So you've got yourself a bitcoin. Congratulations! Its value was hovering around $100 at press time. But what can you do with your newly acquired digital riches? Quite a lot, as it turns out-especially if you have a penchant for projects.

More and more vendors who cater to makers accept bitcoin, a digital currency that's created and maintained by its own extensive virtual network. Bitcoins add little or nothing to overhead because they carry no inherent processing fees and can't be traced. This translates to savings on tools and materials for projects.

CryptoPrinting.com, for example, will 3-D-print custom designs for prices the company claims are about 20 percent cheaper than its competitors'. Bitcoinstore.com offers a wide variety of electronic parts, such as Arduino microcontrollers, power supplies, and cameras. Go to Spendbitcoins.com for a list of other sites that take part in the blossoming mini economy, including virtual marketplaces like Coingig.com, where bitcoin owners can independently buy and sell items from one another.

Want a bit more coin? Success isn't easy, but all you need to mine the currency is a computer that's properly configured to help anonymously secure and verify others' bitcoin transactions (for a great guide on mining, see popsci.com/bcmining). If your computer miner pays for itself, then you can start saving up for all your geekiest workshop desires.

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

Unless you're a gadget reviewer, you can't get your hands on the new iPhones just yet--but if you're using an iPhone 5, 4S, or 4, you're going to get a really nice present today. Within the next few hours, Apple is going to release the brand-new version of iOS, iOS 7, to your phones.

When is the update coming?

Soon! Probably around noon or early afternoon ET, judging by previous software update timing.

How do I get it?

Easy! Open your iPhone's settings app, which (at the moment!) looks like a bunch of gears. Hit the option that says "General," then "Software Update." Your phone will look around for the update; if it's available, it'll let you do it right over the air. If it's not available yet, don't worry about it, it'll come soon enough. Then follow the on-screen instructions; you'll be able to do this without plugging your phone into your computer, though you may be required to connect to a Wi-Fi network.

Is there any reason I shouldn't update?

Well, since it's not out yet, I can't tell you if it'll crash your phone. But it probably won't. I'll be downloading it as soon as I can, if that tells you anything. Backing up your phone is probably a good idea; you can do that easily through iTunes. Just plug it into your computer, open iTunes, click on your iPhone in the left-hand sidebar, and under the "Summary" tab, click "Back Up iPhone," making sure it's backing up to your computer.

So what even is iOS 7?

Wait, how did you get this far without knowing what this is? Fine, no judgments, I'm glad you're interested. So! iOS 7 is the new version of the operating system for the iPhone. The operating system is the underlying platform on a given computer-like gadget; on your computer, you might run Windows or Mac OS X. On your phone, you might run iOS or Android or Windows Phone or BlackBerry OS. (Haha just kidding, you probably don't run one of those last two.) Anyway, iOS has changed a lot since it was introduced in 2007, but it hasn't changed very much visually. iOS 7 won't wildly change the way your phone works but it will very much change the way your phone looks.

You'll notice a totally new color palette, with cool pastels and primary colors rather than shades of blue and grey. The philosophy of the design has changed, too; before, Apple used something called "skeumorphism," which basically means trying to make digital things look like physical things. A note-taking app, for example, might have a design with a spiral binding at the top, like a reporter's notebook. This is considered by the tech elite to be a slightly outdated way of designing things; the modern view is that digital doesn't need to look like anything in the real world, but can be simpler and cleaner, without unnecessary flourishes. This sort of philosophy is called "flat design," and the new iOS is a full-on flat design update.

Feature-wise, the biggest change is called the "Control Center." It's a new, faster way to change basic settings on your phone, like turning the Wi-Fi on and off or changing the brightness. To get to it, you swipe up from the bottom of the screen. Easy!

Search is in a new place. To get to the search right now, you go to your homescreen and then swipe from left to right, as if the search bar was its own homescreen page just to the left of your apps. Not anymore! Now you swipe down from the center, which reveals a search bar at the top of your homescreen. I'm not really sure why this is better! On the other hand, it doesn't seem worse, so, um, just get used to it, I guess.

