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Game Consoles, Meet Your Competition

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A new way to stream
Steam Machines are compact PCs that deliver videogames to your television the same way an Apple TV or Roku delivers movies. 1. iBuyPower SBX. Price: $500. 2. Maingear SPARK. Price: not set. 3. Gigabyte BRIX Pro. Price: $450. 4. Alienware Steam Machine. Price: from $479.
Photograph by Sam Kaplan

An Xbox One or PlayStation 4 has nothing on a gaming PC. Towers pack so much video memory and such powerful graphics chips that they can render details meticulous enough (smoke, shadows, sunlight) to make a console choke. But with power comes problems. PCs can be large, hot, and loud—not exactly what you want in the living room. For that, look to Steam Machines, a new breed of computer that delivers PC gaming from the body of a console.

The boxes run the new SteamOS, an interface that makes browsing and buying games as simple as picking a movie on Netflix. (It’s a couch-potato version of Steam’s desktop remote game-delivery service.) Then there’s the hardware: Even the smallest Steam Machine has a top-shelf laptop graphics chip that, while powerful, runs efficiently enough to stay cool without a lot of fans. A console like the PS4, by comparison, is based on a chip that’s been in production for a year or more and is therefore a generation or two behind.

With the systems in place, all that remains is for SteamOS to deliver a killer game library, and right now it’s only partway there. Currently, about 400 of the nearly 2,900 titles for which Steam owns licenses will play on the SteamOS, a consequence of its underlying Linux code. But Crytek, creators of the popular Crysis series, will include full Linux support in future titles, and other companies are likely to follow suit. Until that happens, several Steam Machine manufacturers will allow their boxes to run both Steam and Windows—a stopgap to please even the most hard-core gamers.

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









Some Deeper Thoughts About GIFs

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Figgy Likes Watermelon

Ever thought of animated GIFs as slang? Or as message-board replacements for gestures in in-person conversations? I've never thought so deeply about GIFs, either. These cool insights come from a recent interview Museum of the Moving Image curator Jason Eppink gave to the U.S. Library of Congress' "The Signal" blog.

Earlier this year, Eppink put together an exhibit of reaction GIFs, based on feedback he got after posting on Reddit, "I want to engage Reddit to collectively curate and define a 'canon' of reaction GIFs." Homer Simpson disappearing into the bushes : the Internet :: Shakespeare : English literature.

You should visit The Signal for the full interview, but here were some of my favorite quotes from Eppink, who has curated a few exhibits with GIFs.

On why GIFs are made and shared without attribution to their original makers, and why everyone is okay with that:

We have a bias towards authorship when it comes to images because we're transitioning from a world where image production was materially expensive. We expect the image to have an author because of the fundamental relationship of authorship to the economics of producing cultural artifacts. But today images are as cheap and prolific as the air that we utter our words with.

On GIFs and copyright law:

I suspect we'll see case law made in the next five years affirming that animated GIFs are fair use.

On the idea that GIFs are Real Art now that they've appeared in a museum:

Artists have been working with GIFs practically since the format's inception, and that's a significant and often overlooked story.

Sadly, "The Reaction GIF: Moving Image as Gesture" exhibit is now over, but the canon lives on on Eppink's website.

 

[The Signal]








A Simple Solar Rover

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Dan Bracaglia

Don’t let NASA monopolize robotic exploration of the solar system. Using a couple of gear motors, solar panels, and leftover LEGOs, you can build a sunshine-powered robot that ambles around a strange landscape: your backyard. Obstacles such as rocks and curious children can’t be avoided, since there’s no software or sensors to control the steering, but this project is a fun introduction to solar-powered electronics.

Materials:

  • Two gear motors
  • Two solar panels
  • Assorted LEGO pieces
  • Cyanoacrylate glue
  • Hookup wire

Tools:

  • Soldering iron
  • Wire cutter

Instructions:

  1. Use the LEGOs to build a rover frame to support the gear motors, solar panels, and four wheels. (Note: Wheels 2 inches or more in diameter are best for traversing a yard.)
  2. Glue your rover chassis together, but not the wheels—they need to move!
  3. Attach a wheel to each gear motor. You may need to glue the inner axis to the drum of the motor.
  4. Mount the gear motors, one to a side, on the rear of the chassis using hookup wire. Loop wire around each motor, and carefully twist the ends together to secure everything to the rover’s chassis.
  5. Join the solar panels together at their edges with glue, or tie them together with a rubber band.
  6. Solder one solar panel to the right-rear gear motor. Solder the second solar panel to the left gear motor with the polarity reversed—wire the positive solar panel to the black motor wire, and the negative solar panel to the red motor wire.
  7. Release the rover into the wild. In bright sunlight, your bot should scoot along at about 2 feet per minute.

