Tank Mower

Illustration by Chris Philpot

Springtime means the return of wildlife and greenery—and annoying chores. Here are a few unconventional devices that nip the season’s nuisances in the bud with military efficiency.

1) Tank Mower

Electrical engineer Luis Medina wanted to trim grassy lawns that no ordinary lawnmower could touch. So he and some friends built the TREX (Terrestrial Robotic Explorer): a remote-controlled, industrial-strength mower with tank-like treads to grip the steepest of slopes. The TREX, now sold by their company, Evatech, weighs 540 pounds and costs about $15,000 to make. It uses electrical motors instead of hydraulic fluid, and it’s waterproofed to mount amphibious assaults on marshy plots.

Wildflower Ammo

Illustration by Chris Philpot

 2) Wildflower Ammo

When inventor Per Cromwell fires his shotgun, he unleashes a blast of life. Cromwell’s flower shells replace metal shot with a dozen different types of seeds, including poppy, lavender, and peony. He aims his gun at the ground in front of him and shoots; sprouts appear three to five weeks later. “Out of this very violent approach,” he says, “you can actually grow beautiful flowers.”

Squirrel-Squirting Turret

Illustration by Chris Philpot

3) Squirrel-Squirting Turret

Kurt Grandis set up a feeder in his backyard to watch birds—not squirrels—so he created an autonomous water sentry gun. Custom software analyzes data from a webcam (pointed at the feeder) and distinguishes squirrels from birds by size, color, and fuzziness. “The idea is basically teaching the computer what squirrel-ness is,” he says. Motors aim a Supersoaker at rodent marauders and pull the trigger.

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

Rob Felt, Georgia Tech

Two years ago, drummer Jason Barnes was cleaning the vent hood at a restaurant when he was electrocuted. The injury left him with an arm amputated below the elbow. Shortly after, he met the Georgia Institute of Technology's Gil Weinberg, and the two teamed up to create what you see here: a prosthetic robot arm with a third stick, which thinks for itself.

Using electromyography sensors, one stick on the arm picks up muscle movement, and acts how Barnes wants it to. The other stick is independent: using a mic and accelerometer, it listens in on what Barnes and his fellow musicians are playing, then lays down a complementary beat in a jazzy style. The arm will be debuting at the Atlanta Science Festival on March 22, with Barnes playing beside some musical robotic creations from Weinberg. 

[New Scientist]

Google's Robotic Army

Illustration by Paul Lachine

Looking back, Google’s emergence as a robotics powerhouse seems obvious—and inevitable. First came the scattered hires of roboticists and the release of self-driving cars into Bay Area traffic. Then, the search giant reportedly bought two humanoid HUBO robots from South Korean university KAIST. But it wasn’t until December’s revelation that Google had acquired eight robotics companies—including Boston Dynamics, maker of BigDog, WildCat and a stable of other astonishing Pentagon-funded bots—that it became clear: Google means to build robots.

Although the prospect of merging Google’s insatiable appetite for data with sprinting, leaping hardware has inspired an unsurprising battery of Skynet jokes, the response among roboticists has been overwhelmingly positive. “Of course it’s part of our business to tell everyone how great we think robotics is, at every opportunity,” says Matt Mason, director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. “But this is the kind of commitment that transcends any sort of BS or rhetoric.” 

Brian Gerkey, CEO of the Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF), ballparks the purchases in the hundreds of millions of dollars—an investment that should attract venture capital to other robotics start-ups. “Now, as of 2014, things are finally changing,” says Dennis Hong, who directs the Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory at UCLA. “The fact that Google bought these companies shows that, finally, it’s time for the robotics business to really start.” 

But as galvanizing as Google’s involvement could prove, Gerkey sees a downside to having some of the best minds in robotics “disappear, in the classic way, into the Googleplex,” where they’ll almost certainly work in secret. “That’s probably the right way to develop a product,” he says, “but from the field’s perspective, we lose something.” Whether Google closes ranks or decides to engage the research community, here’s a glimpse of its future plans, as evidenced by its newly acquired manpower and machines.

Industrial Perception Inc. 

Notable bot: Industrial sorting robot 
Strength: Machine vision. In one demo, an industrial bot was able to quickly pick through stacks of boxes, relying almost solely on simple stereo cameras to find the right products to retrieve and toss. 
Appeal: While a Google manufacturing bot seems the obvious application, machine vision is used by nearly every class of robot, from airborne drones to the bipedal first responders competing in the Pentagon-funded DRC.

