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7 Cool Gifts For Music Nerds

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Urbanears Re:Plattan
Claire Benoist

As scientists toil away to discover what draws humans to music, how it stimulates our brains, and why it’s so integral to our history, we’ve compiled a list of the coolest gifts for the music enthusiasts in your life. This guide is perfect for the aspiring hipster who wants to break out of the top-20 bubble, or the nerdy musician who hacks instruments and curates an extensive music collection.

Click here to enter the gallery


    







Anki Drive

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Anki Drive
Sam Kaplan

The Anki R/C cars are the first toy racers that interact as they would in a videogame. An iPhone app constantly tracks each car’s location and calculates its most likely path around the loop. That data allows racers to deploy virtual weapons (think blasters and tractor beams) to get ahead. Each car also has a memory, so the more a user plays with it, the faster and deadlier it becomes.$199 (two cars and track)

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Simulated Gophers Explain Mysterious Mima Mounds

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black-and-white photo of Mima mounds in the Puget lowlands
Mima Mounds South of Olympia, Washington
Arthur M. Ritchie, Washington State Department of Natural Resources

It’s one of those things that teachers in Washington state use to hook kids on science, alongside salmon runs, hydropower plants and those weird sea stars with way too many arms. Mima mounds, I diligently learned, are 6-foot-tall, 30-foot-wide domes of dirt that cover the open prairie on Washington’s Puget lowlands. They are so large and uniform, it’s hard not to feel they must be man-made. But nobody actually knows who or what made them. They are a scientific mystery, I learned.

Now, one team of geologists says they’ve uncovered the secrets of the Mima mounds. Using a computer program that simulates the behaviors of pocket gophers, the team found that hundreds of generations of the animals will eventually make Mima mounds, Livescience reports. The team, led by San Jose State University geologist Manny Gabet, published a paper on their work in October and presented their results at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting this week.

So as thousands of children learn this season that Santa isn’t real, I, too, am losing a bit of childhood magic. (But explanations are a cool replacement.)

photo of Mima mounds covered in wildflowers
Mima Mounds in Washington
Office of the Secretary of State

The new computer study doesn’t absolutely prove gophers are the Mima mounds’ builders, but it’s good evidence for the gopher hypothesis, Ronald Sletten, a University of Washington soil scientist who has studied Washington’s Mima mounds, told Livescience. You can see other hypotheses in this 2008 article from The Seattle Times. Either way, it seems clear they were not made by some ancient hobbits of Washington, which was what I was kind of hoping for.

There is still a bit of mystery left to the structures. Mima-like mounds appear on all continents except Antarctica. The digging behaviors of pocket gophers, which live in the American West, fit well into Gabet’s model. However, it’s still unclear what could have made the mounds that appear where pocket gophers don’t live. Gabet suggested to the BBC that scientists open those mounds to see if other digging mammals might live in them.


    






Killing Fungus With Plastic Bottles

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micrograph image of Candida albicans
The Fungus Candida albicans

File this under weird things that work. Scientists have created a plastic-like material that, once in the body, acts as a drug against a fungus that causes infections in eyes and other body parts.

In experiments performed in petri dishes, the drug is promising. It punctures fungal cells, but not rat blood cells or human skin cells—a good sign that it may work against infections without too many ill side effects. The fungal cells also didn’t develop any resistance to the drug after several generations, which is important for a drug to keep working for a long time after it’s introduced. So the material, which can be made from plastic bottles, could be a candidate anti-fungal drug. Like other drugs, however, it will require a decade or more of testing to confirm it’s both safe and effective for people to take.

To test the plastic-based drug, biologists coated a contact lens with cells of the fungus Candida albicans.

The experimental medicine is part of a relatively new attempt to turn plastic-like materials into drugs. Scientists originally worked plastics into, say, the capsules of medicines, but in the past few years, some researchers have started to examine whether the materials themselves could be therapeutic. This new research was performed in part at IBM’s research center in San Jose, California. The semiconductor company has been researching what else it can do with the materials it originally developed to etch patterns into silicon wafers, Spike Narayan, the director of science and technology at IBM Research, tells Popular Science.

