Brooke Testing Sleep Bands

Photo by Michael Wasilewski

Many of the latest fitness trackers also claim to monitor sleep, so I decided to test a few. I strapped four of them to my arm 24/7 for a week of self-designed experiments. Some nights, I curbed caffeine, exercised early, and got to bed on time. Other nights, I suffered from jet lag, stayed up way too late watching Homeland, or experienced the ill effects of too much bourbon. The results were mixed.

Jawbone Up24

Courtesy Jawbone

1. Jawbone Up24: Easiest to Use

How it works: An accelerometer that measures motion tracks both activity and rest (including sleep). An algorithm uses its data to calculate calories burned based on the user’s sex, weight, height, and age.
My take: The app breaks down sleep into light and deep phases, supposedly based on small differences in body movement. Yet on nights where my notes say I woke many times, the Up24 claims I slept soundly. $149.99
Data: 5
Ease of use: 10
Looks: 8
Comfort: 10

Basis B1

Courtesy Basis

2. Basis B1: Best Sweat Monitor

How it works: An accelerometer and sensors track heart rate, calorie burn, skin temperature, and perspiration.
My take: The unit repeatedly failed to sync with the app and website, and the minimal sleep data didn’t match how I really slept. (But its sweat feature did encourage me to lower the thermostat at night.) The company says a new version this year will evaluate REM and deep sleep, as well as tossing and turning in bed. $199
Data: 2
Ease of use: 2 
Looks: 5
Comfort: 7

Fitbit Force

Courtesy Fitbit

3. Fitbit Force: Sleekest

Update: In February 2014, Fitbit voluntarily recalled the Force because some wearers got a rash from the device. This story was prepared for Popular Science magazine before The Consumerist broke the story about Force rashes. Fitbit no longer sells new Forces and people who own Forces may return them for a full refund. Learn more about the recall at The Consumerist.

How it works: In addition to an accelerometer, a calorie-burn algorithm, and a meal log, the device has an altimeter to measure number of stairs (or hills) climbed.
My take: The attractive, comfortable, and straightforward Fitbit Force was the only device I’ll consider wearing in the future. But it gave me identical scores on a night I slept really well and on one when I slept horribly after a Homeland marathon. $129.95
Data: 4
Ease of use: 10
Looks: 9
Comfort: 10

BodyMedia Fit Link

BodyMedia

4. BodyMedia Fit Link: Best Sleep Tracker 

How it works: It has sensors for sweat, skin temperature, heat flux, and an accelerometer.
My take: Although itchy and awkwardly placed on my upper arm, it was the most accurate. On terrible nights, it was the only one that came close to reflecting how many times I woke up. But it wasn’t perfect, claiming 78 percent sleep efficiency* on the night I felt I slept the best and 90 percent when I had jet lag. $119
Data: 8
Ease of use: 8
Looks: 4
Comfort: 3
*Sleep efficiency: Percentage of minutes in bed that were actually spent sleeping

Plus: One App

Sleep apps generally use a smartphone’s internal accelerometer to monitor movement in bed, requiring you to put your phone facedown on the corner of your mattress. I tried Sleep Cycle, which claims to record sleep patterns and sound a morning alarm within a 30-minute range when your sleep is lightest (for the least groggy start to the day). In practice, its sleep grades were suspect. The dreadful Night of Bourbon, which included waking up at 4 a.m. with heartburn, scored a respectable 81 out of 100. 99¢

Click here to read more about the science of sleep.

Next page: One day in the fitness-tracked life.

A Day In The Fitness-Tracked Life

Fitness trackers are increasingly ubiquitous, generally supplying metrics on how much you eat, exercise, and sleep. During my informal sleep experiment I took advantage of all the bands’ capabilities to see how they compared.

Here’s a snapshot from one 24-hour period, starting early on December 6 and ending the following morning. My notes say I was jetlagged and felt groggy in the daytime. In addition to a few walks with my dog, I tried a 60-minute spin class around noon in hopes that the exercise would help readjust my sleep cycle. That evening, I went out to dinner and indulged in big mugs of beer. I felt that I slept pretty well, waking at least once around four o’clock in the morning.

None of the trackers perfectly captured my day. Food-wise, it was difficult to enter meals, especially since I cooked from scratch or ate at a restaurant for each meal instead of making pre-packaged food with available nutritional information. All of the devices seemed to underestimate my calorie intake. Not all could capture my exercise routines, either, and there were discrepancies in how well I slept. And none of the data perfectly matches between one device and the next.

Jawbone Up24

The minimal data for this device displays through a smartphone app. Logging food was a little tricky—unless I entered it in real time, I had to manually change the time for every food item. As for exercise, the app let me manually input a spin class since the band couldn’t capture the intensity of the workout.

Quick stats:

Calories consumed: 1,815

Calories burned: 2,072

Steps taken: 9,939

Time slept: 7 hr 59m

Timeline:

Exercise:

Food:

Sleep:

Basis B1

The sleep data, available both on a website and an app, was the least descriptive, although this may be improved with a recent software upgrade (which I haven’t tried). Tracking food wasn’t an option, and although Basis can automatically detect exercises such as running and cycling, it can’t recognize movement on a stationary bike and has no option to manually input activities.

