A mantis with 3D glasses

Newcastle University

If you aren't impressed with the abilities and/or chutzpa of praying mantises, check out this one attacking a hummingbird. Another YouTube video purports to show a mantis eating a bird it just snagged. 

Here's a video describing the research: 

"Despite their minute brains, mantises are sophisticated visual hunters which can capture prey with terrifying efficiency," project lead Jenny Read, a researcher at Newcastle University in England, said in a statement. "We can learn a lot by studying how they perceive the world.”

After putting the glass on the mantises, researchers show them a series of shapes on a screen that are designed to look 3-D with the glasses on. The goal is to fool "a mantis into believing it’s seeing something that’s a likely prey object," project researcher Vivek Nityananda told PRI. "Just a black dot on a white screen, or a black square, that moves around in a particular way.” This will allow researchers to judge their depth perception and other aspects of their vision. Results from the study could help researchers design 3-D technology for animals, humans, and robots. 

Left or Right?

U.S. National Institutes of Health

Researchers found the brain activity that happens when mice that are learning make the right choice—and know it.  

A new study links this specific type of brain activity with the short-term memory that animals, including humans, use for complex tasks. That type of memory, called working memory, is important for mental math, problem solving and remembering grocery lists. It's a big part of learning and everyday life. The study also sheds some light on a type of brain activity, called synchronized gamma oscillations, that neuroscientists have been long interested in.

For the study, neuroscientists associated with MIT and with RIKEN, a Japanese research institute, sent a bunch of mice down tunnels that ended in T intersections. One of the T's arms led to food, while the other didn't. Over the course of several trials, the mice learned and remembered which arm had food and which didn't.

The researchers found that as trained mice approached the intersection, brain signals called synchronized gamma oscillations appeared just before the mice made the correct choice. The oscillations included brief waves of activity that happened in different parts of the brain simultaneously.

Synchronized gamma oscillations didn't appear in mice that hadn't been trained, nor in trained mice that were about to make the wrong choice. The oscillations did appear in mice that turned down the wrong arm initially, but then corrected themselves. The results from the "oops!" mice suggested synchronized gamma oscillations play a role in the mice being aware of information in their working memory, the researchers wrote in a paper they published in the journal Cell.

The researchers also tested mice that are genetically engineered so that their gamma oscillations were impaired. The impaired mice didn't pick the correct arm at the intersection as often as unimpaired mice.

Finally, once the mice really cemented in their minds which way to go at the T intersection, they seemed to shift the type of thinking they used as they scurried down their researcher-made tunnels. After about 18 days of training, the synchronized gamma oscillations that previously appeared before a correct choice began to disappear, suggesting that different brain pathways are responsible for guiding mice once the initial learning phase is over. 

Flickr/Jorge Franganillo

You’ve probably turned to Google’s search box on many occasions, be it for solving a simple math problem, finding out the current exchange rate between the dollar and the euro, or calculating how many calories there are in an egg (FYI, a 50-gram boiled egg has 78 calories). But have you ever thought about how many cups of coffee you can drink before the caffeine in your body becomes fatal? There’s a calculator for that.

The folks at io9 have curated a list of bizarre calculators out on the internet that quantify some seriously weird stuff.

Here are some of the unique calculators we’ve tried out.

• Building your home from Legos:

  As a Lego enthusiast since childhood, I’ve always imagined building a real house out of truckloads of Legos, as I’m sure many others have imagined and even attempted. To build a Lego house of 2,392 square feet—the average floor area in new single-family houses, according to the 2010 U.S. Census—with two stories, it would take 11,647,839 Legos, according to Motovo Blog (“The lighter side of real estate”). The cost amounts to a whopping $1,161,784, more than the median price ($865,000) for a condo in New York City.

• Death by Caffeine:

  Type in your favorite caffeinated beverage or food, your weight, and use this neat calculator to find out how much you can consume in a single day before pushing daisies. Apparently, it takes 57.14 cups of regular brewed coffee or 180.66 cans of Coca-Cola Classic to put me down.

Read the full list here and prepare to procrastinate. 