The molecules IBM and other researchers studied here tend to pack together in structures with an overall positive charge. Reseachers think they work by interacting with and penetrating the walls of fungal cells, which have a negative charge.

To test the efficacy of the new drug, the researchers, from the U.S., Japan, Singapore and China, conduced some delightfully gross experiments. In one, biologists coated a contact lens with cells of the fungus Candida albicans. When they applied their therapeutic, the Candida cells burst. (Don’t think about this too closely if you wear contact lenses.) (But do let me just say Candida albicans also cause yeast infections in women.) (You’re welcome.)

The scientists also gave mice Candida albicans eye infections, then treated their mice with their plastic-derived drug, with a strong prescription antifungal drug called amphotericin B, or with water drops. Both the new drug and amphotericin B, which is available for doctors and patients today, worked against the infection. Water didn’t.

IBM researchers are chemists, not biomedicine researchers, so the next step for their discovery is to wait to see if any pharmaceutical companies give them a call about taking on their work and advancing it. The research team published its work yesterday in the journal Nature Communications


    






Home Test Kit Helps You Find Antibiotics In Leaves

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screenshot showing a petri dish with test substances and instructions printout
ILIAD Project Petri Dish and Instructions
Screenshot from “The ILIAD Project Indiegogo Video” on YouTube

Penicillin comes from bread mold, and many antibiotics in use today come from soil bacteria species called actinomycetes. You might even have some antibiotic-producing critters in your own back yard. One pair of scientists certainly hopes so. Josiah Zayner and Mark Opal have started a crowdfunding campaign to send out kits to folks at home to test leaves, twigs, insects and fungi as candidate antibiotic sources.

The pair hope to crowdsource the discovery of new antibiotics. They’re taking on a hot topic in medicine right now. This September, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report saying that drug-resistant microbes are a growing threat in the U.S., where 23,000 people die each year with infections that modern drugs can’t cure. These people need new drugs, but, the CDC’s director of antimicrobial resistance told The Washington Post, “We do not have antibiotics in the pipeline that are going to be available soon enough to address those problems.”

photo of a wood box with a window showing penicillum mold inside
Sample of Penicillin Mold Presented by Alexander Fleming to Douglas Macleod, 1935

With the kits, people get the tools to grind up and test different natural things they may find around them, including parts of plants, insects and fungi and samples of bacteria. If they find a promising natural substance, they’re able to send their stuff to a professional lab for verification. Zayner and Opal have named their campaign the International Laboratory for Identification of Antibacterial Drugs, or the ILIAD project. As of today, the project is about one-fifth of the way to its $42,000 funding goal, which it needs to meet for Zayner and Opal to get the money and start producing kits.

Can home experiments really find working antibiotics? That probably depends on how many people participate, how creative people are about testing different substances (It doesn’t help if everybody in the neighborhood tries maple leaves), and a lot of luck. But even beyond the ILIAD Project’s noble goal, what struck me about these kits is that they sound really fun.

You can read about the experimental procedure on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. It seems straightforward enough to be a great introduction to experimentation for kids. Yet it still has that element of the uncontrollable. That is, it’s real science, and the results aren’t foregone. Compare that even to the buffering experiments many high school students do in their chemistry classes.

[Indiegogo via The Verge]


    






A Toy Box That's Opened By A Kid's Fingerprint

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Toy Box
Courtesy Grant Gibson

Four-year-old Ewan Gibson loves toy cars. His dad, Grant, a Scottish Web developer, prefers electronics. Hoping to find common ground—and inspired by Apple’s new finger-scanning iPhone—Grant built a biometric lockbox for his son’s cars. He installed a sensor that scans fingers in the lid of the toy box. The data is sent to an Arduino microcontroller, which, when it recognizes one of Ewan’s prints, unlocks the lid. Although Ewan is more interested in the cars than the box, it does fascinate him: As he says, his “fingers are magic.”

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


    






Why Do Pipes Burst?

