Ceres

NASA, ESA, J. Parker (Southwest Research Institute), P. Thomas (Cornell University), and L. McFadden (University of Maryland, College Park)

This is poor, unfortunate Ceres. Discovered in 1801, it was at first called a planet, then soon classified as an asteroid, and recently as a dwarf planet, not quite qualifying for real planet status despite residing in the solar system's asteroid belt. But now it can feel special: the Herschel Telescope has, the for the first time, detected water on the lil' planet--probably a whole lot of it, too.

The telescope, using infrared vision, detected a signature of water vapor from Ceres. The researchers think when the 590-mile-wide Ceres moves closer to the sun, part of its icy surface (something never conclusively proven to exist before now) is being melted, and that Herschel picked it up. How much ice, then, is in the surface? To put it in context: if it was melted, it would be more fresh water than is available on all of Earth.

Serendipitously, NASA already has a space probe, Dawn, in the area, and it'll be heading to Ceres next for a closer look at the surface in spring of 2015.

Not in Iowa? Then Tough Luck Texting 911

Flickr/Sleepyneko

Protesters and others in the area of the protest in Kiev on the morning of January 21, local time, all received the same text message: "Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance." The wording of the message echoes that of a new law forbidding participation in protests deemed violent, The New York Times reports. But no one seems to know exactly who sent the text message, or how.

The Ukrainian protesters are agitating for more integration with the European Union, and against new national laws restricting public assembly. They're becoming increasingly violent, fighting with police. Protest leaders told The New York Times that's in part because the Ukrainian government is encouraging radicals and trying to discredit the movement with things like these text messages. The leaders also say the government is employing more old-fashioned tactics, such as busing in unemployed dudes to carry around sticks and threaten protesters.

Meanwhile, because everyone is denying involvement, it's unclear exactly how the creepy text messages reached phones and whether protesters are really being tracked. The most obvious explanation is that a government official asked cellphone service companies for data on which phones were in section of Kiev at a certain time. U.S. law enforcement asks for data like that frequently. If that's the case, the Ukrainian government could have a list of phone numbers that it could treat as a list of suspected protesters.

However, Ukraine's interior ministry said it wasn't involved in the text messages, The Guardian reports. Ukrainian cellphone companies Kyivstar, MTS and Life said they didn't send the messages or share their subscribers' location with the government, The New York Times reports.

Another possibility is that someone used a cell tower to blast out this message to every phone in the area, similar to the way American agencies blast out emergency messages. In this case, the messaging wouldn't necessarily come with tracking, although again, it would be easy enough for the Ukrainian government to request such data from a company along with the blast. 

A statement from Kyivstar in response to media attention suggested a possible mechanism for sending the messages that wouldn't involve cellphone companies:

We know that there is equipment, so-called 'pirate base stations,' which allow SMS distribution or calls to all mobile telephone numbers of all operators within a particular area. But, as an operator, we are unable to identify the activity of these stations.

Whatever truly happened, the message shows what's possible, The Washington Post reports. "This incident highlights how location metadata—contrary to NSA defenders' claims that such data isn't sensitive—is incredibly powerful, especially in bulk, and can easily be used by governments to identify and suppress protesters attempting to exercise their right to free expression," Kevin Bankston, policy director for the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, told the Post.

In Kiev, the text didn't seem to achieve its goal. Intense police and protester fighting continued afterward, The New York Times reports.

[The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian]

Ergo App

Descartes Biometrics, Inc. on Google Play

How unique are your ears? Maybe only Mom ever noticed them before, but, according to Michael Boczek, the particular way your ear touches your phone when you use it is unique to every person. Boczek's startup, Descartes Biometrics, has developed an app that lets you sign into your phone not with a PIN or a swipe pattern, but by touching your ear to the screen.

