Red Alert

C-Wams Project, Planetek Hellas/ESA

Several of the world’s largest desalination plants sit along the coast of the United Arab Emirates. Every year, they deliver 115 billion gallons of potable water to more than 550,000 people in Dubai alone. But the plants have had to slow or shut down production more frequently over the past decade because of an unexpected disturbance: massive algal blooms in the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf. The algae, known as red tide, clog pipes and filters at the plants. For warning of an approaching bloom, local authorities now consult data from a European Space Agency project, which began in 2012. When a passing satellite captures an image of an algal bloom (and software scans for the algae’s chlorophyll, represented by the intensity of redness), officials alert plant managers, who then have a few days to decide how to adjust water production.

This article originally appeared in the January 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Sarracenia purpurea L.

This fantastic-looking flower is special for NYBG—it was the two-millionth specimen digitized. It's commonly known as the purple pitcher plant (great alliteration) and was collected in Duchess County, New York.

New York Botanical Garden C. V. Starr Virtual Herbarium

Click here to enter the gallery

There's a trove of biodiversity information out there, but much of it is locked in natural history collections. To make all this plant data more accessible, the New York Botanical Garden—one of the four largest herbariums in the word—is turning its more than 7.3 million specimens into a browsable digital database. 

NYBG's herbarium opened its doors around 1900, and from day one, collectors and other private herbaria had already brought in more than 100,000 specimens. New collections continue to come in each year, and curators also go out into the field to collect specimens from around the world. Inside steel cabinets, in a climate-controlled rooms on each of the five floors of the herbarium are specimens that hold interesting looks into plants' pasts. Notably, the collection even includes fungi gathered by George Washington Carver and a moss specimen from Charles Darwin.

The digitizing project began in the mid 1990s, and since then, the technique has been refined, and as a result sped up significantly. In the beginning, large studio set ups with big lights and a camera helped capture the specimen images. Now, NYBG uses a light box that was originally designed for photographing jewelry. The box has even, standardized lighting, and feeds the image data directly to a computer. When the team began this project more than 10 years ago, they were digitizing about 20,000 to 30,000 specimens per year. With upgraded technology and increased man power, they can capture more than 100,000 per year. This fall, the team digitized their two-millionth specimen.

"Prior to the last year and a half or so, we would have someone sitting at a computer to capture by hand the specimen data from the labels," Kimberly Watson, NYBG information manager for digitization tells Popular Science. "Now, we're able to take photographs and process the data through optical character recognition software."

Many of NYBG's specimens are pressed plants, which are glued to standard-size sheets and stored in archival conditions. In addition to vascular plants, there are also a panacea of fungi, algae, and lichen. And while the botanical garden may get requests for certain specimens to be digitized—which it honors—the team tends to digitize the specimens as projects. 

"We do a lot of imaging on demand now," says Barbara Thiers, director of the William and Lynda Steere Herbarium at NYBG. "We must get a request per week for online data. We got lots of feedback about the project, though after a while people don't tell you on a regular basis. But we know it's being used."

The National Science Foundation has been funding efforts for digitizing natural science collections for years—NYBG in particular has received continuous funding since 1997. NSF has brought many of these institutions to work together around specific digitizing projects, and for workshops to share best practices. 

While the digital herbarium may not be enough for researchers who require physical samples, or DNA from the specimens, the online database could further research in new ways.

"As it turns out, there are a lot of possible uses for the data we didn't necessarily envision when we started," Thiers says. Because the specimen data includes when and where it was collected, researchers can begin to use that data to see how plants have changed over the last 150 years, and layer that information with other datasets such as rainfall, soil chemistry, hydrology, and other factors critical for plants to grow.

Check out a just a few of the 2 million (and counting!) digitized specimens in the gallery.

Boots Made For Walking

Greg Maxson

Even though skiers are spending more time hiking into the backcountry, their boots are still geared to traditional lift-access runs. Most alpine boots have cuffs and uppers that are single, rigid pieces, which makes walking in them awkward and painful. And boots made specifically for trudging through snow are so flexible that they’re harder to control when skiing downhill. With stronger materials and adjustable cuffs, manufacturers are creating a new, adaptable breed of boot—one that offers comfort on the way up without sacrificing support on the run down.

1) K2 Pinnacle 130

With the flip of a lever, the Pinnacle 130 boots toggle easily between walking and skiing modes. When a skier locks the cuff in place, a carbon-fiber insert slides into the upper to provide extra stiffness. When the boots are in walk mode, the insert lifts into the cuff, which allows the skier to move freely. $850

2) Scarpa Freedom SL

People say one pound of weight on the feet adds five pounds of pressure on the back. At 3.9 pounds each, the Scarpa Freedom SLs are the lightest alpine boots available. Designers thinned the shell in areas where a skier doesn’t need much support, such as the top of the upper, shaving about half a pound off each boot. $769

3) Black Diamond Factor MX

The Factor MXs have a greater range of motion than any other alpine boots: 40 degrees in walk mode. The cuff rotates on ball joints, so the boot moves more naturally with the ankle. A whale-tail cutout in the calf of the shell leaves room for the leg to flex so skiers can take longer strides. $769 

This article originally appeard in the January 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Tiger peers at a camera trap.

Steve Winter/ National Geographic

This fall, National Geographicaward-winning photographer Steve Winter published a book with Sharon Guynup called Tigers Forever. The images and stories that comprise the book come from three different National Geographicstories Winter worked on, and more than 60 interviews conducted by Guynup. Guynup accompanied Winter in the field for a few locations, but also wrote based on details from her own experiences studying tigers, as well as daily rundowns from Winter via satellite phone. 

Winter captured these intimate images of tigers using camera traps—a method he developed when he was photographing snow leopards years ago. He thought, "how do you do a story about an animal that you're never going to see." The answer was the camera trap, which he has been modifying over the years with National Geographic. 

Tigers Forever

Steve Winter/ National Geographic

Before the tiger wanders into the infrared trigger's domain, Winter spends time setting the scene with lights to mimic beams of sunlight—many of the animals he photographs are most active at dawn and dusk. Some tigers aren't always pleased by the intrusion. One tiger, which  Winter dubbed Smasher, grew very adept at crushing a camera trap and pulling out its cords until it stopped flashing and making sound. 

Winter began his career as a photojournalist. When he began photographing wildlife, he realized that making nice animal portraits was doing a disservice. Portraits fail to show the animals' full stories. Since then, he's been trying to capture the full breadth of the threats, problems, and solutions that surround tigers and other wild animals. There are only 3,200 wild tigers out there now, and with the forces working against them (poaching, habitat encroachment, and more) the book could leave readers feeling as though the situation is quite dire. 