Source info and URLs:

Approximate time to build this project: 3 hours

Cost: About $50

Difficulty: 2/5

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








The Week In Drones: Dragon Boats, Graffiti Art, And More

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A Dragon Boat
Frank Vincentz, via Wikimedia Commons

Here's a roundup of the week's top drone news: highlights from the military, commercial, non-profit, and recreational applications of unmanned aircraft.

New Drone Joins Old Battlefield

The war in Afghanistan may be winding down for American forces, but they're getting a new unmanned ally. The United States Marine Corps just deployed five new RQ-21 Blackjack drones to Afghanistan. The Blackjack is an evolution and an improvement over the earlier ScanEagle, with a longer wingspan and the ability to carry bigger, better, heavier cameras or communications relays. This early deployment to an actual war will let the Marines test the new drone in a practical environment, so that future versions will better meet military needs.

Catching A Blackjack Drone Aboard A Navy Ship
Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Sabrina Fine, U.S. Navy

Guarding Ports

In Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, two drones are going to be flying security cameras over four ports. From Arabian Business:

The security drone’s camera is fitted with an integrated GPS auto-pilot system offering position holding, altitude lock and stable hovering. 

The camera can capture full HD video 1080p at 30fps and 14 megapixel still photographs and comes equipped with its own Wi-Fi network for data transfer.

While this fails to reveal the specific type of drone, drones can offer a lot for security and law enforcement. In this case, flying between ships is an easier and faster patrol than going on foot.

Spray painting Canvas

Call it Dronesy. By attaching a spray can to a drone, graffiti artist Katus has found a way to create art while remaining out of sight. The problem: the control system still isn't great, and the drone's rotors create a wind that blows down on the aerosol spray. For now, the concept is art enough. In the future, better controls and better drones could let anyone mark up their neighborhood from the comfort of their own home.

Watch a video of the spray-painting drone below:

Watching Dragons

Well, dragon boats, at least. Freelance author Robert Rath is based in Hong Kong and took this picture of what appears to be a DJI Phantom drone doing some filming at Hong Kong's Dragon Boat Carnival.

Licenses For Films

In response to a petition from filmmakers, the FAA announced it is open to considering allowing some commercial uses of drones before the rules for unmanned aircraft are finalized in 2020. Presently, drones are governed by a hodge-podge of local regulations and old rules regarding model airplanes, which allow wide discretion for hobbyist use and narrow limitations for business that want to use drones. True to form, the FAA is placing safety at the heart of their considerations. The release reads, in part:

To receive the exemptions, the firms must show that their UAS operations will not adversely affect safety, or provide at least an equal level of safety to the rules from which they seek the exemption.  They would also need to show why granting the exemption would be in the public interest.  

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








DIY Space Suit Chosen For Suborbital And Supersonic Flights

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Tourists, no need to worry about picking an outfit for your suborbital flight—this flexible, comfortable suit has you covered. Final Frontier Design (FFD), a private design firm based in Brooklyn, has partnered with Starfighters Aerospace to further develop and optimize its 3G space suit for intra-vehicular activity (meaning launch, re-entry, and cabin activities) on Starfighters' F-104 supersonic jets that also fly suborbital missions. The sleek, single-layer 3G suit won a Popular Science Invention Award in 2013. Currently, Starfighters' jets only go on research and training sessions, but commercial flights aren't too far away. 

Traveling to space was once an experience reserved for selected astronauts only. With Virgin Galactic recently cleared by the FAA for commercial space flights, a recreational trip to the vacuum is no longer an unreachable dream. But tourists, who pay big money for their tickets to space, have thus far had limited space suit options. Most modern suits are heavy, bulky, and expensive—about $200,000 each.

Fit For Space Teaser
The metal neck ring of the second-generation (2G) space suit proved uncomfortable for a wearer while lying down, so Southern [right] and Moiseev [left] plan to integrate a helmet with a flip-up visor into the 3G suit.
Sam Kaplan

Since meeting at a 2007 astronaut glove design competition, costume fabricator Ted Southern and space-suit builder Nikolay Moiseev have worked together to build lightweight, reliable, and relatively cheap space suits for suborbital flights. The duo launched a Kickstarter campaign—successfully funded in July 2012—to help them complete a prototype for the 3G space suit, which has passed NASA's flight certification test.