"Ergo is the first ear biometric authentication technology for Android smartphones," Boczek tells Popular Science. The app is supposed to recognize people using a combination of cues, including the way their ears and cheeks press the touchscreen and the speed and tilt with which they bring their phones up. Everything works with what's already on their smartphones. "One of the things we're most proud of is there's no additional hardware required," Boczek says.

So this is a very cool idea, but I found the implementation still a bit rough when I tried it for a day. Perhaps it will get better with time, or perhaps the way I touch my ear to my phone screen is just wildly inconsistent. In any case, Ergo would recognize my ear sometimes and not other times.

Ergo offers several ways to make its identifications more accurate, but they didn't work for me. For example, I tried putting Ergo in a more lenient setting—one that would let me into my phone even if my ear scan wasn't as close of a match as required in a more secure setting—but that didn't always help. Once, I set Ergo on minimal security and asked my roommate to try it. Ergo let her into my phone. Ergo did lock her out when I raised the security, but then I couldn't get in. Earlier in the day, Ergo wouldn't let me in on a minimal setting, either.

I tried scanning my ear several extra times throughout the day in Ergo's "add extra scans to your profile" mode, in hopes of teaching it more about my ear. Sometimes the app would tell me my scan didn't match what it already had stored about me. How could it be different? Isn't it still the same ear?

Like some others working in biometrics, Boczek talks about one day getting rid of passwords and PINs and having devices recognize their owners by their biology, whether their fingerprints, their ear prints, or something else. It seems that day is distant yet. Meanwhile, Ergo is cheap and fun to try, although I found it generally more inconvenient than my old swipe pattern. Maybe you'll have better luck. It's available for $3.99 for Android devices only. 

Powdered Playground

Skeezix1000, Wikimedia Commons

When a storm is brewing and the streets are soon to be rendered useless by mounds of snow, there's really only one thing running through every student's mind: please let tomorrow be a snow day. Now there's science to back up canceling school due to nasty weather. According to a study by Harvard Kennedy School assistant professor Joshua Goodman, keeping the school doors open can actually hurt learning more than a snow day closure.

Here's the lowdown: When districts and schools decide to call off school, they also tend to tack on extra days in the schedule to make up for lost time. But when weather conditions are snowpocalyptic, parents are going to keep kids home anyway, or transportation won't be available for students to get to class. These absences can cause students to miss out and fall behind with academics. Additionally, teachers will have to devote time to getting these students caught up with their classmates that made it to school. 

Goodman came to this conclusion after looking at data from 2003 to 2010, including students in third to 10th grade. If more school administrators listen to Goodman's findings, students won't have to worry while they're making snow angels in the park about making up a fractions lesson or discussion on Tuck Everlasting.

Gender Swap

BeAnotherLab

The virtual reality headset Oculus Rift is a marvel of interactive immersion for gaming: throw it on, and instead of using the medium of a controller or keyboard, it's actually you controlling the action. But, thought experiment: What if, instead, it put you in the shoes of real, honest-to-goodness human being?

That's something like what the people at design team BeAnotherLab put together. For the project The Machine to be Another, they strapped two people to an Oculus Rift, then linked the feeds from two cameras, each attached to the other headset. In other words, each person saw what the other should be seeing, in the hopes that it could help them develop empathy for the other. (Of course, that required them to synchronize their movements. But still.)

As Yannick LeJacq at Motherboardpoints out, this is more art project than scientific study. Still, though, it's not too absurd to think that, within reason, we can use virtual reality to better understand someone: research has backed up the idea that we can pick up empathy, or even learn to drop bad habits, through VR. We can't ever fully understand what it's like to be someone different than us--whether it's gender or something else, people are complicated--but maybe we can get an inkling. 

Here's a video of the process. There are some naked people in it, so here is your NSFW warning.

