Miroslaw Kijewski/Getty Images

Some initial work on chubby bugs occurred in the early 1960s, when a Florida entomologist started publishing research on obese mosquitoes. When he fed the wild-caught flies by hand (“by easing the proboscis into a micropipette”), he found that he could turn half their bodies into fat, by dry weight.

More recently, scientists have studied obesity in male dragonflies. Ruud Schilder, a biologist at Penn State, showed that infection with a certain parasite will induce the bugs to build up lipids in their thorax and around the muscles that they use for flight. These fatty dragonflies end up less successful at mating and defending their territory from rivals—perhaps because they’re unable to maintain long flights. In uninfected flies, however, it can help to have some fat: One of Schilder’s colleagues found that plump, healthy dragonflies had stronger flight muscles and reproduced more easily.

The most extensive work on insect obesity has been done on fruit flies. Larvae fed high-calorie diets tend to fatten up quickly, though ones with high-sugar diets develop a condition similar to diabetes and suffer shortened lifespans. Once a fly reaches adulthood, though, there’s a limit to how big it can get. Just like a human, the fruit fly stores its excess energy as lipid droplets, which are encased in cells. (Our lipid droplets live in fat tissue; a fruit fly has a comparable organ called the “fat body.”) But grown-up flies, like other insects, are encased in a chitin exoskeleton. That means their bellies can’t expand, says Thomas J. Baranski, an endocrinologist at Washington University. “Because it’s got this exoskeleton, it just packs the fat in tighter.”

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

Photography by Brian Klutch

Any time a drop of water rolls off a raincoat, a durable water repellent (DWR) treatment is doing its job. But with washing and wear, the treatments tend to rub off, bleeding into the ground, water, and even our bodies. (The EPA has classified common DWR chemicals, perfluorinated compounds, as toxic.) Schoeller’s Ecorepel is the first DWR to perform as well as—or better than—other treatments (without toxins). 

Ecorepel, up close

Long honeycomb-shaped paraffin molecules form a lattice over each fiber. The lattice is too fine for water molecules to penetrate, so water beads and rolls off, but it’s still permeable enough to allow airflow.

Courtesy Schoeller

Ecorepel uses paraffin wax, the same material that sailors once employed to water-treat their outerwear, but with a cleaner and longer-lasting application. Technicians dip garments into a milky paraffin solution, run them through rollers to wring out the excess, then bake at 300°F. As the paraffin cures, it wraps around individual fibers. Ecorepel, unlike other treatments, won’t wear off from washing or abrasion, which makes it ideal for clothes that take a lot of abuse, such as jeans. For example, Levi’s will debut Ecorepel on its 511 Commuter Jeans and a denim jacket this summer. In their tests, the coating held up through aggressive rubbing and at least 20 washes.

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

Faces from the Dataset Used to Test the Algorithm Described Below

Labeled Faces in the Wild, University of Massachusetts

It's already a little eerie when Facebook suggests tags for who it recognizes in your photo, especially for faces that are small, blurry, or otherwise difficult to distinguish. What if Facebook were even better--better at recognizing people in pictures than you are?

Two computer scientists are announcing they've made a program that is better at matching photos than people are, the Physics arXiv Blog reports. This is the first time a program has performed better than people at recognizing people.

To be sure, the new algorithm, developed the Chinese University of Hong Kong, outperforms people in a very specific task with a very specific set of photos. The Hong Kong researchers asked the algorithm to tell whether two faces are the same, drawing from a set of 13,000 photos of 600 public figures. Humans get the right answer 97.53 percent of the time, on this test. The Chinese University of Hong Kong algorithm is right 98.52 percent of the time. (You can try some sample matches at the Physics arXiv Blog!)

Although this isn't exactly the same as recognizing your coworker Mary on the street, the feat is still impressive. The 13,000-photo dataset in which the algorithms were tested is considered a standard benchmark in computer vision, the Physics arXiv Blog reports. Plus, the task is not unlike real life applications. For example, if law enforcement wanted to identify a face in a security camera snapshot, they would run a program that tries to match their suspect's snapshot with their database of mugshots. The program would probably run through different possible comparisons, asking, just as the Hong Kong algorithm does, "Does Mugshot A match Snapshot X?"

