Beijing Smog, January 2013

Photo by Lu Feng, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

There are about 1,300 microbe species that float around in Beijing's smog, a team of Chinese researchers found. Aren't you glad you know? Most of the microbes are harmless, Nature News reports, but some of the species are known to cause allergies and lung diseases in people.

The team tested for bits of DNA in air samples taken from Beijing in January 2013, a particularly bad time for air pollution in the city. The DNA tests were detailed enough to say what species the genetic material came from, a first for a study of city-air microbes, Nature News reports. Smoggier days had higher concentrations of dangerous species, the team found.

Not all of the microbes might actually be living in Beijing's smog, however. The DNA testing isn't able to say whether the DNA comes from live or dead microbes, so it's possible some of those species are actually dead organisms sloughed, for example, from people's skin or dog poop on the street. One way or another, the study "adds to our understanding of what we inhale every day," as the team's lead scientist, Ting Zhu, told Nature News.

Whether these microscopic Beijingers actually sicken people still remains to be seen. Zhu's and his team's study identified what was in the air; it didn't test if that's the route through which people get infections. Nevertheless, even without microbes, pollution is well known to harm human health, raising people's risk of getting heart and lung diseases.

[Nature News]

Did you see Gravity? Ha, lame. Remember in October 2012, when daredevil Felix Baumgartner jumped 23 miles out of the sky above Roswell, safely parachuting back to terra firma? There's new, first-person footage of that out. Look at it! Marvel at humanity's achievements! Possibly vomit at your desk!

[io9]

Smashed

Sam Kaplan

In recent years, researchers have only just begun to understand how and why concussions are dangerous, fueling the debate about football safety. Here’s what you need to know.

1. There are roughly 1.6 to 3.8 million concussions in the U.S. every year from professional and recreational sports.

2. Up to half of concussions go unreported.

3. Concussions reported in the NFL are on the rise, likely because of a reduced stigma in reporting them. Concussions reported per week increased 67 percent from 2009 to 2012.

4. There’s little evidence that current sports helmets for youth reduce the risk of concussions, according to a National Academy of Sciences report published last year.

5. The NFL agreed to pay $765 million to thousands of retired players for damages from concussion-related health problems as part of a 2013 settlement. However, on January 14, a federal judge rejected the settlement because she wasn’t convinced the amount was high enough to cover all of the injured players. By settling with the players, the league won’t have to disclose how early it knew that neurological damage is linked to concussions.

6. NFL revenue in 2012 was $9.5 billion.

7. Repeated head injury is a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease and its signature beta-amyloid protein brain plaques.

8. When the brain is hit, microtubules that act like train tracks for proteins to shuttle back and forth can get broken, dropping the cargo, which potentially builds up as protein plaques.

9. The white matter that connects different regions of the brain seems especially vulnerable because the faster it’s stretched, the stiffer it gets.

10. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), characterized by a loss of neurons and build-up of tau protein in the brain, is often found in those with a history of head trauma. It’s associated with memory loss, confusion, and depression and can only be diagnosed only after death.

11. Frequent suicides have led some experts to wonder whether underlying mental illness causes CTE or if head injury is causing both brain degeneration and mental illness. In a 2012 study, 34 out of 35 postmortem brain samples from former pro football players showed signs of CTE. Six of the athletes had most likely died of suicide.

12. Last year, brain scans of five living, retired NFL players found excessive tau protein in all of them, particularly in memory and emotion areas.

13. Football might not even be the worst offender. It has 0.2 concussions per 1,000 player-hours, compared to 0.4 for FIFA soccer, 1.5 for the NHL, and 13.2 for boxing.

Wasn’t that a downer? Enjoy the Super Bowl, folks!

A similar version of this article appeared in the February 2014 issue of Popular Science.

JAXA astronaut Aki Hoshide takes a self-portrait during Expedition 32 in September 2012.