Autofuss 

Notable bot: None
Strength: Bot-centric marketing. As a sister company to Bot & Dolly, Autofuss works with robots to produce technically complex, visually arresting advertisements. 
Appeal: None of the roboticists we spoke with wanted to assess a video-production company’s role in Google’s new robotics lab. The firm worked with Google in 2011, filming a commercial that featured industrial bots handling a Nexus smartphone. Whenever the first Google bots are ready, Autofuss will likely make the introductions.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

Bot & Dolly 

Notable bot:IRIS
Strength: Motion control. Bot & Dolly’s IRIS robotic platform was instrumental in filming Gravity, precisely moving four separate cameras to create the illusion of weightlessness. 
Appeal: The company’s experience in movies and commercials is likely a red herring. Bot & Dolly’s real asset is its ability to bring new levels of algorithmic control to existing industrial robots.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

Meka Robotics 

Notable bot:M1 Mobile Manipulator
Strength: Series Elastic Actuators. Meka’s robots aren’t particularly strong, but their actuators—which contain a spring between the motor and joint—are compliant and can better control force.
Appeal: Despite developing a wide range of robotic systems, including an expressive head for humanoids, Meka’s specialties are arms and manipulators. “They know how to build something that’s useful, but that can be safely operated around people,” says the OSRF’s Gerkey.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

Boston Dynamics 

Notable bots:Atlas, LS3 
Strength: Hydraulic motors. Nearly all of Boston Dynamics’ bots have two things in common—they have legs, and they’re power-houses. The robots’ ultra-stable mobility and their feats of strength (such as hurling cinderblocks) showcase the company’s progress in hydraulic actuation.
Appeal: The jewel in Google’s robotic crown is also the biggest clue as to the form factor of its future bots. “I’m guessing it’s walking autonomous robots,” says Melonee Wise, CEO of Unbounded Robotics. Other roboticists seem to agree—you don’t buy a company that specializes in legged mobility unless you’re making bots with legs.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

Holomni 

Notable bot: None
Strength: Omnidirectional Wheels. Though Holomni doesn’t appear to have released any products, the company’s description of itself says it all: “Creators of high-tech wheels for omnidirectional motion.”
Appeal: Google seems to be covering its bases. Whether that means it will build something similar to Unbounded Robotics’ UBR-1—a light-labor bot that can be rolled into position—or simply give its legged models another mode of transportation is anyone’s guess.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

SCHAFT Inc. 

Notable bot: S-One
Strength: Liquid-cooled electric actuators. SCHAFT’s capacitor-powered actuators are the electric equivalent of turbocharged engines, delivering massive power on demand. They propelled the Tokyo start-up’s S-One humanoid robot to first place in last year’s DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) trials.
Appeal: SCHAFT’s monster actuators seem to overlap with Boston Dynamics’ beefy hydraulics—which may be the point. “It looks like they’re trying to have their hands on every kind of technology,” says UCLA’s Hong. From floppy series elastic actuators to battery or oil-fed behemoths, Google now has a range of options to move its robots.

Illustration by Paul Lachine

Redwood Robotics 

Notable bot: None
Strength: Simple, low-cost robotic arms. Formed in 2012, Redwood Robotics announced its intent to supply robot arms but hasn’t shown off a specific model.
Appeal: Redwood started out as a joint venture between Meka Robotics, SRI International, and Willow Garage, so it seems safe to assume that Meka and Redwood will pool resources to develop robotic manipulation that’s light on power but heavy on safety.

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

Simulated view

A simulated view of the glory phenomenon on Venus. The false-color image obtained by the spacecraft is below.

C. Wilson/P. Laven/NASA

Behold the glory that is the first rainbow image obtained from Venus. This rainbow is a type of glory, formed by light passing through cloud droplets. Glories are formed when light bounces off spherical cloud particles in the same direction from which it came, creating a ring of light only visible if you (or a spacecraft) are directly between the center of the glory and the sun. That's what happened here--the image below was captured by the European Space Agency's Venus Express, and reported in the journal Icarus. 

"A full glory has never been seen before outside of the terrestrial environment," Wojciech Markiewicz, at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research told New Scientist. 