Quick stats:

Calories consumed: NA

Calories burned: 2,114

Steps taken: 8,937

Time slept: 8 hr 24 min

Timeline:

FitBit Force

The data displays through both an app and a website, and is relatively easy to read. Food was easy to log, although the app didn’t capture nutritional data. As with the Jawbone, I was able to manually input my spin class.

Quick stats:

Calories consumed: 1,637

Calories burned: 2,348

Steps taken: 11,660

Time slept: 8 hr 6 min

Dashboard (note the sleep time listed here is from Thursday night, not Friday):

Exercise:

Food:

Sleep:

BodyMedia Fit Link

This band had by far the most comprehensive data. Everything was available both online and in an app, although the online dashboard had a lot more power. As with the Jawbone and FitBit, I could manually enter the extra exercise that the band couldn’t capture.

Quick stats:

Calories consumed: 1,780

Calories burned: 2,342

Steps taken: 10,571

Time slept: 6:59

Dashboard:

A shorter version of this article appeared in the March 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Anne Wojcicki

Following a suspension by the FDA, personal genomics company 23andMe put their CEO on stage during a popular annual conference in Austin, Texas, to address brewing controversy.

23andMe used to offer a genetic "spit test" for $99. You'd spit into a tube, mail it in, and the company would screen part of your DNA for traits tied to ancestry, inheritable diseases, and more. The company let users privately access their results online--including disease risk information--yet 23andMe never billed itself as a medical product or service. The FDA didn't like this and, late last year, told the company to cease processing the tests, pending a formal review.

"I want to offer you a disclaimer: We are no longer providing you with your health information," 23andMe CEO and co-founder Anne Wojcicki told a crowd Sunday during a featured talk at South By Southwest. She didn't offer much on where the company is in its discussions with the FDA, or if and when its health testing might resume. Wojcicki did, however, acknowledge that federal intervention has made "a significant impact" on the business. The company is still in the process of submitting medical applications through the agency and is only offering ancestry details in the meantime.

Nonetheless, like a defense attorney, Wojcicki laid out the case for once again providing health results that they are currently barred from offering: "The rest of the world is moving forward," she said. Wojcicki also hinted at what's long been speculated is the real thrust of 23andMe: "We can all be useful to [the] drug discovery process," she said.

Already, in the years before it was shut down, 23andMe has amassed an enormous stash of people's genetic data. The end-game was never just $99 genetic tests; once anonymized, genomic data might be sold to drug companies, who can then mine it for correlations with diseases and develop drugs based on the results. (A question asked of Wojcicki through Twitter during her talk: "Shouldn't you be paying me for my genetic data, instead of me paying you?")

When the FDA shut down 23andMe's personal genomic testing service, they stunted the growth of this drug database business, too--which, in the long run, might have been the most important reason for the intervention all along. 

A U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention scientist conducts experiments on live viruses

James Gathany, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Who infected whom? That's the question behind some of the juiciest (doctor deliberately injects ex-girlfriend with hepatitis C) and most important (the 2001 anthrax attacks in the U.S.) court cases.

So how are scientists able to trace an infection back to one lab or one person? A new feature in Nature takes a look. The microbe-sourcing technique, called phylogenetic forensics, has been around for more than a decade now. And it's improved since its early days, as DNA sequencing technology has improved. Still, it's not widely understood by juries and judges. There's also more uncertainty around it, especially compared to the DNA tests used to link individuals to crime scenes, such as in murder or rape cases. Nature explains:

Phylogenetic evidence is very different in nature from the DNA matches that juries may be more familiar with, says [evolutionary geneticist Anne-Mieke] Vandamme: the latter can often confirm or exclude a suspect's involvement in a crime with extremely high certainty. Phylogenetic analyses can offer supporting evidence—that a virus found in person A is very likely to have come from person B, say—but can never prove direct transmission on their own, she says.

Researchers who work on court cases, like Vandamme, worry about explaining what they do to juries. But you can get a head start! The Nature story explains the science behind phylogenetic forensics well. The infographic in the middle of the story is especially helpful.

After that, you can get lost looking up some of the cases that have depended on phylogenetic forensics. You can look up Richard Schmidt, a doctor who injected his ex-girlfriend—who worked as his nurse—with HIV- and hepatitis C-tainted blood after she broke up with him. You can read the latest thinking about the 2001 anthrax mailings, a case that never went to court because the main suspect committed suicide.

And there's the case of Juan Maeso, which Nature uses as its lead example. Maeso, an anesthesiologist in Spain, injected himself with a bit of his patients' morphine before sticking the same needle into them. He infected hundreds of patients with hepatitis C that way. Phylogenetic forensics helped link those infections back to the morphine-addicted doctor.

[Nature]

Arch Aerial Drone

A couple years ago, Ryan Baker founded Arch Aerial, a Houston-based drone manufacturer. An archaeologist by training, Baker worked on shooting excavations for clients, and eventually moved into working on films. Then, universities and high schools came knocking; they wanted drones to film their athletics. Now, with drones recently shooting sports at the Sochi Olympics, the idea might be gaining some mainstream traction.

Baker gave a talk at South By Southwest about how drones are changing sports, and we caught up with him after to chat.

Popular Science: Can you start by telling me a little bit about how drones are already being used in sports photography?

Ryan Baker: It made the most sense and it was first adopted by extreme sports, because one, the general user in extreme sports, a lot of times they’re younger, and they’re trying to get shots of them skateboarding or skiing or snowboarding. That’s where it’s at now. 