NASA

$45,000: the cost to enroll in this FAA-approved spaceflight training program (that's only 18 percent of the price of a ticket on Virgin Galactic)

12 days: the time this fruit fly spent in space. Back on Earth, something's not quite right…

Space Fly

This fruit fly is covered with a fungal infection after a childhood in space compromised its immune system.

Deborah Kimbrell/UC Davis

7 years: the age at which humans begin to forget their early childhood, according to new research 

120 times per second: the rate at which the wings of the RoboBee flap while in flight (read about the rise of insect drones in our January 2014 cover story)

Insects

Travis Rathbone

88 percent: the portion of allergic children in a recent study who could tolerate eating peanuts after this six-month treatment

21 mph: the top speed of this electric Porsche from 1898

1898 'P1' electric car designed by Ferdinand Porsche

$500 million: the estimated amount Google recently paid to acquire DeepMind, an artificial intelligence startup 

1 in 50,000: the chance that a part of someone else’s fingerprint could randomly match with the iPhone 5's Touch ID, according to Apple (read why fingerprint security is not the future)

iPhone 5s

Kelvinsong, Wikimedia Commons

1 week: the length of time the herpes simplex virus can live on a dry surface (compare the lifespans of pathogens with our interactive infographic) 

2021: the year Aerion plans to deliver a supersonic business jet to its first customers

Aerion Jet

The body of Aerion’s supersonic business jet will be made from composite materials and aluminum.

10: the number of species of endangered bats discovered in abandoned bunkers on Israel’s Jordanian border

24 hours: the length of time this hardy leech can survive submerged in liquid nitrogen 

A very special leech

Ozobranchus jantseanus, a leech that parasitizes turtles in East Asia.

Dai Suzuki et al / PLOS ONE

$800: the price of Nikon's new first-of-its-kind, waterproof, interchangeable-lens camera 

Nikon 1 AW1

Brian Klutch

56.62 mph: the record-breaking speed of the world's fastest face-down, head-first, human-powered vehicle

$5,300: the price of the Ryno, a one-wheeled motorcycle with no gas pedal or normal brake

Lemurs In Love

Wikimedia Commons, Frank Vassen

Smell that? Yep, that’s love. No, it’s not the scent of red roses or fine chocolate – it’s the odor from a pair of lemur partners. A new study from Duke University has found that the more similar two lemurs’ scents are, the stronger the connection. Researchers studied the scents omitted from Coquerel’s sifaka lemurs, along with their scent-marking and sniffing activities during the breeding period.

In a modern day lemur-romance, before offspring is on their minds, lemur couples get to know one another by investigating each other’s scent. After lemur lovers give birth to their little lemur babies, the mommy and daddy smell more like one another. Even if a lemur couple with kids hasn’t been together that long, their scents are more in sync than couples without offspring that have together for a while. This is possibly attributed to the swapping of odor-producing bacteria that happens while doing the deed, grooming, canoodling, and other forms of physical activity. 

Coquerel’s sifakas have glands on their throats and genital areas that secrete sticky goo. The lemur juice was collected straight from the naughty bits by researchers who identified chemical ingredients in each creature’s signature fragrance.

Other than just trading bodily fluids, these lemurs also rub their smelly goo onto trees and other surroundings in an activity called scent-marking. When one lemur started doing this, the other lemur followed. While it’s uncertain what the sifakas’ chemical messages exactly mean, it’s possible that they’re defending territories or showing off their relationship to other lemurs. So, pretty much the lemur-version of a letterman jacket. 

What About This Way?

NASA/JPL-Caltech

On January 30, NASA's Curiosity rover took stock of a Martian sand dune while its engineers decided whether to cross the dune on the way to Mount Sharp. This is what it saw.

The last time few times we heard from Curiosity, it had examined an area on Mars that once held a lightly briny lake. The rover also recently examined a rock that appeared in its path, perhaps kicked that way by the robot itself.[Correction: that was Opportunity.] Now, Curiosity is headed to Mount Sharp, a journey that will take several months.

