Influenza Ward in France, World War I

Public domain image made available by the U.S. National Library of Medicine

As the flu spread across the U.S. last winter—earlier and more seriously than usual—several computer models were watching. There was Google Flu Trends, which famously went awry that season. And there was a nameless model, built by researchers at several U.S. universities, designed not only to track how many people have the flu, but also to forecast when flu instances will peak in individual cities across the U.S.

By the last week of December, the model was able to guess cities' peak week 63 percent of the time, the researchers wrote in a paper published today in the journal Nature Communications. Of course, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as Google Flu Trends, keep close tabs on how many people have the flu in the U.S. at any given time. And researchers have long known that in temperate regions, there's a flu season that peaks somewhere between December and April. But this is the first time scientists have predicted when the flu will peak as the season progressed.

In some cases, the model worked up to nine weeks in advance, which is long enough for cities to stockpile flu medicines or launch a it's-coming-get-vaccinated campaign.  The model's data didn't go to any policymakers last year, but its creators say they hope their work will eventually help officials reduce the number of Americans who get the flu every year. Even a prediction just a few weeks in advance could trigger cities to tell their residents to wash their hands more frequently.

Although most healthy, young people weather the flu just fine, it can be serious or fatal to babies, elderly people and people with weakened immune systems. Depending on the year, anywhere from 3,000 to 49,000 Americans die from flu infections annually.

The new predictor combines numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Google Flu Trends, and a basic flu model the researchers created. It predicted flu peaks for 108 American cities, some with greater accuracy than others. (The predictor fares better with cities that have smaller populations, higher density and smaller areas.) The forecaster has been in the works for a while. Its creators tested a previous version of it on data on flu in New York City.

Several times a day, human bodies release a stream of data about internal health. Unfortunately, the data comes analog, and so isn't immediately accessible as useful information. Now an infographic from the Cleveland Clinic offers a helpful breakdown of urine colors, from healthy "pale straw" to icky "brown ale." This guide is good for a fast check, but as the Cleveland Clinic recommends, if you think your pee looks weird, it's probably best to go find an actual doctor.

The Color Of Pee

Cleveland Clinic

Michelin Sign

Caffeinatrix on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The Michelin Man's familiar rolls may get a material makeover in the next decade. French tire company Michelin, supported by a subsidy from France's Environment and Energy Management Agency, will spend $71 million (52 million euros) over the next eight years researching whether it's feasible to make tires in part from plant-based materials, the U.K.'s The Guardian reports. Tires are normally made with a combination of natural rubber from rubber trees and synthetic rubber made from petroleum by-products.

The company and other tire and chemical companies are worried about rising prices for their favorite petroleum by-product, butadiene, The Guardian reports. Increased interest in shale gas is behind the expected butadiene shortage, as energy companies shift focus from oil to gas.

Tire companies have also sought to replace the some of the oil that goes into tires with plant-based alternatives, to improve the tires' performance. Japanese tire company Yokohama has replaced a small percentage of the oil that goes in its tires with orange oil and Goodyear announced last year it's researching soybean oil for tires. Such alternatives aren't necessarily better for the environment than regular oil, however. For example, Yokohama "has no idea" whether its orange-oil supplier is particularly environmentally friendly, Popular Mechanics reported in 2012. The oil replacement was about performance, not about the state of the Earth. 

[Guardian]

Tribogenics The MiniMax

Tribogenics

The MiniMAX is the world’s smallest, most portable x-ray machine. Unlike its predecessors, which are a couple of feet wide and quite heavy, MiniMAX weighs five pounds. It can be whisked to accidents, crime scenes, battlefields, airports, sidelines, and any other place that could benefit from on-the-spot x-ray vision. Inside, an x-ray source about the size of a can of soda generates a beam as powerful as stationary machines, and rather than rely on a bulky transformer, it draws power from a 9-volt battery. The secret to the x-ray source is a blend of special polymers that build up huge amounts of static electricity when brought together and discharge it when the surfaces separate. This year, Los Alamos National Laboratory teamed with Leica, x-ray company Tribogenics, and two others to develop a handheld prototype.

STATS

Weight: 5 pounds

Detector: Cesium bromide

Housing: Carbon fiber

So this isn't exactly from the point of view of an eagle as much as it's from the point of view of an unlucky mouse. The Gooniyandi Rangers, an Australian Aboriginal group similar to American park rangers, inadvertently captured this video when a sea eagle stole one of their cameras and flew with it some 110 kilometers. They had originally set the motion-triggered camera by a river in hopes of catching some footage of crocodiles. Australian broadcaster ABC News has the story.