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One lonely burst pipe.
Cynthia Closkey, via Flickr

When the weather gets cold, localnewsoutlets start warning listeners about pipes bursting. But what exactly happens when water splits metal? Seattle engineer Nick Berry (who recently tested the limits of QR codes) wrote up a handy blog post to explain. The answer comes down to how water reacts at different temperatures. As water freezes, the molecules crystallize into a hexagonal form, which takes up more space than molecules in its liquid form. This expansion—which Berry notes can add 9 percent more volume—causes cool things, like floating icebergs, but also not-cool things, like flooded basements. 

But this is only part of the conundrum: Berry also examines why pipes tend to split in the same manner every time. Surprisingly, it's the same reason sausages split the way they do. It all comes down to hoop stress and longitudinal stress within the pipe walls, which run around the pipe and up the pipe, respectively. For a thorough explanation of the physics, check out the blog post at Data Genetics.


    






Cloned Horse Wins Argentine Polo Open

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photo of a horse and a cloned foal touching noses
A Horse and Its Clone
Sally Harrison/ViaGen

Polo star Adolfo Cambiaso helped his team win the Argentine National Open this weekend, scoring nine goals in the 16-11 match. Two of those he scored atop a horse named Show Me—a clone, and the first to ride onto the Argentine pitch, the Calgary Herald reports.

Breeding top horses has always been big business, and now, with advancements in cloning technology, a handful of firms are offering a more surefire way of reproducing the performance of winning animals. Until recently, horses cloned from polo champions were simply too young to compete. The first cloned polo pony was born in 2010 and ponies don't usually ride in matches until they're five years old. With Cambiaso’s team’s win, however, riders and investors now have evidence that the clones themselves can do as well as their originals in a match, Outside magazine reports.

Cloned animals have showed up in a variety of places in the past few years. In 2009, South Korean scientists produced drug-detecting dogs that are clones of a sniffing star. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration ruled in 2008 that meat from cloned animals is safe to eat. Cloned cattle are usually used to breed new cows the old-fashioned way instead of going directly to slaughter, but officials in the U.K. found evidence in 2010 of two cloned cattle ending up in the food chain there. Meanwhile, cloned racehorses aren't popular because the U.S. Jockey Club, with which horses must register to race in North America, bans cloning.

The success of cloned polo ponies isn't guaranteed. Cloned horses are only genetically 98 percent alike to their originals, plus training and nutrition play essential roles in forming the final athlete, National Geographic reports.

Nevertheless, many are betting big on polo clones. In January, long before this weekend game, The Economist reported cloning firms were booked solid with requests, in spite of costing ten times as much as simply buying sperm from a winning stallion. Cambiaso himself, who is collaborating with the company Crestview Genetics, wants eventually to be able to play an entire game on clones of his favorite mounts, Outside reports.

You can see him talking about it in the video below. Don’t miss the slo-mo pastoral shots of a herd of cloned ponies grazing in a golden field:


    







Martin Aircraft Company P12 Jetpack

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Martin Aircraft Company P12 Jetpack
Martin Aircraft Company

In truth, ducted fans, not jets, propel Martin Aircraft’s creation, but who cares? It’s the jetpack dream made real. With computer-assisted flight controls, an auto- throttle system, a carbon Kevlar roll cage, and a parachute (it can soar to 8,000 feet at 63 miles per hour), the P12 is the first personal-flight device that a sane human might volunteer to fly. And this year, a test pilot stepped onto the frame, strapped on the harness, and did just that. 

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7 Gifts For The Gamer In Your Life

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Game Boy Flask

You, statistically, have a gamer in your life. If you do, you, overwhelmingly likely, will have to buy some Christmas presents for him or her this year. Maybe, though, you don't know anything about games. 

Solution No. 1: just absolutely lose it and buy the first thing you can find from a garage sale and you think maybe it's some kind of sham hand-held Nintendo product that never left Japan but whatever it's, like, December 22 and you're out of ideas. Or, Solution No. 2: stick to smaller stuff you know they'll like because, chances are, if they wanted it they'd already have it.