[Physics arXiv Blog]

Micrograph Image Showing Intestinal Villi

Photo hosted on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

Textbooks (herearejustafew) say the surface area of the human gut is about 300 square meters, or about the size of a tennis court. But who will fact-check the fact-makers, hmm? HMMMM? Never fear, two researchers recently revisited this question and came up with a correction.

"Actually, the inner surface of the gastro-intestinal tract is only as large as a normal studio apartment," gastrointestinal surgery researcher Lars Fändriks said in a statement. Fändriks and a colleague, Herbert Helander, both from the University of Gothenberg in Sweden, found the average surface area of the human gut is actually about 32 square meters, a strange and remarkable discrepancy.

So how does a studio apartment fit inside your belly? You can imagine your gastrointestinal tract as a soft tube, folded up inside you. You've probably seen pictures. Even folded up, however, such a tube could never provide that much surface area by itself, even with the new, lower measurement.

Instead, much of the surface area of the gut comes from tiny structures on the inner surface of the gut. The inner surface is wrinkled, which helps increase surface area. Furthermore, it's covered with weird, tentacle-like microscopic structures called villi. Then each villus itself is covered with tentacly microvilli. Villi and microvilli are evolutionary adaptations that help the body absorb nutrients. Scientists have long known about them.

Villi

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

Fändriks and Helander took biopsies from healthy human volunteers (in perhaps one of the kindest contributions made to basic science) to examine these villi and microvilli. The researchers used light and electron microscopes to take images of the inner-gut structures. They calculated how the structures increased the simple surface area the researchers could calculate from the lengths and diameters of people's intestines. 

They laid out their conclusion in a paper published this month in the Scandinavian Journal of Gastroenterology. "The total area of the human adult gut mucosa is not in the order of tennis lawn," they wrote, "but rather is that of half a badminton court."

Charging in Barstow, California

At the end of his road trip on Monday, Norman Hajjar had used a little more than 4,000 kilowatt-hours of energy. He drove a Tesla Model S sedan for 12,000 miles over 24 days, crossing 27 states along the way.

The trip was a bid for a Guinness world record for the longest all-electric car trip. It was also a publicity stunt on behalf of electric vehicle technology. "It's a way to draw attention and amplify just how far we've come in electric vehicles," Hajjar tells Popular Science. Hajjar is the managing director for research at Recargo, which makes electric vehicle apps and does research for automakers and other groups. He made the trip with the support of his own company, but no Tesla sponsorship.

For now, a trip like this is only feasible in a Tesla, an electric car company that has great technology, but is out of reach for most Americans. Hajjar's sedan costs something on the order of  $90,000. For now, however, only Tesla makes electric car batteries that are able to drive for such long distances on a single charge. Most electric sedan models are federally rated as having ranges between 60 to 90 miles per charge. That works for commutes and city driving, but it's not practical for a road trip.

In the near future, however, Hajjar expects lower-cost electric vehicles to be able to make great American roadtrips, too, so long as companies—or cities—build quick-charging stations along the way. "I'm optimistic that within the next couple generation of vehicles, by 2016, we're going to be seeing lower-priced vehicles than Teslas with ranges beyond 150 miles," he says.

Norman Hajjar's Route

So the other limit to electric-only roadtrips is whether there are charging stations along your route. Hajjar chose a course that followed a series of Tesla's "Supercharger" stations, which work only for Teslas. You can see a map of the charging stops he made here. Compare that with this map of Supercharger stations and you can see he didn't have much choice in his route. Tesla does plan to build many more stations by 2015.

"One of the reasons to do a journey like this is to point out the incredible importance of building out the fast-charging stations all over the United States," Hajjar says. He thinks stations should be dotted throughout metropolitan areas "so there's no place within the metro you can't go," he says.

Hajjar advocates for stations that work for all plug-in cars and that are a step beyond what's called Level 2 technology. Such stations are expensive, but they work more quickly than Level 2 stations. If Hajjar had had to charge at Level 2 stations, he would have had to stop for eight hours each time he needed to fully charge his car, he says. As it was, Tesla's Supercharger stations took one hour to fully charge his car. (Normal, non-country-crossing users might have a quicker time of it. Car charging slows dramatically when the battery nears capacity. Hajjar wanted a fully charged car every time, but errand-running might not require a 100 percent charge.)