Drones being used at Sochi—that was huge, for our industry in general, because it put it in the public eye. It’s becoming a thing that’s adopted by mainstream sports. 

PS: Like what? Football?

RB: Football, initially people think wide game passes, that’s a possibility. But I think it’s more going to be used for practice film and promotional film for teams. Certainly you can get those long shots using those things, but I don’t know if they’ll actually implement that for liability reasons.

PS: You talked a little about having constraints on it due to battery power. You can only have 15 minutes for a shot?

RB: That’s really where the industry’s at right now—it’s about 15 minutes, depending on payload. Also it’s dependent on how high you’re looking to go. Climbing is very taxing on the battery. Laterally, at a lower altitude, you might get a little bit more time out of it.

PS: With that in mind, what are the advantages of using a drone instead of a traditional camera system?

RB: CableCams take a while to set up, they’re expensive. Helicopters are certainly expensive to rent. The ease of use in terms of setup, operating costs—it’s definitely the smarter choice. Obviously you don’t get an hour flight time, but I don’t know how many people are getting uncut 15-minute shots. It’s a lot of panning and that sort of thing.

PS: So this isn’t necessarily something that the NFL, which already has a used infrastructure, would use? 

RB: I don’t see it being implemented in NFL stadiums where they already have a CableCam system in place, because it’s not practical. But for users who don’t have a CableCam system, like a high school football team that wants to get CableCam-style views but can't install a CableCam system in their practice field, that sort of thing. 

PS: So you make a kit, someone buys the kit and wants to use it. Who’s the pilot? Let’s say, in a high school or college game.

RB: We’re just now starting to get involved in high school football, in terms of the mainstream sports. If you’ve got someone in a university, I would think they’d pull somebody from a journalism department or an engineering department. That would be a smart move, if you have those resources internally. If you’re a small organization like a high school football team, then it would probably have to be a coach or a student manager. But having the person who’s had some training, or maybe has some background in RC helicopter flight, that’s just generally helpful. 

PS: What’s training like? Most people are probably amateurs, even if you get them from a school. How long does it take before someone is comfortable doing it, and how do they know they’re comfortable flying it around a stadium?

RB: One of the things we suggest for our customers who are flying it in situations like that is to get a small, indoor microcopter—fly indoors, crash into your wall or your couch or whatever. In terms of training, the internet’s a great resource, but for our clients we also put out a flight portal on our website. On there is flight training and videos on how to change an arm if you snap an arm and that sort of thing. We’re trying to see them all the way through the process.

We also do training for companies like an architecture firm, or a high school football team or an archaeological excavation, where we’ll come out to them or they’ll come out to us and we’ll put them through a 12-hour training program.

PS: Let’s talk about the legal issues. This week, a judge ruled that the FAA doesn’t necessarily have jurisdiction over commercial use of drones. Are people that you’re going to and seeing about this concerned that they don’t know what the status of this will be in a year?

RB: I don’t know if they’re concerned they won’t be able to use it, I think they’re waiting to see how they can use it. The industry is booming. It’s gone from something very small to a noticeable component to the tech marketplace. It will certainly be addressed. People aren’t worried about if it will be used, but using it properly—and they want to see other companies and organizations using it before they do. 

As the technology progress, it’ll be safer. Not that it isn’t safe already, but there’s a lot of room for operator error. The industry has to keep progressing, but it’ll add more clients and add more components to the safety aspect as time goes on. That decision, I’m sure everyone in the industry was happy about that, but it’ll have to be addressed. There’s no getting around that. And I’m all for some sort of training or certification. Nobody wants to see someone get hurt. 

PS: Are there liability issues in sports? If you’re a manufacturer and you send it to someone and it goes into the crowd, do you need to get waivers? Something else?

RB: It’s sort of that gray area. It depends on who your lawyers are, and what your state’s legal situation is. That’s why I don’t think it’ll be adopted at NFL games—one because they already have mobile CableCams, two because nobody wants to be that organization. But I think there are other applications. It doesn’t have to be a high-crowd situation. There are certainly broadcast applications that are safe.

PS: That’s another question. Is this something where people will take it into the film room and say, "This is what we need to do better next time," or is it more for broadcasting applications?

RB: I think it’s both. In the PAC 12 they’ve been using it, and there are major universities around the country that are starting to adopt it. For practice film, they might be using it for tracking shots, where they want to follow a player that you couldn’t get with a fixed position. Broadcasting is going to be huge, just because the shot you get with a CableCam will be much cheaper with one of these things, and you can take it to crazy places, where you’d be limited with a CableCam.

PS: How far do you see this going? Will it be used in lots of mainstream sports?

RB: Football is an interesting one, and doing practice film is an interesting application; broadcast is an interesting application. Golf, I could totally see broadcasting applications for. Racing, for sure. Both motor vehicles and Tour de France, that sort of thing. Soccer, MLS—yachting was one I spoke to a gentleman about. Getting dynamic shots of sports that sometimes don’t have the budget to get those shots within their means? I think it’s definitely going to help out with that. 

Potentially Deadly

This illustration shows an asteroid breaking up as it orbits a white dwarf.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

I'm a writer. My barely-out-of-college kid brother is a computer programmer. Only one of us has the skills to save the world from asteroids. (Okay, spoiler, it's not me.)