Here are some such alternatives. (If you still need more ideas, here's last year's list.)

 


    






Kratos Defense And Security Solutions Laser Weapon System

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Kratos Defense & Security Solutions Laser Weapon System
U.S. Navy

It’s only a matter of time before another country deploys drones against us. Armed with a laser range finder, the Kratos system will fire directed energy weapons at drone sensors to fry their electronics. Unlike ballistics, the weapon strikes nearly instantly, costs less than a dollar per shot, and doesn’t run the risk of stray bullets. After six years of development, the Navy debuts the system in 2014.

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NASA Unveils Valkyrie, Its Humanoid Rescue Robot [Video]

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The Boston Dynamics-built ATLAS is the rescue robot prototype that gets all the attention, but now NASA is getting in on the action, unveiling Valkyrie, a 6-foot 2-inch, 275-pound rescue robot. The 'bot, an entrant in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, a contest designed to find the life-saving robot of tomorrow, will soon undergo a test to see if it can perform tasks like climbing a ladder and using tools. 

Why is NASA involved? Because it wants to eventually send robots to Mars ahead of humans, and the DARPA challenge is providing data on how they can do it. Valkyrie itself won't be rocketed to space--it's a terrestrial robot, not built for that kind of travel--but it's a useful starting point for the agency. 

Valkyrie uses its three-fingered hands (update: and one thumb) to manipulate objects, and it's loaded with cameras and sensors so it can eventually operate as autonomously as possible. Plus, (and this is an admittedly small detail) the robot actually looks great. If it was trying to save my life, I wouldn't recoil in terror, probably.

[IEEE Spectrum]


    






How Will Space Commuters Navigate A Thicket Of Air Traffic?

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FACET
An image of airplane traffic from the simulation tool FACET.
Juan Alonso
"When space traffic becomes routine, there's going to be significant conflict between commercial air traffic and space traffic," says Juan Alonso, a Stanford professor of aeronautics and astronautics.

Right now, orbital launches are infrequent -- about 70 per year around the world. So if there is, say, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch scheduled from Cape Canaveral, the FAA decrees the area to be a "special use airspace" and bars plane traffic from the area for hours to accommodate it.

Special Use Airspace
45 SW Eastern Range: Special Use Airspace, PPT Presentation by Art Ladd

But Alonso is thinking 5 to 7 years into the future. With space tourism carriers like Virgin Galactic and XCOR planning multiple suborbital flights per day, and orbital flyers like SpaceX, Sierra Nevada, and Bigelow sending people and material into orbit, the skies will be getting crowded. The suborbital “up-and-down” space tourism flights offered by carriers like Virgin Galactic and XCOR may number anywhere from several hundred to multiple thousands a year – from zero today. Airline passengers will be less than thrilled to accept a lengthy delay so a rock star can sing in space or a billionaire can hang out in a "space hotel." Also, airlines lose money from delays, or from re-routing around special-use airspace, requiring extra fuel burn.

The Center for Excellence in Space Transportation

So Alonso and other research teams at the FAA’s Center for Excellence in Space Transportation are hard at work crunching numbers and simulating flights, trying to estimate space and air traffic levels in the near future – all to determine how to most equitably divvy up the national airspace. The timing is good for space traffic control, because the FAA is in the midst of a $40 billion transition from the ground-based, radar-based air traffic control system that exists today to a satellite-based system called NextGen. GPS units in planes will update air traffic control once per second, rather than once every several seconds, as radar does. And in the event of a crisis, like an exploding rocket and ensuing cloud of flaming debris, air traffic controllers using NextGen will be able to send electronic re-routing information directly to the plane’s flight management program, rather than requiring instructions to be given verbally over the radio.

”The FAA has been very proactive in dealing with this,” Alonso says. “It’s nice that they are doing something prior to this becoming a problem.”

Alonso and his colleagues have access to NASA's special airspace simulation tool, called FACET.

"It allows us to run back a day in the life of the air-traffic control system," says Alonso.