Hajjar estimates he had to make five or six charging stops a day. When I ask, he says the waits were "not at all" annoying. "You know, the charging stations are always located by some cool restaurants. Simply after driving two, three hours, I'm ready to get out of the vehicle, anyway."

Norman Hajjar in the Driver's Seat

A firefighter uses a flare to conduct backburn operations against the 89 Mesa Fire the night of May 6, 2010.

Credit: USDA Forest Service, Coconino National Forest.

Last year in Arizona, 19 firefighters got trapped in an unpredictably fast wildfire. All of them died. It was the highest firefighter death toll for a single fire since 1933. The same year, Sierra Nevada saw its largest fire ever, which ravaged 402 square miles, and Colorado suffered its most destructive wildfire in state history—nearly 500 homes were destroyed.

According to the Union of Concerned Scientists, some 140 wildfires struck the western U.S. states in the 1980s, while about 250 raged between 2000 and 2012. In those states, fire season has also grown, extending from five months in the 1970s to seven or more months today (California’s drought has been so bad this year, some experts say its fire season never actually ended).

Why are there more fires in more places? The simple answer is us. First, until the 1980s, we didn’t know that fire can be good for ecosystems, so firefighters operated under a policy of fire suppression. By preventing fires, though, they let underbrush build up in forests, fueling bigger fires later on. Then, there’s climate change: The planet’s increasing average temperatures are responsible for drier, longer, and significantly more extreme fire seasons than ever before. Finally, our cities are spreading, pushing their edges (and suburbs) into fire-prone areas.

If we are to deal with these changes and avoid tragedy, experts first need to fully understand wildfires—events we actually know little about. Starting this year, a team of engineers, including our own National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Forest Service, has been carrying out controlled burns and using the data to build computer models that could improve fire predictions. NIST engineers are also testing new building materials for roof tiles and house frames that can withstand wildfire conditions and make for safer homes.

If it seems like mega-fires are occurring more frequently, it's because they are. 

Even if scientists can figure out how to better predict and mitigate fires, people will still be in harm’s way. A team at University of California, Berkeley recently proposed the creation of fire-detecting and tracking satellites to provide advanced warnings. But they would likely be of little help in the most dangerous situations: Tiny blazes can turn into big burns too fast for the process to work.

Instead, we need a system that alerts people to danger even before a fire ever starts. Scientists at NIST recently developed a scale for labeling areas most at risk of wildfires. It’s called the Wildland Urban Interface Hazard Scale. And it would predict the severity and destructiveness of a fire in a particular area. It could also inform building codes for new construction in fire zones—and insurance costs. You pay premiums for deciding to live in the path of quakes and hurricanes, after all, so why not fires?

The method is tried and true. When general warnings won’t do the job, why not use the market to discourage people from doing stupid things like building in fire zones? Without a hazard scale in place, we’re just crossing our fingers and moving into regions that are more and more likely to burn.

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

Flickr/rpavich

Early today, the FDA—after years of saber-rattling—proposed new rules to regulate e-cigarettes. You may have heard something about this, since people in both camps are losing it.

Ah, so the FDA is really putting the clampdown on these, eh? 

Sort of. Up until now, e-cigarettes were almost completely unregulated; the new system would make some changes, like banning sales to minors.

Good!

Yes! Unless you are in the camp that believes e-cigarettes are a healthier (or relatively, at least) alternative to regular ol' tobbacy products. In which case, this is a pernicious affront to public health. 

Bad!

Well, no. There are certainly reasons to be wary of electronic cigs. There was a blockbuster New York Times report about neurotoxins in the cigarettes, which are now "for sale by the vial, the gallon and even the barrel." There was also a Centers for Disease Control report that concluded the "number of calls to poison centers involving e-cigarette liquids containing nicotine rose from one per month in September 2010 to 215 per month in February 2014."

Right, so. Good work, FDA.

Okay. Here's a discomfiting phrase: we know that these either are or are not killing you. It's definitely one of those. 

Quick primer on how e-cigarettes work: the cigarettes, rather than tobacco cigarettes, heat up liquid nicotine—that neurotoxin the Times wrote about—and let users fill their lungs with the resulting vapor. Each puff still has abot 90 percent of the nicotine you'd get from a tobacco cigarette. That means they're still addictive. 