FFD has received three NASA contracts to continue development of the single-layered pressurized suits. With the new Starfighters Aerospace deal, FFD will have the chance to test its 3G suit on the largest commercially available supersonic jet. “If our suits can work in the cockpit of an F-104, they can work in most any space vehicle as well," Southern said in a statement. 








D-Day In Popular Science

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The Destroyer In Popular Science
Popular Science

The technologies used in the June 6th, 1944 invasion of Normandy have captivated writers and readers of Popular Science for a long time. Here are some of the best stories about it from our archives.

"Tin Cans" Dish It Out, July 1945.

Published 13 months after the invasion, two months after victory in Europe, and one month before victory over Japan, ""Tin Cans" Dish It Out" is about destroyers. The Destroyer is a sort of middle-ship, smaller than the large and now-obsolete battleships but deadlier than the tiny torpedo boats they were made to destroy. In D-Day, destroyers got close to the coast, being shallower ships than many in the Navy. The destroyers paid dearly for it, but the whole of the invasion went better because destroyer guns were able to attack the enemy guns that remained.  From the article:

Of course, this is simply throwing the rule book overboard, for a square hit from a six-inch shore battery can demolish a destroyer -- which has no armor worth mentioning -- as thoroughly as a salvo from a battleship''s big guns. But when the fate of a great invading army hangs in the balance, destroyers become expendable. It cost us the destroyers Meredith and Glennon to put our troops ashore at "Utah Beach," a price well justified by the success of the landing and the enormous over-all savings in casualties.

The Weasel Goes Anywhere, November 1944

The M-29c cargo carrier, dubbed the Water Weasel,  was adapted from a two-person vehicle designed for fighting in snow. The amphibious version proved adept in the Pacific, using the tracks as a series of tiny flippers to propel it through water. In the European theater, it was a latecomer, but it's ability to go 4 mph in water and 30 on land allowed it to still fight in the flooded fields of Normandy and Holland. In "The Weasel Goes Anywhere," Popular Science examined the versatility of this light, amphibious vehicle.

The Water Weasel
William W. Morris, Popular Science

Frog Men, December 1945

With a great big "NOW IT CAN BE TOLD" stamp on top, the story of the "Frog Men" is about a wartime secret made less important by the end of hostilities. In this case, it is a story of specialized divers who attached magnetized explosives to underwater mines, blowing them up before they could destroy the ships of the invasion. From the article:

Shortly after dawn on D Day, they slipped unobserved from rubber dinghies and swam like fish to neutralize underwater mines and booby traps. Also, they flattened massive obstructions the Germans had erected in the shallows off the coast of Normandy and opened a path to the beaches for flat-bottomed landing craft.

Frog Men Work Underwater
Popular Science

Fooling Enemy Radar, January 1946

With the war over, it was safe to reveal some tools of deception. And D-Day required a lot of them, with over 150,000 troops, 6,000 ships, and 10,000 plus aircraft all needing to stay somewhat hidden before the invasion launched. If the German defenders saw movement earlier in the process, it could have gone very poorly. "Fooling Enemy Radar" details several jamming techniques used to confuse radar operators.

Operation Overlord, the invasion of Normandy, has gone down in history as the most stupendous military undertaking of all time. But it might have been history's bloodiest debacle if there had been no radar countermeasures. These were provided by the technicians in a top-secret "RCM" project.

The best is "rope", made of aluminum foil, dangled out the back of airplanes to catch radar and convince operators that they were seeing something that wasn't there. Here's a great illustration of the process:

A Confused Radar Truck And Anti-Air Squad
Popular Science

Base Invaders, November 1950

Fascination with the Invasion of Normandy hardly ended in the immediate post-war years. In the November 1950 issue of Popular Science, we wrote about a future "pod plane" for invasions like D-Day, where the plane carried a deployable pod full of troops, which it would then drop behind enemy lines. The story itself was picked up as a flashback in the January 2007 "Marines in Space" issue of Popular Science. The Invasion of Normandy remains such a singular occurrence in how engineering served to end a war that, 70 years later, we're still trying to understand and figure out just exactly how they did it.