So Alonso has been running tens of thousands of simulations, taking into account weather variables, air traffic, and frequency of space launches. He models different distributions of flights when there might be a mere one launch a month, or as many as 6 orbital launches per week from different locations like New Mexico, California, Florida, and Colorado. In fact, the FAA has already licensed 8 different locations around the country as spaceports, and is reviewing applications for more. Not all of these spaceport aspirants will survive, but to model the future, Alonso has to create data for each of them.

4-D Compact Envelopes
Juan Alonso

4-D Compact Envelopes

His goal is to carve out pieces of airspace for space vehicles that are compact -- big enough to safely accommodate blast-off, re-entry and any emergency -- but small, so as to affect airplanes as little as possible. He calls the resulting spaces “4-D compact envelopes” – because they account for the 3 dimensions of space throughout the time of the launch. The green geometric shapes represent parts of the airspace where an airplane would risk hitting the rocket or debris with a higher than acceptable risk (the FAA hasn’t decided what this risk threshold would be, but Alonso cites 1 in 1 million as a hypothetical, and he can tweak his models for more or less risk). And though our photo is static, the 4-D compact envelope is dynamic – as the rocket goes farther along its trajectory, excluded airspace from earlier in the flight can be freed up for airplanes again.

 

Suborbital flights will reach speeds of 2,300 mph, enter space at roughly 62 miles above the surface of the earth, and then glide back down.
Making airspace restrictions better correspond to actual launch windows is part of Alonso’s general goal of making the air and space traffic system more dynamic. Blocking out space dynamically will also help in the event of a spacecraft making an emergency landing, or in the worst-case, suffering a catastrophic explosion. In the event of an emergency landing or explosion, mission control could block out more space immediately.

 

“If it would take 20 minutes for the debris to come down to the area airplanes might be, you can react by re-routing the airplanes around it,” Alonso says.

Alonso also wants to take the extremely short launch windows of orbital flights into account in making the system more dynamic. For example, when the space shuttle would go to the International Space Station, there was a launch opportunity that lasted just 10-15 minutes. If delays caused the crew to miss the launch window, the flight would need to be postponed.

“If you miss the launch window, the Space Station is already above Europe, and you’re never going to catch up with it with the fuel that you’ve got,” says Alonso. “If the window is that short, why would you be reserving the airspace for an hour or two before, and an hour or two after?”

Alonso is optimistic that introducing dynamism into the system, and only creating large areas of restricted airspace in the event of an explosion, will preclude hostile conflict between airliners and spaceliners.

“If we start putting more and more cars on the road, at a certain point we saturate the infrastructure,” Alonso says. “But we believe that for the estimates we’ve been doing, we can manage this conflict relatively effectively.”

Suborbital Versus Orbital

Suborbital Flight
Juan Alonso
Air traffic controllers will have time to adjust – commercial orbital flights, which must reach speeds of roughly 17,000 mph to begin circling the Earth, are a ways off from becoming a daily or even monthly occurrence. The first commercial flights that will occur in any significant numbers are the “suborbital” jaunts, like those that Virgin Galactic hopes to offer in 2014. These suborbital flights will reach speeds of “only” 2,300 mph, enter space at roughly 62 miles above the surface of the earth, and then glide back down in large circles after a few minutes.

Alonso finds the air traffic concerns of these craft much less complex. Because they are not trying to rendezvous with the ISS or a particular orbit, they don’t have a tight launch window – in other words, they can be delayed by weather or technical difficulties without needing to cancel the flight. Also, because suborbital flights are ultimately a joyride rather than a flight with a destination, there is also flexibility in whether the pilots head west, north or east. Lastly, so far, the spaceports are in remote locations. Spaceport America in New Mexico, from which Virgin Galactic will launch, is out of the way – in part because it is right near the White Sands Missile Range. These flights will not greatly interrupt airplanes.

“But they’re talking about putting a spaceport a few miles away from Denver International Airport – that may be a different story,” Alonso says.