As for health effects—the science is inconclusive. There's research suggesting nicotine, whether or not you get it from tobacco, is enough to cause developmental and mood problems. There's also research suggesting smoking e-cigarettes can—maybe—help some people quit traditional cigarettes, although the effects are far from a slam dunk. (Only about one in 10 people benefit, and they might not stick to it.) Teens smoking e-cigarettes can wind up switching to regular cigarettes, which you might be aware are bad for you; and up until now, there was nothing stopping adolescents from buying the cigarettes and vaping to their developing hearts' content. 

Man, science is complicated.

Sure is. We've got decades of slowly accreting research showing the damaging health effects of tobacco, monitored in smokers over the course of lifetimes. E-cigarettes have only been around since 2006. It's going to take a while to figure this out, which is presumably the FDA's case for regulation: getting out in front of e-cigarette development in case it does turn out to be a public health disaster.

All right. In the meantime, what else is up with these regulations?

Lots of stuff, actually. The rules would also federally prohibit the sale of cigars and pipe tobacco to minors, although e-cigarettes are grabbing the headlines. (Not for no reason: as dogoodnik teens in many states can tell you, there are state-wide regulations for cigars in place.) Electronic cigarette manufacturers, under the proposed rules, would have to make clear that their products contain addictive nicotine. They'd also be forbidden from saying their products are safer than tobacco cigarettes unless they can show the FDA some science that proves it, and they'd have to register all of their ingredients with the FDA. Minors would also be banned from buying e-cigarettes online. 

What don't the regulations do?

E-cigarettes come in flavors, which critics say make them more enticing to youngsters. The FDA can't stop that under these rules, although a spokesperson told the Times that these rules would be the first step toward regulating that, too, if it turns out the flavors do cause adolescents to more frequently partake. It also doesn't let the agency regulate the marketing of the cigarettes, at least for now.

Okay. So what's next?

The new regulations could go into effect in about a year, although if manufacturers circle the wagons and sue, they could be pushed back much longer. With a soaring multi-billion dollar business on the line, we could have a fight unfolding soon.

BRD RedshiftMX Electric Bike

The silent hybrid will likely be built from this body.

BRD

Key to many a successful military assault is the element of surprise. If an attacking force can arrive undetected—through terrain thought to be impassible—the battle is half won. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the arm of the Pentagon most responsible for shiny, futuristic technology, recently gave a $100,000 grant to Logos Technologies, Fairfax, Va.-based defense tech company, to develop a silent, hybrid-engine motorcycle for the military.

What can the military do with a motorcycle that runs nearly silently? Wade Pulliam, the program manager at Logos Technologies, told Popular Science that while there's "no CONOPS [concept of operations] set in stone," it would be ideal for missions deep into hostile territory. Helicopters and V-22 Ospreys could deliver troops and bikes to where they'd start the mission, and then troops would ride the bikes farther into difficult terrain.

When not running on electric power, the bikes would use gasoline, JP 8 (a military jet fuel), diesel, and other fuels that could recharge the batteries as they propel the bike. The bike could also be used to charge electronic devices carried by the troops.

Pulliam says DARPA wants "military users to be able to scavenge fuel while on missions," so compatibility with a range of fuels is important. The bikes are also two-wheel drive, which gives them even greater ability to maneuver difficult terrain, such as narrow mountain paths and over fallen trees.

The hybrid off-road motorcycle has a strange parentage. The body comes from BRD's RedShift MX, an off-road all-electric motorcycle. The engine is based on a hybrid electric/fuel drone engine that Logos Technologies is currently developing. The point of the hybrid motorcycle is not fuel efficiency, though there could be some gains there. Instead, the military motorcycle would run electric-only for up to an hour straight, which is one hour of nearly silent use. This is less than the two hours of running time that the civilian RedShift MX gets per charge, but the DARPA-funded bike project isn't a direct modification of the RedShift; it's a new hybrid bike that borrows some features.

DARPA's noise goal is 55 decibels while running electric only, which is slightly louder than the ambient sounds of a quiet office and quieter than a normal conversation. That should be good enough to escape notice from all but the perkiest of ears. When running normally, the motorcycle will be 75 decibels—slightly louder than a normal conversation but quieter than a garbage disposal.

This isn't the first hybrid-electric motorcycle; Hero Motocorp of India makes one. But Pulliam points out that this is the first developed that's "multifuel and with two-wheel drive." Pulliam expects that his team will start development of a prototype in the next three months.