An Iron Dome Radar

Natan Flayer, via Israel Defense Forces

Intercepting and destroying projectiles in midair is costly business. Rockets, like the Qassams and Katyushas fired into Israel by Hezbollah and Hamas, cost around $1,000 each. The counter-missiles that the Iron Dome, Israel's rocket defense system, uses to destroy incoming rockets are far more expensive: about $40,000 a pop. This disparity, and the accompanying prioritization of what gets defended, means the Iron Dome ignores anything smaller than rockets and artillery shells. 

Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, the Israeli defense manufacture that made the Iron Dome system, has a cheaper solution: lasers. Dubbed "Iron Beam," Rafael will unveil the new laser defense system at the Singapore Air Show, a major technology exposition in mid-February. A more comprehensive demonstration of the technology is planned for the Eurosatory defense technology exposition this June.

Lasers are cheap, and U.S. tests of laser defense systems have been promising so far. Last April, the U.S. Navy unveiled a ship-borne laser weapon whose shots cost about $1 apiece, which radically changes the cost calculation of offense and defense. The weapon itself is expensive, costing $40 million to research and develop, but it's so far very promising. In testing, it successfully incinerated a dummy drone. This past December, the U.S. Army tested a truck-carried laser that successfully targeted both drones and incoming mortar shells.

Israel has had its eye on laser defense for some time now, and the specific security situation of Israel makes the need more pressing. Iron Beam won't replace Iron Dome -- lasers work best by locking onto a target and burning through it as it moves, and rockets are currently faster than lasers at downing incoming attacks. Instead, Iron Beam will likely work in a similar fashion to its U.S. counterparts, by tracking drones, mortar shells, and other slower projectiles. It will also get targets at a different trajectory, flying lower than the rockets countered by Iron Dome.

Below, America's HEL-MD laser defense truck successfully shoots a drone and an incoming mortar shell.

Leaves

PixelPlaceBo/Getty Images

In animals, a tumor develops when a cell (or group of cells) loses the built-in controls that regulate its growth, often as a result of mutations. Plants can experience the same phenomenon, along with cancerous masses, but it tends to be brought on via infection. Fungi, bacteria, viruses, and insect infestation have all been tied to plant cancers. Oak trees, for example, often grow tumors that double as homes for larvae.

The good news for plants is that even though they’re susceptible to cancer, they’re less vulnerable to its effects. For one thing, a vegetable tumor won’t metastasize. That’s because plant cells are typically locked in place by a matrix of rigid cell walls, so they can’t migrate. Even when a plant cell begins dividing uncontrollably, the tumor it creates remains stuck in one place usually with minor effects on the plant’s health—like a burl in a redwood tree.

Plants also have the benefit of lacking any vital organs. “It’s bad to get a brain tumor if you’re a human,” says Elliot Meyerowitz, a plant geneticist at the California Institute of Technology. “But there’s nothing that you can name that’s bad to get a tumor in if you’re a plant. Because whatever it is, you can make another.”

Meyerowitz points to another difference between plant and animal oncology with regard to those redwood burls: “Instead of treating plant tumors by surgery and chemotherapy, we make them into cheesy coffee tables.” 

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

So Wired

From an illustration for Popular Science by John Picaco

South Korea's science ministry is investing $1.5 billion in building 5G wireless service for the country by 2020, AFP reports. 

Some of the things the ministry wants 5G to do include downloading an 800-megabyte movie in one second, and providing Internet access to people onboard 500-kilometer-per-hour (310 miles) bullet trains. Yes, I would like to live there, too.

2020 seems to be the deadline many groups are taking for developing the next generation of data networks. Samsung, the European Union, and Chinese device manufacturer Huawei have all said they'll work on commercializing 5G by then. There's plenty of work to do. Beyond improving speed to hundreds of times faster than today's 4G, 5G should have fewer dead zones and use less power than 4G, VentureBeat reported last year.

[AFP]

Coronal Mass Ejection

NASA

Look around you. See the plants, the animals; most importantly, feel the earth beneath your toes. One day, the sun will brighten, and everything on the planet will burn. The oceans will vaporize. Complex life--eventually, even microbes--will no longer survive. But wait: new research offers hope.