NASA is calling on coders to develop software that automatically spots asteroids in photos taken by large ground telescopes. The software has to work better than existing software, which depends on comparing telescope photos of the same patch of sky, taken at different times, to determine which objects in the photos move. In a description of the contest, NASA's Tournament Lab says, "The winning solution must increase the detection sensitivity, minimize the number of false positives, ignore imperfections in the data, and run effectively on all computers."

The winning solution(s) will also win a total of $35,000 in prizes, according to statement from Planetary Resources. The asteroid-mining company signed an agreement with NASA to manage the contest, which is called Asteroid Data Hunter.

The contest is part of NASA's Asteroid Grand Challenge, an overall program to develop ways to detect if an asteroid threatens Earth. The agency already has plans to capture an asteroid and send astronauts to study it. The point of the Asteroid Grand Challenge is to partner with organizations outside of NASA, including citizen scientists, for asteroid-impact prevention.

You can find out more about what NASA wants for its asteroid-spotting software on the contest's website. There are also links there for registering for the contest, which opens March 17. 

[Asteroid Data Hunter]

Fischer and Tal

Legendary chess player Bobby Fischer playing Mikhail Tal in 1960. Academics still argue about how important practice is for attaining elite levels of success in various fields.

Ulrich Kohls via Wikimedia Commons

You may have heard of the "10,000 hour rule," popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, which suggests that many people who have reached the top of their fields got there, in large part, due to practicing for 10,000 hours. The theory is most often credited to a 1993 study by K. Anders Ericsson and colleagues (which has been cited more than 4,000 times, according to Google Scholar). But a new review of that study and other research in the field came to a different conclusion: Practice is not as vital as previously thought. 

In the new paper, published in Intelligence (and relying heavily on a study published last May in the same journal), the authors write that "we have empirical evidence that deliberate practice, while important, is not as important as Ericsson has argued it is—evidence that it does not largely account for individual differences in performance." They continue: 

Deliberate practice does not explain all, nearly all, or even most of the variance in performance in chess and music, the two most widely studied domains in expertise research. Put another way, deliberate practice explains a considerable amount of the variance in performance in these domains, but leaves a much larger amount of the variance unexplained.

In the study, authors re-analyze scores of studies on elite chess players and musicians, but especially the former, since every player has an easily quantifiable numerical rating. They point out that there is enormous variation in how long it took for people to get to the level of a chess master. One player in a 2007 study, for example, "took 26 years of serious involvement in chess to reach a master level, while another player took less than 2 years to reach this level," they write. They conclude that practice can only explain one-third of the variation in sucess in chess and music, and probably other fields as well. 

The evidence is "quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice," they write. They suggest that other factors together explain the lion's share of success (at least in these two most-studied areas), such as intelligence, starting age, personality, and other genetic factors.

Despite their new analysis, the authors write that the debate is likely to remain intense "for many years to come." Which makes me think: Perhaps the "10,000 hour rule" should be defined as "the amount of time academics spend arguing over what factors explain success."

MR-1 Radar System

Ukraine's new RADAR system.

Ukroboronprom State Concern

Last week, Ukraine's state-owned defense conglomerate Ukroboronprom State Concern unveiled the new MR-1 radar system, which, according to a Ukrainian official, can detect stealth aircraft better than other radar. Igor Presnyak, director of Ukraine's Scientific and Production Complex "Iskra," the group behind the MR-1, announced the development in a sparse release to Ukroboronprom. Except, here's the thing: Russia, currently occupying checkpoints and taking over Ukrainian military bases in the Ukrainian province of Crimea, doesn't have any stealth aircraft.

Radar is a defensive tool, and it has been since its inception. In the Battle of Britain, when the Royal Air Force defended the British Isles against the German Luftwaffe, radar provided crucial early warning information. The United Kingdom could see enemy bombers as they approached, and then gather fighters to intercept and shoot them down. In more modern warfare, countries pair plane-finding radar with anti-plane missiles launched from the ground.

Stealth technology is a way to thwart radar. There are two key components of stealth: paint that reflects radar poorly, and a body shape that deflects radar beams away from their origin.

So, for a country currently staring down a hostile invader, stealth-detecting radar is a great advantage. While Russia is developing a stealth fighter, it is still in the testing phase. The Tu-160 "Blackjack" bomber, which has some measures to reduce its radar signature, is stuck in a stagnant modernization program that Russia is struggling to pay for. As of 2012, Russia only had 11 of these bombers.

The second problem for the Ukrainian anti-stealth radar is that there's no clear explanation for how it is better at detecting stealth aircraft than other, similar radar. These radar systems work by sending out both ultra-high frequency (UHF) radio waves and very high frequency (VHF) radio waves. Stealth technologies are designed primarily so that UHF waves can't see them. If a radar using both waves detects something only on VHF and not on UHF, it's likely a stealth aircraft. Getting both kinds of radar to work together in the precise way that best reveals stealth aircraft is the main challenge anti-stealth radar has to solve.

Here is what Ukroboronprom says about the MR-1 radar:

MR-1 has the number of significant advantages against the foreign radar systems of meter range. In particular, MR-1 has a short build up time (up to 5 min) compared to NEBO-SVU Radar System, build up time of which is 30 min. All equipment of our station is placed on one KRAZ motor vehicle in the comparison with three vehicles needed for 55Zh5 Radar System. The MR-1 Radar System allows making an assessment of the altitude of the target location. The VOSTOK-E Radar System has no such ability.

