 psychology students participated in the study, which they thought was about "personality and tolerance for challenging jobs." (Interesting example of how female-dominated psychology classes are-women made up almost 73 percent of the sample.) They had to choose between four unpleasant tasks: killing bugs, helping the experimenter kill bugs, cleaning dirty toilets, or enduring an ice bath.

No one actually had to clean toilets or hop in a bucket of ice; participants who chose that route were released. More participants offered to clean toilets than volunteered for the other tasks, but 27 percent volunteered to kill live pill bugs, which were kept in cups labeled with adorable names like Muffin, Ike and Tootsie. Another 27 percent volunteered to assist the experimenter with killing the bugs.

Though the participants were led to believe they were actually grinding up Tootsie and his friends, no bugs were harmed (the supposed killing machine in the experiment was just a modified coffee grinder). As the researchers expected, the participants who chose bug killing had the highest scores on a sadistic impulse test, which asked people to rate themselves on scales like "hurting people is exciting."

"As expected, higher sadistic-personality scores were associated with greater preference for bug killing over other tasks. The visceral experience of personally killing the bugs was the most appealing choice for sadists," the researchers wrote. The amount of pleasure they took in the activity also seemed to track how many bugs they killed.

‘The visceral experience of personally killing the bugs was the most appealing choice for sadists.'The experiment controlled for "irrelevant phobias," which means they looked at whether or not people were crazy afraid of bugs-indicating that perhaps the bug killers really did just enjoy killing something. The researchers suggest that sadism is perhaps more common than we normally think of it. Sure, there's crazy serial killer variety sadism, but it also might manifest itself more commonly in everyday life. Like, perhaps, on the internet.

The researchers are planning to expand their sadism research in the context of online trolling. "Trolling culture is unique in that it explicitly celebrates sadistic pleasure, or 'lulz,'" University of British Columbia psychologist Erin Buckels said in a press statement. Oh no, the lulz!

The study appears in Psychological Science.

When we close our eyes and drift off to sleep, something in our mind spins us fanciful tales of teeth falling out, bouncing around in giant marshmallows in the sky, failing midterms in classes we've never taken, taking a walk in the park down the street that's also a spaceship. Common as they are, there's not a lot of definitive science on how we dream.

Are dreams the work of the imagination, or the work of some reflex in the brain? A team of French researchers suggest at its most basic, dreaming is generated by the brainstem, the part of the brain that connects to the spinal cord and plays a role in regulating sleep--a "bottom-up" process rather than a result of the brain's higher functions.

The study looked at patients with auto-activation deficit, a syndrome characterized by extreme apathy. People with auto-activation deficit lose the ability to spontaneously activate any cognitive or emotional processes. They report that they don't have any thoughts at all, called "mental emptiness." They often sit quietly in the same place all day without speaking or moving. If someone prompts them, they can answer questions and recall memories, but left to their own devices, their minds remain blank. So if these patients don't have spontaneous thoughts, do they dream?

The 13 auto-activation deficit subjects and 13 healthy control subjects were asked to keep a dream diary, which the researchers then "analyzed for length, complexity and bizarreness." Not all the auto-activation deficit patients reported dreaming, but some did. Those who reported dreaming (only four out of the 13) had shorter, less bizarre dreams than the control group's, dream about normal scenarios like walking or shaving, according to the LA Times. Not sitting on a park bench watching a lady's hat turn into a wolf.

That patients who don't have spontaneous thoughts during the day can do so when asleep suggests that dreaming might be a bottom-down process, essentially a reflex. But the simplicity and lack of emotional resonance of their dreams suggest that higher-order processes are required to create the strange scenarios most people find in their dreams.

The full study was published in Brain this week.

[LA Times]

When Chicago's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory celebrated the arrival of a delicate particle storage ring shipped across the country with the utmost care from the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the lab's neighbors from Two Brothers Brewing Company were on hand to celebrate. And like the best guests, they brought their own beer.

They brewed a limited edition beer called "Magnetic Moment" to herald the safe arrival of the 50-foot-wide, 45-ton electromagnet ring, which had to be transported from New York by barge and specialized truck--without even the slightest bending or twisting--over the course of five weeks. The electromagnet will be used in an experiment called Muon g-2, which will probe the quantum mysteries of subatomic particles called muons.