Ha ha. Juuuuust kidding. We are screwed.

We just have a little longer than we thought. Maybe.

A previous climate model suggested that the sun, which is getting brighter at a rate of about 1 percent every 100 million years, would destroy the planet's water in 600 or so million years. But that model--showing how slowly evaporating water and heat would be trapped in the earth's atmosphere, quickly baking everything inside--wasn't complicated enough, according to two recently published studies. Adding in factors like cloud coverage and regional differences, other models now estimate that the inevitable transformation of earth into a lifeless apocalyptic hellscape will occur closer to 1 billion and 1.5 billion years from now. 

So, great! Take comfort in the fact that you, and indeed everyone you have ever met or will meet, will have certainly have met their demises long before that.

Chamonix 1924, Ski jump, Jacob Tullin Thams of Norway

Olympic.org

In 1924, at the French ski resort of Chamonix, the very first Winter Olympics got off to a precarious start. “A new thaw which set in on Monday has kept the skaters off the Olympic ice rink and even threatens to delay the start of the winter games,” wrote Sparrow Robertson in The New York Herald. “At Les Bossons, where the ski-jumping is scheduled to take place, the snow is so thin that it would be dangerous to permit any jumping until there has been another fall.”

For the past few decades, Olympic organizers haven’t waited around. Instead, they’ve beaten back an unfavorable climate by making snow themselves. Snow guns pointed at Sochi’s ski jump have been running around the clock since December. Technicians plan to use 500 snow machines altogether, plus artificial snow from last year stockpiled under insulating blankets. The Winter Olympics, after all, hinge on the weather (at least the events that have not yet moved to refrigerated tracks or buildings). But not even advanced snowmaking equipment will save them in the future. Organizers face an impending climate that’s too warm for even that.

A team of scientists from the University of Waterloo in Canada and Austria’s Management Center Innsbruck recently set out to calculate the effects of global warming on future Winter Olympics sites. They found that if emissions continue apace, only 10 of the 19 sites that previously held Winter Olympics could reliably host the Games by mid-century. By 2080, only six could. The odds are slightly better, but still dire, if global greenhouse gas production drops to the low-emissions scenario described by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—only about half the sites would be reliable in both time frames.

At-Risk Cities

University of Waterloo

“What are really at risk are the outdoor events, the ones that require snow,” says Daniel Scott, director of the Interdisciplinary Centre on Climate Change at the University of Waterloo. “You can’t refrigerate a ski run. The only thing that’s allowed a place like Sochi to hold the Games are those kind of weather risk-management strategies that have been developed.”

The research, based on two studies accepted to the journal Current Issues in Tourism, combined meteorological data with IPCC climate change projections to examine future conditions at each site. First, the scientists looked at the probability that the daily minimum temperature at the main competition elevation would remain above freezing. “With snowmaking, you can bring the precipitation to the hill,” Scott says. “Every game since the late '80s has had advanced snowmaking built in. They’re not relying on natural snow—they want to know, can I make the stuff?” If you can’t make snow at night faster than it melts during the day, the Winter Olympics will be a bust.

Then, the team identified whether sites could maintain a snowpack of at least 30 cm at higher elevations (requiring temperatures cold enough to manufacture snow a month before the Games begin). That 30 cm figure is conservative, Scott says. It’s the absolute physical minimum a ski area will use on fairly smooth terrain, such as meadows. Alpine areas—like those throughout the Western U.S. and Canada—may in reality need up to a meter of snow to cover rough terrain.

So using those parameters, where might we hold future Winter Olympics? Not at sites like Sochi and Vancouver, which are coastal and so warmer to begin with. They will be high-risk or unreliable by mid-century, under even a low-emissions scenario. Mountain communities such as Squaw Valley, California, and Innsbruck, Austria, which rely on ski terrain at fairly low elevations, will be dicey too.