Multitasking is also totally different, but now it's much better. Double-click the home button to open up a list of all your running apps, as always, but instead of showing just a line of icons at the bottom of the screen, with iOS 7, you'll see a nice big row of thumbnails, showing exactly what's going on with your phone. Tap them to switch to that app, or grab it and swipe it upwards to close it, as if you're tossing the app into a garbage can in front of your phone. (This is an interface stolen from an old OS called WebOS, in case you were wondering. It's a very good one.)

And finally there's one new feature called Airdrop that's designed to let you share things easily. You can get to it with that "Control Center," and it'll let you beam a photo or certain kinds of files--not sure which kinds yet--to an iPhone or Mac nearby. Pretty cool!

The 3-foot-long Microraptor, one of the smallest dinosaurs in the fossil record, had feathers on its arms, legs and tail. Its odd-looking five-wing gliding setup provides clues to the earliest evolution of flight, according to a new study in Nature Communications.

To figure out how exactly Microraptor might have flown, a team of scientists from the University of Southampton in the UK designed an anatomically accurate model and tested its abilities for stability and speed in a wind tunnel. The early Cretaceous dinosaur was a paravian--a classification of dinosaurs that were closer to birds than species like the T. Rex.

In the wind tunnel, the blue 3-D model of a Microraptor showed that the dinosaur probably would have flown down from the trees and glided slowly across medium distances. The dinosaur would have been most stable by generating a great deal of lift with its wings, but the exact positioning and angles of the wings, which haven't been determined, didn't make much of a difference--small changes in the shape and orientation of the wings and legs didn't change how well the model flew. The researchers write that this suggests early fliers like Microraptor "did not require a sophisticated, ‘modern' wing morphology to undertake effective glides."

See part of the wind tunnel test in the video below:

The study is published in Nature Communications today.

Step away from the Jägerbomb. Peter Miller, a psychologist from Austrialia's Deakin University, has taken to BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) to air his view that energy drink titans like Red Bull are meddling in research that explores the harms of mixing energy drinks and alcohol, providing funding and placebo supplies to scientists whose research supports their interests.

Red Bull sold 4.6 million cans of its picker-upper last year, presumably in large part to college students who wanted to use it as a mixer. The company dominates about 40 percent of the energy drink market, and in a 2007 study, 73 percent of U.S. college students said they had mixed energy drinks with booze in the past month.

According to that study, from Nutrition Journal, most energy drinks pack a caffeine punch of 80 to 141 milligrams per 8 ounces, about the same as two cans of soda, plus various energy boosters like caffeine, ginseng and taurine. Some studies have found energy drinks and alcohol together to be associated with riskier behavior, including aggressive sexual behavior and drinking and driving.

Still, the research is slim. Red Bull has only been around since 1997, and in lab settings, researchers can't just get people wasted and give them tons of energy drinks. Because, you know, ethics. So according to Miller, most lab research has been restricted to looking at people with low levels of intoxication who consume only one energy drink.

Many of the researchers who have declared mixing alcohol and Red Bull to be completely safe have been funded by Red Bull. From Miller:

Red Bull often provides a placebo drink to researchers--after the company approves their protocols--but as one psychologist told LiveScience, this means that there's no independent verification that the placebo doesn't contain stimulants like the "active" version of the drink.

In an email to Popular Science, Patrice Radden, a spokesperson for Red Bull, had this to say in response to Miller's editorial:

The company did not respond to inquiries about the placebo they provide researchers or their methods for approving study protocols.

Miller's article wasn't a peer-reviewed study, and it doesn't provide a whole lot of empirical evidence for Red Bull tainting the research pool, per se, but his main point is that researchers who study energy drinks should have to declare any conflicts of interest in their work, whether that's funding or grants for research or money to attend conferences and tell people that energy drinks are safe. And that's a pretty easy argument to get behind.

Read Miller's article in BMJ.

In 2011, water pollution closed or drove visitors away from U.S. shores on more than 15,000 beach days across the country. In many places, the problem is getting worse. As coastal towns crowd with rooftops and parking lots, they produce more runoff from rain. The runoff picks up bacteria from animal waste and collects in pipes that then release the water into the ocean. Pretty gross. But some engineers have a simple and effective solution: Send runoff underneath the beach instead, where sand can filter the bacteria out.