Where can non-Fermi nerds can get their lips on a fine bottle of muon-inspired brew? Symmetry magazine reports there are a few cases left over from the after party, so the best option here seems to be to cozy up to a Fermilab particle physicist. Can't be much harder than moving a 45-ton magnetic ring over 3,200 miles of land and sea.

[Symmetry]

Here in the U.S., our eggs mostly come in two colors: white and brown. But there are two breeds, one in Chile and one in China, that are known to lay blue eggs. Yeah, weird, right? And a new study has figured out why that happens.

The Araucana chicken from Chile and the Dongxiang and Lushi chickens from China (none of which are particularly common in North America) are known to lay pale-blue eggs. This is rare for a chicken; while bird eggs can come in all sorts of colors and patterns, chicken eggs are almost always white or brown. So what's the deal?

A new study found that a single gene, called callee oocyan, is responsible for the odd coloration of these blue chicken eggs. But how did it get there? Turns out that these chickens have a high incidence of a particular retrovirus, called EAV-HP. Retroviruses are a type of virus that integrates its own genetic data into the host in an unusual order. Instead of transcribing DNA into RNA and then into protein, retroviruses operate backwards, retroviruses have RNA, which they use to make DNA, and then integrate that DNA into the DNA of their hosts. HIV is probably the best-known retrovirus.

This EAV-HP retrovirus is responsible for inserting that weird gene, the one that turns the chicken eggs blue. Specifically, it changes the chemistry of the eggshell so that it can take in biliverdin, a bile pigment, from the chicken's uterus. Weird! And not necessarily harmful; blue eggs are widely eaten and the Araucana, in particular, is a very popular exotic chicken breed. But now you know why their eggs are blue!

[via Virology Blog]

People make a lot of fuss about that heartbreaking photo of home that Apollo 8 astronauts took in 1968. But as historic as "Earthrise" was, it wasn't the first time humans thought about what the Earth would look like from an alien land. In a testament to the human imagination, illustrators from as far back as 1800s made drawings envisioning what Earth would look like to viewers standing on the moon, Mercury, or Mars.

Library of Congress special curator Trevor Owens collected some of these illustrations in a blog post yesterday. Check out his post for more images and full explanations of each illustration. Here are just a few:

That's a triple whammy above. Folks see both Earth and the moon from their vantage point on Mars. This is an illustration from a science fiction story, "A Trip to Mars" by Marcianus Filomento Rossi, in which Earthlings visit Mars and find the descendants of ancient Romans (!!) living there.

This illustration doesn't come from a science or science fiction publication. It's from a 1906 issue of Puck, a humor magazine. It shows Martians reacting to the election of the governor of New York. (Do you think they'd be interested in the upcoming mayoral election?) "Showing Earth from space has long been a way to show how something that might seem very significant up close is at a distance not a particularly big deal," Owens writes.

Puck was fond of the cosmic view. The 1905 cover below illustrates "The Earth as seen from Mars." Unlike the "Earthrise" examples Owens found, the cover doesn't show any Martian land, but it does show entirety of the Earth, as well as Saturn in the background. The long view allows the viewer see a slick of oil floating around Earth.

To modern viewers, the Earth below may seem moon-like because it's white and has a man's face in it. But that's oil baron John D. Rockefeller's face on the Earth. So Puck used the space view of Earth to convey the message that Rockefeller's activities had enormous impact. Seventy years later, NASA's "blue marble" photos of Earth would bolster the emerging modern environmentalist movement, by showing how beautiful and "companionable" Earth looked from space.

[Library of Congress]

We've long been interested in the progression of invisibility, which, for us, usually relies on crazy foundations like metamaterials. So when we heard that U.S.-based GDS Architects was working on an invisible skyscraper in South Korea, our ears perked up. Turns out it's not invisible in the scientific sense-it's just designed to appear that way.

GDS received permission this week from the South Korean government to begin construction on the Tower Infinity, located just outside of Seoul. It's a huge (1,476 feet tall), glassy structure, and when it's finished, it'll have the third-highest observation deck in the world. (The highest is the Canton Tower in Guangzhou, China.)

The invisibility trick is achieved by using optical cameras paired with an LED facade on all sides of the building. The idea is that the cameras will capture what's behind the tower and then the facade will host a projection of that image, so it'll feel like you're looking right through it. It's the same basic idea as the "invisible computer monitor" trick, except updating live thanks to the optical cameras.