Removed of all jargon, that means this radar can fit all its components onto a single truck, making it a better version of Russia's current stealth-differentiating radar.

Or at least it will be, if the completed. Ukraine is looking for funding to test the MR-1 radar systems in 2015.

Generated Energy

Becky Stern

Copper wire ties modern civilization together, but it is fragile thread. In 2012, Hurricane Sandy bathed miles of the electrical conductor in saltwater, severing my Brooklyn neighborhood from the grid. Lower Manhattan—a dense concentration of wealth, power, and wiring—fell into darkness for days.

Events like Sandy used to be called 100-year storms. By the end of this century, East Coasters may call them “autumn.” To prepare for the next disaster, I built a simple, robust generator able to power essentials like a refrigerator, chargers, and lights indefinitely.

Gas and diesel generators are common backup sources of electricity, but disasters can easily disrupt fuel distribution networks, as Sandy did. I decided that the best power source would be me: I’m always around, and my fuel is readily available. I just needed a means to turn calories into kilowatts.

Bikes efficiently convert muscle energy into rotary motion, which can rapidly spin a generator. Fun, useful fact: Every motor is a generator. Spin the shaft and it produces electricity. I extracted a motor from a trashed mobility scooter and then built a pipe stand to brace my bike’s rear wheel against the motor’s shaft. Next, I wired the motor to a homemade charging circuit (to regulate output) and connected that to a deep-cycle battery. A common inverter then turned the battery’s 12 DC volts into 120 AC volts.

Pedaling consistently churned out about 150 watts, which is plenty to power a few incandescent lightbulbs. Three to five minutes of hardcore riding stored enough energy in the battery to fully charge my cell phone (with juice to spare). Someday soon, after the next disaster strikes, I will be a power baron: Drudges will sweat bullets to charge their phones on my bike, leaving a surplus for me to squander on high-res cat videos and ice-cold beverages. 

WARNING: Lead-acid batteries can ignite, explode, and cause chemical burns if used improperly.

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

A Mouse Fetus Made From The New STAP Stem Cells

Haruko Obokata

One of the scientists involved in two milestone stem cell papers now wants to withdraw the papers.

Late in January, a team of American and Japanese scientists announced they'd discovered a new, easy way to transform adult skin cells into pluripotent stem cells. It was one of the biggest steps in stem cell research in the last decade. A few weeks later, however, troubles arose when independent scientists inspected the papers more closely and tried to duplicate the transformation with no success.

"When conducting the experiment, I believed it was absolutely right," Japanese geneticist Teruhiko Wakayama told Reuters. "But now that many mistakes have emerged, I think it is best to withdraw the research paper once and, using correct data and correct pictures, to prove once again the paper is right. If it turns out to be wrong, we would need to make it clear why a thing like this happened."

The papers are now under investigation by both RIKEN, the Japanese research institute that employs many of the scientists involved in the papers, and Nature Publishing Group, which published the papers. It is still unclear if the papers' conclusions are incorrect, or if the papers' authors made mistakes in putting together the paper, but do have the correct data somewhere.  

[Reuters] 

P5000 Baby Costume

Carsten Riewe

A parent in Germany created this robo-suit--the P5000 Powerloader from "Aliens"--for his 13-month-old child. Here, according to the YouTube description, is how it was done:

This Baby costume was inspired by the Caterpillar P5000 Powerloader from the movie "Aliens" by James Cameron. The arms and legs are full moveable and the top-light and LED were powered by an 12 Volt battery pack stored in the backpack. The on/off switch is in the left arm. Also in the backpack a Bluetooth boombox ist installed to play mechanical robot sound fx or music if preferred. It took 100 working hours to finnish the costume and I built it for the "Karneval"-Parade in my hometown in Germany February 2014 . My 13 months old daughter enjoyed to be carried and moved in her harnness savely.

We await news of the world's unconditional surrender. Also, apparently someone else did this, too? It may already be too late. 

Edward Snowden, speaking at SXSW via Google Hangout on March 10, 2014

"Encryption is defense against the Dark Arts," National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden said via Google Hangout to an audience at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, on Monday. Snowden and the second panelist, Chris Soghoian, as well as moderator Ben Wizner (both from the ACLU), each began the discussion with the same assumption: that mass surveillance is inherently bad.

Why, Wizner asked, had Snowden chosen to make his first public remarks since fleeing the U.S. to a tech festival, rather than, say, a policy community in Washington D.C.? Snowden responded, "There is a policy response that needs to occur. There is also a technical response that needs to occur."

Here, I'll break down the SXSW panel's technological solutions to the problem of mass surveillance. You can read more about the policy recommendations here and here.

Change how companies store data

"South by Southwest and the technology community, the people in the room right now, are the people that can fix our technical standards," Snowden said during the panel. "The people in this room, you are all the firefighters." The fire in question is mass surveillance, and Snowden's immediate solution to the government appropriation of private information collected by technology companies is to change how companies store their information and relay it between users.

The obvious solution, put forth by Wizner, Snowden, and Soghoian, is more and better encryption—to securely send information only from point A to point B without anyone reading it along the way. The problem is that for companies like Google, which make money through advertising, there is incredible value to reading the content of that email. Gmail, simple and straightforward as it is, comes at the price of some privacy.