The research team, led by Michael Burchell at North Carolina State University, has already built three sand-filtration systems under the dunes of a beach about two hours from Raleigh and is considering sites for additional installations.

1. Dirty storm runoff is diverted into a five-foot-wide open-bottom plastic tube positioned 1.5 to 2.5 feet beneath the sand.

2. The water flows into a bed of gravel, spreading out onto a larger surface area of sand, which acts as a filter.

3. The runoff that reaches the groundwater is diluted, and whatever bacteria get trapped in the sand die.

4. By the time the storm runoff is 75 feet down shore, bacteria levels are comparable to normal groundwater's.

5. The materials to purify dirty storm water are quite simple: plastic tubing, gravel, and a little help from Mother Nature.

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

According to a new paper posted on Arxiv, the Big Bang may not have been what we think it is. In fact, there may have been no Big Bang at all--our universe may have come from an entirely different source.

The Big Bang theory, in very brief form, suggests that the universe began as an extraordinarily, infinitely dense clump of matter that began cooling and expanding, like a balloon inflating. The cooling of the balloon allowed the formation of subatomic particles, and, in turn, stars and planets and lemurs.

There are problems with the Big Bang theory, though until now we haven't really had any better ideas, so we've stuck with it as a plausible explanation for the beginning of the universe. For one, we have no idea what would trigger an ultradense pinpoint of matter to explode outwards. For another, the universe is almost entirely of a uniform temperature, and it's unlikely that, at what we think is a fairly early point in time after the Big Bang, the temperature would have evened out so thoroughly.

This new explanation suggests that the universe might actually be the result of the collapse of a four-dimensional star--a crazy black hole the likes of which we can't even imagine. Some explanation:

The idea is that black holes as we know them--3-D black holes, in our known universe--have as a boundary a 2-D membrane, which is called an "event horizon." But in the event of a 4-D black hole, the event horizon would be a 3-D event horizon--and according to models run by the team, a collapse of a 4-D star would spew material into the 3-D event horizon, slowly expanding over time. That event horizon could be, well, our universe.

This is an early theory; the researchers' own models indicate the idea has promise, but new findings from the European Space Agency found fluctuations in ancient microwaves that match the Big Bang theory but not this new black hole theory. The team says they're still tweaking their models, so nothing's for sure yet. Definitely don't toss out your textbooks; nobody's saying the Big Bang is false, merely that there are other possible explanations. But! Fascinating mind experiment, for sure.

Read more over at Nature.

Man, it's a tough time to be a big-faced dude. Last year, two management professors at the University of California, Riverside found that men with wider faces were more likely to cheat and lie for financial gain. Now, their latest study finds that the selfishness of wide-faced men is a self-fulfilling social prophesy: People perceive men with wider faces as more aggressive and less trustworthy, so they act more selfishly toward them, eliciting selfish behavior in return, the researchers say.

The study consisted of multiple experiments with more than 100 participants in each. First, the researchers found men with wider faces were more likely to be selfish when allocating resources between them and a partner. In another study, participants were shown a picture of their partner in this same resource-allocation task--some saw a digitally manipulated picture of a man with a comparatively wide face, while others saw the same man with a more narrow face. People who saw the wide-faced man as their partner anticipated selfish behavior, and were selfish in how they divided the resources. People who thought they were working with a narrow-faced man behaved more cooperatively.

Golden Rule: If you're mean to people, they'll be mean back.In yet another experiment, the researchers informed participants of how their unseen, simulated partner had chosen to divide resources before they had to make an allocation decision themselves. How the "partner" treated the participant was based on results from two of the previous experiments the researchers had conducted--either the participants were treated as if they were a wide-faced man (whom people perceived as selfish) or as a more narrow-faced man (whom people treated with cooperation). The researchers found that treating someone selfishly led them, in turn, to act more selfish.

As the paper puts it:

The underlying causes of this correlation are debatable, of course. Studies have shown that having a wide face is associated with greater aggression, which might influence how people behave. Or people may perceive big men with wide faces as physically strong, so there might be some factors of dominance involved. And the study didn't control for the participants' facial width, so there's no way to know if their own facial traits affected the results.