The glory may have solved a mystery. Previously, images from Venus suggested the presence of a chemical besides sulfur acid, which makes up clouds on the planet. But now, "the team found that sulphuric acid droplets alone cannot explain the glory, but droplets coated with elemental sulphur or mixed in with ferric chloride fit the data well," according to New Scientist.

"This could be the so-called unknown absorber that people had been trying to identify for years," said Markiewicz, who was part of the team that spotted the glory.

The glory

False color composite of the Venus glory.

ESA/MPS/DLR/IDA

Polaris-H

Joseph Xu, Michigan Engineering Communications & Marketing

Radiation detectors can be expensive and cumbersome. Here's one alternative, now on the market: Polaris-H, a University of Michigan project that offers handheld gamma-ray vision. 

To use the camera, someone looking for radiation sets it down in a room. (Carefully, I assume.) They can then connect it to an external touchscreen, piloting the camera as it lays a radiation map over an image of the room. Unlike some other detectors, the creators say, the Polaris-H operates well at room temperature, as opposed to detectors that require cryogenically frozen components. Other scanners are simply non-imaging, meaning they have to be carted around to see different parts of the room. Plus, they run for "below $100,000," according to a press release from the university. 

A handful of nuclear plants have already adopted the technology, which the creators say could be used to detect the sources of radiation after accidents. Hopefully we won't have to find out how it works in that scenario any time soon. 

Pipelines

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission

Two buildings in New York City collapsed this morning, killing two people and injuring 22, according to ongoing reports. Police are still investigating the cause for the collapses, Reuters reports, but there's some evidence pointing to a natural gas leak. Witnesses reported hearing loud bangs and explosions, plus Con Edison says it received a complaint about a gas odor in the area about 20 minutes before the disaster. The company dispatched a crew, but the buildings had crashed to the ground before it arrived.

A growing collection of evidence suggests that natural gas leaks and explosions are a problem throughout the U.S. It's a problem that gas companies know about, but aren't motivated to fix, according to an award-winning feature published in 2013 in the online magazine Matter. Left unchecked, the leaks occasionally threaten people and property. They may also contribute to global warming as much as coal, undermining natural gas' reputation as a greener choice and, well, threatening people and property, in the long run.

Matter reports:

Natural gas pipeline explosions in the United States kill an average of 14 people every year, and injure an additional 50 or so. In 2010, an explosion in the Californian city of San Bruno killed eight people and destroyed almost 40 homes. An independent audit ordered by state regulators found that the local energy provider, PG&E, had spent 15 years diverting more than $100 million in funds earmarked for safety and operations into other areas, including executive bonuses.

The following year an explosion in Allentown, Pennsylvania killed five; regulators called the safety record of UGI Utilities, the company that owned the pipeline, 'downright alarming' and fined the corporation $500,000.

The feature follows Bob Ackley, a longtime gas-company contractor who drives around cities, finding gas leaks. Over the course of his career, he noticed that companies often wouldn't fix leaks even when he reported them. Frustrated and worried, the community-college dropout signed on to work with professors and grad students to map leaks in cities.

Most recently, the team published a study reporting more than 5,800 leaks in Washington, D.C. The team found 12 manholes—where leaked gas tends to accumulate—had high enough concentrations of methane to cause an explosion. Four months after they gave their results to the local gas company, nine manholes remained dangerously full of methane, the main—and most dangerous—chemical in natural gas.

Older East Coast cities that have used natural gas for generations likely have similar numbers of leaks, Duke University environmental scientist Rob Jackson, who worked on the mapping with Ackley, told Matter. So may older cities outside of the U.S. The culprits are aging pipes, including cast-iron pipes first set down in the 19th century.

It's true that many of those leaks don't pose an immediate danger to people. I'm guessing that's why those thousands of leaks result in fewer than 100 injuries, on average, in the U.S. every year. Ackley himself noticed that gas companies were quick to fix the most dangerous leaks.

Yet even small leaks contribute to methane in the atmosphere, which in turn is a potent greenhouse gas. Methane traps much more heat than carbon dioxide. The silver lining is that methane hangs around the atmosphere for much less time, about 10 years, compared to carbon dioxide, which has a lifetime of up to 200 years. Yet if there's enough methane escaping from leaky pipes, it could be just as bad for global warming as coal. It all depends on exactly how much is leaking and goes unfixed.

Audi's online traffic light information system

Soon, cars may pay more attention to their surroundings than drivers. No one likes to get stuck behind an oblivious person that doesn't notice when a light changes, so Audi came up with a technological solution.

