Dmitry Rogozin

Wikimedia Commons

You may be aware that there's some love lost right now between the United States and Russia, and since NASA relies on Russia to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station, things are a bit awkward. And by awkward, I mean NASA has severed all ties with Russia besides what the agency needs to get to the ISS. But with the U.S. imposing sanctions against the country for its actions in Crimea, is ISS transport next to go?

Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin engaged in either a serious threat, or a prime example of saber-rattling, when he tweeted this:

And later added this (the punchline is "with a trampoline"): 

Russia, it seems, absolutely could do this--but they'd be taking a serious economic hit in the process. As the Washington Post points out, Russia will soon be getting $457.9 million for its services, and that's money the country's aerospace industry would rather not leave on the table. Almost sad, really: I'm all for the idea of a gigantic space trampoline built by NASA.

[Washington Post]

We'll probably never meet a real-life alien.

Flickr/BFLV

Given that we are unlikely to be visiting an exoplanet any time soon, astronomers have been contemplating whether it might be possible to detect indications of simple life – a biosignature – from a distance. Many think that the strongest case for extraterrestrial life would be the discovery of oxygen and methane on the same body. They also think that the likelihood of finding such a biosignature is greatest on an Earth-like planet that is orbiting a sun-like star.

Astronomers who hope to search for these biosignatures in expolanets, however, may be in for a disappointment. New research finds that there is no way we can confirm that such a signature is actually the result of extraterrestrial life. The problem, it turns out, is that an exomoon’s atmosphere will be indistinguishable from the one of the planet it orbits.

Finding E.T.

Searching for extraterrestrial life is no easy feat. Astronomers have to first search for a star that has planets. Then they have to ensure that there is at least one planet that orbits this star in the habitable zone, which is a region around the star in which we might expect liquid water. Finally, they have to record the faint light that originated from the bright star and was reflected off the exoplanet after having passed through its atmosphere.

This faint light, even if only a handful of photons, when compared with light from the parent star is enough to give some indication of the chemicals in the atmosphere of this planet. Life as we know it creates two gases that wouldn’t naturally be present in an atmosphere at the same time – oxygen from photosynthesis and methane from microbes.

Both oxygen and methane can be created independently by non-living processes, so their individual presence is of little interest. What scientists are looking for is both of them in the atmosphere of a single body. If these reactive gases are not constantly replenished by living things, they will react with each other, creating carbon dioxide and water. As a result, we should not observe them in the same atmosphere without a large, living source.

False hopes

In the new study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hanno Rein at the University of Toronto and his colleagues wanted to know whether anything else could mimic this biosignature. While working through potential false positives, which are signals that would show signs of life but in reality there isn’t life, he found a big one: exomoons. Rein found that observers on Earth will not be able to tell whether the signs of methane and oxygen originate from a single celestial body, or come from two nearby worlds.

This could happen because, just as Earth has a moon, there is a chance that exoplanets will have exomoons. While we have yet to find an exomoon, looking at the various moons of our solar system’s planets suggests that exomoons ought to be plentiful. However, even if they are plentiful, chances are that exomoons will be difficult to spot.

If both these celestial bodies have an atmosphere and in their atmospheres the exoplanet has oxygen and the exomoon has methane (or vice-versa), then an observer on Earth will record an oxygen-methane biosignature. This might seems like evidence for life, whereas in reality both these gases are being produced by non-living processes on two separate celestial bodies. Since they can’t react with each other, they will be able to build up to high levels.

Futile technology

“Even if we somehow developed ways of finding exomoons, we won’t be able to tease out the difference between their atmospheres given the limited amount of light that reaches us,” Rein said. This fundamental limit on the light that reaches us is called photo noise.

Rein limited his analysis to biosignatures coming from Earth-like planets orbiting a sun-like star, which is the combination that astronomers are betting has the greatest chance of hosting life. The American space agency NASA recently announced that they had found such an Earth-sized planet less than 500 light years away, although the star it orbits isn’t sun-like.