Still, this seems to be just a scientific validation of the Golden Rule: If you're mean to people, they'll be mean back. And don't judge a book by its super-wide face.

The full study is available in PLOS ONE.

When Microsoft Iintorduced the Kinect sensor in 2010, the company said the motion-capture system would transform gaming. That was only partially true; gamers could do novel things like swing an imaginary golf club or dance, but the Kinect wasn't sensitive enough to register intricate maneuvers. The system, however, has become most popular among hackers, who used it to build smart shopping carts and gesture-controlled quadrocopters. In November, the company will launch an upgraded Kinect with the Xbox One console. With that release, Microsoft could finally disrupt gaming at the level it had originally intended, changing not only how we interact with games but also how games interact with us.

Successful videogames have one thing in common: immersion. When drawn in, players lose track of time, their pulse rises, they become unaware of their surroundings, and, according to a recent study at the University College London, they have difficulty returning to reality. In short, their point of view shifts from the real world to the virtual world. But while it's easy to identify an immersive game (or scene within a game) after the fact, developers have never had feedback of a player's engagement in real time.

The intensity of a game
could ratchet up as a player leaned forward or his heart began to race.With the new Kinect, reams of information will flow from the gamer. And that data will be granular enough to detect extremely subtle signals. A high-speed 1080p camera can detect minute movements, including eye blinks, wrist twists, and muscle flexes. Using a combination of the camera's color feed and the active infrared, the Kinect can also pick up fluctuations in a gamer's facial blood flow to estimate heart rate.

Developers could mine that data to change the way games unfold. Along with a player's skills-response time, shooting accuracy-his reactions could factor into gameplay. For example, the intensity of a game could ratchet up as a player leaned forward or his heart began to race. Games could even respond to facial expressions. Granted, precise emotions are hard to nail down (intense fear and intense joy both raise the heart rate). For that reason, applications may be basic at first-adjusting difficulty based on a player's posture, for instance.

That probably won't be the case for long, as sensors become more powerful, affordable, and easily integrated into devices. Already, Israeli company Umoove has created compact head- and eye-tracking systems that could adjust a player's viewpoint based on head movements. And Irish start-up Galvanic has developed a prototype skin-conductivity sensor that can better correlate a player's stress level and in-game performance. Consoles with such heightened senses will allow for games that are progressively more immersive-and blur the once stark line between the real world and the virtual one.

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

There's no better way to combine a love of drinking and a love of technology than by employing the services of a robot bartender. We've seen many a drink-pouring prototype, but to program a truly viable machine bartender that can take orders in a natural setting, scientists have to break down the fundamentals of the bar experience--like when exactly a customer wants to order.

A bar is a pretty confusing place for a naive 'bot. There are so many people milling about, only some of whom are actually interested in obtaining another drink at any given point in time. So to figure out what conditions indicate a robot bartender should zoom over and ask someone if they need a refill, the researchers studied bartender-customer interactions at several German bars, recording more than 100 orders to see what kinds of behavioral signals result in a successful order most often.

They found that bartenders responded most often to two pretty obvious bodily signals indicating that someone wanted to order a drink. The customers positioned their bodies directly toward the bar, and they looked at someone on the staff. Standing facing the bar had a 95 percent success rate of being served within 35 seconds, while looking at the bartender was 86 percent successful. Things that didn't usually result in being served: chatting with others, staring at a menu, waving at the bartender.

The data will be used to improve the response rate of a robotic bartender named James. Read more about the project here, or take a look at the full study in Frontiers in Psychology.

[The Telegraph]

Hold your horses (cows?), guys. A new analysis of data from the Curiosity rover found there's very little methane in the atmosphere of Mars. Methane gas can be a sign of biological activity-of microbial Martians, farting up the atmosphere-so we're feeling a bit disappointed.

At most, the Martian atmosphere has a methane concentration of 1.3 parts per billion, according to the new analysis. That's one-sixth as much as previous estimates. The measurement means there's little chance methane-producing organisms are currently living on Mars, the researchers wrote in a paper they published today in the journal Science.

