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Gamers Have Ordered $1 Million In Pizza Hut Through Xbox 360

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Screen shot of Pizza Hut's Xbox 360 app for ordering pizza
Pizza Hut's Xbox 360 app: The dream is real.

Pizza Hut says that gamers bought more than $1 million worth of food from the chain last year between April and August, without picking up a phone, leaving the house, or even putting down their consoles. Instead, they ordered custom pizzas using the Pizza Hut app for Xbox 360.

Speaking with gaming news site Polygon, Pizza Hut public relations director Doug Terfehr described the the Xbox app as "a source of unbelieveable growth" for the chain. "When you talk about a sweet spot for the pizza category it's definitely gamers and gaming," Terfehr told the site.

Terfehr hinted that the Xbox app's success has other video game console manufacturers clamoring for apps of their own, but didn't suggest when fans of Nintendo or PlayStation might expect to enjoy the same seamless pizza ordering experience as Xbox users. "[C]onversations continue to be ongoing with us," he told Polygon. "Wherever you are, we want to be."


    







Infographic: Scientists Who Doubt Human-Caused Climate Change

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Pie chart demonstrating vast scientific credibility of human-driven climate change
Mighty thin slice:
In over 2,200 peer-reviewed articles about climate change by over 9,000 authors, published between November 2012 and December 2013, just one author and paper rejected human actions as the cause.

The next time you hear someone dispute that human activity is destabilizing our climate, remember this pie chart.

It represents geochemist James Lawrence Powell's review of 2,258 peer-reviewed scientific articles about climate change, written by 9,136 authors, published between Nov. 12, 2012 and December 31, 2013. Of all those hundreds of papers and thousands of researchers, Powell found one article, authored by a single scientist, that attributed climate change to something other than human actions: "The Role of Solar Activity in Global Warming," by S.V. Avakyan, appearing in the Herald of the Russian Academy of Science, Vol. 83, No. 3.

Powell, a past president of Oberlin, Franklin and Marshall, and Reed colleges, invites anyone to reproduce his survey of the science: 

Anyone can repeat as much of the new study as they wish--all of it if they like. Download an Excel database of the 2,258 articles here. It includes the title, document number, and Web of Science accession number. Scan the titles to identify articles that might reject man-made global warming. Then use the DOI or WoS accession number to find and read the abstracts of those articles, and where necessary, the entire article. If you find any candidates that I missed, please email me here.

Powell's earlier survey of peer-reviewed studies published between 1991 and Nov. 12, 2013, resulted in this pie chart:

Pie chart: Of 13,950 scientific climate articles, 24 reject global warming
Vast majority of scientists accept that human actions are causing climate change.

 

* See: Donald Trump or Rush Limbaugh


    






Overflowing Garbage And Rats: There's (Gonna Be) An App For That

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A Rat in New York
David Shankbone via Wikimedia Commons

A new idea could help reduce overflowing garbage cans and rat outbreaks: fitting trash receptacles with sensors that can tell how full they are, and when they are broken or go missing.

These sensors, wireless Bluetooth low energy (BLE) modules, could then transmit data to the phones of people who walk by, says Samrat Saha of the DCI Marketing Group in Milwaukee, according to the tech site O'Reilly Radar:

As pedestrians who have downloaded custom "garbage can" apps on their BLE-capable iPhone or Android devices pass by, continues Saha, the information is collected from the module and relayed to a Cloud-hosted service for action — garbage pick-up for brimming cans, in other words. The process will also allow planners to optimize trash can placement, redeploying receptacles from areas where need is minimal to more garbage-rich environs.

But it doesn't stop there. City officials have found a clear link between broken and missing garbage cans and rat problems, says Brett Goldstein, the former Chief Data and Information Officer for the City of Chicago and a current lecturer at the University of Chicago:

"We found areas that showed an abnormal increase in missing or broken receptacles started getting rat outbreaks around seven days later," Goldstein said. "That's very valuable information. If you have sensors on enough garbage cans, you could get a temporal leading edge, allowing a response before there’s a problem. In urban planning, you want to emphasize prevention, not reaction."

Though such sensors aren't currently deployed in cities, it would be simple to make them with existing technology (and there are for instance already so-called smart garbage cans.) Getting people to download apps and participate might prove to be a challenge; but then again, who likes trash and rats?

[O'Reilly Radar]


    






100 Years Of Smoking Studies In Popular Science

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line illustrations showing people smoking
Art from a 1958 Popular Science Feature on Smoking

Fifty years ago tomorrow, then-U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry held a press conference announcing that, among other ills, smoking caused lung cancer. His report kicked off America's most intense and successful public health campaign to date. NPR's story about this offers a great peek into what the U.S. was like at that time. For example, the story notes that the surgeon general's report was released on a Saturday (It was a Saturday then, too) to minimize its impact on tobacco company stocks. That's how politically powerful the companies were then.

photo of Luther Terry at podium, with men seated behind him
Luther Terry Addresses a Press Conference on Smoking and Health, 1965
Unknown creator. Photo hosted online by the U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Here's another way to see the 1964 report's impact. The Journal of the American Medical Association has collected some hard numbers in honor of the anniversary, many from a retrospective study the journal published this week:

43: percent of Americans who smoked in 1964

18: percent of Americans who smoke today

7,000: the number of scientific studies the U.S. surgeon general's advisory committee examined before declaring that smoking caused lung cancer, laryngeal cancer and chronic bronchitis

17.7 million: the number of Americans who died from tobacco-related causes between 1964 and 2012. (A chain-smoking doctor among Terry's expert report authors was diagnosed with lung cancer within a year of the surgeon general's announcement, NPR reports. He later died of the disease.)