While their analysis might seem quite restrictive and involves a number of assumptions, it does not really matter: interpretation of biosignatures needs to be flawless. According to David Cullen at the University of Cranfield, “This study seems to highlight a real issue that will needed to be considered, along with other issues, when interpreting biosignatures.”

Rein himself was surprised to find such a limitation. However, he sees the results of his work in positive light. “Finding such a limitation tells us what we should focus on in the future. Rather than a restricted search for Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars, we should broaden our search,” he said.

What this research shows is a need to move away from a highly focused search for extraterrestrial life that is currently in place. Rein points out that the chances of eliminating such false positive biosignatures increases as the star becomes dimmer or larger planets are considered. Perhaps alien life is not just unlike that on Earth, but it is also resides in a place that is unlike Earth.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Gallup

Gallup is out with a new poll and accompanying map measuring responses to this question: "Regardless of whether you will move, if you had the opportunity, would you like to move to another state, or would you rather remain in your current state?"

Big insights from the geographic misery watch? Illinois residents would rather not be residents, with 50 percent (!) saying they'd move if given the chance; 49 percent of Connecticut residents said the same. On the other end of the spectrum, folks are pretty content in Montana, Hawaii, and Maine, with a relatively slim 23 percent in each state saying they'd like to move on. Here, again via Gallup, is a table of the highest and lowest percentages:

Gallup

Gallup also measured the percentage of residents who said they think they will leave in the next year, which, as you might expect, broadly reflect the states where people already want to move. When asked why they planned to move, here's what they said:

Those saying it is at least somewhat likely they will move were asked to say why, in their own words. The biggest factor residents give for planning to move is for work or business reasons -- the 50-state average is 31%. This is followed by family or other social reasons (19%), weather or location (11%), and then seeking a better quality of life or change (9%).

You can read more about the poll's methodology over at Gallup's site. But only if you feel like moving is the right decision for you at this moment in your life.

[Gallup]

Above: Drone-captured video of the April 30, 2014 train derailment in Lynchburg, Virginia. Via WSET.com - ABC13.

Yesterday's multi-car train derailment in Lynchburg underscores what Dan Baum wrote last year in Popular Science: The railroad that keeps our 21^st century economy on the move is still running on 19^th century technology. “Trains carry 40 percent of America's freight as well as 650 million passengers a year, and in general, their safety record is good and getting better. Most of the 2,000 accidents a year are minor, ” Baum wrote in January 2013. But...

Rail operators have known for decades that technological fixes could prevent rail disasters caused by the kind of human errors committed at Macdona [Texas] and Graniteville [South Carolina], but they have been dragging their feet because those fixes are expensive and complicated. Congress is now making them get it done. But the railroads could also cheaply and humanely achieve big safety leaps simply by improving the working conditions of engineers—something they're even less enthusiastic about doing.

There are no reports of injuries or deaths from this latest accident in Lynchburg, where according to the National Transportation Safety Board, 13 cars of a 105-car freight train derailed near the James River in mid-afternoon. One witness told local TV news that he heard a very loud boom, then saw thick smoke along with flames that seemed to shoot as high as where he was standing: on the 19th floor of a nearby office building. According to the train's operator, CSX, the train originated in North Dakota's Bakken shale region and was carrying crude oil to Yorktown, Virginia.

Three cars are laying in the river, and an estimated 50,000 gallons of crude oil are “missing.”

“Some of that burned off, but we do know that crude oil got into the water: We've seen oil sheens [on the water] and on the river banks,” as well as fire on the river's surface yesterday, says Bill Street, CEO of the James River Association.“We're really alarmed and troubled,” he says, but not surprised, because 80 percent of the hazardous materials in Virginia are stored, transported, or used along the James River. “It could happen another day as well. We need to have adequate safeguards in place.”

The James River on fire, April 30, 2014.

Image captured shortly after several rail tankers of crude oil derailed in Lynchburg, Virginia, on April 30, 2014. Flames are spreading onto the surface of the river, suggesting that oil is spilling into the river.

Upper James RIVERKEEPER/James River Association

It's not clear yet how this spill will affect the ecology of the James River or the Chesapeake Bay, says Street. “We're in the middle of a flood right now, which will dilute the impacts on the one hand,” he says, “but also make the effects harder to assess, as well as making containment and cleanup more difficult.”