    






One-Way, Manned Mission To Mars Just Got Closer To Reality

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Mars One 2018 Lander Concept Art
Bryan Versteeg and Mars One

Yesterday, Netherlands-based private spaceflight project Mars One announced the companies it hopes will build the technology necessary for the first private mission to Mars. Lockheed Martin and Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. were awarded contracts to study and develop concepts for a Mars lander and a data link satellite, respectively, for a 2018 exploratory mission. If that mission is successful, Mars One hopes to begin a human colony on Mars by 2025. The lander, based on Lockheed's successful Phoenix spacecraft, and satellite would each test technologies needed to sustain human life on another planet.

I sat next to two wannabe-Martians at the Mars One press conference in Washington, D.C., on Monday. Leila Zucker, a local ER doctor, and Aaron Hamm, a hotelier who'd flown in from Milwaukee that morning, were among the more than 200,000 applicants for the one-way mission. Zucker and Hamm were excited about the announcement. "This is the first tangible sign that this is going to happen," Zucker said. (Read our interview with another aspiring Martian, Los Angeles-based game designer Katrina Wolfe.)

The mission's timetable has been pushed back by two years. The satellite was originally supposed to launch in 2016, with humans arriving by 2023. Now, Mars One is aiming for a 2025 colonization date. 

Mars One Colony Concept
The goal, if all goes well.
Bryan Versteeg and Mars One

These contracts, right now, are the most real part of the project. In the artist's concept above, there's a thin film solar panel, designed to power first the lander and, later, facilities in the Mars colony, but no actual solar panels have been selected yet for the mission. Getting enough drinkable water to the planet is also a challenge, though the Curiosity rover recently discovered that Martian soil contains much more water than previously thought. Mars One launched an Indiegogo campaign to fund the research projects that will be included on the Lockheed lander, including a water extraction project. Another challenge: preventing colonists from going insane

In addition to crowdfunding, Mars One is looking for other forms of sponsorship. Bas Lansdorp, co-founder and CEO of Mars One, said "Mars One will have most unique video footage in the solar system," and compared the value of that footage to the exclusive broadcast rights from Olympic games. If his projection is correct, and if people are as interested in watching a Martian sunset as they are in feats of athleticism, footage rights alone could more than pay back the cost of the mission. The Lockheed contract is for $250,000, and the SSTL contract is for $82,000. 

Of course, this is all assuming that the Curiosity rover doesn't get jealous and wipe out the Mars One lander first:


    






FDA Aims To Reduce Use Of Antibiotics For Fattening Farm Animals

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photos of pigs in an outdoor enclosure
Pasture-Raised Pigs in Rockville, Virginia
Photo by Lance Cheung, U.S. Department of Agriculture

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is asking veterinary drug companies to voluntarily agree to make it illegal to feed healthy animals some antibiotics. If the antibiotic is on the FDA’s list of drugs that are related to drugs used to fight infections in people—including everything from bronchitis to urinary tract infections to Lyme disease to infections after surgeries—then the agency is asking companies to stop their use for fattening up pigs, chickens and other animals people eat.

The move is meant to reduce the amount of antibiotics farmers feed to food animals. “With these changes, there will be fewer approved uses [for animal antibiotics] and the remaining uses will be under tighter control,” Michael Taylor, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for foods and veterinary medicine, said in a conference call for reporters. Scientists have long warned that the constant use of antibiotics in farm animals is a threat to human health, but U.S. agencies haven't taken a lot of official action on the issue.

After talks with industry folks, FDA officials believe companies will comply with the new program. Making the changes this way—voluntarily—is faster than the FDA’s legal process, which would require the agency to evaluate every antibiotic individually, Taylor added.

Critics of the program say it may not make much of a dent in how antibiotics are used on animal farms. “Even if it were observed by the industry, there’s no guarantee that the usage profile for these drugs would change,” Keeve Nachman, who studies food production at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, tells Popular Science. Nachman and other critics worry farmers and farming companies will simply switch from saying the medicines are for making animals grow, to saying they're for preventing illness in animals. For many antibiotics, the dosages for both indications are similar.