The Audi Online traffic light recognition system could save fuel as well as annoyance, by allowing drivers to anticipate changing lights. The system works by reading the automated signals from a city's central traffic computer, and transmitting that information to the driver through the car's Driver Information Display.

At a red light, the system can count down the time remaining until a change to green, as well as prime an engine start-stop system to restart the engine five seconds before that. While on the move, it can also sense whether a car will be able to make it through a green light and--if not--advises the driver to start braking early, preventing abrupt stops.

Audi believes this technology could save significant quantities of fuel in city driving, where the constant start-and-stop nature of traffic can hurt mpg. It could also help smooth the flow of traffic, which would make everyone's morning commute easier.

Audi is currently testing traffic light recognition in Berlin, Las Vegas, and Verona, but says the system is production ready, pending government approval. It said a U.S. launch is the subject of "intense analysis," but did not reveal an on-sale date.

This article, written by Stephen Edelstein, was originally published on Motor Authority, a publishing partner of Popular Science. Follow Motor Authority on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+.

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The International Space Station Deploys CubeSats, November 2013

Expedition 38 Crew, NASA

Over the past 15 years, we've been sprinkling space with eensy satellites. Universities, startups and national space programs have all launched fit-in-your-hand satellites that, variously, study life in space, flash Morse code and snap smartphone photos. This Sunday, a Cornell University-based team hopes to launch 104 poker chip-sized circuit boards that will orbit Earth on their own:

Small satellites are cheap to build and deploy, so they save space programs money. They're also affordable and simple enough for students to build, so they're great educational tools. But their popularity made Popular Science wonder… The Earth is already surrounded by space junk. Isn't launching 100-plus nanosatellites a bit like throwing crumbs on the living room floor?

Luckily, many satellites are able to do something crumbs aren't. They clean themselves up. Small satellites launched into orbit 650 kilometers or less above the surface of the Earth soon fall back down toward Earth. They plunge through the Earth's atmosphere and, because they're small, they burn up before reaching the ground. In addition, few spacecraft orbit below 650 kilometers in altitude, so there's not as much for small satellites to hit.

Cornell's "Sprite" circuit boards will hardly be a blip in space. "Those will only be in orbit for a few days," Nicholas Johnson, chief scientist at NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office, tells Popular Science. "We've reviewed this mission very carefully and there's no problem at all for the other resident space objects out there."

Problems arise when people send smaller satellites into higher orbit. At higher altitudes, satellites encounter exponentially less atmospheric drag, which is the main force that pushes satellites to lower altitudes and eventually back to Earth. Unlike their bigger cousins, small sats don't have the technology to drive back down, either. Researchers may develop this tech in the future. For now, however, once small satellites get way up there, they're stuck. At that point, they're dangerous.

"These are the most dense regions of space. Orbital lifetimes are hundreds of years. They will eventually collide with something," says Donald Kessler, a retired NASA scientist who founded the agency's orbital debris program.

The majority of organizations keep their small sats below 650 kilometers, in compliance with international guidelines developed to reduce space debris. Some haven't followed the rules, however. Johnson sent me a short list of one- to three-kilogram satellites that have gone above 650 kilometers—none, he noted, on American launch vehicles. "We'd like to see those exceptions be reduced to a very few," he says. "It's a matter of education, both of the small satellite owners and the launch vehicle operators."

In addition to Johnson and Kessler, Popular Science thanks Heiner Klinkrad of the European Space Agency's Space Debris Office for his guidance in answering this question.

Light-Up Speed Belt

Dan Bracaglia

Dusk and dawn are great times to go for a run. Trouble is, dim light and glare on the horizon make it hard for motorists to see. If you want to increase your visibility—and make nerdy joggers envious—build this lightweight speed belt. A vibration sensor detects your pace, which an Arduino microcontroller converts into miles per hour and displays on a matrix of bright LEDs.

Materials:
• One 8-inch-by-8-inch LED matrix kit
• Arduino Pro Mini
• Arduino programmer board (six pin-to-micro USB)
• Strip of six right-angle break-away male headers
• Piezo vibration sensor
• Coin cell battery holder (with on/off switch)
• Seven 3-inch-long jumper wires
• Waterproof plastic box (about 3.5”x2.5”x1”)
• Elastic running belt (with zippered pocket)
• Two 1.25-inch-long 4-40 screws
• Two 4-40 nuts
• Two 1-inch-long 4-40 standoffs
• Two 8-inch-long Velcro cable ties

Tools:
Soldering iron, solder, wire cutters, drill with ⅛-inch-long bit⅝⅛, computer, Arduino programming software

Project Schematic

Dave Prochnow

1) Assemble the LED matrix kit according to the manufacturer’s instructions.