The ability of an army mounted on two wheels to launch a surprise attack was best demonstrated during World War II's Fall of Singapore. Alan C. Headrick, in his excellently titled study "Bicycle Blitzkrieg: The Malayan Campaign and the Fall of Singapore," describes how the Japanese attackers managed to catch the British defenders from an approach they through was impassible.

Influenced by the intense heat and impassable jungle, Japanese planners decided from the beginning to use bicycles rather than horses as a means of troop and light material transportation. This decision allowed the foot soldiers to travel farther, faster, and with less fatigue. Due to the vast number of rivers on the Malay peninsula, and the British propensity to destroy the more than 250 bridges they crossed during their retreat, bicycles allowed the infantry (to continue) their advance, wading across the rivers carrying their bicycles on their shoulders,or crossing on log bridges held up on the shoulders of engineers standing in the stream.

While another Fall of Singapore-scale bike assault is unlikely, a silent and capable bike increases the reach of a military to otherwise inaccessible nooks and crannies of the world.

Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper

Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper lived until the age of 115.

Andreas VanderSchaaf / YouTube

Wanting to know the secrets of her longevity, scientists have examined her blood and other tissues, and found some interesting things. For one, they found that about two-thirds of her white blood cells had been made by only two stem cells, as reported by New Scientist. (Stem cells create white blood cells, which are responsible for fighting off infection, and other functions.) Typically, about 1,000 stem cells actively make these blood cells. That finding implies that, predictably, stem cells die out throughout the years, and that there is indeed a limit to human life. But it also means that it may be possible to save stem cells from one's birth or youth, keep them alive outside the body, and re-inject them years later, to lengthen life.

In one of the studies to come out of this research, published this week in the journal Genome Research, the scientists found a number of mutations in van Andel-Schipper's white blood cells, but found that all of them were harmless. This means she likely had "a superior system for repairing or aborting cells with dangerous mutations," although it's not clear exactly what that might have been.

"When there is mutation, there's an opportunity for selection and some somatic mutations lead to cancer," study author Chris Tyler-Smith of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute told New Scientist. "Now we see the range of somatic mutations in normal, non-cancerous tissues like blood, so we can start to think about the health consequences."

Researchers hope to next find out how the woman avoided Alzheimer's, by comparing her genome with those of people with the disease.

[New Scientist]

Detecting fraudulent olive oil

A schematic showing how particles in olive oil can be separated with a magnet and analyzed.

ACS Nano

One new research project that hopes to change that. Scientists from ETH Zurich have created tiny magnetic DNA particles that can be encapsulated in silica, and mixed in with the oil. The DNA can store tons of information such as the oil's source and quality. They particles are small and cheap to produce, with a cost of about $.02 per bottle, according to R&D Magazine. Since they contain small pieces of iron oxide, they can be easily separated from the oil with a magnet, and then "read" rather easily via a process called PCR. As R&D Magazine noted, the method also "made it possible to detect adulteration: if the concentration of nano-particles does not match the original value, other oil—presumably substandard—must have been added."

While the idea of DNA in your olive might not sound appealing, the particles are supposedly safe to eat, and the silica coating prevents the DNA from being absorbed into the body. Silica and iron oxide additives are already present in foods like ketchup and orange juice. In one trial, the researchers heated and cooled the oil, and the particles and DNA remained intact. 

The technology was described in a study published in the journal ACS Nano.

SipSnapp

Screenshot via Kickstarter

A good drink is an important part of a good dining experience, be it a pint of your local microbrew or a glass of pinot noir. While some of us may fancy ourselves as beer or wine connoisseurs, the average customer might not be able to tell ale from pale ale, pinot blanc from pinot grigio.  Worry not: there’s an app for that.

SipSnapp is a mobile app that aims to provide you with enough information to can make an informed decision. Once you’ve settled in your seat, open the app, and snap a picture of the drinks menu in front of you. Within a minute, SipSnapp reads the list from the menu and returns a detailed analysis: brewer, style, user ratings and so on -- all the facts you need to make a wise decision of what drink to order.

Currently, the app’s Kickstarter campaign has raised $467 of their pledged $30,000 total with 28 days to go. Their first prototype, if they reach the funding goal, would focus only on beer. Aside from snapping photos, searching can also be done by drink name and results will include user ratings and comments from Ratebeer.com. Another feature of the app is that it learns of your personal preferences over time, and in a Netflix style, recommends beers that you would like when it pops up on the menu. The SipSnapp team also projects future features that will include a wine section, searching for available drinks according to location, and a paid premium service.