[io9] 

New And Old OxyContin Pills

80-milligram tablets of the current OxyContin formula (left) and the previous OxyContin formula (right)

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration

Can you make prescription painkillers addiction-proof? Popular Scienceasked this question one year ago. At the time, researchers had just gathered enough evidence that a new formulation of OxyContin, released without fanfare in 2010, discouraged addicts from abusing the medicine.

One year on, I was excited to see an update to efforts to make un-abuse-able painkillers in the latest issue of the online magazine Nautilus. Some newer strategies Nautilus reports on include targeting different nerve receptors specifically to relieve pain without providing euphoria—the high that abusers initially seek.

For hundreds of years, people have been trying to figure out how to get pain relief without the high from opioids such as OxyContin and its chemical cousins, including Vicodin, Percocet, morphine and heroin, which was originally created as a painkiller. This is such a difficult problem that when I talked with Alexander Kraus, the vice president for product development at the drug company Grünenthal USA, one year ago, he didn't think it could be done completely. (Maybe it still can't.) At the time, Kraus told me he thought the risk for addiction with opioid painkillers was "something we have to accept," like the risk for accidents with cars. So it is a cool thing that researchers are finding ways to get the best of both worlds here.

Just as I found, however, Nautilus reports that solving opioid addiction isn't about fiddling around with drug chemistry. At best, "addition-proof" formulas shift the blame for drug addiction away from pharmaceutical companies and maybe work a little bit to reduce abuse overall. Maybe. Mostly, however, addicts stop abusing addiction-proof opioid pharmaceuticals only to start abusing heroin and similar drugs.

The Nautilus article argues effectively for what services are needed to stop addiction before it starts. It describes the factors that predispose people to addiction. And it covers a quick history of science's efforts to cook up addiction-proof opioids in labs:

[Nautilus]

Amazonian tribe

Members of an uncontacted tribe in the Brazilian state of Acre observe a passing aircraft.

Courtesy Government of Brazil

As you can imagine, it isn't easy to study uncontacted tribes in Amazonia. And the history of western interaction with these tribes is dark indeed, often leading to the destruction of these peoples' way of life. So researchers have come up with a less invasive way of keeping tabs on them: tracking them via Google Earth. 

In a study published in the American Journal of Human Biology, researchers analyzed satellite images of one particular Amazon village on the border of Brazil and Peru, and calculated that it has fewer than 40 inhabitants. "A small, isolated village like this one faces an imminent threat of extinction," said University of Missouri researcher Rob Walker in a statement. But tracking this and other villages from space could "inform and create boundaries or buffer zones that would allow tribes to stay isolated," he added. 

“Deforestation, cattle ranching, illegal mining, and outside colonization threaten their existence," Walker continued. "Most of these tribes are swidden horticulturalists and so their slash-and-burn fields are observable in satellite images. But, they do move around, sometimes in response to external threats, and this movement requires constant monitoring if there is to be any hope of preserving their habitat and culture.”

There are somewhere between 70 and 100 uncontacted groups in Amazonia. Brushes with modern society are often violent--one previously isolated tribe was recently forced to relocate after a run-in with drug traffickers, according to The Ecologist. 

If you're curious, here is a video of another isolated tribe in Brazil.

Is there any bastion of human misery more wretched than the airline luggage check? Abandon all hope, ye who reach suitcase sizes exceeding 50 pounds. 

AirFrance-KLM, at least, is trying to ease the pain. They've developed an electronic luggage tag that will let users skip the lines. Rather than waiting, customers will be able to use the eTag to digitally tag their luggage at home via smartphone, then drop it off at a designated area in the airport. Also available: the eTrack system, a tiny gizmo you stuff in your bag, and then tracks your luggage in case it gets lost. (Which it will, always, every time.) We've written about such tags before, and apparently the pilot test(heh) is kicking off at the end of this year.

Great. But, concerns: Couldn't we have done this years ago by just printing our own luggages tags? And more importantly, will this one day be used as a way for airlines to squeeze pennies out of customers? My lack of legroom has led to cynicism.

[PSFK]

Step aside, cheetah

Cheetahs are still the world's fastest absolute land animals. But relative to their body size, a small Southern Californian mite has them beat.