Sites farther from the coast (naturally colder), with high elevations, will do better in the long term. Those include Salt Lake City, Calgary, and St. Moritz, Switzerland. But the solution isn’t as simple as returning to the alpine hosts of early years, says Scott, because the Games have grown exponentially—in terms of events, spectators, and media. Climatically suitable towns in the Alps, for example, are no longer big enough to accommodate that many people.

Nor would organizers want to shrink the size of the Games by raising the bar on participation. That would go against the spirit of the Olympics by precluding athletes around the world who aren’t at the most elite level. Scott suspects future Winter Olympics will instead be more spread out. Spectators may find themselves taking long train rides between the locations of various events. In the meantime, the Olympic committee might be wise to prioritize cities, such as Salzburg, Austria, that are climatically reliable now but won’t be by mid-century.

The data show that the average February daytime temperature at Winter Games locations has already been steadily climbing, from about 32°F in the 1920s- 50s, to 38°F in the 1960-90s, to 46°F in the 2000s (partly reflecting organizers' willingness to move them to warmer locations). Anecdotally, athletes have noticed a difference. During the cover shoot for Popular Science’s February issue, we asked alpine skier Ted Ligety whether he worried about climate change. He told us he had just returned from his first race of the season on the Rettenbach Glacier in Soelden, Austria. “It’s crazy how much it’s changed over the last five years,” he said. “That’s not long at all.”

Given enough money and energy, technicians could try to push the limits on some locations with snowmaking. But around or just above the freezing point, the quality of the snow starts to degrade, and it becomes slow and rutted. “From a competition perspective, athletes would detest that,” Scott says. “And it becomes dangerous at some point.” He speculates that somebody may eventually develop a totally temperature-independent artificial snow that behaves like the real thing—but as far as he knows, it’s not on anyone’s drawing board, and from an athlete’s perspective, it’s something Chris Steinkamp, the executive director of Protect Our Winters, likens to the appeal of a genetically modified vegetable.

Steinkamp, whose organization was founded by snow-sports athletes alarmed by the effects of climate change, hopes the research will be motivating. “Hopefully instead of continually trying to beat climate change with advanced technologies, such as snowmaking,” he says, “it will serve as a wake up call to the IOC and world leaders that major commitments to carbon reductions need to be made. Now.” Otherwise, as the scientists point out, it would be extraordinarily difficult to celebrate the Winter Olympics bicentennial in 2124.

River dolphin

An Amazon river dolphin, which looks nearly identical in outward appearance to the newfound species.

Dennis Otten via Wikimedia Commons

This species, named Inia araguaiaensis, becomes the fifth true river dolphin, amongst the rarest and most endangered animals. The last river dolphin species to be described, in 1918, was the Chinese baiji, which went extinct in about 2006. Three of the four previously known species are all threatened with extinction, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Writing in PLOS ONE, the scientists estimate that there are approximately 1,000 Araguaia river dolphins left. They suggest the animal should be listed as "vulnerable" to extinction by the IUCN, and are threatened by fragmentation due to development and construction of hydroelectric dams. The animals differ enough genetically from the Amazon river dolphin and the Bolivian river dolphin that they represent a distinct species, and do not interbreed, the study shows. The new species looks quite similar in outward appearance to its cousin, but they do possess a slightly larger brain case. 

Project BlueShark

John F. Williams, U.S. Navy

Oculus Rift is an amazing virtual reality headset. Originally designed for video games, it's been used for exploring gender, piloting drones, and simulating what it's like to get guillotined. In the future, it might even go to war.

The U.S. Navy is testing Oculus Rift as part of the Office of Naval Research's "Project BlueShark." The goal of BlueShark is to see what the controls of a ship might look like, given new technology over the next decade. Screens, even the futuristic displays on ultramodern vessels like the USS Zumwalt, are limited to two dimensions. Combat, with ships on the surface, submarines below, aircraft above, and missiles, torpedoes, and depth charges moving at odd angles all around, is very much a three-dimensional experience.