The data came from Curiosity's Tunable Laser Spectrometer, which was specially designed to look for methane gas. The instrument has not detected any methane to date. (The team last gave us a similarly sad update on Curiosity's findings in late 2012).

Previous studies of methane on Mars, conducted using data from telescopes based on Earth and in orbit around the red planet, have found more of the gas. Some analyses have found different concentrations of methane at different sites on the planet, or at different times of year. In 2003, one team reported seeing strong plumes of methane at a different location than where Curiosity sampled. That 2003 study has been controversial among astronomers.

There are micro-organisms that don't produce methane, so we're not totally giving up on the possibility of Martians just yet.

Nor does the presence of methane mean there definitely is, or was, something living on a planet. If the Mars air does contain methane, it could come from living organisms, extinct organisms, or geological (not biological) processes within the planet itself. It could have also been carried there from elsewhere in space.

This Saturday at a harbor near Washington, D.C., a team of student engineers is going to shove a homemade flying contraption off a cliff. With their friend inside.

Don't worry too much. Tommy Fallon, the pilot-to-be, and his four teammates (including his instructor) from Temple University designed their wooden aircraft based on Orville and Wilbur Wright's 1902 Glider plans. That aircraft flew distances of more than 600 feet and informed the design of the Wright's motorized Wright Flyer, the first powered airplane to achieve heavier-than-air flight in 1903.

Temple Aeronautics Design and their Wright Glider redux will be one of 29 teams participating in National Red Bull Flugtag, which is an annual contest to fly human-powered aircraft by pushing them off a 30-foot-tall flight deck (and into a body of water).

We stopped by the team's workshop in Philadelphia to see if they stand a chance of busting Red Bull Flugtag's current world-record distance of 229 feet.

The annals of scientific history are filled with brilliant men who, when push came to shove, weren't exactly super nice guys. Renown evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin, though, may have gotten more of a bad rap when it comes to his views on women than he rightly deserves.

Historians have long thought of Darwin as a pretty typical man of his time--a Victorian conservative who once wrote that having a wife would be "better than a dog, anyhow," and in his writing "cast women as deficient in arenas 'requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination'"--but his private letters to women, published through the Darwin Correspondence Project, tell a slightly more nuanced story of the scientist's views on gender.

Previously unpublished letters between Darwin and various women, like the naturalist Mary Treat and suffragette Lydia Becker, show that "his views on gender were a lot more complex than has been acknowledged in the past," according to Philippa Hardman, leader of the Darwin and Gender project. "He was very comfortable collaborating with women like Treat and Becker and encouraged their scientific work wherever possible."

The same scientist who wrote publicly that sexual selection made men "more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman [with] a more inventive genius" also corresponded regularly with suffragettes and lent a professional hand to the relatively few female scientists around at the time. He encouraged Treat to publish her research on butterflies in scientific journals, and wrote in other letters that women should not be excluded from scientific education.

"There are a number of reasons why Darwin may not have openly expressed his attitudes towards gender equality in public," Hardman said in a statement. "[Philosopher John Stuart] Mill, following The Subjection Of Women, was openly ridiculed as ‘feminine'--not a portrayal that Darwin needed, given the masculinity associated with academic science at the time. It is also possible that as the proponent of controversial scientific views, he simply felt that further public wrangling on the question of women's rights was something that he could ill afford."

He wasn't a feminist by any means, but at least we can be a little less disappointed in him.

Making sure that there's enough shelter available for populations displaced by war is a challenge of cost and scale. Fortunately, challenges of cost and scale are something businesses can be really good at. Ikea, best known for making assemble-at-home furniture for poor college kids and divorced men, has a charitable arm, the Ikea Foundation, that's working with the UN Refugee Agency to test new, better, easily assembled shelters for refugees.

The shelter pictured above costs around $1,000 and can house a family of five. It even includes a solar panel that powers both a lamp and a USB outlet. A handful of the shelters have been tested in Ethiopia, as well as in camps in Iraq and Lebanon designed for Syrian refugees.