Joachim Huber via Wikimedia Commons

Here is how that speed would translate into human terms, as noted in the International Business Times: 

If a human could cover 322 body lengths in one second, she would be traveling at 1,300 miles per hour. At that speed, a human runner could circle the Earth in less than 20 hours – or make a round trip from San Francisco to Washington state for a cup of Seattle’s finest coffee in about 75 minutes. In that regard, cheetahs top out at about 16 body lengths per second, [or] roughly 70 miles per hour.

The previous record-holder for fastest (relative) speed was the Australian tiger beetle, which topped out at 171 body lengths per second, Science Magazine reported. 

The mite's speed was documented by researchers using a high-speed camera and results were presented at the Experimental Biology 2014 meeting in San Diego, and in the FASEB Journal. The mite can also stop and change directions quickly, and can survive on asphalt reaching temperature of 140 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than most creatures can withstand. 

A better understanding of how the mite does its thing could lead to better designs for tiny robots, the scientists said.

[Science Magazine]

A Human Essayist

U.S. Census Bureau, Public Information Office (PIO)

Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, we're taking bets. The fight is machine versus machine. Will one of them be able to spot the tricks of the other?

Machine #1 is an algorithm, developed by computer science students at MIT and Harvard University, that is able to write an essay in under one second, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports. Before you get too excited, this is not the machine to get you through that English class you dread. It's designed to come up with grammatically correct, keyword-stuffed nonsense. The essays are made to fool other machines, algorithms that several startups have made in recent years that automatically grade essays.

The idea is that essay-grading algorithms could save time and effort for teachers, professors, and standardized testing companies. Researchers have done studies to show the scores automated essay graders give to papers are similar to the scores human readers give. So maybe this is the machine to get you through English 101, if you know you're being graded by algorithm.*

But some writing teachers say the machines are flawed and easy to exploit. After all, they're machines. They can't read like people. Instead, many look for shorthand markers for writing quality, such as sophisticated vocabulary, or transition words at the beginnings of paragraphs. That doesn't mean they're simple machines. Many are able to learn and improve over time using artificial intelligence. Still, detractors say they're not good enough.

The new robot essay-writer project is led by one anti-robot-grader advocate, Les Perelman, a retired MIT writing instructor. He made it to reveal automated graders' weaknesses. From the Chronicle report, it's not clear if he has systematically pitted his creation against automated essay graders, but here's to hoping. The Chronicle did offer one example, an essay generated from just one keyword, "privacy." Here are a couple of example sentences from the paper: "Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent. Humankind will always subjugate privateness." Whew. The Chronicle reported an automated grading product called MY Access!, which is used in the grading of the Graduate Management Admission Test, gave that paper a score of 5.6 out of 6.

*Popular Science is joking and does not condone cheating. English class is fun! You should do your reading.

[The Chronicle of Higher Education]

Cozy

Illustration by Greg Maxson

While studying for his Ph.D., electrical engineer Marshall Cox moved into a 90-year-old Manhattan apartment. He soon learned that winters indoors were more like sweltering summers; a boiler-fed radiator blasted out so much heat that, even during bone-chilling nights, Cox woke up soaked in sweat. He’d open his bedroom window, only to wake up shivering after the radiator turned off. “It was a constant battle,” Cox says.

The struggle extends beyond personal comfort. Nearly one in 10 U.S. homes relies on steam or water heat and wastes up to 30 percent of the energy it emits, according to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Cox estimates this costs $700 million a year in Manhattan alone. Meanwhile, burning additional heating oil (i.e. in boiler systems) puts more toxins in the air that are linked to childhood asthma.

Cox realized that if he could store only the heat he needed for a room—and divert the rest—he might tame the deplorable temperature control of a dated boiler system. So he built an electronics-laden radiator cover called Cozy in his apartment in 2011. Rather than adjusting the level of steam entering the radiator, the device improves heat distribution to a room. Used throughout a building, Cozy stands to coax boiler systems to burn less oil and generate less pollution. 

How It Works:

1) A boiler heats water into 212°F steam, which snakes from one radiator to the next in a building.

2) Radiators closest to the boiler heat up first and cool down last, yet building thermostats are often set to the farthest, coldest apartments.

3) Cozy radiator covers trap warmth for later use and prevent excess heat from entering a room.

4) The device measures room temperature and blows out hot air only when needed.

5) Tenants can adjust room temperature using an app that talks to Cozy electronics over Wi-Fi.