The tower will have three different vertical sections, dividing the tower into thirds. Each section has six sides, to make it easier to display an accurate image behind it. (With fewer sides, it would be near-impossible to make sure the invisibility trick works well from all angles.)

Read more over at the National Post.

NASA announced yesterday that its Voyager 1 spacecraft, which blasted off in 1977 and is the farthest human-made object from Earth, had officially left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space. Cool! But the news left us with plenty of questions: What kind of data can we get from Voyager 1? How does it still have power? When will it find the aliens?

Helpfully, the scientists and engineers behind the mission answered many of these questions on Reddit yesterday. Here are our favorite moments from their AMA.

How can you still receive information from Voyager after it's gone so much further than expected?-from Reddit user cyberine

What establishes the distinction between interstellar space and space considered to belong to our solar system?-from Reddit user diMario

Is Voyager still able to capture and send photos back to Earth? -from Reddit user Eluveitie

Why was that? Too much power usage?-from Reddit user OG-panda

How long does it take to receive signals from Voyager now?-from Reddit user i_attend_goat_orgies

What kind of data do we get from Voyager?-from Reddit user whatireallythink

What does the data from Voyager look like when it is first received?-from Reddit user music99

How long will it take for the power to run out?-from Reddit user 10247bro

What kinds of data do you hope to see in Voyager's remaining years?-from Reddit user goblynn

Once the Voyagers run out of power and stop transmitting, will we still be able to detect them?-from Reddit user IdolRevolver

Can Voyager be said to drift indefinitely?-from Reddit user replicasex

What else in the universe lies along its current trajectory and how far away is it?-from Reddit user just_foo

How does the processor and memory of Voyager I compare to the average modern smartphone?-from Reddit user jjlava

Do you have an official brief or Standard Operating Procedure if you pick up unmistakable signs of alien life?-from Reddit user BrettW-CD

Thanks to the following scientists for their great AMA: Ed Stone, Voyager's project scientist; Arik Posner, Voyager's program scientist; Tom Krimigis, Voyager's low-energy charged particle principal investigator; Matt Hill, Voyager's low-energy charged particle science team member; Bill Kurth, Voyager plasma wave co-investigator; and Enrique Medina, Voyager guidance and control engineer.

$3.6 billion: the funding a team of engineers needs to complete development of the Synergistic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine, a new type of engine that could make runway-to-orbit space missions a reality

2,656: the number of times these three astronauts orbited Earth during their 166 days aboard the International Space Station (see them return home in a flaming Soyuz spacecraft)

202,586: the number of people who have applied for a one-way trip colonize to Mars (where they will probably go insane)

36 years: the length of time NASA's Voyager 1 has been traveling through the solar system. The craft has now officially entered interstellar space and is the farthest human-made object from Earth.

124,000 metric tons: the amount of chemical agent unleashed during World War I (read about how to safely dispose of chemical weapons here)

3 to 5 pounds: the weight of the bacteria the typical person carries around (enough to fill a large soup can)

$400: the price of the new 64GB iPhone 5S, which comes in gold, black, or silver and includes a capacitive fingerprint sensor

51 feet: the length of the giant robotic trucks that load, haul, and dump ore in Australian open pit mines

13 stories: the height of the solid carbon-fiber wing powering the AC72, a 50-mph catamaran that raced in this year's America's Cup

110 decibels: the noise a typical MRI scanner generates when in use-about as loud as a rock concert. GE Healthcare this week announced a new silent MRI machine

300 frames per second: the frame rate of the cameras used to capture amazing bees'-eye footage of mid-air honeybee mating

A new low-cost, highly automated rocket from Japan's space agency launched Saturday with just eight crew members and two laptops on-site. Japan's previous launches required teams of 150.

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency sent the first of its new generation of launch vehicles into orbit carrying a telescope that will observe the atmospheres of Venus, Mars and Jupiter. The telescope's measurements will provide astronomers with clues to events early in the solar system's history, according to the agency's description of the project.

"A large control room could be integrated into a single laptop PC," the rocket's project manager, Yasuhiro Morita, said in a statement in 2011.

‘We are trying to make rocket launches much simpler and ordinary events.'The new rocket, called Epsilon, has artificial intelligence to perform its own safety checks. Its computer system reduces the number of people needed at a launch site from the 150 that were standard at Japan's previous space launches.

Japan's space program, JAXA, developed both its Epsilon Launch Vehicle and the small satellite carrying the planet-viewing telescope so that it could launch more missions, more frequently. "We are trying to make rocket launches much simpler and ordinary events," Morita said.