The timing of the accident could not be much worse for some animals. “We're right during the spawning season for migratory fish, particularly herring and shad, which have low population levels already,” says Street. “Their eggs and the small fish when they hatch—those are the most vulnerable life stages. So we're worried about what the crude oil might do to that."

The derailed cars in Lynchburg appear to be DOT-111 tankers.

DOT-111 tankers have been moving hazardous liquids on the rails for decades, so unsurprisingly they're found at many rail accidents--which, as Baum wrote, are more often than not caused by human errors, not equipment malfunctions. But the National Transportation Safety Board has known since 1991 of serious safety flaws that can turn DOT-111 tankers into bombs when accidents do happen, as the Associated Press reported last year:“Its steel shell is too thin to resist puncture in accidents. The ends are especially vulnerable to tears from couplers that can fly up after ripping off between cars. And unloading valves and other exposed fittings on the tops of tankers can also break during rollovers.”

Exploding DOT-111 tankers carrying crude oil were involved in the 2013 disaster in Lac-Mégantic, Canada, where more than 30 buildings in the center of town were destroyed and over 40 people killed. The DOT-111's flaws in are so notorious, in fact, that an entire web site, The DOT-111 Reader, is devoted to reporting on its mishaps and demanding action.

Garden tomatoes!

National Museum of Natural History

In the study, the researchers found that neighboring tomato plants exposed to these chemical cries for help contained a substance in their leaves called HexVic (or (Z)-3-hexenyl-vicianoside, if you must). They also found that when HexVic is fed to cutworms, which are the larvae of a moth, it makes them less likely to gain weight and survive.

Further analysis showed that HexVic was produced from the conversion of infested plants' (Z)-3-hexenol emissions, something the scientists confirmed by labeling the latter chemical with a radioactive substance that also showed up in the former.

Other plants like sorghum and rice can produce HexVic, and may be using a similar technique to defend themselves, the scientists found. "This kind of selective uptake of one specific compound and then conversion into a compound that is directly toxic to the caterpillar itself is unusual – it’s nice they show the signal is replicated across really diverse plants," Purdue University researcher Ian Kaplan, who wasn't involved in the study, told Chemistry World.

The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and co-authored by Kenji Matsui from Japan's Yamaguchi University.

[Chemistry World]

The umbrella prototype

A sensor measures raindrops hitting the umbrellas canvas, and transmits that data to a smartphone.

Rolf Hut / Delft University of Technology

This is how it works, as noted by the BBC: 

Surprisingly, there are now fewer rain gauges than in years past, because they are expensive to maintain, and "people who do operational water management or do research into hydrology... don't have the access to the data they used to," he told the BBC. In fact, all the rain gauges in the world capable of providing real-time data would cover an area significantly smaller than a soccer field, according to NASA scientist Chris Kidd. 

Hut said he hopes so-called "smart umbrellas" could solve that problem in the future, providing real-time info to scientist to help "improve our ability to predict urban flooding and take measures when things are going bad."

[BBC]

Dearman Engine

The Dearman Engine Company

Right now, as many as 250,000 semi-trucks are hauling refrigerated trailers full of frozen foods, fresh vegetables, and other perishable goods along U.S. roads. Yet such vehicles burn about 25 percent more fuel than unrefrigerated trucks.

At fault is what industry buffs call forgotten polluters: auxiliary “donkey” engines that chill a trailer’s cargo and cumulatively emit unknown tons of carbon and pollutants each year.

In attempt to curb fuel consumption and reduce pollution—especially in developing countries, where consumer demand is driving a rapid increase in the number of refrigerated vehicles hitting roads—inventor Peter Dearman has developed a cryogenic engine system. Dearman’s contraption absorbs the heat of goods inside a trailer with liquid nitrogen, boiling the liquid, and then uses the expanding gas to power devices that further chill cargo.

A fully functional prototype is scheduled for road testing in the United Kingdom this July. If all goes as planned, Dearman says the industry might soon kick the need for donkey engines.