Caged animal

Tommy the chimpanzee, kept in a small cage near Gloversville, N.Y.

Nonhuman Rights Project

But as detailed in a long and gripping piece in the New York Times Magazine--illustrated with photos of styled chimps in court--Wise and other lawyers are trying to change that, arguing that chimpanzees (and other animals like orangutans, dolphins, and elephants) are autonomous, and due to their intelligence deserve the same rights under the law as human persons:

Wise is pursuing the legal argument of habeas corpus, or a "court order requiring that a prisoner be brought before a judge by his or her captor in order to rule on the legality of that prisoner’s detainment." This argument has been used to grant personhood to those previously denied it, such as in the case of a British slave named James Somerset. A number of non-human entities are also already seen under the law as persons, including corporations, states, and even rivers (as in one case in New Zealand). Wise said he thinks that he will eventually be able to convince a judge that chimpanzees and other intelligent animals deserve such rights.

Wise's case for Tommy was denied and he hasn't yet succeeded in his other suits, but he presses on. 

Read the full story in the Times Magazine. 

If you've spent any time lately walking on busy city sidewalks, you'll know that many people are gazing steadily into smartphone screens as they get around, often at the expense of seeing who and what are right around them. Presumably they're checking texts and email, or using online maps and other apps to find shops, restaurants, doctors' offices, and other destinations.

By focusing so intently on our screens and following a set route from point A to point B, have we sacrificed chance encounters with the unexpected? That's what MIT Media Lab researcher Dhairya Dand suggests. "Today we immerse in our digital lives through smartphones," he writes. “We don't get lost anymore, we don't wander, wonder and discover."

Dand has set out to solve this disconnection with his “SuperShoes," which decouple sight from the map-based navigation equation, and replace it with the sense of touch. Flexible insoles are embedded with vibrating motors under the toes, which connect wirelessly to an app on the user's smartphone. The phone in turn taps into information stored in a cloud account where the user has already input likes and dislikes: hobbies, shops, foods, people, interests and more.

Enter a destination into the app and put the smartphone away in a bag or pocket.  The tiny motors in each insole then communicate directions via toe-tickle. “[L]eft toe tickles - turn left, right toe tickles - turn right, no tickle - keep going, both tickle repeatedly - reached destination, both tickle once - recommendation, both tickle twice – reminder,” Dand writes.

Feel Your Way

The SuperShoes insoles includes small motors that tickle the wearer's toes to indicate which direction to walk, a microcontroller, and a low-power Bluetooth transmitter that wireless connects the insoles with the user's smartphone.

Dhairya Dand

The tickling interface lends itself to several functions beyond being a tactile map. They can also act as tour guide to points of interest, known and unknown; as a reminder when the user nears a site related to a to-do task (like buying a quart of milk at the nearest bodega); as a prompt to get up and take a worry-free walk break during free time, knowing that you'll make your way back in time for your next meeting or other calender commitment; and, as a way to safely encounter new things in the city, by taking different routes between regular destinations without getting lost.

"The novel feature of the SuperShoes is that it can instill 'acts of random serendipity' — suggest a different route to work in the morning," writes smart clothing guru Syuzi Pakchyan on the FashioningTech blog, "or suggest a scenic walk for mediation, adding a level of discovery and exploration to one of the best forms of exercise — walking." And one of the best ways to spur creativity, according to some new science.

Although the accompanying video suggests Dand has tested SuperShoes with a number of users, he does not seem to have released any specs for how to build and program up your own set of tickling insoles, or made the app or cloud platform public. Perhaps he's hoping to follow a path to market being taken by a similar recent project out of MIT Media Lab: Lechal, a shoe with a tactile feedback system in the insole that can help the blind and visually impaired get around more safely.

Lake Mead, Boulder City and vicinity

Nearby Boulder City is where the sagebrush state plans to test drones.

Doc Searls 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.