6) Multiple covered radiators move heat more quickly through a building to where it’s needed most.

Lead inventor: Marshall Cox

Development cost to date: $500,000

Company: Radiator Labs

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.

Albino lab mouse

Wikimedia Commons

Confounding how? The new study, published in Nature Methods, found that mice exposed to male experimenters were much less sensitive to pain than control animals. The same effect was seen when mice were exposed to shirts worn by men, men's underarm secretions, or bedding used by other male mammals. Thus, for example, if a male researcher were testing how a certain compound effected pain tolerance, the results could be swayed. 

"People have not paid attention to this in the entire history of scientific research of animals," Jeffrey Mogil, a pain researcher at McGill University and lead author of the study, told The Verge. "I think that it may have confounded, to whatever degree, some very large subset of existing research." 

It also stands to reason that stressed-out mice could mess up data in other ways, and the scientists suggest this effect may be one reason why many studies involving mice can't be replicated. 

The scientists think that the mice are reacting to the scent of a male, human or mouse, and what the mice really fear is the presence of another male mouse, not necessarily a human, and are spurred by competition to ready themselves for a fight-or-flight scenario.

If shirts from men and women are presented to mice at the same time, they don't get stressed out, suggesting that what the mice really fear is a lone male. In nature, such a solitary lad would be "up to no good — either hunting or defending his territory," Mogil said. One possibility is "to fire all the men--or have them chaperoned by a woman," Mogil joked to The Verge. Likewise the mice settle down after about 45 minutes of exposure to a male experimenter. 

For the record, there appear to be slightly more male researchers in biosciences than females. In 2010, for example, there were 12,185 male post-docs, and 9,352 female post-docs, according to the National Science Foundation. But the ratio may even out in the future--the same year, 53 percent of bioscience doctoral students were women.

The award for the worst headline on stories covering this study goes to the Daily Mail: "Is this why women are more scared of mice?"

[The Verge]

Examples of Asian Glow, Including Your Author

Photos not of me are by Flickr users: istolethetv, Jason Saul, downbeat, Christina Xu, Gaby Av and Joe. All are Creative Commons licensed with this license or a less strict one. All were tagged "Asian glow."

Between the two of us, my roommate and I have the, uhh, digestive problems that are more common in people of East Asian descent. She's lactose intolerant. I get so-called "Asian glow" when I drink alcohol. But at least when my roommate is craving cheese, she can pop some Lactaid pills. Why can't I take an Asian glow pill?

After all, both conditions stem from trouble with enzymes our bodies make. Like most people around the world, my roommate stopped producing the enzyme lactase as she got older. Lactase digests the milk sugar lactose, so without lactase, she gets bloating and cramps when she eats dairy products. Lactaid pills give her extra doses of lactase.

Meanwhile, my body produces an inefficient version of the enzyme aldehyde dehydrogenase (ALDH), which is the second of the two enzymes that people need to break down the ethanol in alcoholic drinks.

When ethanol enters the body, it first encounters alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH), which turns it into acetaldehyde. "Acetaldehyde is nasty stuff," says Robert Swift, a physician and researcher who studies alcoholism at Brown University. "It's like formaldehyde, which is embalming fluid. It destroys proteins. It destroys DNA." In fact, scientists suspect acetaldehyde is behind nasty hangovers in all races.  

Luckily, in most people, aldehyde dehydrogenase immediately breaks down acetaldehyde, ultimately turning it into into compounds such as acetate, which cells commonly use in metabolism. In those of us who produce insufficient aldehyde dehydrogenase, however, acetaldehyde builds up. That gives us red faces, racing hearts, and nausea, even after moderate drinking. About one in three people of East Asian descent have the gene that makes the inefficient variant of aldehyde dehydrogenase.

Incidentally, this why that Esquire article on no-hangover binge drinking is total pseudoscience. The article advocates eating yeast, which contains  dehydrogenase, to mitigate the ill effects of drinking. Even if the yeasties survive the journey into the human stomach, all they would do there is create more acetaldehyde... potentially so much there's a backlog that aldehyde dehydrogenase can't get to quickly enough. Giving yourself extra doses of alcohol dehydrogenase should make the effects of drinking worse, not better. Swift knows this intimately. He has a gene, common in some ethnic groups, such as Jews, that gives him over-active alcohol dehydrogenases. "I've had it measured," he tells Popular Science. His aldehyde dehydrogenases are normal, but they can't keep up with his alcohol dehydrogenases. "You get a little bit of Asian flushing." 