How It Works:

1) Factories compress air into a -321°F liquid. (Ideally, renewable energy drives this process to create a carbon-neutral, zero-emission cryogen.) The liquid air is pumped into a Dearman-refrigerated truck's storage vessel for about 62 percent the cost of diesel fuel, and a full tank provides about eight hours of operation.

2) The ambient heat of cargo boils the liquid air back into a gas. The super-cold air moves through a heat exchanger, providing about two-thirds of a truck’s refrigeration capacity.

3) The pressurized air feeds into the Dearman engine to drive pistons that power fans and a compressor.

4) The compressor chills a refrigerant, which pumps to a second heat exchanger and provides the remaining one-third of refrigeration capacity. The system is estimated to harness about 40 percent of the energy used to liquefy the air as it boils into a gas—roughly the same efficiency as a diesel-fueled engine—yet it emits only cold air.

Lead inventor: Peter Dearman

Development cost to date: $8.3 million

Company: The Dearman Engine Company

Market Maturity:•••••

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

This article is a web-only story accompanying the May 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Morpher

Photograph by Ralph Smith

Jeff Woolf was riding down a narrow London street when an irate driver clipped his bike. The car’s fender snagged Woolf’s pedal, flinging him headlong into a curb. As ambulance workers triaged Woolf’s broken body, they marveled that his skull had remained in one piece; his helmet, they said, had saved his life. Twenty years later, Woolf saw few London bike share riders wearing helmets, so he invented a model that’s as handy as a bike itself. Called the Morpher, his creation is a full-scale helmet that folds to the size of a textbook.

Woolf’s timing couldn’t be better. The duration of bike rides in the U.S. has more than doubled since 2001, trips are up 25 percent, and cities around the world—Chicago, Dublin, Montreal, and more—are launching or expanding bike share programs. Yet while helmets can reduce the risk of head injuries by 85 percent, less than half of American cyclists wear them.

A traditional helmet’s bulk is a major turnoff for casual riders. (Around 83 percent of bike share users cite inconvenience as the reason.) What’s more, their domed shape makes it difficult to fit more than a few into vending machines near bike share racks—the main reason such devices are found nowhere. The Morpher addresses both problems by collapsing to just 1.4 inches thick (the model here collapses to 2.5 inches). It’s compact enough to fit in a laptop bag and stack efficiently in a kiosk. The latest prototype has passed European-grade safety tests at a factory, and Woolf expects the next design to meet U.S. standards as soon as this summer. 

PROTECTION:

Hard plastic and foam, like that found in traditional helmets, protects a wearer’s head.

TRANSFORMATION:

An internal, flexible layer links segments of foam, acting as a hinge and allowing the helmet to fold in half.

STORAGE:

Neodymium magnets inside the helmet lock the Morpher in a closed position.

Lead inventor: Jeff Woolf

Development cost to date: $400,000

Company: Morpher Helmet Company Ltd.

Market maturity:•••••

Click here to see a thermal radar with omniscient view, a robotic exoskeleton, and more from our 2014 Invention Awards.

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

Ganymede

A diagram of our solar system's largest moon.

NASA/JPL

For all of those unfamiliar with reference, probably including most of the scallywag youth who don't read newspaper comics, Vance is speaking of the moon's resemblance to a character in the "Blondie" cartoon, who is fond of multi-tiered sandwiches. But enough about sandwiches. Except now I want one. 

It used to be generally thought that our solar system's largest moon contained an ocean with ice on bottom and top. 

To come up with the "club sandwich" result, scientists included the presence of salts thought to reside in Ganymede's ocean, and modeled how they would react under pressure. Analysis suggested salt-rich water could sink to the bottom--and form multiple layers of different kinds of ice.

The kind of ice one usually thinks about, on Earth, is called Ice I. It is the least dense kind. But crushing pressure on Ganymede could create up to three layers of ice, with different kinds in each. The densest and heaviest ice on Ganymede is called "Ice VI." (This reminds me of "ice-nine" in Kurt Vonnegut's hilarious book Cat's Cradle.) The types of ice differ in their crystal structure--the molecules in ice III and ice VI are respectively more tightly packed together. While all earthly ice is ice-one and forms hexagonal crystals, ice III and VI form tetragonal crystals. 