8 million: the estimated number of tobacco-related deaths in the U.S. that anti-smoking initiatives have prevented since 1964

19.6: the average number of years people add to their lifespans by not smoking regularly

Popular Science has reported on tobacco smoking throughout its history. There are some fun anachronisms, like a 1910 declaration that "there is no scientific evidence that the moderate use of tobacco by healthy mature men produces any beneficial or injurious physical effects that can be measured." Health organizations now say there is no healthy level of smoking, nor of exposure to secondhand smoke.

At the same time, there are hints throughout Popular Science's archives suggesting people knew that they should try to quit, that evidence was accumulating for smoking's long-term harms, and that tobacco was bad for adolescents. As surprising as the 1964 declaration might have been for some, the writing was on the wall for those who followed the science.

illustration of a smoking fish with words, "don't you get hooked!"
U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare Anti-Smoking Ad, 1970

In that 1910 article, by a Dr. George L. Meylan of Columbia University, you can see some of the early science of tobacco's health effects. He talks about animal studies showing nicotine's dangers, as well as funny comparisons of the heights and grades of smoking versus non-smoking college men. His own study wisely points out that smoking may not necessarily cause bad grades—it might be correlated with bad grades because smoking students tend to be more social, and perhaps came to college for the social benefits, rather than the scholarly ones. He ultimately comes the not-bad-nor-good conclusion quoted above, but also points out, "All scientists agreed that the use of tobacco by adolescents is injurious; parents, teachers and physicians should strive earnestly to warn youths against its use." Thanks, Dr. Meylan.

Fast-forwarding to the years preceding the 1964 surgeon general's report, scientists were gathering more rigorous evidence that smoking causes various illnesses, including lung cancer. Popular Science reported on some of these studies in 1958:

The U.S. Public Health Service, for example, has reported that among veterans who died from lung cancer over a certain period, about 10 times as many had been smokers—cigarette smokers—as non-smokers. USPHS has also reported that the death rate from coronary heart disease among cigarette smokers was almost two-thirds higher than the rate for non-smokers. In cigarette smokers the death rate from all causes was more than half again as high as among non-smokers.

The same article hauls out an assertion that was still common in 1964: that for most, smoking is a habit, not an addiction. The difference between a habit and addiction is that addicts compulsively seek out a behavior, even when they know it harms them. It's now well recognized that nicotine is addictive, but during an era when nearly half of America smoked, it must have seemed inconceivable that all of those upstanding people were compulsively lighting up against their own best interests.

The summer after the surgeon general's warning, the magazine published a fascinating piece on researchers' efforts to create a safer smoke. "Cigarette addicts, with few iron-willed exceptions, aren't about to give up the weed," it declared. After a 20 percent plunge immediately following the lung cancer warning, tobacco sales were back to normal, it reported.

So researchers turned toward making cigarettes from other types of leaves, including cabbage and those of a flowering tree called the catalpa. But it turned out that convincing people to stop smoking was the way to go, after all.


    






Well-Preserved, 2,000-Year-Old Skeleton Found In South Florida

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Digging Deep
All Florida construction sites must be surveyed to ensure no historical objects are destroyed.
Archaeological and Historical Conservancy
In the process of installing a waterline in Davie, Fla., construction crews happened upon a 2,000-year-old, fully-intact skeleton. The bones are thought to be those of a Tequesta Indian woman and according to South Florida's Sun-Sentinel are "perhaps the best-preserved remains of an ancient human uncovered in the past 40 years, authorities said." (Presumably they are only comparing it to other remains found in the region, not the whole world.) The Sun-Sentinel continues: 

"It's either Tequesta or the member of a people that predates the Tequesta," said Bob Carr, of the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy in Davie. "It's unusually well preserved, considering it's been under a highway with thousands and thousands of cars going over it every day."

The woman, about 5 feet tall and about 20 to 30 years old, will now be analyzed by state and local archaeological authorities and then reburied in about a month in a secret location, with Seminole and Miccosukee Indians conducting the ceremony. No artifacts were found with the skeleton, and it had no distinguishing marks to indicate how she died. "There's nothing in the bones to indicate trauma," Carr said.

The analysis will not include DNA or radiocarbon dating, as these would require destruction of bone material, something the current-day Florida tribes are opposed to, the paper reported. There will also be no photos forthcoming: 

After the skeleton was unearthed, Seminole and Miccosukee Indian officials requested the discovery remain quiet until Thursday [Jan. 9] and insisted no photos be taken of it.

"This is fairly standard protocol," said Gary Bitner, whose public relations firm represents the Seminole Tribe of Florida. "It's done with an obvious respect for the remains."

Because of a state requirement that all construction sites must be surveyed to ensure no historical objects are destroyed, Carr and other archaeologists have found numerous bones and artifacts. But finding full skeletons is relatively rare.

For the full story, hop on over to the Sun-Sentinel


    






Another Effect Of Racism: Accelerated Aging

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Scientists examine the biological impact of racial discrimination
Diego Vito Cervo | Dreamstime

A new study from the University of Maryland found that racism may speed aging at the cellular level. Researchers found signs of accelerated aging in African American men who reported being heavily discriminated due to their race and who had internalized anti-Black attitudes.