In the above picture, John Moore of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory explores a ship, with his virtual avatar sitting atop the vessel. The icons on the display appear to be other nearby ships, and because his avatar is perched above, Moore can see them around his boat.

In the video here, you will see, as promised, a can of Coca-Cola devoured by lava. There are two cans, even. I am hypnotized by this. Is it the juxtaposition of the incredibly mundane with the inherently exotic? Is it a subtle, sharp commentary on commercialism worming its way subconsciously into my brain? Is it the reversal of human creations encroaching on nature, and a reminder of the Earth's occasionally frightening power?

It is probably not. Also: red hot nickel ball is still better. 

[Laughing Squid]

Sweet Dreams?

Wikimedia Commons

If you can't get real sleep, perhaps you can make up for it with placebo sleep. Or such is the suggestion of a new study that found that people did better on cognitive tests after being told that they got a high proportion of REM sleep, even if they didn't. Researcher Eric Horowitz describes the study in his blog, "Peer-Reviewed By My Neurons": 

In an initial experiment participants were given brief lesson on the relationship between sleep quality and cognitive functioning, and told the normal proportion of REM sleep was between 20% and 25%. Participants were then hooked up to a machine and told it would measure their pulse, heart rate, and brain frequency, after which a program would use the data to calculate the amount of REM sleep they had had the night before. (Very few participants reported having suspicions about the [fake] machine.) Some participants were told they got 16.2% REM sleep (below average sleep quality) and some were told they got 28.7% REM sleep (above average sleep quality.)

Study participants were also asked to self-report how well their sleep went. 

It turns out that those who were told they got better sleep did better on a test of information processing speed called the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test (PASAT), which involves adding many numbers together, as well as on a verbal fluency test called the Controlled Oral Word Association Task (COWAT). Those who were told they got lousy sleep did worse. The same relationship didn't hold for self-reported sleep quality--those who thought they got better sleep didn't generally do better on the PASAT than those who thought they hadn't had a good night's slumber. 

As the authors conclude, "these findings supported the hypothesis that mindset can influence cognitive states in both positive and negative directions, suggesting a means of controlling one's health and cognition." How exactly you could trick yourself into thinking you got better sleep than you really did is unclear. Although perhaps, as Horowitz writes, if "you’re able to convince yourself that your bedtime routine is working — whether it’s reading, exercising, or eating honey— you might see the cognitive benefits of improved sleep even on nights when you don’t actually sleep better."

The universality of the placebo effect continues to astound researchers. But the information that is presented along with the placebo is vital. Given information that placebos can help reduce migraine pain, people who took fake medicine reported less pain--even after being informed that they had swallowed placebo pills.

The study was published this month in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition.

[Via The Independent]

Hey, nerds: instead of tending a garden, which takes forever, consider this project, wherein you 3-D print an inflatable flower. It might even be the world's first inflatable, 3-D printed thing. The flowers are also black, much like they would be if you had grown them yourself, so you've got realism, too. There are no downsides to this, is what I'm saying. 

Northern spotted owl

US Fish and Wildlife Service

To save the endangered northern spotted owl, biologists have begun killing barred owls, a more widespread and aggressive bird that has invaded the former species' territories in the U.S. Northwest. Once a barred owl enters a spotted owl's range, it can out-compete it for food by being less picky and often aggressively kicks it out of its roost by repeatedly harassing and even "body-slamming" it.

But killing owls--even an aggressive intruder--represents a moral challenge for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). On the one hand, killing these large birds seems wrong to many, but that agency is also required by law to protect spotted owls, which are listed as "threatened" under the Endangered Species Act. 

It's not contested that barred owls can kick out and replace spotted owls; that has been observed in many places as the barred owls have spread to the West Coast over the last few decades. Forests along Northern California's Redwood Creek were prime spotted owl territory in the 1990s, for example, but then barred owls showed up and proliferated, replacing the native species. No northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina) have nested in the area for years, NPR reported. And this pattern has repeated itself again and again. 