Here's the coolest part, I think--upward snow. I'll let NASA explain:

Scientists think that the interaction of water and rock could possibly support life; in the previous model, it was assumed ice coated the moon's rock bottom. But no longer. "This is good news for Ganymede," Vance said. "Its ocean is huge, with enormous pressures, so it was thought that dense ice had to form at the bottom of the ocean. When we added salts to our models, we came up with liquids dense enough to sink to the sea floor."

Behold: an aquarium than can be driven by a fish. In February, we saw "Fish on Wheels," a water-filled vehicle that allows our finned friends to move about on dry land. Digital cameras on the device sense which direction the fish is swimming in, and a tiny onboard computer moves the whole contraption thattaway. The creator, Studio diip, just announced a Kickstarter to fund the project--they're looking for €40,000 (slightly over $55,000, as of May 2).

At last, your own fish can drive.

For the past three weeks, we've been following an incredible livestream of the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, filmed from a submersible operated by researchers aboard the Okeanos Explorer. The expedition, led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, ended this week. Using the sub's high-def camera, the scientists captured footage of parts of the ocean floor never before seen by humans, including ancient shipwrecks, unidentified species, and rare geology.

We'll have much more coverage of this expedition next week, so stay tuned. But in the meantime, enjoy these animated GIFs of deep-ocean creatures that wound up in the sub's LED beams—many of them likely experiencing bright light for the first time.

Note: To avoid crashing anyone's browser (or our servers) we've split these 10 GIFs over four pages. Choose single-page view at your own risk.

This is a dumbo octopus using its ear-like fins to swim. According to NOAA, this coiled-tentacle posture has never before been witnessed in this species.

Here's another view of the same dumbo octopus.

This was an exciting moment. A bright red creature—a Humboldt squid?—swam right past the sub's cameras before disappearing into the darkness.

Here's a gorgeous sea cucumber.

A rat tail fish suddenly realizes it has an audience.

A jellyfish swims in a current.

Hello, fish. Behold human technology.

A little red shrimp swims away from the sub.

At first, the researchers couldn't tell what this creature was, only that it was rapidly fleeing the ROV. Turns out to have been some kind of ray or skate.

Here, oil naturally bubbles up from the ocean floor amid sea urchins and mussels.

Ramendranarayan Roy, prince of Bhawal estate

A couple of drones and this may have never happened.

public domain, 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.

The Unmanned Maiden's Tale

At the CHI 2014 conference on human-computer action, noted fiction author Margaret Atwood piloted a drone hands-free. 

@MargaretAtwood controlling a drone with here brain #chi2014pic.twitter.com/S8JlN2JPpu

— Albrecht Schmidt (@albrechtschmidt) April 29, 2014

It's a neat trick, but it's one we've definitely seen before.

Robot Lifters For The Future

Unmanned vehicles appear a few times in the House Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces section of the 2015 defense authorization bill. If passed, it would allow other agencies or companies to, with permission from the Department of Defense, use military airspace for drones. Another section requests a new missile for Reaper drones, probably like this one. The robotic heart of the bill concerns cargo drones. It reads: "the committee encourages the Department to implement a program of record for this unmanned cargo helicopter system as part of the fiscal year 2016 budget submission." This won't be the first military cargo drone in use, but it means the future will be less about testing drones to carry freight and more about relying on them to do so.

Mountain Roads And Mechanical Observers

This short video by David Chen shows a mountain road from above. It's a pretty animated scene, a long portrait of the world from above. The rotors visibly identify the drone as a quadcopter. In the future, roadside drone portraits could become the polaroids of travel photography.

Earning Stripes Guarding Tigers

At the Panna Tiger Reserve in India, officials started testing drones as a way to watch and protect their endangered charges. These drones have a 6-foot wing span and a range of 25 to 40 miles. They can stay in air for 45 minutes at an altitude of 650 feet. This isn't the first high-tech challenge for tiger protection at the Panna Reserve. Last October, hackers tried to break into the emails that contained tiger location information. 