But Winter and Guynup are optimistic. Ttigers are a productive species—females can give birth to 15 cubs over their lifetimes, and given a safe place to hunt and access to food, they have the opportunity to thrive. 

"In many circumstances, conservation is like fighting a war," Guynup says. "And it's our job as journalists to tell the story."

Click here to enter the gallery. 

Concept For Mars One Colony

Bryan Versteeg and Mars One

The number of Earthlings looking at a potential one-way ticket to Mars has just shrunk by 99.5 percent.

People started applying for a voyage to the red planet in April 2013 through Mars One, a Netherlands-based private venture that wants to land humans there by 2025. By the time the company stopped taking applications, more than 200,000 people had submitted one. Today, Mars One announced that it's made a short(er) list of 1,058 applicants. 

 Here's what the numbers tell us about Mars' potential future inhabitants::

• 55 percent of the new applicant pool is male and 45 percent is female. That's more masculine than the general population, but still substantially more gender balanced than U.S. Congress.
• 63 percent have a bachelor's degree or higher, while 3 percent of the total hold medical degrees (who wouldn't want a doctor on Mars?). Less than 7 percent of people on Earth in 2010 had college degrees, which means Mars may soon be the most educated planet in the solar system.
• 76 percent of applicants are employed, 15 percent are still in school, and 8 percent are unemployed. If surviving as a colonist on another planet counts as a job, expect Mars to have an employment rate of 100 percent.
• 43 percent of applicants come from the Americas, 27 percent from Europe, 21 percent from Asia, 5 percent from Africa, and 4 percent from Oceania. That hardly jibes with the distribution of the world population; if it did, 60 percent of Martians would be Asian and 14 percent would hail from the Americas. A closer match is the distribution of global wealth by nation, of which the Americas claim 35 percent.
• 107 countries are represented in the applicants and, at 28 percent of all those accepted into Mars One's second round, the United States has the largest pool of candidates.
• 34 percent of potential Martians are younger than 25, about 65 percent are between the ages of 26 and 55, and 2 percent are older than 56. In contrast, 40 percent of Earthlings are less than 25 years old and 17 percent older than 56.

The defining moment for Mars One will be selecting its crew (or crews) for a 2025 voyage, but the news does bring a private mission to the red planet one step closer to reality. A bigger step occurred earlier this month, when Mars One announced a contract with Lockheed Martin to craft a design concept for a robotic lander. Its goal: to find and prepare a landing site for the first human visitors to Mars.

This is a cork popping out of a champagne bottle, as imaged by a high-speed infrared camera. The infrared light lets you see the plumes of carbon dioxide that shoot out of the bottle’s mouth behind the cork. Carbon dioxide is invisible to the naked eye; the fog you might have noticed around the mouth of opened bottles of fizzy drinks isn’t the carbonation. It’s a combination of water vapor and ethanol vapor.

These photos come from researchers at the University of Reims in the Champagne region of France. They wanted to examine the speed of cork-popping at different temperatures. They found, of course, that corks pop faster out of warmer champagne. At higher temperatures, less of the carbon dioxide in champagne remains dissolved in the liquid. Instead, it lives as a gas in the headspace in the bottle’s neck, creating higher pressures there and thus forcing the cork out faster when you finally open the bottle.

The researchers also found that of all of the energy released when a bottle of Champagne is opened, only five percent contributes to the speedy exit of the cork. The rest of the energy creates an audible shock wave--that festive champagne bang, the researchers think. To be sure, they’re planning to measure the sound waves created by popping bubbly.

Gérard Liger-Belair, a physicist and the lead researcher in the study, tells Popular Science in an email that he wanted "to better understand this rather mythical 'object' that a champagne bottle is." His and his colleagues' study appeared in the Journal of Food Engineering.

Lasers Unleash A Flood Of Space Data

ESA's Optical Ground Station

The European Space Agency’s Optical Ground Station on Tenerife in the Canary Islands can communicate via laser with NASA’s newest lunar orbiter. Here, it receives a laser transmission from a telescope on neighboring La Palma island.

IQOQI Vienna, Austrian Academy of Sciences/ESA

In January 2013, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter received a historic transmission: an image of the Mona Lisa. It was the first time scientists used a laser to send data to the moon, a feat that promises to exponentially increase the flow of information to and from space.

For the past 50 years, spacecraft have relied on radio waves to communicate with Earth. But radio has limitations. Airwaves are crowded. Signals degrade with distance, so transmissions require power-hungry generators and large antennas. Focused laser light operates in wavelengths 10,000 times shorter than radio, pumping out more waves—and more information—each second. Lasers maintain signal strength across large distances, so transmitters require less power. And spacecraft carrying smaller receivers would be cheaper to launch. 

In October, the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (Ladee) performed another successful test in which it beamed laser pulses containing high-definition video between three different Earth receivers. The European Space Agency’s Alphasat, launched in July, will use lasers to relay data from other satellites observing Earth. And NASA engineers have begun to construct the next-generation system, the Laser Communications Relay Demonstration, to launch in 2017.

If space-based laser communication works—and there’s little reason to believe it won’t—it could change how humans explore the solar system. Rovers could pack extra tools and beam back more sophisticated data. High-def video streaming could enable scientists to track storms on Saturn as they do on Earth. And astronauts could Skype home. Dave Israel, lead investigator for the laser relay team at Goddard Space Flight Center, puts it this way: “This jump is an equivalent order of magnitude from dial-up Internet to high-speed into your house.” –Rebecca Boyle
 

January 20, 2014

On this date, the Rosetta spacecraft will wake up from more than 42 months of deep-space hibernation to begin the most detailed study of a comet. In August, it will arrive at Comet 67P, and in November, it will deploy a probe to land on the comet’s nucleus.

Computers Decode Our Brains

The Human Brain Project

Bartholomew Cooke/Trunk Archive

On October 7, 2013, at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, one of the most ambitious brain-research projects in history officially kicked off. The Human Brain Project—backed by 1.2 billion euros and more than 250 researchers—aims to create the first complete computer simulation of the human brain. Over the course of a decade, everything we know about the organ’s biology will be modeled. Eventually, virtual neurons will even be subjected to virtual drugs. 

The Human Brain Project is one element in a larger, interdisciplinary surge in brain research that has pulled engineers, data theorists, and other non-neuroscientists into various efforts. In the U.S., the government-led Brain Initiative plans to deliver its own “first”: a detailed map of all brain activity. The future potential ranges from the borderline poetic—watching a memory form as activity flows across multiple circuits of neurons—to the clinically useful, such as a device that could directly alter those circuits to possibly diagnose and treat disorders. Other projects starting in 2014 include a five-year, eight-institution plan led by Penn State University to simulate the visual cortex in silicon. 