Dunes can be treacherous to rovers. In 2009, NASA's Spirit rover got caught in a sand trap in a dune. NASA engineers were never able to free it. Nevertheless, Curiosity's handlers are considering a dune crossing because driving over Mars' rockier surfaces has torn up Curiosity's aluminum wheels, according to a NASA statement. Universe Today put together several photos showing the punctures.

NASA has dubbed the proposed dune crossing "Dingo Gap." The dune itself is about three feet high. The Curiosity team found Dingo Gap after analyzing images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter flying above the planet, but will make its next decisions based on images from Curiosity's own cameras, like this one.

[NASA, Universe Today]

Battling Cancer With A Vaccine

Medi-Mation

Part of what makes cancers so insidious is that they’re not invaders: They’re our own cells turned against us. That means the body usually doesn’t see them as a threat. But over the last few years, teams at several different research institutions have been programming peoples’ immune systems to recognize and destroy cancer. So far, clinical trials of about a hundred terminal leukemia patients have shown some lasting effects. A single treatment has kept two of them cancer-free for three years and counting—after everything they tried had failed. Applying the technique to more cancers requires finding new targets to attack, says Michel Sadelain, an immunologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who pioneered the approach. Exploratory clinical trials, including for lung and prostate cancers, are getting under way.

1) Capture T cells (the immune system‘s attack force) from the blood of a patient with B-cell leukemia.

2) Genetically engineer the T cells to train their sights on the CD19 molecule, which sits on the surface of B cells and the cancer cells that arose from them.

3) Inject the patient with the modified T cells, which may then destroy all cells with CD19—both cancerous and not.

4) Bolster the patient’s immune system with treatments of antibodies, since B cells normally make antibodies needed to fight infection.

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

Horse_ebooks

Twitter

In September, the collective deflation of Twitter was almost audible. The famous, beloved account @Horse_ebooks was unveiled as a hoax--or, well, it was unveiled to be something, at least. Art? Maybe.

We learned there was a pair of humans behind the account, and that they'd manufactured its tweets. The operators were mostly silent on the subject, but a New Yorker profile out this week finally helps us understand their motivations.

The account--a malfunctioning text-robot, at first--tweeted surreal, occasionally profound inanities, like "Everything happens so much.” People loved this horse. I loved this horse. So when it turned out the account was under the control of human beings (at least for most of its existence), people felt betrayed. The profile, penned by Susan Orlean, who first unmasked Horse_ebooks, is out this week, and the wizards behind the curtain, Jacob Bakkila and Thomas Bender, make the case that their horse was an elaborate work of art native to the Web.

Horse_ebooks first into the weird-Twitter world, but Bakkila prefers to describe it as "conceptual/performance/video art," or, sometimes, as "performance mischief."

The duo had cut their teeth on "performance mischief" like a series of videos on how to pronounce words ("haute couture," and eventually, "Timothy Olyphant") and a faux tourism ad for Milwaukee.

Bakkila found the Horse_ebooks account to be an ample canvas for another performance, and purchased it in exchange for $250 worth of e-books from the Russian Web developer then running it. Bakkila began posting bits of text to the accounts, mostly sliced-up, dadaist sentences culled from real websites. The account became more and more popular before the big reveal: there was a human there all along.

Even now, as the profile points out, opinion is divided on whether this was a work of art, or a huge scam. (The profile, which is pay-walled, is really worth the price of admission for a print copy, by the way.) Orlean writes about what made the tweets so borderline-beautiful: "They were more peculiar and more evocative than bots usually are; they were like found poetry in an otherwise crass medium."

Except, as wonderful as it was, this isn't what most of the account's followers had signed up for. They'd hoped it was an unintentional work, that its poetry was really "found," and not by people. Eager Twitter users followed the machine for a laugh, and were shocked when the machine looked back and laughed, too. Is that art? Or just a simple hoax?