Why cut down on antibiotic use? Concern about the rise of antibiotic-resistant microbes is the primary reason. Such microbes can give people diseases that no modern antibiotics are able to cure. One recent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report found that 2 million Americans get antibiotic-resistant illnesses every year and 23,000 Americans die from them.

These illnesses evolved recently, after decades of unnecessary antibiotic use among farmers, doctors and patients. On many farms, animals eat low doses of antibiotics mixed into their food, either to make them grow faster or grow more on less food. It's not clear exactly why low-dose antibiotics fatten animals up, although one study done in mice hints that it's got something to do with changes to the animals' gut microbes. 

Farmers and farming companies don’t need prescriptions from veterinarians to get drugged feeds; they get them from feed stores. Once inside livestock’s bodies, the medicines kill off most microbes, but leave behind so-called superbugs that are able survive a round of antibiotics. The low doses used to promote growth are especially prone to leaving superbugs behind.

Eventually, the resistant microbes come out of the animals’, uhh, other ends, and from there may spread to crops as fertilizer, get carried around by birds and eventually make it to people. Multiply this by millions of farm animals and years of antibiotic use and you eventually breed large populations of superbugs.

photo of a research-size manure-applying machine at work on an alfalfa field
Swine Manure Being Applied to Alfalfa Fields
Photo by Joann Lamb, USDA

Getting farms to stop using antibiotics unnecessarily would be a major step toward slowing the evolution of superbugs. The argument now is whether the FDA’s new program actually does this.

Critics worry that farms will continue to use antibiotics widely while complying with the FDA's request to the letter. This blog post from National Resources Defense Council lawyer Avinash Kar summarizes that argument. The National Resources Defense Council has sued the FDA over the use of antibiotics in farm animals.

“This is a critical issue because obviously we want the effect to be real and the effect on resistance to be real,” FDA’s Taylor said. The key to addressing the issue, Taylor said, is that when companies agree to the new FDA program, non-growth uses of antibiotics should require the equivalent of a prescription from a veterinarian. “It’s a big shift from the current situation,” in which animal antibiotics are available to farming companies over-the-counter, Taylor said.

Others are not so sure veterinarians will act as good gatekeepers to reduce unnecessary antibiotic use. “It potentially could help, but unless these veterinarians believe these uses are creating a public health problem, they have no incentive to do that,” says Steven Roach, a program director for public health at the Food Animal Concerns Trust, a farm animal welfare organization based in Chicago.

Companies have 90 days to write to the FDA, saying they intend to follow the new program. After that, they’ll have three years to phase in the changes.


    







LIVE FACEBOOK EVENT: DECEMBER 12, 2013, at 12:00PM EST [SPONSORED POST]

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Have you ever tasted something so good and wondered: How is this so delicious?! How would I go about making this myself? Well then, lovers of single malt Scotch whisky, you’re in luck. Glenfiddich and PopSci would like to invite you to our live Facebook Q&A event on Thursday, December 12th where we will be discussing the perfect single malt Scotch whisky and anything and everything that goes into the science of making it.

The Glenfiddich range of single malt Scotch whiskeys has received more awards since 2000 than any other single malt Scotch whiskey in two of the world’s most prestigious competitions, the International Wine & Spirit Competition and the International Spirits Challenge. A Glenfiddich expert will be hosting this session to answer and educate our PopSci readers on the Science Behind Whisky. Therefore, we are pretty sure that the secrets of a great tasting single malt Scotch whisky are going to be unearthed. So please join us for this exciting look into the history and science behind something that tastes so good, you need answers as to why!