Cori Bargmann, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University, explains why such projects are suddenly gaining traction. “We now have the computational and statistical tools that we need to make sense out of billions of individual neurons, each becoming active and inactive on complex time scales,” she says. So while 2014 won’t be the year that the brain is fully mapped, simulated, or hijacked, it will be the year that the quest to do all of that—and much more—truly gets under way. –Erik Sofge

Painkiller Crackdown

Painkiller

Getty Images

Tighter controls on narcotic painkillers, such as Vicodin and Lortab, should go into effect this year. The regulations are designed to reduce abuse and overdose-related deaths, which have quadrupled in the U.S. since 1999.

First-Responder Bots Face Off

First Responder Bots

Robot: Valkyrie, Team: NASA Johnson Space Center, Strength: Agility; Robot: RoboSimian Team: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Strength: Passive stability

Graham Murdoc

In December 2014, autonomous robots from about a dozen teams will compete in the final DARPA Robotics Challenge event, performing rescue operations in a simulated disaster.

How To Dismantle A Chemical Weapon

Field Deployable Hydrolysis Systems

Trevor Johnston

This year, the U.S. Army will build mobile decontamination labs called Field Deployable Hydrolysis Systems (FDHS) that can rapidly neutralize bulk chemical-warfare agents such as sarin. The technology could be particularly useful in a country like Syria, which does not have the proper facilities to destroy its chemical-weapons supplies.

Step one: Dilute a given amount of chemical-weapon agent with water in the lab’s titanium tank, then add bleach (sodium hypochlorite) and lye (sodium hydroxide).

Step two: Heat titanium tank with mixture to just about boiling for three hours. In that time, the bleach, water, and lye will hydrolyze 99.9 percent of the chemical agent.

Step three: Transfer the byproducts into a tanker for shipment to a regular hazardous-waste facility, where they will be further processed.

Drones Get The Green Light

Drone

Pierre Andrieu/AFP/Getty Images

The domestic-drone age will officially begin by year’s end. That’s when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will issue a draft rule regulating the use of drones under 55 pounds in U.S. airspace, a category that includes most commercial models. But the devices will be in the air before then. Flight tests planned for 2014 will shape the future of unmanned aircraft for years and perhaps decades to come.

At press time, groups from 24 states were competing to house six sanctioned test sites, where drone models and flight protocols will be evaluated. And although the FAA is expected to be restrictive in its initial guidelines—likely requiring constant line of sight between pilots and unmanned aerial systems (UAS), as well as an altitude ceiling of 400 feet—the testing at those sites will explore more ambitious capabilities, including autonomous sense-and-avoid systems that would allow drones to operate at higher altitudes, sharing the air with manned aircraft.

In the meantime, the FAA has already cleared hundreds of police departments, public universities, and other applicants to fly in a not-for-profit capacity. Kyle Snyder, director of the NextGen Air Transportation Center at North Carolina State University, says drone activity will reach unprecedented levels in 2014, as centers like his continue to gather test data for UAS researchers and the FAA. This is great news for farmers, real estate agents, and anyone else hoping for cheap aerial footage. For those still dreading robotic overflights, the invasion is already happening. –Erik Sofge

Climate Takes Priority

“Today we should embrace cutting carbon emissions as a way to grow jobs and strengthen the economy. Let’s approach it as an opportunity of a lifetime. Because there are too many lifetimes at stake not to embrace it this way.” 

—Gina McCarthy, Environmental Protection Agency administrator (appointed July 2013)

Celebrities Go To Space

Katy Perry

Mike Marsland/Wire/Image/Getty Images

Virgin Galactic plans to begin commercial operations in 2014, taking paying passengers—including pop star Katy Perry—to the edge of space.

Curiosity Roves To Mt. Sharp, Gale Crater, Mars

Mt. Sharp

How To Build An Ice Wall

Fukushima Ice Wall

Trevor Johnston

Fukushima, Japan

Last August, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco) admitted that a tank at the earthquake-crippled Fukushima nuclear power plant had leaked more than 300 tons of contaminated water into the ground. To prevent groundwater from carrying it to the ocean, Tepco announced plans to build an underground ice wall in 2014.

Step one: Install pipes three to five feet apart into the earth around the power plant.

Step two: Pump chilled coolant (calcium-chloride brine) into the pipes, and circulate it continuously through a refrigeration station.

Step three: Frozen ground around each pipe joins to form a wall of ice, blocking water flow.

Cancer Diagnoses Become Less Invasive

Cancer Diagnosis

Laguna Design/Getty Images

Cancer presents many bedeviling issues, starting with diagnosis. Tissue biopsies, the only surefire test for most cancers, are invasive and painful and can cause infection. They also tend to be performed after symptoms have developed, and that’s often too late. A new diagnostic tool may make identifying some diseases much easier.

Within the body, tiny sacs called exosomes travel through fluids, such as blood, urine, and saliva. They shuttle genetic material and proteins between cells, playing an important role in cellular communication. “We like to think of it as the body’s Federal Express system,” says James McCullough, CEO of Exosome Diagnostics. 

McCullough’s company developed a test to capture those messengers and analyze the RNA they contain, flagging mutations that point to the presence of malignant cells. Another company, Caris Life Sciences, searches for proteins on the surface of exosomes that are correlated with certain tumors. Both groups are racing to release the first commercial exosome test in 2014—Exosome Diagnostics for prostate cancer, which it identifies by isolating exosomes in urine, and Caris Life Sciences for prostate and breast cancers, which it detects with a blood test. 

Significant clinical studies are also under way. Exosome Diagnostics’ technique has already shown promise detecting mutations indicative of brain cancer in the blood. This year, 18 medical centers are evaluating the method further. Researchers with Exosome Sciences will begin early-stage clinical studies to detect HIV and hepatitis B and C using exosomes isolated from urine.

The technology’s potential is broad. Lymphoma, tuberculosis, and Parkinson’s are all potential diagnostic targets. Exosome tests could also be used to track a disease’s progress and monitor the efficacy of treatments. –Cassandra Willyard

Sally Jewell, @SecretaryJewell, 29 October 2013

Science Budgets Stay Small

Federal Research And Development, 2004-2014

American Association for the Advancement of Science

United States

Federal funding for basic research and development in 2013 was down 8 percent from the previous year and 16 percent from its peak in 2010. Congressional 2014 budgets don’t restore much, and sequestration caps could make money tight for the next decade. With research grants harder to come by, science in the U.S.—and the innovation and growth that result from it—will probably slow, according to Matt Hourihan, director of the budget program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

*Science-budget data courtesy American Association for the Advancement of Science. All amounts are adjusted for inflation. Figures for 2013 are estimates, and those for 2014 are proposed budgets. Not included is the House 2014 allocation for the National Institutes of Health, which hadn’t been released when this issue went to press.