Some evidence suggests that removing barred owls (Strix varia) from spotted owls' territory can help the endangered species recover. To find out if it's feasible over a wide range, the Feds are are conducting a six-year, $3.5 million study in which 3,600 barred owls will be removed from areas of protected forest in California, Oregon, and Washington. (Spotted owl populations have continued to decline, despite the designation of 18.5 million acres of protected habitat.) 

Concerns remain about the ethics of killing one owl to save another. Some think it won't help the spotted owl, although the six-year study should find that out, and the point is moot since the study is underway. Others find it unethical to kill thousands of owls, period. The advocacy group Friends of Animals is suing to stop the experiment on those grounds. 

Still others think it will be too expensive or technically unfeasible. A study reporting initial results should put those concerns to rest. It found that killing barred owls is easier and less expensive than previously thought. Barred owls respond aggressively to calls from a digital owl caller, according to Lowell Diller, a study author and biologist at Green Diamond, a timber company. 

In the study, Diller shot more than 70 barred owls over the last five years, which felt "totally wrong," he told NPR. "I hate it every time I go out and do it," he says. But he thinks that it's necessary to save spotted owls.

Outside experts said the study will help guide the rest of the six-year federal experiment, as the AP reports:

Paul Henson, Oregon state director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said the study answered important questions about managing the incursion of barred owls into spotted owl territory. The experiment now underway will take it to the next level, from a few score birds to a few thousand.

"This is the first good technical quantitative evaluation of what it will take to do some of this," he said.

Dan Rosenberg, co-director of the Oregon Wildlife Institute in Corvallis, said in an email that the study confirmed "small-scale removal is a feasible approach. It is planning the long-term, range-wide management to address barred owls that remains the challenge."

Hanson said it may only be necessary to remove 20 percent of the barred owls from the Northwest to provide enough refuges for spotted-owl numbers to start recovering.

Sign at the headquarters of the National Security Agency

National Security Agency

Fifty prominent American computer scientists have signed an open letter urging the United States to reject mass surveillance and preserve privacy. At the heart of the letter is a warning against systems that encourage abuse:

Indiscriminate collection, storage, and processing of unprecedented amounts of personal information chill free speech and invite many types of abuse, ranging from mission creep to identity theft. These are not hypothetical problems; they have occurred many times in the past. Inserting backdoors, sabotaging standards, and tapping commercial data-center links provide bad actors, foreign and domestic, opportunities to exploit the resulting vulnerabilities.

In June, Microsoft revealed that they informed the NSA about bugs before sending out a general patch, giving the spies a chance to explore vulnerabilities and backdoors before anyone else. This leaves computers vulnerable for longer, and also hands those vulnerabilities to someone that will exploit them. The letter goes on, clarifying that this isn't the rejection of spying itself, only spying that makes citizens less safe.

The choice is not whether to allow the NSA to spy. The choice is between a communications infrastructure that is vulnerable to attack at its core and one that, by default, is intrinsically secure for its users. Every country, including our own, must give intelligence and law-enforcement authorities the means to pursue terrorists and criminals, but we can do so without fundamentally undermining the security that enables commerce, entertainment, personal communication, and other aspects of 21st-century life.

In the month since Edward Snowden leaked information about NSA spying projects to the public, the agency has been at the center of two parallel revelations: the incredible reach it has in creepy-but-legal targeted surveillance, and the fantastic breadth it has for mass collection of bulk information. The targeted surveillance, which includes intercepting computers before they're delivered and installing hardware that then spies on the user, has stronger legal precedence, and fits a regular definition of surveillance that targets only those allowed by a judge, given reasonable suspicion.