So this isn't just a problem for Asian folks. If someone could make a pill that gave people extra doses of aldehyde dehydrogenase, it could even help those whose bodies make a normal amount of the enzyme. An aldehyde dehydrogenase pill could be a hangover cure.

"If somebody could do this," Swift says, "somebody would make a million dollars." However, he quickly quashed my dreams by saying, "My sense is that people have tried, but nobody's found anything."

It turns out making an aldehyde dehydrogenase pill would be much harder than making Lactaid. (Or eating brewer's yeast.) The lactase enzyme works in the digestive tract, so it makes sense to swallow a pill containing the enzyme. Aldehyde dehydrogenase, on the hand, works in the mitochondria—tiny, specialized structures—inside the cells of the liver. If I were to swallow a lot of aldehyde dehydrogenase, it would get digested before it ever reached my liver's mitochondria.

Even if I could hustle aldehyde dehydrogenase intact into my liver, it's difficult to deliver enzymes into cells. "They're big. They're too big to get into cells," Swift says.

Okay, so I can't add aldehyde dehydrogenase to my liver cells. Could I stimulate the weak, pitiful aldehyde dehydrogenase I already have? "You just can't go and change the activity of enzymes like that," Swift says. "It's a lot easier to inhibit an enzyme than it is to stimulate an enzyme. There are very few compounds discovered that can stimulate enzymes."

Generations in the future, Swift says, it's possible scientists will develop the technology to fix the inefficient aldehyde dehydrogenase gene. It remains to be seen whether this will be worth it, in terms of safety and price. My guess is, probably not.

After all, having inefficient aldehyde dehydrogenase is a mixed blessing. Some scientists think the reason people of East Asian ethnicity are less likely to have alcoholism is because the inefficient enzyme makes them less likely to drink as much. In fact, disulfiram, a medicine used to discourage alcoholics from drinking by giving them unpleasant side effects when they do drink, is an aldehyde dehydrogenase inhibitor. That's right, doctors treat alcoholics by giving them really bad Asian glow.

One last tip: Once you feel the glow coming on, it's probably best to listen to your body. There's some evidence that those who drink despite their protesting enzymes have an increased risk for certaincancers. Remember, Asian glow—and, potentially, the ill effects of alcohol all races feel—come from a buildup of acetaldehyde, which is toxic.

"The best thing to do is not drink or drink in moderation," Swift says. "People don't want to hear that, but that's the reality."

Otter Eats An Alligator

Uh, so everything you thought about otters being the cuddliest animal ever is probably torn apart after seeing this image. Crocodiles, beware: you might be next.

Geoff Walsh via Facebook

Where do you stand in the War of the Otters? The first volley came in the form of a post at Vox titled "The case against otters: necrophiliac, serial-killing fur monsters of the sea." In the post, writer Dylan Matthews explained various things about otters, and listed several reasons why the animals are, in Matthews' opinion, "jerks": they kill baby otters; they have (on rare occasions) attacked people, monkeys, and alligators; and they sometimes copulate with dead otters (and baby seals).

Then The Dodo writer Jenny Kutner responded with a post, "5 Reasons You Should Never Believe That Otters Are Anything But Awesome," pointing out that otters aren't humans, and that most of Matthews' points were based on anthropomorphic interpretations of otter behavior. Kutner also rightfully pointed out that otter populations are threatened worldwide.

Just today (April 29), there's a story that toxic algae blooms are killing otters in California, and another about how a giant dam is affecting river otters in Brazil.

I sought out an otter perspective on this fierce internet battle, but unfortunately otters don't speak human languages. Otterly frustrating. 

In the mean time, there will be a 33-hour live cam of otters tonight, starting at 8 p.m. ET, as mentioned by The Week: 

Watch the otter cam here.

And just for fun, below is a PBS Nature video about otters holding hands. 