2) Stick the six breakaway right-angle headers into the Arduino’s programming interface pads. Solder them in place.

3) Connect the LED matrix kit to the Arduino with five three-inch-long wires, according to the schematic here, and solder in place.

4) Solder the piezo vibration sensor to pins A0 and A1 of the Arduino.

5) Measure the length of a typical jogging stride (either of these sites are great: Johnson Outdoors Gear LLC or Walking with Attitude). This will ensure the Arduino calculates and displays an accurate estimated speed on the LED matrix.

6) Link the Arduino to your computer’s USB port via the programmer, add your stride length to the sketch at the correct variable, and then upload the code to the Arduino.

7) Use the screw holes on the LED matrix kit as guides and mark the inside of the plastic box for drilling two 1/8-inch holes. Drill the two holes. Also, drill an entrance hole big enough for the battery holder’s red and black wires.

8) Thread the red and black battery holder’s wires through the entrance holes.

9) Connect the coin cell battery holder to the Arduino using solder (follow the schematic).

10) Stuff all of the electronics into the plastic box and slide the Arduino underneath the LED matrix kit, holding it in place with your fingers while inserting the two 4-40 screws through the LED matrix kit’s screw holes.

11) Slip the two 4-40 standoffs between the LED matrix kit and the inside of the plastic box first, then guide the two screws through the two 4-40 standoffs and secure with the two 4-40 nuts on the outside of the plastic box.

12) Turn on the battery holder and slip it into the running belt’s zippered pouch, secure the plastic box to the belt (using the Velcro cable ties), and get moving.

How it works:

As you run, the piezo vibration sensor flexes. During a 30-second interval, each flex is counted. These flexes are then multiplied by two. This calculation tells the Arduino how many steps you took in one minute.

Each vibration or step is equal to your stride length. Your personal stride length (measured in inches) must be individually calculated (see Step 5, above) and inserted into the Arduino sketch in the “strideLength” variable (we've clearly marked this variable inside the code).

Our sketch then multiplies the stride length by the number of steps or vibrations that the piezo vibration sensor recorded. This results in your speed measured as inches per minute. We now divide the measurement by 12 for arriving at a calculation of feet per minute.

Finally, we divide our feet per minute figure by 5,280 feet (the number of feet in a mile) and multiply by 60 (the number of minutes in an hour) for obtaining a value in miles per hour or mph. This value is then displayed on our speed belt LED matrix kit.

Our calculations look like this:
•((# strides x 2) x stride length)/12 = feet/minute
•Convert to mph>
•(x feet/minute / 5280 feet) x 60 = speed mph

Now that you have an mph output on the speed belt, you should verify the speed being displayed. The easiest way to evaluate your speed belt output is by running on a treadmill that is equipped with an mph display. Compare the treadmill display with the speed belt display during a 30-minute testing period. Tweak your stride length value higher or lower depending upon the result of your testing.
•If the speed belt is too fast, then shorten your stride length.
•If the speed belt is too slow, lengthen your stride.

Speed Belt Pattern

Dave Prochnow

The two coin cell batteries powering the speed belt have a life expectancy of about three hours of operation. You should replace both cells when the LED matrix kit display begins to dim.

Now get out there and run safe.

Time: 3 hours

Cost: Less than $30

Difficulty: 4/5

Download an Arduino sketch for the Speed Belt here (Note: Save the file with a .ino extension—not a .txt extension.)

WARNING: This project may make runners more visible, but it won’t eliminate distracted drivers. Please be aware of your surroundings.

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

Human Embryonic Stem Cells

In this image, the human embryonic stem cells are colored blue.

Clay Glennon, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Less than two years before he died, famed computer scientist Alan Turing wrote a biochemistry paper. Called "The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis," Turing theorized about how cells change and develop. Now, 60 years later, a team of scientists says it's provided some new experimental evidence that Turing was right (mostly). Their work offers Turing, who created the Turing test for artificial intelligence and decoded German messages for the Allies during World War II, one more feather for his cap.