The video below shows a shelter being assembled:

Hiroshi Yamauchi was the president of Nintendo from 1949 to 2002, and might be the person most responsible for bringing gaming into mainstream culture. He shepherded the company when it was a small business selling playing cards, and, through ingenious marketing, turned hobbyist idols like Zelda, Mario, and a swath of others, into cultural touchstones. He died today at 85.

Before Yamauchi's 53-year tenure (in the U.S., CEOs reign for about eight years on average these days, by the way), Nintendo was a tiny company making playing cards. Yamauchi's father, the legend goes, left his family when he was five, and less than two decades later, Yamauchi would transform Nintendo into a child-focused gaming empire. Yamauchi first searched for markets in soup, taxis, and even Japanese "love hotels" before recognizing the potential of the video game market.

Later, he was the business mind who recognized the creative genius in Shigeru Miyamoto, the man who created Donkey Kong and other Nintendo classics. What's more, Yamauchi realized that kids would want those characters and stories near them all the time. (At the time, games were still frequently relegated to arcades; Nintendo planted them firmly in the home.) So in 1983 Yamauchi spearheaded the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System, perhaps the most iconic game console ever released. It wasn't the first home console, but it was the most popular one of its generation. Then, in 1990, Nintendo released the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and did it all over again. That became my console, the one that reminds me most of childhood, when I played 12 hours of Super Mario World convinced there was a secret level. Yamauchi would oversee the release of two more consoles--the Nintendo 64 and GameCube--and countless wonderful games, like Mario 64 and Super Smash Bros, to name just a couple, before stepping down in 2002.

The NES was a gamble when it was released; the success of home gaming systems was unproven. So without Yamauchi stepping in and permanently altering the landscape, we not only wouldn't have the Nintendo games that touched so many--it's hard to say what else we might've missed out on, too.

Car companies like Nissan and Lexus are doing it. Tech companies like Google are doing it. So why not Tesla, the company with the tightest integration of tech and automotive?

According to some strong rumors and hints, it's looking like Tesla, makers of all-electric luxury vehicles, is working on a self-driving car. The first hint is that Elon Musk, the founder of the company, um, basically said it on Twitter.

Intense effort underway at Tesla to develop a practical autopilot system for Model S

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 18, 2013

Engineers interested in working on autonomous driving, pls email autopilot@teslamotors.com. Team will report directly to me.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 18, 2013

But that's not all! In an interview with the Financial Times (locked behind a paywall, argh, what's up with journalists demanding payment for their work), Musk said that the company is working on a "90 percent" autonomous vehicle within three years, and a fully autonomous version after that.

Tesla is a curious and sometimes difficult company; they've had trouble with reviewers (as in, Musk accused an NYT reviewer of fudging numbers in his negative review) as well as various production delays. Elon Musk has had enormous success with his other companies, namely PayPal (which has a near-monopoly on online banking and payment) and SpaceX (the most successful private American space agency in history), but Musk reserves his public bluster mostly for Tesla, even individually responding to negative reviews of Tesla's cars.

Musk is passionate and prone to overblown statements, but he's had enormous successes in industries that shouldn't have allowed a startup to come in and dominate. Banking and spaceflight are two of the toughest areas to change; it often takes top-down initiatives from the President to have significant impact on either. The automotive industry, though, has had major shakeups in the past decade or so, with the introduction and success of the hybrid car, the battle for increased gas mileage, and now the beginning stages of the electric car revolution. Musk clearly thinks Tesla is already on track to be a major part of the latter update, so why not keep looking forward? And what else could be next but automation?

Murder and car-jacking simulator Acclaimed video game Grand Theft Auto V was released on Tuesday, and every man, woman, child, and several species of lower fauna purchased multiple copies, propelling it to the category of Biggest Entertainment Thing Ever. How big? It made an estimated $800 million in 24 hours. That's a larger first-day take than any movie, game, or album ever released.

Not to compare apples and oranges, but by contrast, even blockbuster movies don't come anywhere near that. The Avengers was a gargantuan success, and it still raked in a relatively minuscule $80 million. If you adjust 1983's Return of the Jedi for inflation, it still only comes to $14 million for opening day.

GTA V was also reportedly the most expensive game ever made, with production costs running an estimated $115 million. Still not a bad return on investment, though.

[Fast Company]