The agency retired Epsilon's predecessor, a rocket called M-5, seven years ago because of its high costs, the BBC reported. It took $37 million to develop the Epsilon, half of what it cost to develop the M-5.

The mission was originally supposed to launch in August, but blastoff was first delayed, and then cancelled, apparently because of computer glitches. JAXA reported Saturday's launch went fine and that the satellite, now in orbit, is "in good health."

[Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, BBC]

Deep in one of the deepest caves in the world, a cave that reaches more than 4,500 feet below ground, scientists made a startling discovery: a new species of snail with a near-transparent shell.

Zospeum tholussum, an air-breathing land snail, is a brand-new entry in the Ellobiidae family of hollow-shelled snails. It's very tiny, with a swirled, translucent dome-shaped shell. This type of snail, living as it does thousands of feet below ground, has totally adapted to live in darkness; it seems to have no visual sense, for example, which is a common mutation. Cave animals, including crustaceans, fish, and salamanders, often lose their sense of sight over the millenia; what's the use of wasting energy on interpreting visual stimuli when there's no light?

Found more than 3,000 feet below ground in the Lukina Jama-Trojama cave system in Croatia, this particular snail also seems to have a limited ability to move; it mostly stays in the deep, cold cave mud, near running water to keep its body moist. The scientists aren't quite sure yet how it reproduces or what it eats.

Only one specimen of Zospeum tholussum was found, but a study published in the current issue of Subterranean Biology dives deep into the behavior and patterns of the new snail. You can read it here.

Click here to enter the gallery

Not everyone can explore the Galápagos Islands. There are a couple of flights and a handful of hotels on the inhabited islands, but you need a guide to take you to the visitor sites. With all the limitations, it's hard to pretend you're a 19th century explorer.

But your dreams of retracing Charles Darwin's scientific steps are about to come true! In May, Google took its Street View Trekker-a bulbous camera attached to a backpack-to the archipelago. The mapping team has already trekked to Mt. Fuji, the Canadian Arctic, and the Great Barrier Reef, to name a few.

The whole imaging expedition, a cooperative effort of the Charles Darwin Foundation, Google Maps, Catlin Seaview Survey, and the Galapagos National Part Directorate, took ten days. The team hiked through wetlands on Isabela Island, marched along the craggy shorelines of San Cristobal Island, and even dove beneath the waves off the coast of Floreana Island. The results of the 360-degree photo mapping trip (on land and underwater) launched last week.

To encourage virtual wanderers to participate in citizen science, iNaturalist and the Charles Darwin Foundation launched a site called Darwin for a Day. If you happen upon an interesting species during your digital treks, you can call them out and try to identify them. And being that the Pacific islands are some of the most biodiverse places on Earth, you never know when you'll run into a blue-footed boobie, giant ancient tortoise, frigates, or even a trove of sea lions.

Check out the gallery for our favorite island scenes.

Each year, Popular Science seeks out the brightest young scientists and engineers and names them the Brilliant Ten. Like the 110 honorees before them, the members of this year's class are dramatically reshaping their fields--and the future. Some are tackling pragmatic questions, like how to secure the Internet, while others are attacking more abstract ones, like determining the weather on distant exoplanets. The common thread between them is brilliance, of course, but also impact. If the Brilliant Ten are the faces of things to come, the world will be a safer, smarter, and brighter place.--The Editors

Nicolas Fontaine

Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent

Achievement

Saving the Internet from itself

Nearly all communications data-Web, phone, television-runs through a network of fiber-optic cables. For now, that's fine. But within a decade, data traffic is expected to outgrow infrastructure, which will result in transmissions that are slow and garbled. Nicolas Fontaine, an optical engineer at Bell Labs Alcatel-Lucent, has devised a clever way to avoid a data bottleneck.

Fontaine and his colleagues invented a new kind of multiplexer, a device that bundles multiple inputs into one stream in order to cram a lot more data into a single optical fiber. It works by routing different light beams, called modes, along carefully planned pathways; the beams of information travel together but don't interfere with one another. "The old fiber would be only a single-lane highway," says Fontaine. "Now we can add multiple lanes." Fontaine's multiplexer avoids the signal loss that crippled earlier devices; he has already shown that his multiplexer can send six light streams down 497 miles of fiber without losing data along the way.