It's not like this horse kicked off such a debate; we've been having it for a long while. Consider the case of Ern Malley, a 1940s "poet" who turned out to be fictitious. A pair of writers submitted purposely terrible work under the fake author's name, to prove that modernist poetry was drivel. The hoax was eventually uncovered, but not before striking a serious blow to the form in Australia. Bizarrely, and in a way the creators of Horse_ebooks would no doubt appreciate, the work eventually became seen as a prime example of playful surrealist poetry. This is the inverse of what happened to Horse_ebooks: instead of a hoax that turned out to be unintentional art, the account was intended to be a work of art and taken to be an elaborate hoax.

That won't do robot-based art, something that can be seriously amusing, even sometimes poignant, any favors. Take Darius Kazemi (on Twitter, @tinysubversions), who's created gorgeous text-shuffling robots, like one that displays instances of executed Texas inmates saying "love" in their last words. That's a perfect example of what makes Web art great: it cedes some, and only some, control to the machines. The results are only half intentional, and the beauty and humor comes from everything else. That's why Horse (and "Malley's" poetry) was so wonderful at first, and so unfortuante after. Without that element of chance, it's no experiment--it's closer to the Turk, a supposed chess-playing machine, mentioned in Orlean's profile, that turned out to have a human being stuffed inside. If that was art, it certainly wasn't very good art.

Peek's Cataract Imager At Work

Screenshot from "Peek – a portable eye examination kit" by LSHTM on Vimeo

A handful of teachers in a poor region of Kenya will soon test a smartphone app to give their students eye exams, the BBC reports. Doctors there hope the app will help them catch vision problems in more kids. Once teachers find problems, they can send the kids onto doctors for treatment, all without requiring the limited number of eye doctors in the region to visit schools to do that first test.

The app is able to take pretty sophisticated images of the eye, including the back of the eye and the optic nerve, with the help of an add-on device. It also helps community health workers give that basic "Can you read a letter of this size?" eye exam. It's called the Portable Eye Examination Kit, or Peek for short. You can see it at work in a video in that story by the BBC.

Many researchers from different labs around the world have tried making diagnosing apps for people living in regions where they can't easily visit a doctor, because they don't have transportation and/or because there aren't enough doctors for the population. But many of those apps never make it beyond prototype. It's nice to see one rigorously tested in the field.

The app's makers, a team from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, previously tested their app in 5,000 Kenyan adults. They haven't finished that study yet, but they aim to compare their app's diagnoses with those made by doctors going out to remote places with all of their standard equipment.

[BBC, Peek]

XStat

RevMedx

When a soldier is shot on the battlefield, the emergency treatment can seem as brutal as the injury itself. A medic must pack gauze directly into the wound cavity, sometimes as deep as 5 inches into the body, to stop bleeding from an artery. It’s an agonizing process that doesn't always work--if bleeding hasn't stopped after three minutes of applying direct pressure, the medic must pull out all the gauze and start over again. It’s so painful, “you take the guy’s gun away first,” says former U.S. Army Special Operations medic John Steinbaugh.

Even with this emergency treatment, many soldiers still bleed to death; hemorrhage is a leading cause of death on the battlefield. "Gauze bandages just don't work for anything serious," says Steinbaugh, who tended to injured soldiers during more than a dozen deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. When Steinbaugh retired in April 2012 after a head injury, he joined an Oregon-based startup called RevMedx, a small group of veterans, scientists, and engineers who were working on a better way to stop bleeding.

XStat, before and after

RevMedx

RevMedx recently asked the FDA to approve a pocket-size invention: a modified syringe that injects specially coated sponges into wounds. Called XStat, the device could boost survival and spare injured soldiers from additional pain by plugging wounds faster and more efficiently than gauze. 

The team’s early efforts were inspired by Fix-a-Flat foam for repairing tires. “That’s what we pictured as the perfect solution: something you could spray in, it would expand, and bleeding stops,” says Steinbaugh. “But we found that blood pressure is so high, blood would wash the foam right out.”