Participants in the study were 92 black men between 30-50 years of age. They were asked about their experiences facing discrimination in different environments, such as in the workplace or housing, along with getting service in public settings like stores or restaurants. Investigators also measured racial bias using the Black-White Implicit Association Test, which gauges unconscious attitudes and beliefs about race groups that people may be unaware of or unwilling to report.

"African American men who experienced greater racial discrimination had the shortest telomeres of those studied."

To measure aging, the scientists examined the length of telomeres, repetitive sequences of DNA capping the ends of chromosomes that shorten progressively over time, at a rate of about 50-100 base pairs annually. Telomere length is a marker scientists use to evaluate biological aging – shorter telomere length is associated with increased risk of premature death and chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, stroke and dementia. "We found that the African American men who experienced greater racial discrimination and who displayed a stronger bias against their own racial group had the shortest telomeres of those studied," says Dr. David H. Chae, assistant professor of epidemiology at UMD's School of Public Health and the study's lead investigator. 

Researchers found that the average telomere length was 140 base pairs shorter in participants reporting higher levels of racial discrimination – this difference may equal out to 1.4 to 2.8 years chronologically. Past studies have also shown that telomere length may shorten faster under conditions of high psychosocial and physiological stress. Additionally, children who have gone through traumatic experiences tend to have shorter telomere length.  

Health disparities between races are well-documented, with African Americans having shorter life expectancy and a greater chance of suffering from age-related illnesses compared to whites. This study revealing accelerated aging at the biological level may also help show the link between racism and disease risk. “Despite the limitations of our study, we contribute to a growing body of research showing that social toxins disproportionately impacting African American men are harmful to health,” Chae explained. “Our findings suggest that racism literally makes people old.”


    






Will This Helicopter Truck Fly?

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The Black Knight Transformer
Advanced Tactics

It's a lot easier to "leave no man behind" when the rescue crew is robotic. Advanced Tactics, an El Segundo-based firm, plans to test a remotely operated, transforming, flying, driving evacuation vehicle early this year. It's not quite a drone, but it's not really a truck or a helicopter either.

It's called the Black Night Transformer. Transformer is an apt name, though the Black Knight won't reconfigure itself into a giant robot warrior. Instead, the transformation is relatively subtle—eight rotors, four on each side, will spring out for takeoff, fold in for driving through tighter streets, and tilt forward in the air for faster flight.

The impetus behind this odd chimera is a U.S. military desire for a "Multi-Mission Medical and Casualty Evacuation Unmanned Air Vehicle / Unmanned Ground Vehicle." Or, in non-Pentagonese, a flying car that can work in a lot of different scenarios. The program is managed by the U.S. Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center with funding from a congressional earmark in 2009. Why make the vehicle unmanned? From a U.S. government study on medical evacuation, the use of robots in military missions will:

(1) Provide tactical commanders with increased tactical and operational flexibility; (2) Allow the execution of Unmanned Aircraft Systems for Casualty Evacuation - these missions in conditions that manned platforms cannot (or should not) operate in, such as “zero-zero” weather or a contaminated environment; (3) Husband critical medical “first responder” resources; and (4) Act as a force multiplier of scarce “high demand/low density” medical evacuation assets.

In essence, sending a robot helicopter to evacuate wounded troops is good because it means the military can operate in weather unsafe for human pilots and doesn't risk more medical personnel than absolutely necessary. If the robot helicopter can also drive like an off-road vehicle, that gives the military even more rescue options.

If troops are skeptical of crawling into a remotely-driven rescue vehicle, the Black Knight is also designed for cargo delivery. "The U.S. Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory is interested in using the Black Knight vehicle for unmanned cargo resupply missions," Advanced Tactics chief engineer Rustom Jehangir tells Popular Science. "They've done work on this in the past with other platforms, such as the Lockheed Martin K-Max, but our platform will be much less expensive."

But before anyone starts buying transforming heli-cars, and before it can be said for certain which unmanned cargo helicopter-like vehicle is cheapest, the technology needs to work. Advanced Tactics tested the driving component in late 2013. Before the end of February, Advanced Tactics plans to test the flying part. Only then will we know if this vehicle concept can get off the ground.

The Black Knight Drives
Rotors are tucked flush with the vehicle along its sides to better fit on roads.
Advanced Tactics

    






How Dangerous Is The Chemical Spilled Into West Virginia Waters?

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Drink At Your Own Risk
At a chemical plant near Charleston, W.V., a 48,000-gallon tank of 4-methylcyclohexane methanol, or MCHM, was found to be leaking into the Elk River yesterday (January 9). The leak has put the drinking water of about 300,000 people in jeopardy, and officials have told residents in nine counties not to drink tap water. But just what is this chemical and how dangerous is it? 

MCHM is a solvent used to rinse coal. According to CNN:

The leaked chemical... is harmful if swallowed, said Thomas Aluise, a spokesman for the state's Department of Environmental Protection. It is used to wash coal before it goes to market.

"When coal comes out of the ground, it's got pieces of rock, it's got other things that are associated with the coal-mining process that aren't coal -- mainly rock and dust and things like that, so it's sent to a cleaning plant," said Phil Smith, director of communications for the United Mine Workers, in a telephone interview.