While previous multiplexers are a cubic foot or more; Fontaine's is 50 cubic millimeters. Since it's made of glass and etched by laser, it would be cheap to produce. The device is also scalable: "Right now, we're working on a 10-mode device-an order of magnitude over existent single-mode fiber," Fontaine says. "We want to figure out how far we can go."

Click here to see more from our annual celebration of young researchers whose innovations will change the world. This article originally appeared in the October 2013 issue of Popular Science.

Look at these shapes for a few seconds. Then close your eyes, and try to imagine how they look. Try to take the mental image of one of them and break the shape into pieces in your mind, or combine it with another shape to make something new.

Cognitive scientists hypothesize that our ability to imagine, to come up with mental images and creative new ideas, is the result of something called a "mental workplace," a neural network that likely coordinates activity across multiple regions of the brain. A new study from scientists at Dartmouth College paints a fuller picture of this mental workspace by imaging the brain regions involved with mentally manipulating images, like the shapes above.

"Our lab is very interested in the kind of flexible cognitive behaviors that humans have," lead author Alex Schlegel, a Ph.D. student in cognitive neuroscience at Dartmouth College, tells Popular Science. "We can learn new things, we can think of new concepts, seeing things from different perspectives--a lot of this has to do with a very rich mental space, kind of a mental playground."

Shlegel and his colleagues asked 15 participants to look at pictures of abstract shapes, then recall the shapes in their imagination while they were undergoing an fMRI scan. Some participants concentrated on maintaining the image of the shape, while others were asked to change the images in their mind, either imagining deconstructing the shapes into requisite parts or combining them with others to make a new shape.

The researchers expected the mental manipulation activity to involve the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes imagery. By looking at activity in the visual cortex, scientists in the past few years have been able to decode the type of image that a person is imagining--something scarily akin to mind reading. But the visual cortex wasn't the only region involved--they found 12 "regions of interest" that seem to be involved in manipulating imaginary shapes. "We saw differences in activity all over the brain when we compared to control conditions," Shlegel says. "It does seem rather than being a single area responsible for imagining or manipulating, it seems like lots of areas have to work in concert."

Though the study was small and only explored imagining visual shapes, it provides support for the kind of widespread neural network of imagination that other scientists have suggested exists, but haven't seen in action before. Further studies will likely need to continue exploring how these neural networks function, but the researchers suggest a mental workspace could be integral to humans' flexible cognitive abilities. "What we're starting to show is that eventually, when we start to get to these complex cognitive behaviors, we need to start looking away from isolated areas," Shlegel says, "but rather how the brain acts as a whole."

The paper appears in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

From 1984 to 1993, during the heyday of the Nintendo Entertainment System, more than 700 games were released for the console--and many, many of them are classics, from M.U.L.E. to Prince Of Persia to Ice Climber. The excellent designers at Pop Chart Lab, who previously created this infographic of game controllers, has now mapped all of the games from that period in one handy chart.

The infographic starts at the center, with mid-'80s games like the original Mario Bros., and spirals out from there to early '90s games. There are multiples spirals, and they're color-coded by genre: purple, for example, represents entries in the "sports" genre, while gray represents "puzzle/racing/driving" games. That means you can monitor the evolution of NES games, to some extent: Donkey Kong came before Metroid which came before Mega Man--ad nauseum.

Just as interesting as Nintendo's crown jewels, though, are the games that were released and never made much of a dent in gaming culture: for every Zelda, there are several more Kid Kools.

You can purchase a print of the infographic for $32 over at Pop Chart Lab's site.

In this image, the sun reaches out into space with long, super-intense flares of magnetized plasma called coronal mass ejections. When they're directed toward Earth, such ejections may trigger auroras. Especially powerful ejections interrupt power supply and communications on Earth.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint project between the European Space Agency and NASA, originally took this photo in 2002. Scientists recently colorized it to show the intensities of the ejections. The white regions in the image are the most intense, while the red regions are of medium intensity and the blue regions are the least intense.

The solid blue disc shown around the sun helps block direct sunlight so that details in the corona are more visible. The sun itself is shown in an ultraviolet view that displays which of its regions were active that day.

SOHO continues to take pictures like this today. (Check them out.) The satellite hangs out at Lagrange point L1, located between the sun and Earth. There, the gravitational forces of the star and planet cancel each other, keeping SOHO in place. It sends data to Earth that help astronomers understand the sun's weather and predict events that would affect human life.

[European Space Agency]