Think about the moment you were conceived. No, not that part! I mean, think about how, when you were conceived, you were made up of just one cell. Eventually that cell divided into two cells, and then each of those divided, making four in total. When cells divide, they try to create perfect copies of themselves. Yet, as an embryo grows, its cells differentiate. They turn into blood cells and bone cells and back-of-the-eyeball cells, each with a different shape and function. Turing was interested in how such changes happen. He came up with a model that biologists consider an important way of thinking about differentiation, while acknowledging the model has its "successes and pitfalls." Turing's paper about the idea has been cited more than 8,000 times.

Turing theorized that when arranged in a ring, identical cells will interact with each other chemically and thus change. To test this, a team of scientists created a ring of identical drops, containing two chemical compounds, floating around in an oil. These drops were the scientists' simplified "cells."

Team members observed that, as Turing predicted, the drops exchanged chemicals with one another. That led the drops to become chemically distinct, even though they started out the same.

The team did see some results that didn't fit with Turing's model. In a paper they published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers describe how they would modify Turing's ideas to account for what they saw in lab.

The team's success is a tribute to Turing's ability in different science fields, Seth Fraden, a physicist at Brandeis University and the lead author on the paper, said in a statement. Fraden's team included five physicists, a chemist, and a mathematician. I don't know if they ever all walked into a bar together.

Waste Heat

Wikimedia Commons, Jorge Royan

In the next few years, the stale, thick heat produced by the London underground will no longer drift uselessly into the atmosphere. Instead, some of it will warm 1,400 nearby homes, cutting heating bills by about 10 percent. Recycling heat is quite common in Europe. Denmark gets roughly half of its electricity from recycled heat, followed by Finland at 39 percent, and Russia at 31 percent. In the U.S., it’s just 12 percent.

According to a report by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Department of Energy, the U.S. wastes more than half of the total energy we produce—mostly as heat, but also as gas, biomass, and methane. Using that waste could reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 17 percent. “It’s free energy, essentially,” says Brendan Owens, vice president of LEED at the U.S. Green Building Council.

 Recycling heat is actually quite simple. For example, new buildings often have condensing water heaters, which use gas burners to warm up water (just as other heaters do) but also capture the heat in the combusted gas that’s going out the flue. It happens on a larger scale, too. In 1882, when Thomas Edison built the world’s first commercial power plant in Manhattan, he sold its steam to heat nearby buildings. Today, such plants are known as combined heat and power, or cogeneration, plants. Edison’s old plant eventually became the massive Con Edison, whose operations today produce 19.7 billion pounds of steam a year. The ArcelorMittal steel mill in East Chicago, Indiana, is another good example. It uses extra blast furnace heat to make steam that then generates electricity for the mill, saving roughly $20 million a year and preventing 340,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions—the equivalent of taking 62,000 cars off the road.

So why don’t we have more projects like these? It’s partly logistics: Trapped heat can’t travel far, and the U.S.’s centralized power plants tend to be farther from urban centers than European ones. Even in ideal circumstances, large energy projects usually have big, upfront costs that may not be recouped for years. And U.S. government tax breaks on heat recycling are less than those on other clean technologies. Corporations get a 30 percent tax rebate for solar and wind power, but just 10 percent for combined heat and power. 

Energy regulations in the U.S. have unintended consequences that create other barriers to recycling heat. Although some electric generation has been deregulated since the 1970s, energy transmission and distribution are still monopolistic. In many states, it’s illegal for nonutilities to sell excess electricity to their neighbors. Because of the Clean Air Act, factories must limit their emissions—but the law doesn’t give credits for energy efficiency or emissions prevention. It effectively penalizes companies that invest in waste-heat systems. What’s more, the act’s stricter rules only apply to new sources of pollution, grand-fathering in older, dirtier plants and giving incentives for companies to hold on to them. Energy policy is extremely complicated, and there is no single solution. But it’s time for us—regulators, producers, and consumers—to start thinking of ways to sweeten the deal for recycled heat. We don’t have time to waste. 

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

Scaly anteater

A tree pangolin (Manis tricuspis), native to equatorial Africa.

Valerius Tygart via Wikimedia Commons

Authorities in the Chinese government and elsewhere now seize approximately 10,000 animals per year, but experts warn the illegal trade is far greater, the BBC reported.

"The numbers of pangolins traded are shocking, and all the more so considering the pharmaceutical pointlessness of the trade," David Macdonald, director of the University of Oxford's Wildlife Conservation Research Unit and paper co-author, told the BBC. "This trade is intolerably wasteful."