A preview of questions that could be…

  • Who was the first person thought to have created a single malt whisky?
  • What is the science behind how a single malt is created? What are the elements that are required to make a perfect single malt whisky? Time, temp, ingredients, etc...
  • How does single malt whisky effect a person's body in terms of consumption? Does the body react differently if drinking a single malt whisky as opposed to a vodka?
  • It's been established that a cigar is the best compliment to a single malt whisky. Is that true? If so, why do the two work so well together? 
  • Is there a particular food that also goes well with single malt whisky? If so, what food is that and what is the chemical reaction inside the body that creates a harmony b/w the 2? 
  • When you have a single malt whisky 'on the rocks' as opposed to 'neat', how does the water (H20), effect the structure of the whisky? 
  • If you consume the same amount of single malt whisky, 'neat' or 'on the rocks', is your alcohol level any different? With the introduction of water, does the change in chemical balance of the whisky allow your body to consume more? 
  • Can single malt whisky be used to cook food with? If so, what food is best to pair it with? And what element of the whisky is the essential ingredient to the dish?
     

    

Bounce Imaging Explorer

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Bounce Imaging Explorer
Bounce Imaging

First responders can toss the baseball-size Explorer into a building or enclosed space for a quick snapshot of any hazards. Sporting six cameras with wide-angle lenses, it can take 360-degree panoramic images of its surroundings and send them to a cellphone or tablet in less than three seconds. Bounce Imaging strove to make the Explorer affordable, so it built the device using off-the-shelf parts. Future iterations could have swappable sensors to detect carbon monoxide, radiation, or hydrogen cyanide. Less than $1,000

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A 3-D Printed, Hand-Cranked Computer

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3-D Printed Computer
Dan Bracaglia
When the hackerspace NYC Resistor hosted a “digital archaeology” interactive show last spring, electrical engineer Chris Fenton built a throwback computer using modern technology. Fenton works with supercomputers all day but wanted to slow things down, so he designed the Turbo Entabulator. The 3-D–printed hand-cranked calculator relies on punch cards, string, and rubber bands to execute functions. One minute of turning produces part of the Fibonacci sequence, a numerical pattern that appears in nature. The plastic machine may be inefficient, but it’s a computer nonetheless and uses parts analogous to those in modern devices.

Time 50 hours

Cost $100

 

 

A. SOFTWARE:
A drum of four punch cards works like a program. Three of the cards engage a set of levers that, in turn, pull strings that increase or decrease the numbers on the counters. The cards are tied together with loops of embroidery floss to run continuously.

B. MEMORY:
Similar to RAM, three counter wheels store numbers generated by the punch-card software. Each pull of a lever steps a counter either up or down. When the right counter hits zero, a fourth card advances and a bell rings as the next Fibonacci-sequence number appears.

C. PROCESSING:
A hand crank acts like a modern CPU. It reads the punch-card instructions for which levers to pull, executes them by pulling those levers, and stores the results in memory via the strings that turn each counter. The faster it’s cranked, the quicker it computes.

For Fenton's 3-D printing files and build instructions, click here.

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


    






A Pen That 3-D Prints Bone Right Onto Patients

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The BioPen
University of Wollongong

One of the greatest promises of 3-D printing is that we'll one day be able to print organs on-demand. Need a new liver? There it is, at the push of a button.

Anticipating that future, scientists from the University of Wollongong in Australia have created the BioPen, a tool that lets physicians more or less draw new bones on people through 3-D printing. The pen is loaded with so-called "stem cell ink," a batch of human cells that can form new bone. Another second substance, a polymer, then seals the area so the stem cells can do their work in peace. You can see why this is promising: if someone loses parts of bone in an accident, a tool like this pen could apply a fix directly to the problem area.

We've seen 3-D printed bones before, actually, but this device could give a little more precision. It's yet to undergo clinical testing, so it still may be a while before it hits the market, but if and when it does, it'll have some company

[University of Wollongong via DVICE]


    






ZF & Levant Power Genshock

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ZF & Levant Power Genshock
ZF & Levant

Developed by MIT students, Genshock is the first active suspension system that generates energy from bumps in the road. Each shock absorber houses a compact electric motor, electronic control unit, and electrohydraulic gear pump. When a car drives over a rough surface, the moving shock absorbers generate electricity that helps power the car’s electrical systems. Genshock, which is still just a prototype, has another advantage: It can lift individual wheels off the ground, allowing for jack-less tire changes. Price not set

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