The rangers believe the eagle must have been young, because more experienced eagles normally drop captured prey from a great height to kill it, ABC News reports.

Our rookie eagle friend lives in the Kimberley region of western Australia, a tropical area the size of California that's home to many unique animal species. 

Head YOUTEK Graphene Speed Pro

Sam Kaplan

By the gram, graphene is the world’s strongest material, but its commercial applications have remained few. Head is the first sporting goods company to integrate it into a product. By reinforcing the Speed Pro racquet with graphene, Head stiffened the frame without adding weight, so players get more power without sacrificing control. $225

Qualcomm Toq

Sam Kaplan

Amid a flurry of text and e-mail alerts, designers tend to forget something critical about smartwatches: They still need to show the time. LCDs wash out in the sunlight, and e-ink is blank in the dark. The Toq’s Mirasol display is the only full-color one that’s always visible. Each pixel is a tiny glass pane; as charge moves through the screen, the pane moves to reflect different ambient light wavelengths—red, blue, or green—to the viewer. An LED provides the necessary light when it’s dark. Price not set

A Whale's Tale

Mark Jones Roving Tortoise Photos/Getty Images

Baleen whales have no need for Q-tips. Water blocks off the ear canal, which has a unique anatomy, so over time wax builds up into what researchers call an earplug. Previously, scientists counted the layers of wax, like counting tree rings, to help determine a whale’s age, but a team at Baylor University in Texas recently discovered that the gunk contains even more information. Because fluctuations in hormones and chemical exposures are documented in the earwax, it can provide a chronological archive of a deceased whale’s life. And while blubber samples can yield one data point on exposure, earwax can reveal when that exposure happened—details that weren’t available before now. Museums have hundreds of earplugs from the baleen whale group, which contains 14 species. So far, the Baylor team has used one (about a foot long) from a male blue whale to figure out when it hit puberty, what pollutants its mother passed along during nursing, and when it encountered pesticides and mercury. Next, the researchers plan to try to answer questions such as how many pregnancies a female has had and whether the noise of passing ships has physiological effects. 

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

Modern Times

Wikimedia Commons

According to a study conducted by the Library of Congress, 70 percent of American silent films are lost--and a good portion of the remaining ones aren't exactly in great shape, either. Of the 11,000 films made before "talkies" came into the picture, only about 3,300 are left. Of those, 17 percent are incomplete, and some, like the only missing Greta Garbo feature, The Divine Woman, are down to a single remaining reel. What happened?

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington explains in the study's foreword that, with the rise of sound, silent movies were seen as having little commercial value. As myopic as it comes across from a 21st-century vantage point, silent films were lost to "chemical decay, fire, lack of commercial value, cost of storage," and most film producers were content with unsentimentally moving on toward the Next Big Thing. From the study, here's the breakdown of what we lost, and what we have left:

American Silent Feature Film Survival

Library of Congress

With a more complete view of what we're missing, we might be able to better prevent losing more. Anticipating that, the Library has also released a searchable database filled with every silent feature still around.  

[via The Verge]

Image of One Gel Electrophoresis Experiment, Copied Three Times

Original image made by Dr d12 on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Italian biologist Enrico Bucci originally developed his startup's software to make scientists' lives easier. The software is a search engine that automatically pulls images from published scientific papers. Say you're studying a certain cancer. Bucci's software can collect for you a bunch of images of gel electrophoresis experiments—a common type of experiment in biochemistry—having to do with the cancer you're studying. Handy, right?

But as he was developing his software, Bucci noticed several duplicated images of "gels," as they're called. That is, it seems that in their papers, many scientists were claiming they ran numerous gel experiments that gave them the same results. Instead, they published images of the exact same gel, or parts of the same gel, pretending they were different experiments. Bucci's findings have already led to the investigation of one prominent cancer researcher in Italy, Afredo Fusco of the University of Naples, Nature News reports. Fusco likely won't be the last. Bucci has found that one in four papers run through his software have "anomalies."

Any editor reading a paper before deciding to publish it should be able to see if the paper has copied gels in it (Although this doesn't always happen). What's helpful about Bucci's software is that it's able to compare gels made by the same scientist over his or her entire career. If a cheating scientist copies gel images in several different papers, an editor would be hard-pressed to catch it, but Bucci's company software will find the similarities.