Base Invaders
Popular Science







The Engineer Who Proposed Powering The World With A Solar Satellite

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illustration showing an orbiting solar power satellite, meant to power human activity on Earth
Giant Solar Satellite Concept
Popular Science, December 1972

The conceiver of one of mankind's coolest ideas for boundless clean energy died last week. He was 90 and first published his ideas in 1968, a year before NASA put a man on the moon. In its December 1972 issue, Popular Science described engineer Peter Glaser's proposal:

Glaser's plan is to build a huge array of solar cells in a synchronous orbit around Earth to collect sunlight, convert it into DC electric power. The DC could be used to power microwave convertors, and the microwave energy would be beamed to Earth, where it would be received by a large antenna and converted back into electrical power.

Although it sounds incredible, the basic technology for Glaser's orbit-to-Earth power plant already existed at the time. However, nobody had used the tech in that large of a project before. In addition, it would take an enormous amount of money and resources to make such a plant happen, including about 500 shuttle flights to bring all of those components to space, Glaser estimated.

The U.S. government studied the plan at a cost of $20 million, The New York Times reports. Ultimately, researchers decided it was too infeasible.

Although Glaser's proposal never made it to reality, former Popular Science editor-in-chief Hubert Luckett credited the idea for sparking research into Earth-bound solar energy fields more akin to what we have today. The magazine published a feature on the future of solar energy in its December 1972 issue. In addition to Glaser's ideas, writer C. P. Gilmore described a more familiar-sounding vision:

The [Aden and Marjorie] Meinel plan is simple in principle, breathtaking in scope. They hope ultimately to build a vast array of 'solar farms' across the southwestern deserts that will collect heat, use it to generate steam and run power-generating turbines. They envision a long-range plan to create a 1,000,000 megawatt generating facility . . . .

That sounds a lot like the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System in California, does it not? One major difference is that Ivanpah makes 392 megawatts of gross power (377 megawatts net), not, uhh, 1 million megawatts. (The Meinels, who worked primarily as astronomers, never went much further with their idea and were not involved in Ivanpah's design and construction.)

"Things have never looked better" for solar energy research, Glaser told Popular Science, in that issue.

Solar energy research passed several milestones in the 1970s, including increases in the efficiency of solar cells and the construction of one of the world's first solar-powered residences by researchers at the University of Delware.








DNA Sequencing Diagnoses Boy's Mysterious Bacterial Disease

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scanning electron microscope image of Leptospira bacteria
Leptospira Bacteria
Janice Haney Carr, CDC/NCID/Rob Weyant

For the first time, doctors have used DNA-sequencing technology to diagnose and treat a boy in an emergency. It's a big step for DNA sequencing—that the technology is able to work so quickly, and to help a patient directly. As useful as DNA sequencing is for research and genetic counseling, before this, no one had ever used it to diagnose and decide treatment for somebody with an infectious disease in a time crunch.

It will take years of more research to make technology like this commonplace, the New York Times reports. When that happens, however, DNA sequencing could simplify some of medicine's trickiest infectious-disease diagnoses—ones where the disease is rare, or ones where many diseases might give people the same symptoms. The New York Times offered Lyme disease as an example.

Osborn's doctors didn't even wait to confirm their diagnosis using other tests before beginning to treat the boy.

In this case, 14-year-old Joshua Osborn fell seriously ill in the summer of 2013. Fluid collected in his brain and he had serious seizures. Yet all of the tests doctors gave him didn't found any traces of fungi, bacteria or viruses, the doctors reported in The New England Journal of Medicine. So the doctors asked Osborn's parents' permission to try an experimental DNA test.

The test looked for bits of genetic material of illness-causing microbes in samples taken from Osborn's blood and spinal fluid. This contrasts to the medical genetic testing most people are familiar with, in which scientists search for genetic problems in a person's own DNA. In Osborn's case, doctors were looking for bits of DNA from foreign critters. The international team that developed the test published a paper about it this week.

Two days after scientists received Osborn's samples, they had a diagnosis: leptospira, a type of bacteria that only rarely causes the symptoms Osborn was suffering. The boy's doctors decided to treat him with penicillin. He recovered gradually over the next seven days, his doctors reported.

Previously, genetic testing for foreign, non-human DNA has helped scientists identify new infectious diseases, such as new flus. But that's for research, not for treating people. In Osborn's case, his doctors didn't even wait to confirm their leptospira diagnosis using other tests before beginning to treat the boy, they wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine. That's partly because penicillin, the treatment for leptospira, has relatively mild side effects. When Osborn's doctors weighed the potential drawbacks of giving him penicillin against the severity of his condition—the discussion took two hours—they decided it was worth it. They did eventually confirm their diagnosis using other tests.