This is the general bargain of the internet. Giants like Google, Yahoo, and Facebook provide simple and straightforward services to users in exchange for their information. Users get a simple system they can use, and companies get data they can sell to advertisers. It's also where mass surveillance starts, as the information is collected in bulk and held in servers belonging to the private companies. When news of the NSA's PRISM program broke last summer, the scandal wasn't just the NSA's collection of data—it was the revelation that companies were handing it over.

The case of Firefox vs Chrome

The panelists acknowledged the irony of using a Google Hangout for a discussion of eroded privacy. Soghoian said people have to "choose between easy to use, reliable and polished, versus tools that are hard to use and very secure. Rational people choose bundled tools because they are easy."

Soghoian noted that there is a tradeoff between protecting oneself from targeted surveillance and keep one's personal information private, saying  "a privacy-preserving experience might not be the more secure one." He said he was "constantly torn" between Firefox, which is a more private browser and so better at protecting a person from mass surveillance, and Google Chrome, which is more secure from targeted attacks.

On its own, Silicon Valley won't necessarily take steps toward better security. Soghoian pointed out that following the PRISM revelations, many online companies (he specifically mentioned Google) started defaulting their services to SSL, which adds a layer of encryption. Previously, users had to find the 13th item at the bottom of a drop-down list in a settings menu; by changing it to the default for Gmail, Google encrypted a lot of communication all at once.

Snowden related a personal experience, from when he reached out to journalist Glenn Greenwald about the information he was willing to leak. About encryption technology, Snowden said: "It has to pass the Greenwald test. Any journalist in the world gets an email from somebody saying, 'Hey I have something the public might want to know about'—they need to be able to open it." For people to use cryptography regularly, it must be easy to use, Snowden said. "If you have to go to the command line, people aren’t going to use it. If you have to go three menus deep, people aren’t going to use it. It has to be out there. It has to happen automatically. It has to happen seamlessly."

Beyond the Gmail/SSL example, and an exhortation to the technologists present to design with encryption in mind from Snowden, neither Soghoian or Snowden really advocated a way to make communication through cryptography the default on the internet, especially when privacy runs up against those companies' interest in advertising dollars.

Watch the full panel below, and read the transcript here.

Artificial Pacemaker

Wikimedia Commons

In the case of "inert" implants, like silicone breast implants or artificial hips, they are often left in and buried with the body, writes Frank Swain for the BBC. In the case of cremation, silicone burns up, but metal hips and the like are usually separated from the ashes and disposed. Other metals may be collected, like gold fillings--for instance, the Dutch company Orthometals removes 250 tons of metal annually from crematoriums around Europe to sell. "After you die, a little piece of you may one day end up in an aeroplane, a wind turbine, or even another person," Swain writes. 

Pacemakers, internal cardiac defibrillators (ICDs) and other prosthetics with electronic components are usually removed, especially in the case of cremation, as they contain batteries that can explode. One 2002 study found that "about half of all crematoria in the UK [United Kingdom] experience pacemaker explosions." The first reported case of such an explosion, in 1976, created "a finger-sized hole half an inch deep" in the crematorium wall. (Death via crematorium pacemaker explosion would be a bad, and perhaps ironic, way to go.) 

There are currently rules against re-using many prosthetics, such as pacemakers, in Europe and the U.S. But these devices cost a lot; some people in the developing world cannot afford new ones. So several charities are trying to reuse these. In the UK, the charity Pace4Life collects and sends working pacemakers to India. An American effort called Project My Heart Your Heart is looking to do the same thing in the U.S., and has found that "75 patients who received second-hand ICDs showed no evidence of infection or malfunction." 

Many healthcare providers will not take back artificial limbs. So several charities are trying to reuse them. One group called Standing With Hope, based in Nashville, recycles old prosthetic limbs for the developing world, in countries like Ghana. 

[BBC]

So you have a Kegerator. Good! This is an economical choice you have made regarding your beer consumption. But you are probably (hopefully) sharing it with others. How can you fairly decide who's spending the right amount on refills?

Phil Harlow, in a passive-aggressive roommate move for the ages, hooked a Raspberry Pi computer with a camera up to the Kegerator. The computer monitors the flow of beer; the computer detects that a person is present. (Right now, it can only detect that a person is there, not who it is. Harlow wants to fix this soon so it identifies the person.) After that, it charges the amount of beer consumed to the drinker's tab. 

We need a similar system for when someone tries to take a disproportionate number of pizza slices. Please.

[Phil's Project Blog via Hack A Day] 

Super World

Because Titanfall’s multiplayer matches are cloud hosted, developers no longer have to make tough choices—like whether to add players or artificially intelligent background characters—to save processing power. “Other AI running around makes the world much more interesting,” says Respawn software engineer Jon Shiring.

Courtesy Respawn Entertainment

On March 11, Electronic Arts will release Titanfall (Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC; $60), an online first-person shooter that promises to reinvent shooting-your-friends-in-the-face technology. Developed by Respawn Entertainment, it comes with a notable pedigree. Respawn co-founder Vince Zampella created the Call of Duty franchise before leaving Activision, and his team has the best track record in the business for creating preternaturally compelling games (the CoD series has sold more than 100 million copies). With new gameplay concepts and technology, Titanfall will be this year’s shooter to beat. Here’s why.

Expert Manipulation

Zampella’s team devised CoD’s grabbiest feature, an awards system that gives players weapons based on experience points. It’s an extremely effective method for keeping players engaged. Titanfall adds several twists, such as “burn cards,” single-use items that provide a quick stat boost or extra muscle.