So the team tried a new idea: sponges. They bought some ordinary sponges from a hardware store and cut them into 1-centimeter circles, a size and shape they chose on a whim but later would discover were ideal for filling wounds. Then, they injected the bits of sponge into an animal injury. “The bleeding stopped,” says Steinbaugh. “Our eyes lit up. We knew we were onto something.” After seeing early prototypes, the U.S. Army gave the team $5 million to develop a finished product.

But kitchen sponges aren’t exactly safe to inject into the body. The final material would need to be sterile, biocompatible, and fast-expanding. The team settled on a sponge made from wood pulp and coated with chitosan, a blood-clotting, antimicrobial substance that comes from shrimp shells. To ensure that no sponges would be left inside the body accidentally, they added X-shaped markers that make each sponge visible on an x-ray image.

“By the time you put a bandage over the wound, the bleeding has already stopped.”

The sponges work fast: In just 15 seconds, they expand to fill the entire wound cavity, creating enough pressure to stop heavy bleeding. And because the sponges cling to moist surfaces, they aren’t pushed back out of the body by gushing blood. “By the time you even put a bandage over the wound, the bleeding has already stopped,” Steinbaugh says.

Getting the sponges into a wound, however, proved to be tricky. On the battlefield, medics must carry all their gear with them, along with heavy body armor. RevMedx needed a lightweight, compact way to get the sponges deep into an injury. The team designed a 30 millimeter-diameter, polycarbonate syringe that stores with the handle inside to save space. To use the applicator, a medic pulls out the handle, inserts the cylinder into the wound, and then pushes the plunger back down to inject the sponges as close to the artery as possible.

XStat sponges

RevMedx

Three single-use XStat applicators would replace five bulky rolls of gauze in a medic’s kit. RevMedx also designed a smaller version of the applicator, with a diameter of 12 millimeters, for narrower injuries. Each XStat will likely cost about $100, Steinbaugh says, but the price may go down as RevMedx boosts manufacturing.  

If the FDA approves XStat, it will be the first battlefield dressing created specifically for deep, narrow wounds. Gauze, the standard treatment for gunshot and shrapnel injuries, is only approved by the FDA for external use, but “everyone knows that if you get shot, you have to pack gauze into the wound,” says Steinbaugh. When RevMedx submitted its application to the FDA, the U.S. Army attached a cover letter requesting expedited approval. According to Steinbaugh, RevMedx and the military are now in final discussions with the FDA. 

Last summer, RevMedx and Oregon Health and Science University won a seed grant, sponsored by The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to develop a version of XStat to stop postpartum bleeding. In the future, RevMedx hopes to create biodegradable sponges that don’t have to be removed from the body. To cover large injuries, like those caused by land mines, the team is working on an expanding gauze made of the same material as XStat sponges.

“I spent the whole war on terror in the Middle East, so I know what a medic needs when someone has been shot, ” Steinbaugh says. “I’ve treated lots of guys who would have benefitted from this product. That’s what drives me.”

Rose Pastore is an assistant editor at Popular Science. Follow her on Twitter at @RosePastore.

The tour

When a knight touches every spot on a chess board and returns to its original spot, as shown here in numbered moves, it's called a closed tour.

Numberphile / YouTube

Remove all the pieces from a chess board except for one knight. Then try to move the knight across all 64 squares of the board, touching each once. (As a reminder, knights move in a L-shape, two spaces in one direction, and then one space left or right, or up or down, at a 90- degree angle.) This so-called "knight's tour" is very difficult to achieve for a single person, but mathematicians have calculated that there are a mind-boggling number of ways to pull it off. If you end up at the spot you started, you'd be completing a so-called "closed tour." There are more than 26 trillion ways to do this. If you merely touch every spot, without returning to your point of origin, it's called an open tour. The number of ways to do this is so large that scientists haven't calculated it. 