It is unsafe to come into contact with, at least when it is undiluted, as the New York Times reports

The chemical, which smells like licorice, can cause headaches, eye and skin irritation, and difficulty breathing from prolonged exposures at high concentrations, according to the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists. Officials in West Virginia said they did not know how much of the chemical had leaked into the river or what its potential health impact might be.

The state’s order not to drink tap water or use household water to bathe, brush teeth, supplement infant formula or cook was made in an abundance of caution, officials said.

“We don’t know that the water is not safe, but I can’t say it is safe,” Jeff McIntyre, president of West Virginia American Water Company, which supplies most of the household water in the area, said at a news conference on Friday. “The only appropriate use for this water is toilet flushing.”

Further, the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources said symptoms of MCHM exposure include “severe burning in throat, severe eye irritation, non-stop vomiting, trouble breathing or severe skin irritation such as skin blistering.”

Without knowing how much MCHM has been spilled, as that figure hasn't yet been released, it's unclear what the concentrations might be in tap water and what the health effects might be. But that will hopefully be ascertained relatively quickly, as an investigation has been launched by U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin, as well as several federal and state agencies. This is only the ninth time that a federal emergency has been declared due to concerns about chemical or biological contamination. 


    







Real-Life Emoji And Other Amazing Images From This Week

Software Accurately Predicts Books' Popularity By Analyzing Their Sentences

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photo of a library aisle
Books!
Greg Friedler/Getty Images

Maybe this is something we can apply to Popular Science posts? A team of computer scientists has developed software that's able to predict whether a book will be popular based on its writing style, the U.K.'s Telegraph reports.

The software learned this trick from analyzing 800 books from Project Gutenberg, an online archive of public domain works, and comparing the books' word use and grammar with how often they've been downloaded. For some books, the computer scientists also considered Amazon sales data awards such as Pulitzer Prizes. The books were of all different genres and types, ranging from novels to poetry, and from love stories to sci-fi.

Some of the qualities the software identified in popular books sound just like what your writing teachers have been trying to tell you forever. Less successful books included more adverbs and "relied on words that explicitly describe actions and emotions such as 'wanted,' 'took' or 'promised,'" The Telegraph reported. In other words, they didn't adhere to "show, don't tell."

Other secrets to writing success were less intuitive. For example, successful books contained more conjunctions, such as "and" and "but." Do successful books have a lot of long sentences?

In a paper they wrote for an Association for Computational Linguistics conference, the software's makers, a team from Stony Brook University in New York, made this table of "successful" and "unsuccessful" words in adventure books:

 

Words in Adventure Books
From "Success with Style: Using Writing Style to Predict the Success of Novels," published by the Association for Computational Linguistics

 

So don't write your next great novel about breathless affairs in beach rooms by the bay. Stick to plain writing, and just let people say the things they mean.

[The Telegraph]


    






Why Are These Stars Fleeing The Milky Way?

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Hypervelocity Stars
Top and side views of the Milky Way Galaxy show the position of four of the new class of hypervelocity stars. The colored bands show the general directions from which the stars have come from. These stars move at more than a million mph relative to the galaxy, fast enough to escape from its gravitational pull.
Graphic design by Julie Turner, Vanderbilt University

Astronomers have discovered a new class of potential hypervelocity stars that could suggest an alternative escape route from the galaxy.

Hypervelocity stars are so called because, uh, they travel really fast—enough to break free from the galaxy. Astronomers have long known that this can happen when a binary star system gets caught in a black hole’s grip. Under the right circumstances, one of the stars spirals in toward the black hole while the other is violently flung outward at a tremendous speed.

Over the past decade, astronomers have found 18 such speedy blue stars in the Milky Way that could have been created this way, all tracing their birthplace to the supermassive black hole at the Galactic center. But an international team of researchers has now discovered a new batch of 20 sun-sized hypervelocity stars that don’t appear to originate from the Galactic core, presenting a mystery to astronomers about their origins. The study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society last week.

So far, astronomers haven’t figured out how these new rogues gained their speed. Because the stars appear to have the same composition as normal disk stars, the researchers have ruled out birthplaces such as the Galaxy’s central bulge or the halo that surrounds it. But many possible scenarios remain: interactions within globular clusters, tidal tails or ejections from supernovae in the Galactic disk.

There is a catch though—measuring the speed of stars requires recording their positions accurately over decades. If a few of those measurements go wrong, the stars can seem to move a lot faster than they really do. But the researchers believe the majority of these candidates are real.

Next, they will verify the status of these stars and expand their search for more stars on the run.


    






This African Fish Can Catch and Eat Flying Birds

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African tigerfish
Smithsonian Channel / YouTube
Birds sometimes eat fish. This we know. In my mind's eye I can picture a bald eagle majestically scooping a salmon from the water. But this ain't that. This is about fish eating flying birds.

But fish don't catch birds in mid-air and eat them, I hear you protesting. Well, nobody told that to the African tigerfish.

Nico Smit, a researcher at North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa, traveled to the country's Mapungubwe National Park to study the habitat and migration of African tigerfish, a toothy little bugger that must really scare the shit out of barn swallows. And for good reason.

During Smit's study, published this month in the Journal of Fish Biology, he and his colleagues witnessed these fish jumping out of the water and snagging barn swallows, up to 20 times. Per day. This is the first time that scientists have witnessed a freshwater fish preying upon a bird in mid-flight, according to Nature News.

Although the video quality isn't exactly top-notch, you'll be able to see a large fish jumping out of the water and snagging a barn swallow in the left-center of the frame. 