Bodies In Motion 

Most shooters are played on the ground, but Titanfall lets players move like parkour athletes—running on walls and taking massive leaps. “People start playing it normally,” says Zampella, “but after a certain point it clicks: ‘I can jump over that fence.’ Now, when I play a game without wall running, I feel like something’s missing.”

Better Connector

Network-induced delays in multiplayer sessions (a.k.a. “lag”) are instant immersion killers and the bane of a gamer’s existence. All Titanfall games will be hosted on Microsoft’s global network of servers, Xbox Live Compute, which promises to make multiplayer scenarios less susceptible to interruption. 

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

Dancer Marie-Claude Pietragalla

Courtesy Dassault Systemes

Benoit Marini has spent years working with virtual-reality technology for the French company Dassault Systemes. As the director for the company's Experiental Lab and Passion for Innovation program, he's overseen several projects using illusory or reconstructed worlds, like an explorable version of the Khufu Pyramid. (It's in his blood. His parents were both engineers and his mother used to crack open the TV and use a welder on it; he assumed this was normal.)

In 2012, he started touring his latest show: the experimental, virtual-reality dance production Mr. and Mrs. Dream. It's bizarre, and I mean that in the best way. Based on the works of absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco, projectors, lights, and sensors (the dancers forbid the use of virtual reality goggles) combine to make the--uh--production something different, to say the least. Example scene: an apartment that crumbles away to reveal the universe hiding behind the exterior. (The French!)

I caught up with Marini at South By Southwest to talk about the project, coming soon to the U.S.

Popular Science: What is this project? How would you describe it?

Benoit Marini: The project is a mix between dance and 3-D technologies. It's the marriage of art and science. It cannot be described as a ballet, as a traditional dance show. It's not a play. It's not a dance show. It's a new kind of show. 

As it makes the universe of Ionesco, which is really surreal, we decided to call that "virtual unreality," because it brings life to fantasy, to something weird and strange, instead of giving life to something real.

The show involves two dancers, and they're from the mind of the author, Eugène Ionesco, and we travel with them through his plays, through the interpretation of the dancers. I think the experience the people have when they come out of the show, they describe it as really unique. 

PS: What's the technical setup like? 

BM: We designed a big box, called the Magic Box, because it creates an illusion, like a magician. This box is using screens on the side and on the back. On the floor there is a regular dance floor. Everything has the same color--it's a light gray. We are using five or six projectors to project everything--everything is like one big universe, one big picture.

All of the projectors are located directly on top of the dancer. We use, for particular scenes, sensors located on the top to know their position in the space of the Magic Box. In other scenes, we're using sensors directly on the bodies of the dancers so they can interact.

PS: Which part came first? The choreography or the technical side?

BM: When we started the project, they set up the music--it would not be the final music of the show, it would just be music that would be replaced by another original creation, from Laurent Garnier, who is a famous french DJ. They selected the music and searched for choreography, and during this time we were designing the box and creating the software. Then, during the rehearsals, they tried the test we'd prepared, they adapted and changed the choreography. 

PS: Can you tell me about some of the specific scenes? There are surreal moments: You mentioned an apartment falls apart and you can see the universe outside of that. What are some other scenes you accomplished with this technology?

BM: I really like the first scene, because at the beginning, when you're a spectator, you think it's real. Time accelerates, a painting falls, there is a clock turning really quick, you see a storm, and everything starts to get old in the room and to vanish. The question it brings is: Is reality real, or only an illusion? This opening scene takes everyone into the fantasy world. You know you're no longer in the real world. 

All the scenes have their own meaning. You see a big character called The No Face--the character symbolizes God--and cells come from him, and that's the rebirth of the character into the show. There's one cell at the beginning--the dancers dance very close together--and then they split, like mitosis, and they have their own individuality. 

PS: Tell me more about what you do in general. This was kind of a departure from the kinds of projects that you usually do? 

BM: I've been working for Dassault for 14 years, and I've been working for the Passion for Innovation program [where the idea for the production was born] for 10 years. So we started small, with only a few people. But we started with a big project: it was about the Khufu Pyramid. We met a guy, and he had a theory, it was about the construction of the Khufu Pyramid. The Egyptians would know what would happen 10 years later, and they had a plan for that. It was related to the core of what we know. So we said, let's use this theory and simulate it. 

We changed the experience into experimental theater--it was like an immersive room, and people could learn in real time what was happening in ancient Egypt, and how this could be built. 

I've also been working on realistic avatars--how you can quickly create your own avatar just by uploading one or two photos.

PS: Do you see this technology as something that could be used in more traditional theater? Will there be a virtual Death of a Salesman?

BM: There is no limitation when you create 3-D worlds--you can create whatever you want. And this kind of immersive display can be used to examine life, so I hope there will be new kinds of shows using this immersive technology. This is the beginning, I think. In the future, we can use it on the stage, or make it bigger, with more sensors or people inside. But what we already have is still bringing people the illusion that you have something alive in front of you. 

L'Aquila quake damage

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

Emergenza Terremoto Abruzzo via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists have recently shown that strange lights, such as those described as "glowing orbs," have indeed appeared before major earthquakes, for example in Japan and L’Aquila, Italy. But how?