Two of eight species of pangolins, also known as scaly anteaters, are considered endangered by the IUCN. Unlike elephants, rhinos, and big cats, the fate of the pangolin has been overlooked, since they are lesser-known, say conservationists. Officials from TRAFFIC, a group that monitors illegal wildlife trade are "helping to train customs and postal workers to help them detect smuggling attempts and raise awareness of the animals' plight," the BBC noted. 

[BBC]

Fabric Flame Tests

Flame-resistance fabrics. From left to right: casein-treated cotton, casein-treated polyester, casein-treated cotton-polyester blend.

Federico Carosio , Alessandro Di Blasio , Fabio Cuttica , Jenny Alongi , and Giulio Malucelli

Asbestos was once a miracle substance. An abundant rock, it breaks into fibers that mix easily with plaster, fabrics, tiles, and construction materials, making them all extraordinarily fire resistant. But those fibers don't stop there. When tiles break or insulation crumbles, boilers shatter or dust accumulates, those asbestos fibers crawl their way into people's lungs, where they cause cancer and other diseases.

Researchers at the Polytechnic University in Turin, Italy, have discovered a safer fireproofing method. Whey, a byproduct of cheese production, contains casein, which in turn contains a lot of phosphate groups. Phosphate groups are important because when they catch fire, they quickly turn to char and so give only a dead end for a flame to follow.

To test the retardant capabilities of whey, researchers coated three different fabrics in a water and casein bath. Once the samples were dry, the researchers then set them on fire. Flames on the casein-coated cotton self-extinguished after only consuming 14 percent of the fabric. Only 23 percent of the polyester sample coated in casein burnt before the fire ran out of fuel. The casein was unable to stop the fire burning up a cotton-polyester blend, but it did slow it down, with the fire taking 60 percent more time to consume the treated blend then it did an untreated blend.

This is a promising start, but there is much more to be done before casein-coated fabrics are ready for the public. One challenge is making sure that the coating doesn't wash off when the clothes are cleaned. Another is making sure that a fabric coated in dairy doesn't have any characteristics, like bad odor, that would stop people from using.

Still, if the choices are "smell bad," "get cancer," or "be on fire," I think the smell is easily the least bad option.

[I&EC]

Everything began as normal on July 16, 2013, when Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano and American Chris Cassidy set out for a routine spacewalk. But then something went wrong. 

"I feel a lot of water on the back of my head," Parmitano told Mission Control.

"Are you sweating? Are you working hard?"

"I am sweating, but it feels like a lot of water..." Parmitano continued. The water did not let up, and began coating his head and approaching his nose and mouth. For a man in serious danger, he sounds very calm, as you can see in this video. I won't spoil it for you--go ahead and take a look. It's an excerpt from the show "Live From Space," which premieres at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT on Friday, March 14, on The National Geographic Channel. 

To find out how the leak happened, which NASA said was "probably the most serious [spacewalk incident] that we've encountered," check out this Popular Science story. 

Video credit: NASA/Arrow Media

NIH

The Mark O. Hatfield Clinical Research Center at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md.

NIH

The trouble wasn't that it was too demanding, but impossible to get anything done in a reasonable time frame. And there were some good parts, he admitted in his letter to his boss, assistant secretary for health Howard Koh:

In his letter, David Wright writes that working with ORI’s "remarkable scientist-investigators" was "the best job I’ve ever had." But that was only 35 percent of his job; the rest of the time he spent "navigating the remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy" to run ORI. Tasks that took a couple of days as a university administrator required weeks or months, he says. He writes that ORI's budget was micromanaged by more senior officials, and that Koh's office had a "seriously flawed" culture, calling it "secretive, autocratic and unaccountable."

For example, one job that Wright urgently needed to fill remained unfilled 16 months later. Hopefully Wright can be replaced more quickly than that (one assumes he will be), and more importantly that his critiques will be addressed. 

To read the rest of Wright's epistle, head over to Science magazine. 

In the U.S., a person’s health care averages more than $8,000 a year, about twice that of other developed countries. To help hold providers accountable, last year the government made a subset of national Medicare records publicly accessible for the first time. The data reveals that the fee for a given procedure varies widely across the country and between hospitals. And one issue stands out: the difference between the initial bill an uninsured patient pays in full [orange] and the far lower amount hospitals collect when someone has Medicare [gray]—a gap the Affordable Care Act is designed to close.