Four New Studies Explore The Medical Benefits And Practical Dilemmas That Arise From Sequencing Newborn's Genomes

“These grants will allow us to collect information about the ethical, legal, and social implications of this testing prior to its widespread application. It’s not clear how patients or providers will deal with this information.”

—Armand Antommaria, director of the Ethics Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center

Wind Goes Offshore

Offshore Wind

Evirgen/Getty Images

Multiple projects, including Cape Wind (in Massachusetts’ Nantucket Sound) and Deepwater Wind (near Block Island, Rhode Island), are vying to become the first offshore wind farm in the U.S. They plan to begin construction in 2014.

Several New Funds Created Exclusively For Bitcoins Enable Institutional Investors To Buy And Trade Shares Of The Digital Currency

“We’re approaching an inflection point. The catalyst for bitcoin to succeed could be regulatory clarity, major venture-capital investment, support from a large country like China, or improved accessibility for investors.”

—Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of SecondMarket, which runs the Bitcoin Investment Trust

Physicists Create Spyproof Code

GridCOM QKD System

To demonstrate the first QKD system that works with wireless devices, GridCOM plans to send an "uncrackable, NSA-proof" text between phones by the end of 2013.

Don Farral/Getty Images

It hasn’t exactly been a banner year for privacy. Revelations of the National Security Agency’s mass-surveillance efforts underscored the obvious need for better data security. Recent breakthroughs in quantum cryptography could provide just that: spyproof encryption that’s no longer lodged in laboratories or stuck at industrial-grade price points.

Quantum key distribution (QKD) is an essentially unbreakable encryption protocol that exploits one of quantum physics’ more head-spinning principles—that simply observing information changes it. In a QKD-based system, a randomly generated key is encoded on light particles and shared through fiber-optic cables before being used to encrypt sensitive data. Any attempt to detect the key en route will alter its photons, indicating that the transmission has been intercepted and a new key is necessary.

So far, QKD has remained tethered to fiber-optic networks. It also requires large emitters and detectors, but now researchers are working to miniaturize them: Nokia and the University of Bristol in England are collaborating on a quantum source small enough to fit in a phone, while physicists at the Institute of Quantum Computing in Waterloo, Ontario, are developing microsatellites that could beam encoded photons across the globe.

The best evidence of QKD’s momentum might be GridCOM Technologies, which plans to launch the first commercial quantum-encrypted data network in San Diego by September. Although the company’s initial focus is on securing infrastructure—the network will protect a portion of the city’s electrical grid against cyberattack—GridCOM co-founder Duncan Earl, a physicist formerly at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, wants to scale up to larger bandwidths suitable for mobile phones and PCs. “In five years, this technology will be everywhere,” Earl says. “We’re about to enter the age of cryptography. We have to have it, to support the world we’ve created.” –Erik Sofge

Infectious Diseases Reemerge

In 1900, the U.S. death rate from infectious disease was 40 times higher than it is today. But despite the progress made last century, some illnesses have begun to reappear. “We are facing a perfect storm of vulnerability,” says Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control, citing increasing travel and food trade, failure to vaccinate against preventable diseases, and poor antibiotic management as causes.

Whooping Cough

Cases of pertussis, or whooping cough, have climbed in the U.S. for several reasons. For one, the vaccine adopted in the 1990s wears off faster than the previous vaccine did. Better diagnostic tests in the U.S. may also contribute to the higher prevalance.

Measles

Measles was eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, but cases still pop up when unvaccinated people pick up the highly contagious disease abroad. Outbreaks have been worst where infected travelers return to areas with relatively high numbers of other unvaccinated people. 

Gonorrhea Superbug

Fewer drugs are available to combat gonorrhea as it develops resistance to more antibiotics—though no U.S. case has yet failed treatment. Of particular concern is the bug’s long memory: It retains its resistance even after a particular drug is no longer prescribed.

Sixteen Studies Organized By The Environmental Defense Fund Will Determine Climate Impact From Natural-Gas Production And Distribution

Natural Gas Drilling

River North Photography/Getty Images

“If we want to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, we need to understand the sources, including methane from the natural-gas supply chain, and the options to minimize that leakage. You can’t accomplish those two goals if you don’t have the data.”

—Steven Hamburg, chief scientist, Environmental Defense Fund

This article originally appeared in the January 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Local Color

Built in 1967, DTU’s anechoic chamber was orginally black, but “it was like working in a grave,” says Olav Breinbjerg, an antenna engineer. So in the nineties, new absorbers were painted a cheerful blue.

Alastair Philip Wiper

More than 1,000 working satellites orbit Earth. As space becomes increasingly crowded, there’s a greater chance that the satellites’ radio signals could overlap. To avoid that problem, which disrupts communications, satellite antennas must transmit only within a narrow frequency band. The radio frequency anechoic chamber at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) is one of the best places in the world to accurately calibrate antennas. A steel Faraday cage surrounding the chamber blocks interference from external sources, such as Wi-Fi and broadband networks. Inside, foam pyramids stop a satellite’s own radio waves from bouncing around, to ensure that a receiver in the chamber measures only the signals coming directly from the antenna and not reflections. (The pyramids dissipate the signals as they travel from tip to base.) Engineers then use the recorded transmission patterns to adjust, and sometimes rebuild, the antenna. After all, if a satellite fails in space, there’s little anyone can do.

SMOS

ESA

The European Space Agency calibrated several research satellites at DTU:

SMOS maps soil moisture and ocean salinity. Launch: 2009

Sentinel-1 will monitor sea ice and polar weather. Launch: 2014 

BIOMASS will measure carbon stored in forests. Launch: 2020

This article originally appeared in the January 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Warm Santa

Kirby Hamilton/Getty Images

At the yearly Rottnest Channel Swim in Western Australia, participants often smear their bodies with animal fat for insulation against the 70-degree water. But their own body fat also helps to keep them warm, like an extra layer of clothing beneath the skin. When scientists studied aspects of the event in 2006, they found that swimmers with a greater body mass index (BMI) appear to be at much lower risk of getting hypothermia.

The same effect has been demonstrated in hospitals where patients who’ve suffered cardiac arrest are treated with “therapeutic hypothermia” to stave off brain injury and inflammation. Studies have shown that it takes longer to induce hypothermia in obese patients than in their leaner counterparts. The extra fat seems to insulate the body’s core.