A Bombing Campaign In Yemen

Last weekend, the United States launched a series of drone strikes in Yemen, killing at least 40 people alleged to be al Qaeda affiliated terrorists. Yemen's government claimed credit for the strikes, while U.S. officials said they were CIA drones. Either way, they were likely operated by U.S. Air Force pilots, and fit into America's long and ongoing campaign of targeted killing. The attacks come shortly after a al Qaeda released a video of a meeting in Yemen's desert. Bot the presence of that video and the weekend strikes illustrate the limitations of America's drones and the very real roles they still perform.

Strange Lights And Plant Science

Stevia First, a biotech company focused on the sugarless sweetener that comes from the Stevia rebaudiana plant, wants to fly drones over stevia fields at night so they can shine lights on the plants and confuse them into being better. Or, in Stevia First's words, they are "planning a field-scale study using agricultural drones to interrupt stevia's photoperiod using brief overnight illumination which could produce dramatic gains in stevia leaf and steviol glycoside yields." Drones shining lights over a field are likely a cheaper and safer option than night flights from light-equipped airplanes, and more scalable than producing crops entirely indoors.

The Stevia Plant

Mokkie via Wikimedia Commons

Elsewhere In Nevada

Nevada, one of the six states designated as drone test sites by the FAA, is getting ready to add drones to their skies. Nevada is starting small, focusing on a small drones flying within eyesight of their pilots. The test area, initially, will be no more than four square miles. And continuing Nevada's tradition of using lake beds for test beds, the drones will fly from some southeast of Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Business Press writes: 

The state is designating the dry lake beds south and west of Boulder City around the Eldorado Valley for drone flight tests. Test zones will be tucked into an area between Boulder City and McCarran International Airport’s established flight patterns.

Drone Orchestra

Drone orchestra. Drone orchestra. Drone orchestra? Drone orchestra!

Watch below:

Flying Backpacks For Drones

Arcturus UAV's "JUMP" is like a second set of wings for a drone. Many drones, like the famous military Predator, are airplane-shaped, with long cylindrical bodies and wide wingspans. This is a great shape for being in the sky, but it means it needs a runway to take off and land, limiting where it can go. Other drones, like the popular commercial toy Phantom, are quadcopters, with an array of four propellers. These take off and land from compact spaces like helicopters, but that also means they fly slower and with more energy expenditure than a normal plane. JUMP combines the best of both worlds: it let's an airplane-shaped drone take off and land like a helicopter. This isn't the first time we've seen something like this. At an industry conference last year in Washington, DC, Latitude Engineering unveiled a similar design. JUMP, unveiled this past Monday, is different in that it's an in-the-field conversion kit for another existing drone, rather than a hardware modification.

Live Free Or Drone

In a cautious moment from the Granite State, New Hampshire's state Senate voted to study potential drone regulations more. This comes in response to a bill in the New Hampshire House that would limit institutional, commercial, and police use of drones. If New Hampshire is look for a primer on potential drone use and regulation, this isn't a bad place to start.

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

N-Zorbit

courtesy Modernist Pantry

151: minimum recommended rum proof for powdering

32 square meters: the surface area of the average human gut

Micrograph Image Showing Intestinal Villi

Photo hosted on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0

84 years: the time it takes for 9 drops of pitch to fall

215 calls to poison centers per month: involve e-cigarette liquids, one of the reasons the FDA has put new restrictions on vaping

35 million cubic feet: the amount of nuclear waste at a seaside dump in Britain, which is "virtually certain to be eroded by rising sea levels"

Sellafield nuclear site

The Sellafield nuclear site in northwest England. About six kilometers (4 miles) to the south is the nuclear waste site, the Low Level Waste Repository, where material from Sellafield and elsewhere is stored.

98.52 percent: the portion of human faces that a new algorithm can identify correctly

60 years: the age of the solar cell this week

Solar Arrays on the ISS

NASA

$200: the price to pre-order a Roomba-like miniature printer

Pocket Printer

A bearded dragon

André Karwath via Wikimedia Commons

In all, 58 percent of the ill people are under the age of five, and 42 percent have had to be hospitalized. But there are no deaths so far. Whew. The largest number of cases were found in California and Wisconsin, and are linked with pets purchased at multiple locations throughout the country. 

This is not the first Salmonella outbreak linked to the bearded ones. In Wisconsin in 2009, a cook who owned two of the critters prepared gravy and other foods in the house, and served it to a large group. At least 19 of them became infected with the bacteria.