Who You Gonna Call? Goosebusters!

The "Goosebuster" is a quadcopter with a mission to scare geese away from beaches so their poop doesn't pose a health risk. Fun fact: goose poop poses a health risk! More power to anyone who can turn flying a robot at birds into a job.

Geese, man. Send the frickin' drones at 'em.

Legal Storm Chaser

After a tornado tore through Arkansas, a journalist used a drone to document damage in the tornado's path. The FAA is investigating the legality of that drone use. Drone journalism exists in a legal grey area, where the free speech rights of the press clash with the FAA's efforts to crack down on illegal commercial uses of flying robots.

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

Fork-tailed drongo

Dick Daniels / Wikimedia Commons

While fork-tailed drongos (Dicrurus adsimilis) often alert other animals to the presence of predators with their alarm calls--which can send creatures like meerkats scurrying away, for example, mid-meal--they also use false alarms to get animals to abandon their food, after which they swoop in and eat it. Their own species' alarm call often does the job, but if it doesn't, they switch to the call of another species, often that of the type of animal they are trying to rob. They can mimic many birds and even mammals like meerkats. 

Drongos get as much as 23 percent of their daily food using this type of trickery, according to a study published this week in Science.

In the study, the researchers found that by switching up their calls, the drongos were able to keep fooling duped targets. If they kept using the same call, the other animals would soon learn better, perhaps viewing the drongos as the "boy who cried wolf." But drongos are clever enough to know this, so they learn to sing in many languages, as it were. 

Above: Acoustic engineers tested alert sounds for EVs against more common street sounds like a “big truck” or a common automobile (“Mitsu 1156 rpm”), to learn which were most effective and audible without being irritating. Credit: Quartz/Delta

We rely heavily upon our hearing to stay safe from moving vehicles. Combustion-powered vehicles make plenty of noise, of course. But electric vehicles (EVs) are so quiet at slow speeds that pedestrians and bicyclists can't hear them coming. As a solution, manufacturers are adding artificial sound options to EVs, but how can they be sure those sounds will be the best choices for alerting passers-by?

Enter acoustic science. Quartz reports today that Danish tech firm Delta has created an assortment of potential EV sounds, and collected data on which are most effective at being audible to those who need to hear them (perceptibility), without creating noise pollution for everyone else (irritation). That metric was termed “suitability." It's not simply a question of louder volume, or decibel level: sometimes subtle qualities like sound frequency are what make a noise distinct to our ears.

In the U.S., EV warning sounds are not yet required by law. The European Union is in the process of approving legislation that will require EVs to have “pedestrian alert systems” by 2019.

This Renault Zoe EV allows UK drivers to select from one of three chordlike trilling noises, which are activated at speeds of 1-18 mph:

These soothing sci-fi hums gratify my inner nerd. (“Wide shot: In the distance, a sleek red craft floating three feet above the sand speeds across the tawny desert landscape...”) Delta's acoustic research may help determine if they're also effective at alerting passers-by to watch out for my EV.

[Quartz]

Above: Scientists recently linked MERS to a virus in camels, according to this CNN report in late April 2014.

A patient in Indiana is ill with the first U.S. case of a serious infectious disease from the Middle East. The American, a health care worker, left the Arabian Peninsula on April 24 for London, and arrived in the U.S. on April 27, less than a week ago.

The Centers for Disease Control confirmed this afternoon that the Indiana patient is infected with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). He was health care worker in Riyadh, according to the CDC, and most likely became infected while doing that work. The Indiana patient is being given “supportive care” for fever, shortness of breath, and other symptoms, Assistant Surgeon General Dr. Anne Schuchat said on Friday afternoon. Currently “no anti-viral drug targets MERS-coronavirus,” she stated.

The agency is actively looking for those who may have shared transportation or otherwise been in contact with him.

Dr. Schuchat told reporters that the CDC is keeping the name of the patient and his location confidential. (Presumably to preserve the patient's privacy and public calm, although neither were stated directly.) The agency is cooperating with the World Health Organization as well as health officials in other nations on this investigation, she said.