Under certain conditions, though, overweight people might feel colder than people of average weight. That’s because the brain combines two signals—the temperature inside the body and the temperature on the surface of the skin—to determine when it’s time to constrict blood vessels (which limits heat loss through the skin) and trigger shivering (which generates heat). And since subcutaneous fat traps heat, an obese person’s core will tend to remain warm while his or her skin cools down. According to Catherine O’Brien, a research physiologist with the U.S. Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, it’s possible that the lower skin temperature would give fatter people the sense of being colder overall.

But O’Brien points out that many other factors beyond subcutaneous fat help determine the rate at which we chill. Smaller people, who have more surface area compared to the total volume of their bodies, lose heat more quickly. (It’s often said that women feel colder than men; average body size may play a part.) A more muscular physique may also offer some protection against hypothermia, partly because muscle tissue generates lots of heat. “We have a joke around here that the person who’s best-suited for cold is fit and fat,” says O’Brien.

This article originally appeared in the January 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Great white shark surfacing

Brocken Inaglory via Wikimedia Commons

Chris Peck, from SLSWA, told Sky News that the shark tweets will notify swimmers much faster than traditional warnings on the radio and in newspapers. There have been six fatal shark attacks in Australia over the past two years, most recently in November, NPR reported.

It should be noted that of course not all sharks have tags (duh), so a lack of tweets doesn't mean an absence of sharks. And the mere presence of a shark doesn't mean that swimmers are necessarily in mortal peril. "Just because there's a shark nearby doesn't mean to say that there's any danger," Kim Holland, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii, told NPR. "In Hawaii, tiger sharks are all around our coastlines all the time, and yet we have very, very few attacks."

Although Australia has had more sharks attack than any other country, the animals still present a relatively tiny threat to humans. Fewer than ten people are killed every year by sharks worldwide--in the United States alone, cows kill more people every year (about 22).

The state of Western Australia plans to begin catching and killing large sharks in designated areas near Perth and some popular beaches, starting Jan. 10. But thousands are expected to protest the decision this weekend, and 100 scientists co-signed a letter to the State Goverment calling on it to abandon the shark cull and adopt non-lethal measures to protect beach-goers. Most scientists agree that shark culling is ineffective at preventing attacks, since many large sharks are highly mobile, and don't stick around any one area for long. Scientists agree that sharks are in trouble; about 100 million are killed every year, partially due to demand for shark-fin soup, an Asian delicacy. 

Welcome to North Dronekota

According to the University of North Dakota's privacy policy regarding drone use, these signs must be set up alerting the public to a drone flight.

Kelsey D. Atherton

Earlier this week, flying barely under the wire of its 2013 deadline, the Federal Aviation Administration announced the six states it had selected as test sites for domestic drone use. The goal is to figure out how unmanned aerial vehicles can safely work in U.S. skies alongside commercial planes, news and police helicopters, cropdusters, and the whole range of peopled flying machines. Twenty-four states applied, eager to lead the country in developing commercial uses for drones and grab a slice of what the Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems International predicts will be an $82 billion industry by 2025.

The winning candidates were Alaska, Virginia, New York, Texas, Nevada, and North Dakota. Prior to test site selection, the FAA authorized over 300 much smaller test sites for drones, most of which were universities and small police departments. The FAA program is set to conclude in February 2017.

In November, I went to one of these test sites in Grand Forks, North Dakota, to see what exactly the future of domestic flying robots might look like. Full disclosure: The North Dakota Department of Commerce paid for my trip.

When I, along with four other journalists, traveled to the Roughrider State, I found a community united in avoiding the word "drone." The officials I spoke with refer to their flying machines as "unmanned aircraft." That's what the FAA is calling them, while at nearby Grand Forks Air Force Base the term is "remotely piloted vehicle."

"Unmanned is unequivocally the future of aviation," 69th Reconnaissance Group Commander Colonel Lawrence Spinetta said, speaking at Grand Forks Air Force Base. It's not just the military that has adopted this attitude. In 2010, the University of North Dakota, which has a long history in training airplane and helicopter pilots, created the nation's first civilian degree program in piloting drones. The FAA granted the University of North Dakota a special certificate that allows the school to fly unmanned vehicles.

The FAA authorized the Grand Forks County Sheriff's Department to use drones for law enforcement missions in March 2013. Canadian dronemaker Draganflyer and California drone company Aerovironment have both partnered with the sheriff's department to test their small drones. In May, the department used a drone during a police mission for the first time.

Grand Forks County Sheriff's Department Drone

This is an Aerovironment Qube, and it fits in the back of a patrol car.

Kelsey D. Atherton

In Seattle, a plan for police to use drones was scuttled by the mayor before it had even taken off, following outcry and protest by privacy advocates. I asked North Dakota Lieutenant Governor Drew Wrigley why that didn't happen in Grand Forks. "We don't have that many Black Helicopters types," he said, before quickly clarifying, "There's a lot of trust in institutions here." He mentioned the state's status as the best-run in the nation, according to financial news company 27/7 Wall Street. Of course, not everyone in North Dakota would agree with Wrigley. Driving back from a tour of Grand Forks Air Force Base, we passed a home with "Libertarian: Less Government, More Freedom" painted on the side.

In an effort to gain community support for drone use, the University of North Dakota created the Unmanned Aerial Systems Research Compliance Committee, an academic ethics assembly that reviews and approves proposals for drone use. The committee's meetings are open to the public. I spoke with committee members Barry Milavetz and Thomasine Heitkamp about the project. Milavetz has a background in medicine; Heitkamp in social work. While neither comes from law enforcement or aviation, they both have extensive experience in the ethics of academic research.

The keys to a successful drone program are community standards, feedback, and public notification, Heitkamp and Milavetz told me. These standards, adopted voluntarily by the University of North Dakota and accepted by the sheriff's department, may have influenced the FAA's drone roadmap, which issued privacy guidelines that seem to be based on the committee's work.

UND Scan Eagle

The Scan Eagle is an unarmed drone. It is in use by the military, but it also has civilian applications. Here is one being tested by the University of North Dakota.

Kelsey D. Atherton

One example of the committee's influence is the sign pictured at the top of this page, which informs people driving by that a police drone is in use. Another example comes from a major concert, which prompted a tremendous influx of traffic into Grand Forks. The city, with a population of 53,000, expected thousands more visitors, and the sheriff's department wanted to use drones to better manage the traffic. The public safety benefit was there--it's easier to spot and resolve traffic problems from above. But flying cameras can make people uneasy. Heitkamp and Milavetz both discussed the challenge of data retention: what happens to the video recorded by the drone? Is it stored indefinitely, and if so, by whom, and who can gain access to it? In the case of the concert, the committee tried to balance the safety benefits and privacy concerns by allowing the drones to stream live video, but not record it for future use. And they were only allowed to film cars, which matter for traffic snarls, and not people, which largely don't.