Searching for new solutions to the knight's tour, a problem that has intrigued mathematicians for centuries, University of Nottingham computer scientist Graham Kendall and a colleague turned to simulated ants. They used the ant colony optimization algorithm, a swarm intelligence technique based on the behavior of ants looking to find a path between their colony and a food source. It works like this, as Kendall explains at The Conversation: 

A computer program is used to simulate a population of ants. These ants are assigned the task to find a solution to a problem. As each ant goes about their task they lay a pheromone trail – a smelly substance that ants use to communicate with each other. In the simulated algorithm, the most successful ants (the ones that solve the problem better), lay more pheromone than those that perform poorly.

This program is repeated hundreds of thousands of times, placing more "pheromones" on paths that complete a tour. But a balance must be struck between reinforcing paths that work, and emphasizing finding new trails. 

Using the program, Kendall and his colleague found nearly 500,000 novel solutions to the knight's tour. Who knew that (simulated) ants could find new answers to a question that has intrigued peope for centuries? 

[The Conversation]

Wait, don't throw away that Pringles can: it's a valuable component of a photography lighting setup, weirdly. No, really, it is. Our friends at PopPhoto have rounded up that, along with seven other ideas for DIY lighting. Check it out here. [PopPhoto]

Barley in Space, 2006

Space tourist Anousheh Ansari holds barley growing in a Lada root module.

NASA

Potluck time! Russian scientists have verified that several plants grown aboard the International Space Station are safe to eat, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reports.

The space-grown edibles include peas, dwarf wheat and Japanese leafy greens. They look great and not at all weird, one of the scientists working on the project, Margarita Levinskikh of the Institute of Biological Problems, assured The Voice of Russia. "The plants have been very developed, absolutely normal and did not differ a lot from the plants grown on Earth," she told the radio station.

And yes, cosmonauts have given them a munch. "We have also gotten experience with the astronauts and cosmonauts eating the fresh food they grow and not having problems," crop scientist Bruce Bugbee wrote to Popular Science in an email. Bugbee is a professor at Utah State University and has worked on studies of food grown in space. 

Space crop programs aim to learn if people would be able to grow some of their own food for longer stays in space. Space agencies hope the fresh vegetables will feed not only astronauts' bodies, but their spirits, as well. "Caring for a plant every day provides vital psychological relief, giving astronauts a small remembrance of Earth," NASA project scientist Howard Levine told Modern Farmer in a 2013 feature about space veggies.

Produce in the International Space Station grow in a greenhouse named Lada, after the Russian goddess of spring. Lada has removable "root modules," in which astronauts are able to grow several generations of crops before the modules' nutrients are used up. At that point, the astronauts send the modules back to Earth for analysis. Biologists on Earth examine the modules to see if any harmful microbes have grown on them. They also check the modules and the plants' leaves for contaminants which may come from the space station's environment. "These are the same types of tests we routinely conduct on the food grown on Earth," Bugbee says.

Lada needs some repairs now, RIA Novosti reports. Once those are done, astronauts will plant it with rice, tomatoes and bell peppers, none of which have been grown in space before. Rice has a special advantage: Its genome has been fully sequenced, so scientists will be able to compare space rice with Earth rice to see if space affects which genes the staple expresses, RIA Novosti reports. 

Updated February 3: Added comments from Bruce Bugbee.

Big Horn

Engineer Kees van Zijtveldt stands in front of a Large European Acoustic Facility horn.

ESA/Guus Schoonewille

This looks a bit like a giant ear canal, but in a way, it's the opposite. It's the largest horn in the most powerful sound system in Europe. The system's maximum output, according to the European Space Agency, would kill any human exposed to it. 

The horn is part of the European Space Agency's Large European Acoustic Facility in Noordwijk, the Netherlands. The facility blasts sound at spacecraft components to test whether they're able to withstand the intense noise of launch. There are four horns, to create sounds in a range of frequencies. ESA engineers send nitrogen gas through the horns to create noise of more than 154 decibels.