Pasture-Raised Pigs in Rockville, Virginia

Photo by Lance Cheung, U.S. Department of Agriculture

She's got the heart of a pig—and that's a good thing. Researchers are reporting that a baboon is still alive after receiving a heart transplanted from a pig, The Telegraph reports. The baboon has lived with the heart in its abdomen for more than a year.

Its longevity is a milestone. Previously, when researchers tried to transplant pig hearts into primates, the primates' bodies would reject the transplants within six months, The Telegraph reports. Ultimately, researchers want to make pig hearts transplantable into humans. Pigs could provide a larger supply of the organ than human donors can, closing the tragic gap between supply and demand. In the U.S., about 3,000 people are on the waiting list for a heart transplant, but only about 2,000 hearts become available each year, according to the U.S. National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, which conducted the baboon study. Those who are waiting can use mechanical devices, but those aren't perfect, the institute says.

Pig hearts are promising because they're close enough to human hearts in anatomy. Doctors also already use heart valves taken from pigs and cows in human surgeries. It seems pig hearts are just a little too foreign for primate bodies to accept easily, however. In previous studies, the hearts would trigger a massive immune response in the primates they were transplanted into. Such responses can be deadly and they've been a major barrier to developing pig heart transplants, The Telegraph reports. It will be years before pig hearts are ready for human patients, if they ever are.

To make hearts that baboons—and, in the future, humans—won't reject, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute team specially engineered its pigs to have some human genes and to lack some pig genes. The researchers also gave their baboons drugs to suppress their immune systems. (Human patients take immunosuppressant drugs when they get organ transplants, so that's not unusual.)

It seems what made the transplants work was just the right balance of genetic engineering and immune system-suppressing drugs. In an abstract the team submitted to a meeting of heart and torso surgeons, the team reports that when it tried other drug regimens, their baboons died in less than a year. Baboons who received hearts from un-genetically modified pigs rejected the hearts within a day. 

Now that the team has shown pig hearts are able to hang around inside primates safely, the next step will be to actually replace baboons' hearts with pig hearts, The Telegraph reports. The baboon in this study has a pig heart in its body alongside its own heart, which is doing all the work.

This baboon study hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet, but its authors presented it yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.

[The Telegraph]

SolePower

Illustration by Lucas Nene/Sole Power

Stanton worked closely with Hahna Alexander, a fellow Carnegie Mellon University engineering student, over three years to create the SolePower system. Instead of using piezoelectric and other inefficient, bulky methods of generating electricity, the pair shrunk down components similar to those found in hand-cranked flashlights. The result is a near standard–size removable insole that weighs less than five ounces, including a battery pack, and charges electronics via USB.

SolePower’s current version, to be released later this year, requires a lengthy 15-mile walk to charge a smartphone. But Stanton says the company is working toward a design that can charge an iPhone after less than five miles of hiking and withstand about 100 million footsteps of wear and tear. 

How It Works:

1) A drivetrain converts the energy of heel strikes into rotational energy, spinning magnetic rotors.

2) The motion of the rotors induces an electrical current within coils of wire.

3) Electricity travels along a wire and into a lithium-ion polymer battery pack on a wearer’s shoelaces.

Lead inventors: Hahna Alexander, Matt Stanton

Development cost to date: $300,000

Company: Sole Power LLC

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.

Guitar Wing

Photograph by Ralph Smith

To untether frustrated guitarists, a group of musicians invented a low-profile and wireless MIDI controller called Guitar Wing. It clamps onto any guitar in seconds for near-effortless control over effects, software, digital audio workstations, and even stage lights between strums. Jay Smith and his colleagues recently redesigned the buttons for better ergonomics and response in a new version, which will hit the market this spring for $199. 

TAPPING:

Pressure-sensitive pads transform tapping into sound effects; for example, dynamic percussion.

SLIDING:

Three sliders enable the player to pan audio, bend notes, dim stage lights, and much more.

MOTION:

A three-axis accelerometer permits control over devices simply by moving the guitar around.

Travis Redding, Matt Moldover, Jay Smith

Inventors: Travis Redding, Matt Moldover, Jay Smith
evelopment cost to date: $100,000
Company: Livid Instruments
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.

Pudding Lane

Last year's contest winners created a historically accurate, 17th-century London environment.