“The whole action of jumping and catching the swallow in flight happens so incredibly quickly that after we first saw it, it took all of us a while to really fully comprehend what we had just seen,” Smit told Nature News.

These African tigerfish, or Hydrocynus vittatus (which translates to "spotted water dog," according to the Smithsonian Channel), can grow up to more than 3 feet in length and weigh up to 22 pounds. 

Thought experiment: what would happen if a tigerfish tried to eat a fish-eating bird? Or a fishing bat? I don't claim to have an answer. 


    






Mystery Gas Cloud On Course To Enter Supermassive Black Hole At Milky Way's Heart

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image of X-rays around the center of the Milky Way galaxy
Center of the Milky Way
As imaged by the Swift X-ray Telescope. This image includes data from 2006-2013.
Nathalie Degenaar

Astronomers expect a mysterious gas cloud to cross paths with the black hole at the heart of the Milky Way galaxy in the next few months. Then, one of two things could happen. The cloud could plunge on in, throwing off intense X-rays as it goes. Or, if the cloud contains a star that astronomers cannot currently see, the star will pass by unaffected, while some of the cloud enters the black hole less spectacularly.

This prediction comes from astronomers at the University of Michigan, who have been monitoring the black hole, called Sagittarius A* (pronounced Sagittarius A-star), using NASA's Swift telescope. If the gas cloud, called G2, does get completely sucked into the black hole, astronomers will be able to measure the resulting x-rays for years to come. They can use that data to learn how dim black holes like Sagittarius A* consume matter.

The Michigan team posts its Swift data online daily, so other scientists can know right away once G2 impacts Sagittarius A*. They sound pretty excited about the whole thing. "Everyone wants to see the event happening because it's so rare," Nathalie Degenaar, the lead scientist in the Swift monitoring project, said in a statement. She and her colleagues presented their work so far on Sagittarius A* at the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

[University of Michigan]


    






A Few Questions For Peter W. Singer About The Future Of Cybersecurity

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Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs To Know
by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman. Buy it here.
Peter W. Singer and Allan Friedman's brand new book is an impressively comprehensive guide to one of the least understood arenas of modern life. The book consists of some five dozen questions and answers about cybersecurity, divided into sections: How It All Works, Why It Matters, and What Can We Do? As I read through it, thinking about these questions I might want to ask the authors, all too often the question that occurred to me on one page was already answered on the next.

Popular Science: What was the context and impetus for you and your coauthor to create this book, and what impact can you optimistically foresee from its publication?

Peter W. Singer: We were at a major conference in Washington DC. A senior Pentagon leader was trying to explain why he thought cybersecurity and cyberwar was important. But he could only describe the problem as “all this Cyber-stuff.”

Our entire modern way of life, from communication to commerce to conflict, depends on the Internet, and the resultant cybersecurity issues challenge literally everyone. We face new questions in everything from our rights and responsibilities as citizens of both the virtual and real world, to how to protect our companies, our nations, and our families from a new type of danger.

And, yet there is perhaps no issue so important that remains so poorly understood. That “stuff” problem happens in the halls of government power, but also in business, the military, law, media, and even in our personal lives. It ranges from the 70% of business executives who have ended up making a cyber decision for their firm, despite the fact that no MBA teaches it as a regular part of 21st public and mass media’s confusion on matters from the NSA to the latest credit card hacks.

So what we tried to do is provide the kind of easy-to-read yet deeply informative resource book that has been missing on this crucial issue. The book is structured around the key questions of cybersecurity: how it all works, why it all matters, and what we can do? Along the way, we take readers on a tour of the important (and entertaining) issues and characters of cybersecurity, from the "Anonymous" hacker group and the Stuxnet computer virus to the new cyber units of the Chinese and US militaries. Importantly, its neither too technical nor histrionic. Rather, I hope it pushes some new matters and approaches to aid the experts, but more generally helps people understand this all. Hopefully it will better equip us all to deal with these important issues and new responsibilities, as they are not going away.

We have to understand that as long as we use the Internet, we will face cybersecurity and cyber war issues. The question is how will we manage them?

PS: What sort of significant changes or scenarios do you predict we may expect in the cybersecurity arena over the next year or two? 

We’re discovering 9 new pieces of malware every second.

PWS: Clearly the number of attacks will go up; indeed, we’re discovering 9 new pieces of malware every second. But in the book we try to look beyond these astronomical, but also sometimes meaningless numbers, to key trends. One, for example, is the shift to different uses and users, such as the move towards more mobile devices (and threats towards them). Moreover, the Internet is no longer just about sending or compiling information online, it shapes the real world via the emerging Internet of Things. Indeed, Cisco believes the number of Internet-enabled devices will rise to 40 billion over the next 5 years, as cars, fridges, medical devices, and gadgets not yet imagined or invented all link in. But these in turn will be targeted with different consequences that say defacing a website. For instance, PopSci has explored the move toward Internet-enabled cars and even driverless cars and the drone boom. Well, we’re also seeing the move towards “car-hacking” and “drone-hacks.”

In war, more than 100 nations are now building some kind of cyber-military capability and that trend will only grow. Indeed, it has all the hallmarks of an arms race, from the outcome of more spending (the word “cyber” appears 147 times in next year’s Pentagon budget), but less security, to even a brewing “cyber-industrial complex.” The interesting (and scary) thing for warfare overall will be militaries figuring out how to integrate and synergize computer network operations with their other military tasks. Think of it like how they had new technologies like radios, airplanes, and tanks in World War I, but it wasn’t until they were all brought together in the Blitzkrieg that they reached their true power.