The treatment helped Osborn recover from an infection he had apparently had since he visited Puerto Rico in 2012, yowch. For months, he kept going to the hospital with fevers, headaches and other symptoms, then getting discharged again. "I don't have any headaches anymore," he told The New York Times. "It's almost like a rebirth."

[New York Times]









'Bricksy' Lego Art And Other Amazing Images From This Week

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Bricksy
This is no ordinary Lego piece—it's a work of “Bricksy.” Photographer Jeff Friesen used his daughter's Lego collection to recreate Banksy's iconic street art. The actual British artist posted the Bricksy works on his own Instagram








The Week In Numbers: Google's Internet Satellites, Humans In Suspended Animation, And More

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O3b Satellites mounted to launch dispenser
Google recently hired O3b Networks Ltd's founder and chief technology officer. This is the kind of satellite they make.
O3b Networks Ltd

$1 billion: money Google is spending to spread internet access with satellites

50 degrees F: temperature of a human body in suspended animation

70 percent: fraction by which projected benefits of e-cigarette regulations should be cut to account for lost pleasure, according to a recent cost-benefit calculation from the FDA

Pleasurable
New calculations from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration quantify how much pleasure Americans lose by not smoking tobacco vapor products, such as e-cigarettes.
Los Angeles County Supervisor

30 percent: estimated portion of Americans who use DEET (is the insect repellent safe? A review of the science here)

30 percent: amount by which U.S. power plants must cut their carbon dioxide pollution, under a new EPA plan

3 hours: time it takes to build your own simple solar-powered rover

Dan Bracaglia

$80: price of a wireless drill that can stop itself before it strips heads or cracks surfaces

Black & Decker AutoSense Drill
This wireless drill is the first to stop itself before it strips heads or cracks surfaces. A microprocessor senses the changing torque of the screw as it bores into wood and signals the motor to stop in time. $80
Courtesy Black & Decker

 

 

 








What’s The World To Do About Water?

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Photograph by Jonathon Kambouris

In 2007, when my daughter was seven years old, we would brush our teeth together every night as part of our daily ritual. To conserve water, we would turn off the faucet after wetting our brushes and turn it back on only to rinse. One night, I didn’t turn off the water fast enough to her liking. She turned off the faucet, made an angry face at me, and growled, “Turn off the water, Daddy. The scientists need time.” 

That statement still resonates with me today, not only because of her precociousness but also because she was exactly right. Kids seem to intuitively get this: We need to conserve our resources to buy ourselves time so scientists can find new solutions to our problems. And this is especially true for water. 

Water is on track to be the most important and most contentious resource of the 21st century. It could replace oil as the strategic resource that triggers geopolitical conflict. But with the right solutions, it could also be the one that brings us all together.

In 2003, the late Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley gave a lecture at Rice University’s Energy & Nanotechnology Conference highlighting humanity’s top 10 problems for the next 50 years. His list, in descending order of importance, was: energy, water, food, environment, poverty, terrorism and war, disease, education, democracy, and population. 

The reason energy and water sit at the top, ahead of food and poverty, is that addressing them alleviates subsequent problems. Developing abundant sources of clean, reliable, affordable energy enables an abundance of clean water. An abundance of clean water enables food production and protects the environment. And so forth.

In many ways, the 1900s was the century of energy conflict, with great skirmishes triggered and fueled by a quest for petroleum. Now, the dawn of a new energy era is just around the corner—with the prices of solar power plummeting, and distributed generation and energy efficiency on the cusp of taking off—and we can project forward to a time this century when water replaces energy as the next great challenge for humanity. Getting water right could clear the path to a fully liberated, healthy, and peaceful civilization.

But water is complicated. First, there’s no alternative. There are alternatives to coal and petroleum, but water cannot be replaced. Second, water is intertwined with every other sector of society. Energy production requires water for cooling power plants and fracturing shale. Agriculture needs water for irrigation. Industry and cities use trillions of gallons of water for all sorts of purposes. Third, water demands are growing at the same time supplies are fluctuating. Climate change is expected to intensify droughts and floods while shifting where water will be and when. That means humanity will be confronted with decisions about whether to move people to water or water to people.

Thankfully, there are solutions. Some are large, incredibly expensive, and energy-intensive, such as building cross-continent water-transfer aqueducts, new hydroelectric dams, and massive desalination plants. Some are small, such as using micro water harvesters that condense water vapor out of the air. All of them take a while.