Screenshot from "Pudding Lane Productions, Crytek Off The Map" by Joe Dempsey on YouTube

I'm excited already. There's a contest in the U.K. right now for students to design an explorable online world to the theme of gothic literature. To be precise, the theme is "Terror and Wonder: the Gothic Imagination." My guilty pleasures are Jane Eyre, Bram Stoker's Dracula and "The Cask of Amontillado," so I already can't wait for October, when judges will decide on a winner.

The competition, called Off the Map, provides for free many of the materials developers will need. There's Cryengine, a video game development engine by the German company Crytek, which is free for non-commercial use. In addition, the British Library is offering historic maps and illustrations for reference, as well as free sound files. The sounds include "crashing waves, blustery wind, heavy rain and some eerie screams and cries from a variety of animals."

The contest is open to undergraduate and graduate students in the U.K. who aren't employed full time in the games industry. Here's where you register.

The British Library and its collaborators also held this contest last year, when the challenge was to re-make a historic place. The winners created a digital version of 17th-century London:

XStat

Photograph by Ralph Smith

When bullets or shrapnel strike a soldier, standard first aid calls for stuffing gauze as deep as five inches into a wound and applying pressure. If bleeding hasn’t stopped after three minutes, the old gauze is pulled out—and new gauze shoved in.

There’s room for improvement. Military doctors estimate that, during the most violent years of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, blood loss killed about 90 percent of the wounded that might have otherwise survived with better emergency care. To save more lives, a group of veterans, scientists, and engineers known as RevMedx has created a pocket-sized device called XStat: a faster, more effective way to plug wounds. The polycarbonate syringe slides deep into a wound, such as a bullet track. When a user pushes down on the handle, it deposits dozens of pill-size sponges that expand to stem bleeding. Meanwhile, a substance in the sponges fights infection while clotting blood.

The team is currently seeking FDA approval for XStat, which would allow military medics to add it to their life-saving arsenal. But the battlefield isn’t the only place the device could make an impact. Law enforcement, ambulances, and other emergency responders have shown interest in carrying the device as well. And, with help from Oregon Health and Science University, RevMedx is even developing a version to stop postpartum bleeding. 

Lead inventor: Ken Gregory

Development cost to date: $5 million

Company: RevMedx

Market maturity:•••••

UPDATE: On April 3 (after this issue went to press), the FDA announced it had approved XStat as a first-of-its-kind medical dressing.

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.

Ripe for a Social Science Study

Paramount Pictures

It's the tenth anniversary of the release of Mean Girls. We love that movie! Scientists apparently do, too. I did a Google Scholar search of the phrase and found dozens of books and studies, all published after the release of the movie, examining girl culture, attitudes in the media, and other social science topics.

The reason I, an American woman, love Mean Girls is because it captured and validated so many of my high school experiences. I'm guessing the reason social scientists keep referring to the movie is related. The movie gave scholars—and American culture—a shorthand way of referring to phenomena people knew about, but didn't have a common, popular phrase for before.

Some examples of papers:

Mean Girls Grown Up– Argues that adolescent mean girls phenomena carries over into adulthood sometimes

"Mean Girls or Cultural Stereotypes?" – Are mean girls even real?? And are they really meaner than boys?

"Mean girls and bad boys: Recent research on gender differences in conduct disorder" – Mean girls actually have a psychiatric disorder that's more often associated with boys.

Of course, some studies weren't just alluding to Mean Girls. They directly studied the movie. Many such studies didn't seem to be fans:

"Mean Girls? The Influence of Gender Portrayals in Teen Movies on Emerging Adults' Gender-Based Attitudes and Beliefs" – College kids who watched movies like Mean Girls hold more negative stereotypes about female friendships than their peers who don't watch such movies.

"From invisible to incorrigible: The demonization of marginalized women and girls" – Media and academic attention to "mean girls" phenomena "has resulted in significant backlash against women," including higher arrest and incarceration rates of women even as violent crime rates decreased.

"The effects of viewing physical and relational aggression in the media: Evidence for a cross-over effect" – Viewing clips from Mean Girls primes study volunteers to be more aggressive

Now that a decade has passed since Mean Girls opened, will researchers continue to study and talk about them/it? Maybe so. Just this year, references include a book chapter about Toddlers & Tiaras, that reality TV show about kid beauty pageants; an essay about what girls really need; and a paper about makeovers in teen movies. It seems like mean girls, at least as a meme, are here to stay.