If all this sounds pretty mundane for a future of flying robots, that's because it is. The essential part of making drones work in Grand Forks, at least according to the officials I spoke with, seemed to be trust--the sheriff's department voluntarily adopted the university's standards; the university took their role as researchers and community stewards seriously; and the research compliance committee sought public input on all decisions about drone use.

Now that the FAA has selected North Dakota as a test site, the state will begin rolling out programs that have already been implemented on a small scale in Grand Forks. By participating in the FAA's research project, North Dakota, Alaska, Virginia, Nevada, Texas, and New York all stand to benefit from an economic windfall, with new industry and jobs springing up around domestic drones. For now, though, the future of unmanned aircraft is still in beta.

Ford C-Max Solar Energi Concept at CES 2014

Solar power has proven itself better for static charging than it has for on-vehicle use, even if Australia's Solar Challenge race has shown solar cars to be possible under certain, very specific conditions.

The trouble is, electric cars draw too much power and take up too small an area for solar roofs to charge them as they drive along.

There are other possibilities though, one of which Ford is exploring with the C-Max Solar Energi concept--which uses solar power to directly charge the plug-in hybrid's battery pack.

If you're hoping this could be the car to finally make on-the-go charging a reality, you'll be disappointed--it's still designed to charge when parked up.

But the concept is a unique one. Rather than plugging in your C-Max Energi each time you stop, you park below a special solar concentrator with Fresnel circular lenses. This magnifies the sun's rays onto the roof of the car--which is covered by solar panels.

The normal sunlight is boosted by a factor of eight--allowing the relatively small roof-mounted solar array, using SunPower cells, to gather enough light during a day's charging for a full battery top-up, or 21 miles of EPA-rated electric range.

It frees the car entirely from the need to charge via the electricity grid, though the Solar Energi retains its charge port so once you get home you can still plug it in and benefit from your home's solar panels. If you don't already have solar panels and charge via the grid, using the solar roof system could cut your grid charging by as much as 75 percent.

A vital component in making best use of the sun's energy is ensuring that the solar concentrator focuses as much light as possible onto the panels as the sun moves across the sky. In order to do this, the car is programmed to move autonomously beneath the collector, ensuring it remains below the focus of the light.

Such a system doesn't seem entirely problem-free.

For a start, you're replacing the complexity of an infrastructure-based solar array and charging system with a low-tech infrastructure, high-tech automobile complexity. Requiring the car to move within its (presumably fairly large) parking space seems like undue complication.

Then there's the spaces themselves, which need to be large enough to occupy a car moving along their length. And you still need to erect these solar collectors above relevant spaces, which isn't entirely infrastructure-free.

Also, a day's worth of solar charging for only 21 miles range doesn't strike us as particularly efficient--you'd still be better off using a conventional charging cable hooked up to a solar-generated electricity supply.

On the plus side, it could be an amusing answer to the problem of "ICEing"--that of combustion-engined vehicles parking in electric car spots.

Why? Well as deterrents go, focusing eight times the solar energy onto the roof of a regular car may not be great for its health, nor its appearance. We've already seen the damage focused solar energy can do to cars--neither this Toyota Prius nor this Jaguar XJ luxury sedan got away lightly (pun not intended) after their own run-ins with our nearest star.

Our take? It's a neat system and great to see Ford thinking outside the box.

But in reality, the Solar Energi concept seems to be over-complicating the much simpler practice of using infrastructure-based solar cells to power regular electric car charging.

Ford will display its C-Max Solar Energi concept at this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, beginning January 6.

This article, written by Antony Ingram, was originally published on Green Car Reports, a publishing partner of Popular Science. Follow Green Car Reports on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

More from Green Car Reports:

Electric Cars So Disruptive, Gas Cars Will Be Obsolete In 2016, Says Futurist
2015 Ford F-150 Gas Mileage: What We Know So Far
Norway’s Electric Cars: Already Too Popular?

L'Aquila earthquake damage

Lights were reported prior to an earthquake that struck near L'Aquila, Italy, in April 2009.

Emergenza Terremoto Abruzzo via Wikimedia Commons

But the lights are not (necessarily) hallucinations nor created by E.T. "Earthquake lights are a real phenomenon--they're not UFOs," researcher Robert Thériault, a geologist at Quebec's Ministry of Natural Resources, told Nature. "They can be scientifically explained."

In study published in the January/February issue of the journal Seismological Research Letters, Thériault and colleagues pulled together reliable sightings of these lights since 1600, and found some strange similarities. A total of 63 out of the 65 sightings occurred along nearly vertical faults. The researchers suggest that along these faults, the stress of rocks grinding against each other produces electrical charges, which can travel upward and interact with the atmosphere to create light.

"When the stress of an earthquake hits the rock, it breaks chemical bonds... creating holes of positive electrical charge. These 'p holes' [can flow] vertically through the fault to the surface, triggering strong local electric fields that can generate light," according to Nature. The existence of these p-holes was proposed in 2003 by researcher Friedemann Freund, who wrote that "under normal conditions [these p-holes] are dormant, but when they 'wake up'" during earthquakes, "the rocks begin to sparkle and glow."

The researchers sifted through many strange tales to arrive at their final 65 reliable sightings, Nature reported. Among those: 

Off the Peruvian coast in August 2007, a fisherman reported the sky turning violet a few minutes before the sea began shaking. Near Ebingen, Germany, in November 1911, a woman reported seeing glows that moved along the ground “like snakes” as a quake began.

Spreading the word about earthquake lights could help them to be used as possible earthquake warnings. In at least one case, lights have alerted people about an impending quake, according to Nature: "Near L’Aquila, Italy, in April 2009, a man saw white flashes reflecting off his kitchen furniture in the early hours of the morning and took his family outside to safety." And two hours later, a huge earthquake rocked the region. 

Belt Sander

Chris Philpot

Sharpen Knives (Good Idea)

Belt sanders may smooth floors and strip paint, but YouTube user wyldediver demonstrates how they can also breathe new life into dull blades. To sharpen yours, start with a 150-grit belt. Slowly run one side of the blade across the belt a few times using light pressure (the sharp edge should point down at an acute angle to the belt). Next, sand the other side. Turn off the sander, swap in a 240-grit belt, and sharpen again. Repeat the cycle for 400-grit, 20-micron, and finally 9-micron belts. Buff away any flecks with a leather sanding belt treated with polishing compound.

Perform a Mani-Pedi (Bad Idea)

Long nails? Callused feet? You’ll need help, just not from this power tool. Sanding belts move upwards of 1,000 rpm, so contact could leave you abraded at best, amputated at worst.