Finally, 2014 will be a huge year for the role of the government in the online world to be debated. It is not just the ongoing NSA mess that will continue to shake out in the US and reverberate abroad (notably on American tech companies, who have already lost billions of revenue). There are also international negotiations over the underlying governance of the Internet, where authoritarian regimes are pushing for more controls. If we don’t watch out, the Internet that has been so wonderful to us could be something our kids don’t end up enjoying.

As much as 94 percent of attacks would be stopped by basic cyber hygiene

PS: Can you synopsize three early actions you would take if you were appointed to an official executive role to improve US cybersecurity?

PWS: Goodness, the last third of the book is all “what can we do?” type chapters, not just at national level, but also at corporate and even personal levels. But a few that would be important for the US government would be:

Launch a major campaign of cyber hygiene awareness, backed by a cyber version of the most successful government agency in history, the CDC (Centers for Disease Control). At the end of the day, both the problems and answers in cybersecurity and cyberwar are not about the software or hardware, but the wetware, the people behind the systems. Get the incentives, the organizations, and education right and things get much better. Not solved, but better. Indeed, one study found that as much as 94 percent of attacks would be stopped by basic cyber hygiene, with my favorite example being that the most popular password is..."password."

Create balance in our approach: At the Pentagon, we are spending 2.5-4 times as much on cyber offense research as we are cyber defense research. That’s a lot like standing in your glass house and thinking the best way to deal with gangs of neighborhood kids is to buy a stone sharpening kit. We are spending over 10 times as much on the Pentagon cyber capabilities as we are at civilian agencies like the DHS. Likewise, we need balance in the public-private sector responsibilities. Firms should not think this is only for the government to handle. Whether you are a bank, a power company, a department store, or a cupcake stand, you have to start taking your cybersecurity responsibilities more seriously.

Get Congress on board (harder said than done): The last time Congress passed any significant cybersecurity legislation was 2002, half a decade before anyone had even heard of the iPhone, let alone today’s world of metadata and Google Glass.

PS: As you recognize in your book, the internet has facilitated an explosion in the creation and distribution of cute videos. Will you share a favorite or two?

PWS: Since my last book was on robots, I have to combine the two and go with the cat using his Roomba robot to escalate the eons-old battle with canine forces.

But as the new book explores, the US and Chinese approaches to cybersecurity and cyberwar are another one of those crucial trends that will define the future. Part of this is the two governments’ political and economic power and their very different visions of the future. But part is simply driven by the fact that the Internet’s users and uses has evolved from its roots a generation back in California. And there is no better illustration than the news that cute panda bear videos are now starting to outnumber cute cat videos. So I should also include my favorite of those, where pandas play on a slide, just like Nature intended...


    






With India On Board, Southeast Asia Could Soon Be Declared Polio-Free

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photo of a child in Nepal getting the polio vaccine
Polio Drops
A child gets polio drops during a vaccination campaign in Nepal.
Adam Bjork, CDC

Three years ago today, India reported its last case of polio. Five years ago, the country was home to nearly half of the world's cases of poliovirus, 741 cases out of 1,604 worldwide. And before the launch of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative in 1988, the illness crippled an estimated 200,000 children in India every year.

"It's really quite extraordinary," Carol Pandak, an epidemiologist with the community-service group Rotary International, tells Popular Science. "India was a country where it was once thought polio could never be eradicated."

So this is a huge win for the country. It also means that the World Health Organization could soon declare its South-East Asia Region, which includes 11 countries, officially polio-free. WHO's South-East Asia Regional Certification Commission plans to meet to review its data in March, the WHO Country Office for India wrote to me in an email. If the region checks out, it would be an official recognition that polio no longer arises in that part of the world endemically, although the virus still could creep in over borders, especially from neighboring Pakistan, which is one of the three countries in the world in which polio is endemic. (The others are Afghanistan and Nigeria.)

For Pandak, the successes in India mean public health organizations have got a good chance in polio's remaining hideouts. Rotary International works with the World Health Organization, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the United Nations as a part of the Global Polio Eradication Initiative. "The ability to eradicate polio from there gives hope and inspiration to other countries that may have some similar challenges like highly densely populated slum areas, issues with water and sanitation, et cetera," she says.

"India was a country where it was once thought polio could never be eradicated."

Getting rid of polio in a region mainly means ensuring everybody is vaccinated against the virus, including every new generation of children. Those places where the virus is still endemic have struggled with vaccine resistance, including among some Taliban groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan. For example, some Taliban leaders have questioned whether U.S.-led vaccination efforts are actually covers for spying. But through working in India, Rotary members have learned some lessons they think will work elsewhere, Pandak says.

In two of India's northern states, where vaccinators encountered some resistance and suspicion, local Rotary members gathered a committee of several dozen religious leaders and talked to them about why it was important to get vaccines. Once those leaders were on board, their community members were on board, too.

For the rest of India, Rotary focused on a different kind of leader—popular movie star Amitabh Bachchan (In U.S., he's appeared in The Great Gatsby), who became a polio vaccine advocate. Rotary has recruited Pakistani cricket star Shahid Afridi and Nigerian actors Sani Danja and Funke Akindele to do the same for their own countries.