Katie Peek

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

Normal Forest Decomposition

J Schmidt, 1977. Photo hosted online by Yellowstone National Park.

Strange to say, fallen logs, leaf litter and other forest debris doesn't decay as quickly around Chernobyl's most affected areas as it does elsewhere, Smithsonian reports. When scientists set out to study the phenomenon, they found that lingering radiation from the 1986 nuclear meltdown is stunting fungi and other microbes' ability to break down leaves in parts of the land that's most contaminated.

Smithsonian describes on the study's results, published this month in the journal Oecologia:

In the areas with no radiation, 70 to 90 percent of the leaves were gone after a year. But in places where more radiation was present, the leaves retained around 60 percent of their original weight. . . . Because [the researchers] had so many bags placed in so many different locations, they were able to statistically control for outside factors such as humidity, temperature and forest and soil type to make sure that there wasn't anything besides radiation levels impacting the leaves' decomposition.

One of the weird consequences of this? Leaf litter is two to three times thicker in Chernobyl's most contaminated zones than it is in uncontaminated areas, the researchers found. Check out Smithsonian to learn about what this means for the health of the forest's trees. For a look at how the wildlife of Chernobyl is doing overall, you've got documentaries, books, and any number of articles to choose from. This Wired feature from 2011 is interesting, focusing on a debate among scientists about how badly, exactly, the wildlife continues to suffer from radioactive isotopes in Chernobyl's soil.

[Smithsonian]

A Panorama Filmed By A Drone

This panorama was captured by a DJI Phantom, which is increasingly the Model T of home drones.

Chensiyuan via Wikimedia Commons

Here's a roundup of the week's top drone news, designed to capture the military, commercial, non-profit, and recreational applications of unmanned aircraft.

Into a Vanuatu Volcano

Drone pilot Shaun O'Callaghan flew his DJI Phantom quadcopter over a volcano in Vanuatu, an island nation in the South Pacific. "Amazingly," O'Callaghan says, "no Phantoms were harmed while filming!"

(Almost) Into an Aussie Prison

Authorities in Melbourne, Australia, arrested two individuals found with drugs and a drone outside of a prison. This isn't the first time people have tried to fly contraband over prison walls with a drone. As drug-smuggling innovations go, it ranks somewhere above a catapult but below a submarine for ingenuity. 

Victoria Police released this statement:

Police have arrested a man following an alleged incident where a drone was hovering in the vicinity of a prison in Ravenhall yesterday afternoon.

A man and a woman were located in a car on Middle Road around 4.30pm with what was believed to be a drone with four engines and a small quantity of drugs.

The 28-year-old Lalor man was charged with possess a drug of dependence and attempt to commit an indictable offence.

Filming Sports

This week, Popular Science spoke with Ryan Baker, founder of Houston-based drone manufacturer Arch Aerial. Baker spoke about the future of legal drone use:

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. 

Check out the full interview.

Mexico To Survey The Seas

Mexico's National Fisheries Institute plans to use drones for finding out where in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific ocean is suitable for aquaculture. People have already used drones for better farming; this aquatic survey will apply the same principles to raising fish at sea.

Hovering Over Harlem

On Wednesday, an explosion caused by a gas leak ripped apart two buildings in New York City. One of the spectators who rushed to the scene was a man named Brian Wilson, who brought a small quadcopter with him.

Watch a video of the drone at the scene:

Did I miss any drone news? Email me at kelsey.d.atherton@gmail.com.

Neurons

Patrick Hoesly on Flickr

In the study, published in the journal Cell, scientists found that roundworms that were genetically modified to lack the musashi protein did much better on a smell-based learning task, actively retaining memories 24 hours later that unmodified mice did not. This is one of the first studies to show that forgetting can be an active (as opposed to passive) process, the authors wrote. 

Further analysis found that the protein impedes the production of molecules that stabilize synapses, which are connections between neurons involved in forming and holding onto memories. The study also showed that another protein called adducin stimulates the growth of synapses, helping to retain memory. The balance between these competing processes determines which memories are held onto. "An imbalance in these of these mechanisms may result in altered memory function that could play a role in memory-related disorders" in humans, the study concluded. While it's too early to make the leap to humans, these proteins could be important targets for research into pharmaceuticals to treat Alzheimer's disease and the like.