Bulk collection, on the other hand, rests on a legal case decided in the late 1970s, which predates almost every modern function of the internet. And unlike targeted surveillance, bulk collection grabs the innocent with the guilty, storing the information indefinitely and threatening the privacy. In collecting so much, and especially so much information just from private citizens, it risks hiding threats in a sea of irrelevant data. Much of this information is already freely collected by private companies like Google or Facebook online, but when the U.S. government obtains that information, it threatens Silicon Valley's business in Europe and elsewhere.

The letter's signatories have joined with many of these tech companies to offer five recommendations for government surveillance reform. Those recommendations are, briefly, that governments create sensible limitations on their authority to collect users' data; that intelligence agencies work under a clear legal framework subject to strong checks and balances; that governments be transparent about the number and nature of their demands for user information; that transfer of data across borders not be impeded; and that, in order to avoid conflicts, there should be a transparent and robust framework to govern the sharing of information between governments. 

Read the letter in its entirety, and its complete list of signatories, here.

Pills

iStockphoto

Nexavar, a kidney and liver cancer drug made by Bayer, costs an estimated $69,000 for a year of treatment, Forbes reported in 2012. That year, an Indian company got a license to make a generic version of the same drug and sell it at a 97 percent discount. The license came from the Indian government, without consulting Bayer. Now the government is preparing to give out more licenses for Indian companies to make expensive Western drugs for Indian citizens to take, Bloomberg News reports.

The Bloomberg and Forbes stories offer a glimpse into a fascinating practice that's got Western drug companies riled up and seems to have no easy solutions.

The license-giving program is the Indian government's way of making lifesaving drugs affordable to its people. Nexavar's $69,000 price tag is 41 times the per capita income in India, Forbes points out. The drugs the government committee is now considering for licensing include those for HIV and diabetes, which affect tens of millions of Indians. (Previously, the government committee only looked at cancer drugs, so the addition of these common diseases are a first, Bloomberg reports.)

At the same time, drug companies say the practice is unfair, with Bayer CEO Marijn Dekkers telling Bloomberg it is "essentially theft." The generics licensing, offered without the patent-protection period drug companies enjoy in the U.S. and other western nations, undercuts companies' ability to recoup the billion-dollar costs of researching new treatments. It discourages companies from making the investment needed to find new drugs, Merck told Bloomberg.

[Bloomberg News, Forbes]

J1532

X-ray: NASA/CXC/Stanford/J.Hlavacek-Larrondo et al, Optical: NASA/ESA/STScI/M.Postman & CLASH team

One of the most powerful things in the universe wears a sparkly purple coat. Well, at least it looks that way in this image combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. This is an image of the galaxy cluster RX J1532.9+3021 (Nice to meet you; my name's Francie).  At the cluster's center is one of the most powerful black holes astronomers have ever found. The black hole is surrounded by hot gas, which appears here in purple.

Normally, astronomers would expect dense, hot gas like this to form stars, but they haven't found any evidence of stars here. Instead, they think, the black hole has prevented stars from forming by keeping the gas hot where it would normally cool, drop in pressure, and pull in more gas to form trillions of stars.

The black hole is so powerful, it's created gaps in the gas surrounding it. NASA explains:

The X-ray image shows two large cavities in the hot gas on either side of the central galaxy. The Chandra image has been specially processed to emphasize the cavities. Both cavities are aligned with jets seen in radio images from the VLA [Very Large Array]. The location of the supermassive black hole between the cavities is strong evidence that the supersonic jets generated by the black hole have drilled into the hot gas and pushed it aside, forming the cavities.

Astronomers have found other black holes that formed similar cavities, but these are unusually large—about the size of the Milky Way galaxy.

This and other evidence suggest the black hole could be "ultramassive," instead of merely supermassive, and have a mass more than 10 billion times that of the sun. It could also be extremely massive and spinning slowly.

A team of astronomers who studied the black hole published a paper about it in The Astrophysical Journal and on the paper server arXiv.

[NASA]