The Global Polio Eradication Initiative's work is not done in India, either. To maintain India's and other southeast Asian nations' polio-free status, workers must continue vaccinating children. They'll have to until polio is wiped from the world, because of the constant danger of the virus traveling from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria. Although the world now sees just a few hundred polio cases a year, if countries began vaccinating incompletely, they could start to see 200,000 cases of paralytic polio every year within 20 years, according a study published in 2007. "Worldwide eradication of wild polioviruses is likely to yield substantial health and financial benefits," the study's authors wrote in their paper, published in the medical journal The Lancet, "provided we finish the job."

Such a full-court press will be expensive. As cases dwindle, the cost per case becomes extraordinary—nearly $2.5 million per case in 2012, as Wired reports. Researchers from the Global Polio Eradication Initiative argue that by 2035, eradication efforts will have saved countries $40 billion to $50 billion, much more than the estimated total campaign cost of $9 billion to $10 billion. Much of the savings will come from productivity gains in people in low-income countries no longer becoming crippled.

Should the day come when polio is truly gone from the world, it would be the second vaccine-preventable disease that humans have eradicated. The only precedent is smallpox. The next, Pandak thinks, may be measles and rubella. There are a couple of reasons those diseases are promising. Like polio and smallpox, they don't have any animal carriers, which means no wrangling with microbes lying in wait in monkeys, bats or mosquitoes. There are also safe, effective vaccines for measles and rubella that work in children.


    







Military Attracts Youths Who Are Delinquent, But Not Too Delinquent

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Color Guard
The U.S. Joint Service Color Guard at Fort Myer, Virginia in October 2001.
U.S. Department of Defense via Wikimedia Commons

Being a delinquent youth doesn't exactly help your career prospects. But it may make you more likely to join the military. A new study found that delinquent youngsters were more likely than their rule-abiding peers to join the military. And that's basically a good thing, the authors argue, as enlisting helps them make the transition to adulthood. 

In particular, for delinquents, enlistment may be seen as an indicator of desistance from criminal activities and the assumption of adult roles. Even though other markers of the transition to adulthood are available, such as marriage or employment in the civilian labor force, military service may be more attractive to delinquents. The military is an environment in which aggression and violence often associated with delinquency can be channeled into legitimate forms.

Interestingly, the link held true for men and women (the latter who now make up 20 percent of the military). In fact, female delinquents may be more likely to join up. According to the study: "the odds of enlistment for some male delinquents are more than 40 percent greater than for comparable respondents who have not engaged in delinquent behavior. For women, that figure is even greater at 80 percent."

The researchers measured delinquency with data from a national survey, the 1997 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Those who scored higher on the "Delinquency Index" were often involved in stealing property, selling drugs, running away from home and/or getting arrested. 

Beyond a certain point, however, higher delinquency scores were linked with a decreasing likelihood of enlisting. Buy why? The study suggests that "some individuals may be too engaged in an alternative lifestyle to see military service as beneficial to them. It may also be the case that individuals with high scores on the Delinquency Index do not meet the moral standards used by the various branches of the military."


    






The Volkswagen XL1 Is The Most Efficient Car Ever

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Volkswagen XL1
Courtesy Volkswagen

For years, automakers have worked to push fuel economy beyond 100 miles per gallon. Reaching that mark typically meant three things: cutting weight, maximizing aerodynamics, and improving powertrain efficiency. In 1999, Volkswagen engineers got close with the Lupo 3L, a three-cylinder coupe that could go 78.4 miles on one gallon of diesel. Not satisfied, VW tasked star engineer Ulrich Hackenberg, whose résumé includes work at Bentley and Bugatti, with breaking the 100mpg barrier. Hackenberg’s team crushed that goal—and then some. In tests, their new XL1 got a mind-bending 261 mpg. 

The team designed nearly every part of the XL1 from scratch. To trim weight and add strength, they replaced some steel components, such as the chassis, with carbon-fiber ones. To reduce drag, they removed side-view mirrors and sculpted the body into a smooth, low-riding shape. With the car lighter and slipperier, the 830cc, two-cylinder diesel engine and the 20kW electric motor can propel the XL1 well over 500 miles on a single 2.6-gallon tank of fuel. 

The XL1, Exploded View
Courtesy Volkswagen

VW is producing a limited run of 250 XL1s for sale in Europe. U.S. safety regulations make importing the car tricky, but Hackenberg says that Americans may see the XL1’s efficient engine in future VWs.

Volkswagen XL1

Fuel economy: 261 mpg

Weight: 1,753 pounds

Horsepower: 47 diesel, 27 electric 

Top speed: 99 mph

 

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


    






9 Swedish Women Receive Womb Transplants, Will Try To Get Pregnant

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Transplant Surgery
In September 2011, University of Gothenburg physicians performed the world's first mother-to daughter uterus transplantation.
Sahlgrenska akademin / You Tube
Nine Swedish women have successfully received transplanted wombs donated by family members, and will soon try to have children, the AP reports. There have been no major complications following the surgeries, and every woman left the hospital within days. The transplants are part of the largest effort yet to produce children from transplanted uteri, which hasn't yet been accomplished: 

There have been two previous attempts to transplant a womb — in Turkey and Saudi Arabia — but both failed to produce babies. Scientists in Britain, Hungary and elsewhere are also planning similar operations but the efforts in Sweden are the most advanced. "This is a new kind of surgery," Dr. Mats Brannstrom told The Associated Press in an interview from Goteborg. "We have no textbook to look at."