In April 1961, President John F. Kennedy said, “If we could ever competitively—at a cheap rate—get freshwater from saltwater, it would be in the long-range interest of humanity and would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishments.” That was one month before his famous moon-shot speech. Before the decade was over, we sent man to the moon and back. But we still haven’t cracked the code on how to get freshwater from saltwater without a lot of money and energy. That’s mainly because our great innovation apparatus has not been dedicated to water. Research budgets have prioritized energy, defense, and health while mostly ignoring water, even though fixing water would help our energy, defense, and health problems. If we spent as much money looking for water on Earth as we do searching for it on Mars, the outcomes might be very different.

In the end, we can solve the water problem. But we need aggressive conservation that will buy us time while our inventors get to work.  

 

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

Read the rest of Popular Science’s Water Issue.








The Fish That Could Save Antarctica

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The Antarctic toothfish can grow longer than 6.5 feet and weigh more than 300 pounds. It can live for up to 50 years but doesn’t reach sexual maturity until it’s about 10 years old—the same age it reaches the size fisheries consider ideal.
Rob Robbins/USAP

A primeval predator patrols the dark, icy waters of Antarctica’s Ross Sea, antifreeze proteins coursing through its blood. An icon of the Southern Ocean, the Antarctic toothfish is a crucial link in the rich food web of the planet’s most pristine marine ecosystem. Since 1996, it has also become prized by fisheries, which call its meat “white gold.”

In the 2011–12 season, 15 ships from six nations pulled roughly 3,500 metric tons of Antarctic toothfish from the Ross Sea. (Eight nations have vessels registered to fish there.) More than half the catch ends up in the U.S., where it’s sold (along with Pata-gonian toothfish) as the more palatably named Chilean sea bass for upwards of $25 a pound. Toothfish grow only about one centimeter per year, so scientists fear the species can’t withstand the pressure.

At stake are all Antarctic fauna. “Taking the toothfish out will totally change the ecosystem,” says marine ecologist David Ainley—an impact that will ripple down to prey like silverfish and up to predators like whales and seals. “The Ross Sea represents the last continental-shelf ecosystem on Earth that has not been trashed by humans,” Ainley says. “And it’s being plucked for a luxury item that few people can afford to consume.” Protect the toothfish, save the sea.

The Ross Sea Reserve
Fishing limits in Antarctica are set by the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, a governing body made up of 24 nations and the European Union. Three proposals to establish a Marine Protected Area in the Ross Sea have so far failed due to objections from Russia. The commission will reconvene to vote on a fourth in November. Sponsored by the U.S. and New Zealand, it would create a large-scale reserve that would put about a third of the 3.6 million-square-mile Ross Sea off-limits to commercial fishing, while allowing scientists to catch a limited number of Antarctic toothfish in a special research zone.

A Species In Decline
From 1972 to 2011, scientists caught more than 5,500 Antarctic toothfish in the Ross Sea (85 percent were tagged and released). The abundance and body condition of toothfish began to decline when a commercial fishery opened there in the mid-1990s.

 

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

Read the rest of Popular Science’s Water Issue.








New IBM Patent For Identifying You By The Way You Click Around On Websites

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photo of a hand using a Microsoft Surface Pro mouse
Clicking Away
Dan Bracaglia

IBM has a new patent for a program that watches your every move on a device, the company has announced. The patent is for techniques to recognize people by the way they click, swipe and navigate on websites.

Do you tend go straight to a certain tab when you first visit PopSci.com? Do you ever navigate using your arrow keys? (Who does this?) If the app notices that a person, while signed into his account, isn't navigating like usual, it can do something about it. For example, it could ask for him to answer security questions. This level of security might not be so crucial for Popular Science, but it's attractive for banking and shopping online. An app based on these techniques could even recognize and repel spambots, the patent suggests.

Ideas for apps like this have been floating around for at least two decades. Several research groups have investigated whether computer programs are able to identify people by the way they swipe and touch their devices. Before the era of touchscreens, researchers tried to determine if they could continuously check in on the identity of people using computers by monitoring the way they type. Here's a paper about that, dated 1995.

Why haven't these apps caught on in the devices you use and sites you visit? All security programs have to perform a careful balancing act. They have to be secure enough that they don't let in nefarious characters, while not being so choosy they annoys legitimate users. It's a difficult balance to strike for a program that has to study complex behaviors like clicking.








Teasing Out Fact From Hype In The War On Fructose

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sugar cubes
Sugar Concentration
Brix is the scale used to determine the sugar content in fruits, vegetables, juices, wines, soft drinks, and honey. One gram of sucrose in 100 grams of solution is equal to one degree Brix. It's similar to a few other units of measurement, including the Plato scale, which uses a similar method to determine the density of beer wort.
Wikimedia Commons

If you're feeling confused about sugar, join the club.