U.S. scientists propose a new theory: Shifting soil layers could create huge electrostatic charges that travel to the surface, giving off light.

"We took a tupperware container filled with flour, tipped it back and forth until cracks appeared, and it produced 200 volts of charge," said Rutgers University researcher Troy Shinbrot. "There isn't a mechanism I know that can explain this. It seems to be new physics." They repeated the experiment with other granular materials (like those in soil) and got the same results. Shinbrot explained in an email that although it did produce high voltages, there was "no current to speak of, so there's no power to be obtained."

The data showing the production of charges has been shown by labs at Rutgers, N.C. State and Penn State, Shinbrot told Popular Science. But whether or not it produces earthquake lights is as yet unclear. The team, including researchers from the three schools, presented their findings at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver.

There are several other theories about what creates these lights. In 2003, researcher Friedemann Freund proposed that the lights were produced by electrical fields unleashed by the crushing and twisting of rocks. Another theory proposed in 1982 suggests the lights could be created by frictional heating at faults. A recent paper in Seismological Research Letters found that 63 out of the 65 times that earthquake lights were reported in the past couple centuries, vertical faults caused the quakes. This could help explain all of the theories, depending on how one interprets them, but does suggest that this alignment fosters pre-earthquake lights, which could potentially be used some day as an early warning system. 

[BBC]

Reef Squid

Wikimedia Commons

Evolutionary neurobiologist Robyn Crook and colleagues at the University of Texas Health Science Center have recently shown that cephalopods (a group including squid and octopi) possess nociceptors, nerve cell endings that quickly transmit potentially-damaging stimuli to the central nervous system. Crook "also has found that octopuses show much of the pain-related behavior seen in vertebrates, such as grooming and protecting an injured body part," as New Scientist reported. The animals are also more likely to retreat and squirt ink when touched near a wound than elsewhere on their body. 

Here's what's going on with squid: 

This research compliments work done by Robert Elwood, a professor of animal behavior at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, showing that crabs and lobsters probably feel pain:

The jury is still out on smaller invertebrates like insects. It's reasonable to think that if small crustaceans can feel pain, then so can some insects, which can have similar-sized nervous systems. But one researcher in this area, Hans Smid at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, said insects do not show pain-related behavior and he is convinced they do not feel pain. 

A Map Of Crimea From 1922

No drones shot down here.

Statistical Office of the Crimean via Wikimedia Commons

According to a Voice of Russia report that has now mysteriously vanished, two American drones were shot down over Crimea this morning, including a "heavier, two-engine drone." The story popped up on Reddit's world news front page, and has been floating around Twitter, too. But lest we think World War III broke out over the Black Sea this morning, there are plenty of reasons to think the report, which cites info from Novosti Kryma (News of Crimea), is totally false. 

One is that the American military has no two-engine drones. The closest is Boeing's Phantom Eye, an experimental potbellied drone built around a pair of liquid-hydrogen engines. Eventually, it could be a long-range surveillance drone, but just last month the U.S. Air Force designated it an experimental Air Force vehicle, meaning it's at the start of a long road to being an airplane the military uses. The Pentagon confirmed to Popular Science that the United States has no twin-engine drones.

Another problem with this news report is that America doesn't fly drones over hostile skies without an escort. In wars like Afghanistan, where there is no enemy air force to speak of, American drones fly independently. In places like the Persian Gulf, where other air forces might challenge American drones flying overhead, the Air Force escorts drones with fighters. 

A third problem is the nature of the report itself. It comes from Voice of Russia, an English-language radio service owned by the Russian government. Russia is currently moving a large number of soldiers into Crimea, so many that the government of Ukraine is accusing Russia of invading. The Voice of Russia story has since been replaced with a report about the Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 crash. The URL, at time of writing, still reads "2014 03 11. Two US drones allegedly shot down in Crimea."

Something Is Off Here

Voice of Russia's URL doesn't match the story in a really weird way.

Voice Of Russia

Peter Singer, a security expert at the Brookings Institution, said this report "sounds bogus." (Peter Singer is also a contributing editor at Popular Science).

The Pentagon was even more blunt: "There is no truth in the reporting."

[inSerbia]

Artist's Interpretation of HR 5171

ESO

The astronomer who discovered the size of this star says it's shaped like a peanut, but we disagree; that one "lobe" is much too large. Perhaps that's because the larger star is, in fact, one of the 10 largest stars ever discovered. Its diameter is 1,315 times that of Earth's sun.

Astronomers have seen the star, named HR 5171, before. In a new study, however, an international team of scientists learned much more about it. For example, they discovered that HR 5171 is a binary system with a small companion star that touches and orbits the larger star. The astronomers also calculated HR 5171 A's (the bigger star's) surprising size. The star is almost twice as large as scientists expect for stars of its type.

Telescope Image of HR 5171 Among Other Stars

ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2

HR 5171 A is a yellow hypergiant, a type of star that's rare in our galaxy. Like its type-mates, HR 5171 A is big, bright and unstable. It's about 1 million times brighter than the sun. Over the past four decades, it's been cooling, enlarging and expelling material outwards.

The team made its new observations from data from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope Interferometer. The astronomers also analyzed archival data extending back 60 years, to learn what HR 5171 A has been doing over time. They published their work today in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. You can see the full text of a version of the paper on the arXiv, where they posted it publicly before it was peer-reviewed.

[European Southern Observatory]