Whether that's enough to literally kill is unclear. (There are so many variables. Did the agency mean "kill you on contact" or "kill you if you're sealed inside the facility for a while"?) At the very least, it would cause some serious damage. The eardrums rupture at around 150 decibels. The lungs rupture at around 200 decibels.

For safety, the facility has half-meter-thick walls made of steel-reinforced concrete coated inside with epoxy resin, which reflects noise into the chamber. It also won't operate unless all of its doors are closed. 

[European Space Agency]

A DJI Phantom Drone

Clément Bucco-Lechat, via Wikimedia Commons

When a fire breaks out at an industrial location, first responders need information fast: What chemicals are on site, and are they explosive? How close is the fire to those chemicals? Last week, hundreds of people were evacuated from the area surrounding the pink granite Stone Creek Quarry in Connecticut when old blast mats--heavy rubber sheets placed over holes to contain explosions--caught fire. Emergency workers were concerned that the fire was getting close to a storage unit containing dynamite or other blasting explosives, a scenario that would make it too dangerous for firefighters to go in. 

So one volunteer firefighter sent in his personal drone, a DJI Phantom. They were able to see that the fire was far from the explosives, and they safely went in to put the fire out. The small quadcopter streamed video back to the pilot's smartphone. The drone is expensive from a toy perspective, but at $1,200, it's a cheap alternative to helicopter flights.

Besides cost, there are two major advantages for firefighters using drones: small unmanned aircraft can see places people can't, and they can fly into situations that are too dangerous for humans. Firefighters have already used drones to help with forest fires, including last summer's Yosemite Rim Fire. In Australia, the Melbourne Metropolitan Fire Brigade conducted a year-long study of drones for firefighting. Before the drones, Melbourne's best option for spotting fires from overhead was men on ladders. Thanks to tests like that in Australia and incidents like Stone Creek Quarry, in the future drones might just replace dalmatians as firefighter's best friends.

Watch an interview with the Stone Creek drone pilot, as well as some footage of the fire from the drone itself, below:

Snow way!

Real snow shows char marks when a flame is put to it.

TheBadAstronomer / YouTube

After a snowstorm hit Atlanta and a good portion of the Eastern Seaboard last week, snarling traffic and stranding many, rumors circulated that it wasn't snow. Some said that it was FAKE snow, either deposited via chemtrails, or made up of psychoactive substances, or nanobots. (If I had nanobots, I wouldn't waste them by spreading them haphazardly over Atlanta. I'd pick Bavaria, so I could infiltrate the Illuminati.) 

A strange conspiracy, to say the least. Some viewers, especially those who have not encountered snow before, could possibly be forgiven for believing the idea had some merit. A rash of videos showed people torching snow, only to see it (apparently) not melt, leaving a black char mark on the exterior of the white stuff... as if it were synthetic, and not just made of frozen water.

Fed up with these misleading videos and dumb theory, astronomer and science writer Phil Plait took a lighter to snow in Boulder, Colo., and got a similar result. But this is merely how real snow behaves. As Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote at BoingBoing, Plait takes advantage of the situation to explain the science behind what is going on in, in this video: 

As he says, when snow melts, the water is absorbed by the remaining loosely packed snow. This is how snowcones hold onto their delicious sugary water, and explains why they are so delicious. And the black char marks are traces of soot from the lighter fluid.

[BoingBoing]

Just Dance 2014

Ubisoft

Just Dance

Ubisoft

I have no idea what it was like to be alive in the '40s. Not really, anyway.

This video from 2012 is making the rounds right now--with good reason. Drop whatever you're doing, leave your desk, quit your job, and find a magnet and copper tube, because, wow. Look at this! It's a Matrix time-freeze in your hands.

The video is showing a demonstration of Lenz's law: the magnet induces a current in the tube, and that current creates a magnetic field that pushes against the falling magnet. Try it with a similar setup (neodymium magnets work well), and bam: you've got yourself a slowly falling magnet. This phenomenon actually has practical applications in industrial separation of recylables, look:

[Digg]