Nutrition professionals continue to say that processed, or added, sugar--as distinct from the sugars consumed while eating whole fruits and vegetables--should be a small part of a person's regular diet. But beyond that, the choices start to pile up: Is “regular” sugar worse for you than agave nectar? Is high fructose corn syrup a health demon, and concentrated fruit juice natural and good? Which of these make us fatter than the others? Or is a calorie a calorie, no matter its source?

A recent feature article in The Atlantic takes on this sweet, sweet controversy. In "Being Happy With Sugar," Atlantic senior editor James Hamblin, MD, digs into the Gordian tangle of popular media, the food industry, and health science around the sugar called fructose.

It begins with the influential doctors of daytime and cable television--Gupta, Oz, and Weil—who for years lauded agave nectar as a healthier alternative to both granulated sugar and the high fructose corn syrup used in many bottled drinks, because it tends not to cause quick “spikes” in blood sugar that can leave a person feeling tired or hungry.

But then along came Dr. Robert Lustig and his viral video hit “Sugar: The Bitter Truth.” Viewed over 4.76 million times on YouTube since 2009, Lustig's essential message is that what matters more than the simple presence of some or other sugar in one's food is that sugar's constituent parts. How much is fructose (bad, toxic, stay away) compared to other forms of sugar, usually glucose or sucrose? Lustig's castigation of fructose is based on a growing body of studies showing that both animal and human subjects who consume enormous quantities of fructose can suffer negative health effects including more bad cholesterol in the blood, higher risk of heart attacks, and buildup of fat in the liver (which can contribute to diabetes in humans).

Agave is 90 percent fructose to 10 percent glucose, which is why it fell out of grace with the TV doctors. So out with the agave and in with...what? "Skepticism about the safety of processed food lends an air of nobility to the anti-HFCS crowd, and gives a health halo to “natural” sugars," writes Hamblin, but there are many signs that functionally, they are equally noxious in many of the same ways if they're too much of a person's daily diet.

Hamblin's article is well worth the read both to suss out what it is about sugars that can hurt our health, and why panic might not be the most helpful reaction. For a food that's so ubiquitous in modern life, there is still a lot we still have to learn about what it does to us.

Read the full article at The Atlantic.








Catfish Barbels Detect Breathing Of Buried Worms

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Japanese sea catfish
Kagoshima Aquarium

Bristle worms can dig, but they can't hide--at least not from Japanese sea catfish. Although the seafloor mud into which these animals burrow hides them from view and withholds their scent, the worms still need to breathe. As they exhale, they send out small plumes of carbon dioxide, which momentarily make the water just above them slightly more acidic, albeit only in a tiny area within five millimeters of their burrow entrance. The barbels of a catfish, it turns out, can detect this change in pH

This is the first example of a fish being able to measure pH in its environment, as Ed Yong writes in his blog at National Geographic. Louisiana State University researcher John Caprio and colleagues uncovered this ability with a series of experiments, finding that the Japanese sea catfish (Plotosus japonicus) could find bristleworms buried within a tank in the lab, even in complete darkness. Further, as Yong elaborates:

The team repeated the same experiment without any worms; they just hooked up a pipe to the artificial tubes, and released a small squirt of sea water with a pH of 7.9—slightly more acidic than the tank water at 8.1. “Immediately, the fish’s behaviour changed. It went straight into food searching behaviour,” says Caprio. They would even bite the end of the tube. “That was very consistent; we never saw that when we pumped in water with the same pH [as the tank].”

"It's quite dramatic," Caprio told New Scientist. "The fish is like a swimming pH meter."

So, next time you're hiding from a catfish in the mud, just hold your breath. 

The study was published in the journal Science

[National Geographic]









Congress Asks For Anti-Missile Tech That Actually Works

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Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle Launch
The Kill Vehicle sits in the pod on top and doesn't emerge until the missile is in space.
Raytheon

Congress wants the machines it's been buying to shoot down missiles to, you know, shoot down missiles. In the recently passed 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the congressional bill that grants the Department of Defense the ability to spend money, the House of Representatives set aside rules and goals for a better "Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle." It's the latest in a long series of developments for missile defense, and it shows that members of Congress are as eager for a working version as they are frustrated by the continued lack of success.