S2

Illustration by Benjamin Louis

More than half of all personal aircraft accidents occur during takeoffs or landings. That’s why inventor and entrepreneur JoeBen Bevirt—known for designing airplane-like wind energy turbines—is intent on making runways obsolete. Bevirt, 40, has mobilized his wind energy team to create a personal electric airplane called S2 that takes off vertically, like a helicopter, and flies aerodynamically, like an airplane.

No full-scale prototype exists yet, but Bevirt and his team have built about two dozen 10-pound models to demonstrate their concept works. NASA has taken notice and is now funding the development of a 55-pound unmanned aerial vehicle. Supercomputer simulations of a full-scale, 1,700-pound S2 suggest it could fly two people about 200 miles (New York City to Boston) in an hour on 50 kilowatt-hours of electricity, or roughly equivalent to 1.5 gallons of fuel used by a typical two-seat airplane—which would make the new aircraft about five times more efficient.

S2 wouldn’t have been possible just a decade ago, says Bevirt, who believes new compact and efficient motors, ever-increasing power density in batteries, smarter control systems, and tinier sensors mean his plane will soon be a reality. “There has never been a better time to be an aircraft designer,” he says. 

SAFETY AND EFFICIENCY

A dozen compact electric motors operate three times more efficiently than a typical personal airplane’s combustion engines. Bonus: More motors improve redundancy and lower the risk of accidents.

FLEXIBILITY

Retractable arms reposition the motors to transition between vertical takeoff, forward flight, and landing.

CONTROL

Computers adjust motor speed 4,000 times per second to optimize efficiency, reduce noise, and improve flight control.

Lead Inventor: JoeBen Bevirt

Development Cost To Date: "Several million dollars"

Company: Joby Aviation

Market Maturity:•••••

Click here to see a flat bike helmet, a robotic exoskeleton, and more from our 2014 Invention Awards.

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

Extremely Perfect Tacos

Taco Bell

Tacobell.com has one particularly interesting page (you know, besides its popular new video ad). It's one big, purple page that serves as a short intro into industrial food science. On it, the fast food company briefly explains some of its "unpronounceable" ingredients.

Cellulose is found in plant cell walls and helps bind together water and oil, the page explains. Sodium phosphates improve the texture of Taco Bell's ground beef. This page can't say whether these are things you want to eat all the time.

Still, it's actually pretty cool to learn what some of these ingredients do, especially because, as Taco Bell points out, they appear frequently in grocery-store items such as packaged bread and lunch meat. I've seen many of these words myself, over and over, and I never knew what they were.

In a way, the page is a counterpoint to the idea of avoiding "unpronounceable ingredients." In recent years, healthy-eating advocates have campaigned for people to avoid eating foods whose ingredients lists include so-called "unpronounceable" words—in other words, proper chemical names.

It's a great idea to reduce the number of packaged and restaurant foods you eat. And an ingredients list with many proper chemical names in it is a good sign you're running into these foods, which are often high in the tasty, bad stuff—sugars, sodium and other things that are overrepresented in the American diet—and low in the healthful stuff, like fiber, vitamins and phytochemicals. Yet the sentiment against "unpronounceable ingredients" is harmful. It's anti-chemistry. It makes chemical names seem monstrous and impossible to understand. It also lumps together a number of ingredients that have different effects on human health and have been studied to different degrees. It's a well-intentioned health message that relies on fearing science.

Again, that's not to say people should eat fast food or packaged food frequently. Packaged snack companies engineer their products, in part using ingredients like these, to be impossible to resist. That leads to you (and me) binging on stuff that should be infrequent treats. It's just that the ingredients in them are not scary poison that the average person will never understand. Most are fine in small amounts, or when consumed in infrequent treats. Some, like cellulose, are probably okay even in large amounts. (That doesn't sound very tasty, though.) You can understand them and learn to recognize them. Maybe understanding makes you more likely to avoid some of them, while feeling a little more relaxed about others.  

Google's self-driving cars are zipping right along, with 700,000 miles logged. In a new blog post, the company announced that it's been shifting its attention toward city driving, attempting to master the more challenging bustle of streets, maneuvering past pedestrians and other obstacles.

We've written pretty extensively on how Google wants to make this happen, but it's fun to see exactly how the cars interpret these objects: to the software, bikers passing cars are a red blur, instead of the more human translation of Oh, God, look at this moron, think he owns the road.