WARNING: Wear gloves and eyewear that will protect you from sharp blades and flying bits of metal. And don't do the bad idea. (It's a bad idea.)

This article originally appeared in the January 2014 issue of Popular Science.

A blast from the past

Alexander Stevens on the deck of the Aurora, McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. Stevens was Ernest Shackleton's chief scientist.

Antarctic Heritage Trust, www.nzaht.org

From 1914 to 1917, explorer Ernest Shackleton traveled to Antarctica, trying to set a record by voyaging across the entire continent. But nature intervened. His ship, Endurance, was crushed in sea ice and his miraculous rescue mission through the Southern Ocean on a 20-foot boat is the stuff of legend (Shackleton managed to save all 27 of his men). On the other side of the continent, trouble also beset the crew of a second ship in the expedition--known as the Ross Sea Party, aboard the Aurora--when they were marooned at a base in Cape Evans, on Antarctica's Ross Island, after their ship blew away. The purpose of this party was to supply Shackleton's group on the trek across the continent. 

This base is also known as Scott's hut, named after explorer Robert Falcon Scott, whose group built it in 1911. Scott and four colleagues died in 1912 while returning from the South Pole. They thought they would be the first to this location, but once they reached it they discovered that Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen had beaten them there. And then they froze and/or starved to death. Rough.

Ice and land

Ice in front of Ross Island, Antarctica.

Antarctic Heritage Trust, www.nzaht.org

Anyway, during the time that the Ross Sea Party was stuck at Scott's hut, they took and left behind a box of 22 black-and-white photo negatives. These celluloid artifacts were discovered recently by New Zealand's Antarctic Heritage Trust, which has preserved more than 10,000 objects from Scott's base. The photographs were developed after careful restoration, and many were badly damaged, according to the organization. 

"It’s an exciting find and we are delighted to see them exposed after a century," said Nigel Watson, the trust's executive director. "It's testament to the dedication and precision of our conservation teams' efforts to save Scott's Cape Evans hut." The photos serve as a "time capsule" of the area, the trust wrote, and many landmarks from the region can be recognized therein. 

Old negatives

The cellulose nitrate negatives, found frozen together in ice.

Antarctic Heritage Trust, www.nzaht.org

Thick-Skinned

A fossil of hadrosaur skin

Canadian Light Source

Were they fuzzy or were they flat-skinned? That's the great question now for dinosaur researchers. After surveying all the world's known fossils of dinosaur skin, one pair of paleontologists says the vast majority of non-avian dinosaurs were scaly-skinned, Nature News reports. But this isn't the last word on the subject.

What's going on here? Why are the dinosaurs of my childhood all weird now? It helps to know the state of the science on feathered dinosaurs. This post, in The Guardian's Lost Worlds blog, and this one, in Smithsonian magazine's Dinosaur Tracking, offer great background. In short, there's plenty of evidence that the group of dinos that gave rise to modern birds—a group that includes Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor—had feathers. (Check out this 30-foot-long fuzzy tyrannosaur.) There's less evidence that dinosaurs from other groups, including things like sauropods and Triceratops, were feathery, but some scientists hypothesize they were. "It [is] certainly not unreasonable as a hypothesis or improbable," David Hone, a University of London paleontologist, wrote in The Guardian in June. Scientists have discovered a few feathered non-avian dinosaur fossils, but it's not clear how common such animals were.

A Swimming, Fuzzy Theropod

Scientists have found plenty of evidence that theropods were often feathered, but there's more debate about other types of dinosaurs.

Nathan E. Rogers

It all depends on when dino-feathers evolved. If they arose further back in the dinosaur family tree, then more dinosaurs are likely have them.

Paul Barrett of the Natural History Museum in London and David Evans of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto tried to answer this question by looking at the world's dinosaur skin fossils and examining where feathers popped up in the dinosaur family tree. Nature News reported on the paleontologists' findings from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting. The survey results suggest that dinosaur feathers/bristles/fuzz did not arise early enough in the family tree to spread to many non-avian dinosaurs. The results are a "valuable reality check" about the appearance of early dinosaurs, another paleontologist, Richard Butler of the University of Birmingham in the U.K., told Nature News.

Nevertheless, things could change with the discovery of new fossils, which, of course, happens all the time. Older fossils would help settle the debate, Butler said. And there's always that element of luck, of finding the right fossils that were preserved in the right way, particularly to capture structures as delicate as feathers.

[Nature News]

Once upon a time in the 1960s, scientists thought the human genome might contain as many as 2 million genes, units of DNA that code for proteins. But ever since then, the estimated number has been steadily shrinking. A new study suggests that the human genome could contain as few as 19,000 protein-coding genes, fewer than nematode worms.

By the time the Human Genome Project began in the late 1990s, the Physics arXiv Blog reports, the highest estimates of the number of protein-coding genes put the number at 100,000, and estimates continue to fall:

In 2001, the initial sequence of the human genome cut the figure dramatically. The International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium put it at 30,000 while a rival group led by Craig Venter estimated the number at 26,000. In 2004, the final draft of the human genome reduced the figure even further to around 24,500 and in 2007 further analysis suggested that it was more like 20,500. And that’s where the figure has sat. Until now.

Researchers came up with the new estimate, detailed in a paper submitted to Molecular Biology and Evolution, by performing a variety of analyses such as filtering "out the human genes that are not present in other species and do not have a structure likely to code for a protein."

Of course, research has shown that more complex organisms don't require more genes. As Medium points out, a water flea has 31,000 genes, the most in any animal, while the record for the largest genome is thought be held by a rare flowering plant native to Japan called Paris japonica.

All this raises the question: How does the human genome create as much complexity as it does: for instance the brain? Nobody knows exactly, but the answer would be invaluable. Non-coding regions of DNA, which make up a majority of the genome, play a huge role that is only just beginning to be understood.

Bird-Powered Moon Lander

From The Man in the Moon by Francis Godwin

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-53277

The year is 1638. The Puritans are still settling New England. You're probably wearing some pretty weird stuff. Galileo is still alive.

In fact, Galileo published his first observations of the moon's surface, as viewed through a telescope, less than 30 years ago. So you might know that the moon has varied topography, just as the Earth does, but it all seems pretty new to you. Futurist that you are, however, you're already one step ahead, trying to imagine what it would be like to look upon those alien mountains. How do you imagine you would get there?

In the first known story of space travel in English literature, bishop and historian Francis Godwin envisioned getting carried to the moon by a craft harnessed to a flock of yet-to-be-discovered, super-strong, goose-like birds. Yes, he imagined a goose-powered moon lander. U.S. Library of Congress Special Curator Trevor Owens highlights this and other fictional spacecraft in a recent blog post for the Library of Congress' website. It is just as awesome as it sounds. We'll show you some pictures, then you should go check out the post.