Bucci and his company are now analyzing the papers of tens of Italian scientists their software has red-flagged, Nature News reports. They had originally used the software to compile a list of scientists whose names appear as authors on three or more retracted papers. There are a million names on the list, too many for them to investigate, so they decided to focus just on their own home country.

[Nature]

Silkworms Fed a Red Dye Form Pink Silk

American Chemical Society, from "Uptake of Azo Dyes into Silk Glands for Production of Colored Silk Cocoons Using a Green Feeding Approach"

Brown cows may not actually make chocolate milk, but pink silkworms do produce pink skeins of silk, a team of scientists has discovered. To see if they could produce pre-dyed silk—silk that comes colored, straight from the source—the team fed ordinary silkworms mulberry leaves that had been sprayed with fabric dyes. Out of seven tested dyes, only one worked, producing a thread that reminded me of pink-dyed hair.

And yes, the worms themselves take on some color before they weave their silk cocoons. Their colorful diets did not affect their growth, the team, which included engineers and biologists from the CSIR-National Chemical Laboratory in India, reports in the journal ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering. (The researchers didn't look too deeply into how the dyes affected the silkworms' health. After all, silkworms die when people harvest their silk.)

The team investigated dyeing silk this way because coloring fabric normally uses enormous amounts of fresh water. The water gets contaminated with dangerous chemicals in the process, requiring costly treatment before factories can dump it back into waterways—or wreaking havoc when factory owners dodge cleanup rules.

Dyeing silk directly by feeding silkworms would eliminate those water-washing steps. Scientists are just starting to study this idea, however, it remains to be seen if it's commercially viable. In this experiment, the Indian team tested seven azo dyes, which are cheap and popular in the industry.

The scientists found different dyes moved through silkworms' bodies differently. Some never made it into the worms' silk at all. Others colored the worms and their cocoons, but the color molecules settled mostly in the sticky protein the worms add to their cocoons. That sticky stuff gets washed away before the silk is turned into fabric. Only one dye, named "direct acid fast red," showed up in the final, washed silk threads. By the time it made it there, it was a pleasant, light pink.

Penguin Selfie

G Adventures

Between this penguin and this eagle, it has been a good week for incidental animal selfies. Travel company G Adventures set up a GoPro camera on a visit to Antarctica, when a penguin apparently decided to examine the equipment more closely. 

Yes, yes. Cute. But did you know, as I just learned, that penguins have spiny tongues for trapping wiggly fish and devouring them? That is evil, penguins, and makes this photo 80 percent more diabolical.   

[G Adventures via Colossal]

The Old USB

ed g2s

The new plugs and receptacles will be bilaterally symmetrical, so never again will you try and fail to plug in a USB plug because it's upside-down!  "Users will no longer need to be concerned with plug orientation," says the press release calmly.

The new USB standard, called Type C, will not connect to existing USB ports, but that's a small price to pay.

Roboray

Roboray maps its surroundings in real time.

Samsung

Roboray, developed by the University of Bristol and Samsung, brings engineers a step closer to a robotic SWAT team. The 4.6-foot-tall biped uses mapping software to help it get its bearings, and a suite of 53 actuators provides unprecedented agility. Roboray can 3-D–map its surroundings on the fly, enabling it to quickly navigate through an environment and around obstacles without GPS.

STATS

Height: 4.6 feet

Weight: 110 pounds

Vision: Head-mounted stereo camera

UCSD Skysweeper

UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Skysweeper inches along live power lines scouting for bad splices, frays, tangled branches, and other trouble spots. Developed by engineers at the University of California at San Diego, it will be the most affordable and versatile power-line monitoring tool. Production versions of this will have induction coils to grab power from the lines and cameras and sensors to beam information to an inspection crew.

President Obama Inside A SCIF In A Rio De Janiero Hotel Room

President Obama authorizes military action in Libya inside a "Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility," made inside his hotel room in Rio de Janeiro.

Pete Souza, via Wikimedia Commons

When members of the U.S. military and other federal government agencies need to discuss the big secrets, they go into secure, soundproof rooms called "Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities," or SCIFs (pronounced "skiffs"). Except, according to initial research by acoustics engineer Marlund Hale, the rooms might not be all that soundproof.