Litter Found on the Seafloor of European Waters

Pham CK et al. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0095839

We hope you liked the Okeanos Explorer livestream as much as we have. We saw shiny things and creepy things, passive things and aggressive things. We've also occasionally seen trash, such as a kitchen glove. For the Okeanos mission, which focused on recording marine life, those were incidental finds. But one recent deep-sea mission sought trash.

The European Union-funded Hotspot Ecosystem Research and Man's Impact on European Seas (HERMIONE) project reviewed data from previous surveys of 32 locations on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. The HERMIONE scientists, a team including marine and geology researchers from several European countries, wanted to see how extensive underwater trash is. Unlike with trash on beaches or floating on the water, data on seafloor litter are harder to come by because underwater missions are expensive and difficult to perform. So this is a rare, comprehensive look at how humans have affected even areas of the ocean that humans have never previously seen. "We were shocked to find that our rubbish has got there before us," one of the HERMIONE researchers, Kerry Howell of Plymouth University in the U.K., said in a statement.

Howell and her colleagues found all of their study locations had some trash. The most litter-filled locations had more than 20 pieces of trash per hectare (about 2.5 acres). The cleanest places were along continental shelves and had just one or two items per hectare. Plastic was the most common litter material the HERMIONE researchers found. Scientists worry about plastic in the ocean because it can release chemicals into the water that are toxic to marine creatures. The HERMIONE researchers also saw a lot of abandoned fishing gear. These stray lines and nets can catch and kill sea life even though their human owners are no longer using them. The researchers even saw clinker, the burnt remnants of the coal that 18th-century steamships used to burn. Steamship crews regularly dumped clinker overboard. It's hung out on the ocean floor since.

The remotest location where HERMIONE found litter was on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 2,000 kilometers (1,242 miles) away from land. The deepest litter HERMIONE found sat 4,500 meters (1.2 miles) below the surface of the sea.

The HERMIONE team published its findings today in the journal PLOS ONE.

Even for the New HPV Test, You Still Need These

Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR

There's a new, high-tech alternative to the Pap smear, the cervical swab-based test that women are supposed to get regularly to check for cancer. But some health groups say relying on the new test alone could lead to doctors not catching certain cases of cancer, while over-treating young women who might otherwise fight off human papillomavirus infections before they cause cancer. Who to believe? A new story at The Verge lays out the science in detail. Thanks, guys!

The new test, called the cobas HPV test, looks for the DNA from the human papillomavirus. It detects 14 types of HPV, including the two, HPV 16 and HPV 18, that cause about 70 percent of all cervical cancers. In contrast, doctors conduct Pap smears by examining cells collected from the cervix under a microscope, to see if any of the cells look abnormal. It's a real contrast between old and new. Physician George Papanicolaou, AKA Dr. Pap, first had the idea for the Pap smear in the 1920s. DNA testing, on the other hand, only became accurate enough and cheap enough for regular exams over the past decade.

Because the two tests look for different things, they each have their pros and cons. The DNA test could catch women who are infected with the high-risk HPV types, but whose Pap smears still appear normal. That happens to about in about 1 in 10 women with normal Pap smears, The Verge reports. On the other hand, not all HPV infections lead to cancer. Most adults actually get HPV once they become sexually active and fight off the infection successfully without even knowing it. Opponents to replacing Pap smears with cobas HPV tests worry that the DNA tests could lead to unnecessary biopsies, yowch. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which approved the cobas HPV test as Pap smear alternative this week, says it has data showing this doesn't happen, The Verge reports. 

Now it's up to doctors' organizations to develop new guidelines to take the new FDA ruling into account. After all, the FDA doesn't offer recommendations ("You should do this") only regulatory approval ("You are allowed to do this if you want"). Check out The Verge for more details about the cobas HPV test's journey to approval, as well as the recommendations that cobas-test-only opponents support.

P.S. In case you were curious, both Pap smears and the cobas HPV test require cervical swabs, so from a patient point of view, they're equally uncomfortable. The cobas HPV test is more expensive, ranging in price from $80 to $100 to the Pap smear's $40, the Associated Press reports.

[The Verge]