But whether or not it will work is anybody's guess. One woman who received a uterus transplant in Turkey last year became pregnant after artificial insemination, but the pregnancy failed two months later. 

All of the women were either born without a uterus or lost it due to cervical cancer. Each had eggs removed and fertilized, and won't be able to get pregnant the old-fashioned way, according to the AP: 

The transplant operations did not connect the women's uteruses to their Fallopian tubes, so they are unable to get pregnant naturally. But all who received a womb have their own ovaries and can make eggs. Before the operation, they had some removed to create embryos through in vitro fertilization. The embryos were then frozen and doctors plan to transfer them into the new wombs, allowing the women to carry their own biological children.


    






An Infection Turns Swarming Locusts Into Solitary Grasshoppers, Study Finds

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photo of a female migratory locust
Locusta migratoria

The difference between a locust and a grasshopper is at once great and maybe much, much less than you'd think. I'll let this Aeon magazine article explain:

At the front of the room, a bug-obsessed neuroscientist named Steve Rogers was describing these two creatures — one elegant, modest, and well-mannered, the other a soccer hooligan.

The grasshopper, he noted, sports long legs and wings, walks low and slow, and dines discreetly in solitude. The locust scurries hurriedly and hoggishly on short, crooked legs and joins hungrily with others to form swarms that darken the sky and descend to chew the farmer’s fields bare.

. . . So I was quite amazed when Rogers told us that grasshopper and locust are in fact the same species, even the same animal, and that, as Jekyll is Hyde, one can morph into the other at alarmingly short notice.

Whoa. Creepy. And what could drive these changes? Aeon reports on how the grasshopper/locust transformation happens at a genetic level. Now a new study checks out a different level of trigger. It turns out that one Asian species of locust, Locusta migratoria manilensis, morphs into a benign grasshopper after getting infected by a parasite called Paranosema locustae. At a human level, it'd be as if eating a pathogen-infected undercooked burger transformed you from a cosmopolitan party animal into Henry David Thoreau.

That said, maybe the idea of bug-wrought changes isn't so strange. Consider the protozoan, carried in cat poop, that some researchers think may make infected people slightly more outgoing and risk-taking. In addition, P. locustae affect locusts' gut microbes, which scientists know is important to overall health. In humans and lab rats, alterations to the gut microbiome have been linked with physical conditions, such as obesity, as well as personality traits.

In a series of experiments, a team of entomologists and biologists from China and the U.S. showed that getting a P. locustae infection reduces the numbers of a certain bacterium in locusts' guts. (This is a common phenomenon, where one bodily critter reduces the numbers of another one.) Those same gut bacteria make a pheromone that tells grasshoppers to gather together in large aggregations, so the infection dials down those chemical signals. Locusts that sense less pheromone from other locusts respond dramatically. They produce less serotonin and dopamine, nervous-system chemicals that work to maintain locust swarms. Effects on these chemicals are thought to be the mechanism behind gut microbes' effects on human behavior, too.

Why should P. locustae infections turn gregarious locusts into solitary grasshoppers? The changes don't benefit the parasite, which spreads through "cannibalism of infected dying insects" and "fecal contamination," among other ways. (Delightful!) Instead, it seems locusts' response to getting infected evolved for their own protection. They avoid each other, and thus avoid spreading the plague.

The locust-studying team published its work today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences


    






Six Years After Chemical Ban, Fewer Female Snails Are Growing Penises

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photo of two sides of dog whelk shells
Doing Better
Shells of dog whelks, a type of sea snail that suffered from imposex because of TBT.
Photo by Manfred Heyde, CC BY-SA 3.0

When do you want to see penises disappear? (I mean, besides on Snapchat.) When they appear on female animals. Luckily, six years after a global ban on a chemical that once appeared in the paint on ship hulls, the number of female marine snails with penises has declined, Australian public broadcaster ABC reports.

Before the ban, in the worst cases, female marine snails would also grow large vas deferens, the duct that carries sperm in many male animals. The vas deferens would block the snails from releasing their eggs, so they would explode. Until I read about that, I never knew I could feel so sad for a snail.

Before the ban, the chemical, tributyltin or TBT, entered waterways in small amounts from painted ships. Places with high shipping traffic, such as harbors, had higher concentrations of TBT and more cases of so-called "imposex" female snails. The chemical is meant to keep barnacles, algae and other creatures from sticking to boats. Countries agreed to stop using TBT on ships in 2008, but it's still used on land to keep things from growing on wood, fabric and other products.

Researchers began seeing imposex snails soon after boats started using TBT in the 1960s, ABC reports. The chemical was also linked to falling populations of marine invertebrates such as oysters and crustaceans. In 1987, a marine chemist told The New York Times, "I've never seen anything like it. I think it's one of the most toxic compounds we've ever intentionally added to our waterways." Most recently, researchers have found that lab mice exposed to TBT while they're developing become obese.

Now, snail populations in Australia seem to have fewer imposex cases and some populations have none at all, Central Queensland University marine biologist Scott Wilson told ABC.

Since 2008, the shipping industry has been searching for less environmentally damaging ways to prevent ships' hulls from growing maritime hangers-on, which can damage hulls over time and increase boats' drag and fuel use. Popular Science has reportedonseveral.

[ABC]


    






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