“In 2014 these new diseases are just a plane ride away. It's crucial that we cooperate,” said Dr. Schuchat. “We need to work together effectively, and that's what we're doing right now.”

There was an upsurge of reported MERS cases in March, although Dr. Schuchat told reporters that this mirrored a similar increase in 2013, which suggests a possible seasonal pattern to the outbreaks, rather than a mutation or other change in the virus.

MERS has similarities to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, which broke out in 2003-2004 in Asia and eventually spread to over two dozen countries. Both diseases are caused by a coronavirus, so named for the crown-like spikes on its surface. Their symptoms aren't easily distinguished from other respiratory illnesses: fever, cough, shortness of breath. Both are virulent; SARS had an overall mortality rate of 15 percent, and greater than 50 percent in those aged 65 and older. MERS, which was identified in the Middle East in 2012, so far has an estimated mortality rate of 30 percent. Of around 400 known cases of MERS to date, over 100 people have died. But this number may change as more cases are identified, particularly those where there are no visible symptoms.

The median age of people with MERS is around 51 years old, Dr. Schuchat told reporters, and the disease tends to be worse in the elderly and those who are vulnerable due to underlying medical conditions.

Popular Scienceblogger Jason Tetro wrote last week about important differences between MERS and SARS that make the former less of a threat, however, including that "SARS was easily transmitted in the environment while MERS continues to require close contact with an infected person or animal."

Coming to Term

San Luis Obispo County California

As Janet Vertesi writes at Time, she only bought items with cash, as credit card purchases of things like maternity clothes can give you away to marketing algorithms--"identifying a single pregnant woman is worth as much as knowing the age, sex and location of up to 200 people," she noted. She also told family members not to say anything about the upcoming baby to her on social media, which is moniored for that kind of thing. Surfing the web isn't safe either due to cookies and other tracking software, so she download Tor, which routes traffic through foreign servers, and is known for illicit activity. 

Of course you cannot control what everyone else does. Here's one example that Vertesi brings up to show how hard it is to "opt out":

Perhaps a bit of an overreaction, but Vertesi's quest--or anybody's--to opt out requires extreme measures. As she explained, internet companies stand to gain from your information, and perceived privacy is "sleight of hand." This companies "hope that users will not only accept the trade-off between 'free' services and private information, but will forget that there is a trade-off in the first place," she added. 

In related news, the Obama administration released a report on Thursday (May 1) warning of the potential for abuse of private information by data brokers. 

[Time]

SolePower

Illustration by Lucas Nene/Sole Power

15 miles: the distance you must walk to charge your smartphone using a new shoe insole that stores energy from footsteps as electricity

322 body lengths in a second: the speed of the world's fastest land animal, relative to size

57.14 cups of regular brewed coffee: the amount of caffeine it would take to kill our intern

132 people: have been sickened in a recent Salmonella outbreak linked to pet bearded dragons

A bearded dragon

André Karwath via Wikimedia Commons

50,000 gallons: the amount of crude oil that is "missing" after a train derailment in Lynchburg, Virginia

The James River on fire, April 30, 2014.

Image captured shortly after several rail tankers of crude oil derailed in Lynchburg, Virginia, on April 30, 2014. Flames are spreading onto the surface of the river, suggesting that oil is spilling into the river.

Upper James RIVERKEEPER/James River Association

$8.3 million: the cost to develop a cryogenic engine powered by heat 

1.4 inches thick: the collapsed size of this folding bicycle helmet (see all of our 2014 Invention Award winners here)

Morpher

Photograph by Ralph Smith

50 percent: the portion of Illinois residents would live anywhere else if they could

3: the number of ice layers that may be in the "club sandwich"-like ocean of Jupiter's moon Ganymede

Overall Winner: Jupiter with lo and Ganymede

Damian Peach's awesome detail on two of Jupiter's moons in this photo taken from Barbados clinched him the overall win.

Damian Peach

Historical Derby data courtesy Kentucky Derby Museum

Katie Peek

Click here for a larger version of this infographic.

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