Cyrano de Bergerac, whom I always imagined to be a pretty smart guy, came up with this fireworks-powered craft for a book published in 1657. This illustration shows Bergerac ascending in said craft, surrounded by plumes of smoke like those around real space rockets: 

Fireworks-Powered Moon Lander

From A Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac

Digitized by the Library of Congress

Fast-forwarding a bit, this print comes from Italy, sometime in the 1830s or 1840s. It's a space elevator, proving that no idea is truly new:

Moon Elevator

Lithograph made by Salvatore Fergola

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ppmsca-35549

[U.S. Library of Congress]

Extinct bird

A stuffed passenger pigeon at the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

Keith Schengili-Roberts via Wikimedia Commons

In 1813, John James Audubon saw a flock--if that is what you call an agglomeration of birds moving at 60 miles an hour and obliterating the noonday sun--that was merely the advance guard of a multitude that took three days to pass. Alexander Wilson, the other great bird observer of the time, reckoned that a flock he saw contained 2,230,272,000 individuals. To get your head around just how many passenger pigeons that would mean, consider that there are only about 260 million rock pigeons [common pigeons] in the world today. You would have to imagine more than eight times the total world population of rock pigeons, all flying at the same time in a connected mass.

There were so many pigeons in the 1800s that they would occasionally break trees and their limbs after settling down upon them, causing feathery avalanches. As late as 1871, one roosting ground in Wisconsin covered 850 square miles (more than twice the land area of New York City), holding more than 100 million birds. In such quantities, hunting birds wasn't difficult: 

Many of the hunting stories have a tall-tale aspect perfectly in tune with the fantastic aura that surrounds the birds. Boys stuck long hickory poles into the ground, pulled on ropes tied to the tips of the poles, and knocked birds down simply by making the poles quiver. Nets were stretched between trees. A roosting ground in Tennessee was set on fire and “scorched corpses were then collected the next day for personal use or sale” from two-foot-high piles of the dead.

But the bounty was misleading. In 1900, a boy in Ohio shot what was then identified as the last wild passenger pigeon with his shotgun. But how did such a widespread animal disappear so quickly? 

According to Rosen, the book blames it on the development of railroads and logging after the Civil War. While America was still largely rural, hunting didn't dent the huge flocks that used to block out the sun. But shortly thereafter, people could find out where flocks were over telegraph wires, travel there to hunt, and sell birds to people in cities, transported by railcar. The invention of refrigerator cars in 1878 didn't help. Widespread logging also took out many of the forests that the birds depended on for seeds. Furthermore, the birds likely thrived on having such enormous populations, finding safety in numbers. Once these populations plummeted, they lost their competitive advantage. 

Interestingly, Americans didn't at first seem to be able to accept that the birds were gone: 

Greenberg hauntingly documents the way people kept “seeing” the birds after the great flocks vanished, or devising outlandish theories to explain where they might have gone. The journal Science speculated that they were in the desert of Arizona; another journal, the Auk, suggested that they were east of Puget Sound, and a lumberman claimed to have seen millions in Chile. Henry Ford was convinced that they had all drowned in the Pacific en route to Asia. The flocks were like phantom limbs that the country kept on feeling. Or perhaps the birds’ disappearance, and the human role in it, was simply too much to bear.

There are now plans to resurrect passenger pigeons using DNA from old specimens, a phenomenon called de-extinction, although it's unclear if that would be possible or advisable. 

[The New Yorker]

NSA Headquarters At Night

This image is officially titled, I kid you not, "The Mission Never Sleeps"

National Security Agency

On Sunday, German newspaper Der Spiegelpublished a story about the National Security Agency's “Tailored Access Operations” unit, based in San Antonio, Texas. The NSA, whose mandate concerns intercepting electronic communications, is usually associated with high-tech espionage. Buried in the article, however, is an altogether lower-tech revelation: the NSA’s TAO unit has swiped computers in transit. Says Der Spiegel: “If a target person, agency or company orders a new computer or related accessories, for example, TAO can divert the shipping delivery to its own secret workshops."

From there, the NSA can install malicious software or even hardware components on the intercepted computer. The NSA refers to this technique as “interdiction,” a term reminiscent of the way the Drug Enforcement Agency nabs drug smugglers on their way into the U.S. To better understand the implications of this interception, I spoke with Kit Walsh, a fellow at the Cyberlaw Clinic of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Intercepting packages and bugging them is an older technique than, say, collecting location data from cell phones. Is there clear legal precedent for secretly installing hardware onto confiscated computers?

Walsh: While dragnet surveillance is contrary to the Constitution, intrusive targeted surveillance can be authorized by a judge. If there is probable cause to believe the intrusion will yield evidence of a particular crime, then particular intrusions of specific scope can be authorized by an impartial judge. That's the basic framework required by the Constitution.

Knowing that this tactic is being used does not tell us how its use is being governed. It could be in use in rampantly illegal ways, or constrained only to narrow, legitimate circumstances. We cannot know. Which is itself a problem in a democratic nation. Thanks to Snowden, we are having the overdue public debate about how our government should and shouldn't spy on us and others.

Of course, it is unlikely that the NSA is constraining itself to what is constitutional, given that they have the very broad FISA statute to work with and they are willing to stretch the English language to the breaking point in their secret interpretations of the law. U.S. law is also very bad at protecting any rights of foreigners in the intelligence-gathering context.

What rights does such interception by the NSA threaten?

Walsh: This kind of surveillance implicates the same rights of privacy as other forms of surveillance, with the consequent chilling effect on free speech and freedom to associate with persons of your choosing. To give a technical answer, it also implicates the target's property right in the device being modified.

What do you see as the most troubling consequence of this?

Walsh: This tactic makes it more difficult and expensive for activists, journalists, and others to acquire computing devices they can trust, and inevitably people and organizations will be compromised and have a reduced ability to hold their government accountable. It dangerously alters the relationship between the people and the state.

Unlike broader metadata collection, these "interdictions" seem to be targeted. For the general public, is that a good thing? What does it mean for activists?

Walsh: This tactic is used in addition to, not instead of, dragnet surveillance. If the NSA had to justify intrusions to a neutral judge, with respect to particular individuals, that would be a much healthier system than the one that has evolved in the U.S., closer both to the Constitution and to the governance scheme envisioned by Congress when it set up the FISA court.

Any further thoughts on the matter?

Walsh: Even if you personally don't feel you need privacy, you can help those who do just by playing with anonymization technology such as Tor and encryption technology for communications, so no one sticks out as one of the few users of privacy-enabling technologies.