The problem, Hale says, is that the whole of a SCIF is less secure than the sum of its parts. The requirements for making a site secure are elaborate; the unclassified version of the technical specifications runs at 158 pages. Acoustic insulation standards cover all sides of the room, including the floor and ceiling. Despite these standards for individual sections, the door and frame systems often don't seal as well as intended, letting noise escape, Hale says. He suggests the flaws arise when contractors neglect specific design details during construction. As a result, SCIFs are no more soundproof than a typical California apartment, according to Hale, who presented his findings yesterday at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America.

Current Department of Defense design standards "only require sufficient acoustical isolation to prevent a casual passerby from understanding classified information, but do not need to be adequate to prevent a deliberate effort by someone to understand that information," Hale says.

Next week, Hale will conduct 13 more tests on another military installation. Among his early recommendations are special airlock-like, two-part entrances, which would prevent sound from traveling down the hall when a door opens. Until new improvements are adopted for acoustic insulation, it's probably a good idea for people with secret information to use their inside voices when inside a SCIF.

Animal Testing

Ryan Snook

Last summer, the National Institutes of Health announced that it’s phasing out experiments on chimpanzees. All but 50 of its 451 chimps will go to sanctuaries, and it won’t breed the remainder. The change is based on its 2011 study that determined that advancements have rendered human trials, computer-based research, and genetically modified mice more scientifically useful than chimps. The U.S. is late to this. Australia, Japan, and the E.U. have already banned or limited experiments on great apes in medical research. But the science community should take it further. We should work to end all animal testing for good. 

Ninety percent of drugs that pass animal testing then fail in human trials.It’s not just a moral question. Ethics aside, there are plenty of scientific reasons to push away from animal testing. The most important is that animal-based methods are being equaled or surpassed by other means. And the result is better science overall. Over the last 10 years, we’ve started replacing rodents with human cells in drug toxicity tests. But the biggest hurdle is probably testing efficacy: how well a drug treats a medical condition. A common tack is to genetically manipulate mice to imitate human diseases, but human and mouse genes still behave differently. In part because of this, 90 percent of drugs that pass animal testing then fail in human trials.

Organs on a chip are one alternative. The thumb- size devices combine a thin layer of human cells with microchips that pump bloodlike fluid through them. At Harvard’s Wyss Institute, researchers have built a human gut-on-a-chip that replicates intestinal muscular contractions and a lung-on-a-chip with air-sac and capillary cells that exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide. The pseudo-lung can get infected and mimic complicated diseases such as chemotherapy-induced pulmonary edema. The institute is also working on chips for bone marrow, heart, and even brain tissue.

Computer models can help replace animals too. In the relatively new field of systems biology, scientists are making digital maps that simulate entire systems of the human body, down to the molecule. The Center for Systems Biology at the University of Iceland recently finished modeling all the chemical interactions of human metabolism and is starting on the blood. Last year, researchers at the University of California at San Francisco used a computer to predict negative side effects in on-market drugs with about 50 percent accuracy. That accuracy will only get better.

Human studies are also getting stronger. Lab animals are usually genetically identical clones, but people have lots of DNA differences that can affect how a drug works. For example, in 2010 it was discovered that the popular heart-attack-prevention drug Plavix is less effective for nearly one in three patients because of variances in their metabolisms. Now, gene tests can help doctors choose whether or not to prescribe it, and similar tests could do the same for other drugs. By relying on cloned animals and cells, we’ve probably been screening out helpful medicines before they even get to human trials.

Some animal testing will remain scientifically necessary for a long time. Studying visual perception, for example, requires a working eyeball connected to a brain (until a computer perfectly mimics it). But the more research options we create, the better science we’ll have. 

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

"You can ban drugs, but you can't ban chemistry," Mike Power, author of Drugs 2.0, explains in this talk at the HIT Hot Topics Conference. And he gives a personal, investigative story to prove it.

Governments can legislate chemicals--ban a drug, say, a stimulant or a psychedelic--but what happens when chemists make a slightly different version by mixing in a new molecule? The drug becomes, legally, something different, and for as long as it takes the government to catch up on the new substance, the drug can be sold. Power went on a quest to discover just how easy that process was, out-sourcing a version of the stimulant phenmetrazine to a Chinese lab, and in a few weeks, getting the legal version delivered to his door in the United Kingdom. The lab never even learned his name. 

What's the answer to that loophole? Power offers one, but it's a slow build to how he gets there, and the video is worth watching in its entirety.