"Exo-atmospheric kill vehicle" is a complicated name for a simple and awesome concept: A missile that flies into space to destroy another missile. Defense giant Raytheon makes a version, which the Department of Defense purchased and deployed. The problem with these, in the words of Congress, is that

(1) the existing models of the Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system are prototype designs that were developed and deployed without robust and rigorous acquisition practices;
(2) consequently, the deployed models of the Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle have experienced flight test failures since 2010, and have not demonstrated the degree of reliability, robustness, cost-effectiveness, or performance that are desirable;

Notably, the program had a major failure in 2010, during a test of the system. A ballistic missile, simulating a hostile nuclear warhead, was fired as the test target. The detection system located the missile, launched the rocket that carries the Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle, and put it in space. What should have happened next is that the Kill Vehicle's thrusters maneuvered it into position where it would collide with the target. That didn't happen.

Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle Concept Art
Raytheon

Congress still wants the program to work, and the 2015 NDAA insists upon a redesign to "increase significantly its performance, reliability, cost-effectiveness, and affordability." In addition, Congress says that "in order to stay ahead of evolving ballistic missile threats" the Department of Defense should "design the Next Generation Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle to take full advantage of improvements in sensors, discrimination, kill assessment, battle management, and command and control, including the potential to engage multiple objects."

The most damning part of the new authorization is the line that "it is important to redesign the Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle using a rigorous acquisition approach, including realistic testing" [emphasis added].

If this goes according to plan, in the future America can shoot missiles at other, deadlier missiles to blow them up in space. If not, the U.S. might just have to rely on its old, terrifyingly named nuclear deterrence standby: Mutually Assured Destruction.








Roadside Laser Could Remotely Detect Drivers' Alcohol Breath

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Hand 'Em Over
City of Johns Creek, Georgia

It's a bad idea to drink and drive. No rocket science there. But with the goal of reducing drunken driving, researchers have gone high-tech, creating a laser device that can detect alcohol vapor within a moving car, from alongside the road. After the laser is shone through a speeding vehicle, a mirror bounces it back to a detector that can sense small concentrations of alcohol. 

In the study, published in the Journal of Applied Remote Sensing, the researchers found that it could detect the amount of alcohol exhaled by a drunk person with a blood alcohol concentration above 0.1 percent. There were a number of assumptions that went into that calculation, but the researchers suggest that the device may be even more sensitive than stated, since the temperature of the human lung is higher than the device used in the experiment, and thus breath may contain more alcohol in the real world than modeled in the lab. (That said, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board says you're drunk at 0.05 percent blood-alcohol content.)

The device could be fooled, as the scientists admit, by alcohol exhaled by tipsy passengers, or a spill in the car. Or open windows, or air conditioning or fans... but anything to narrow down the number of cars stopped by police could help, they say. 

As an aside, I was initially thrown off by the suggestion that the device could measure breath concentrations of 0.1 percent and higher, as stated by SPIE, the international society for optics and photonics (and publisher of the study journal). But this is wrong--if breath contained this much alcohol, the person would be long dead. A typical blood-to-breath alcohol ratio is 2,100, meaning that the concentration of alcohol in a drinker's bloodstream is about 2,100 times higher than the concentration of ethanol in the breath. You can see for example that this nifty BAC calculator appears to use the same multiplier. 

So if you ever face social pressure to drink and drive, just glance off into the middle distance and say, "I would, but for the lasers. The lasers, man." 

(I also just realized that this is the second post I've written today about sensing chemicals in the breath. Pardon me while I go brush my teeth.)








A Spaceship For The Sea

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The SeaOrbiter
Illustration by Jacques Rougerie

Scientists know more about the surface of the moon and Mars than they do about our own seafloor. Which helps explain the grand vision of the French architect Jacques Rougerie, who’s designed an ocean-going laboratory that rivals the Starship Enterprise in scope.

Rougerie envisions his machine, the SeaOrbiter, as a sort of space-age buoy floating unobtrusively in the ocean, equipped with submersibles and a team of divers who can explore and analyze the marine environment. “If we want to better understand the ocean, we need a paradigm shift in research,” he says. That means direct observation in remote locations like the Sargasso Sea, where forests of seaweed create a unique and poorly understood ecosystem. “Eels from North America and Europe converge here to spawn after spending decades in freshwater rivers,” says Sylvia Earle, a marine biologist and former National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration chief. “We know very little about this place, and it’s home to one of the most unusual life histories of any animal in the ocean.”

SeaOrbiter’s price tag—$48 million—is its biggest drawback. But, thanks to the French crowd-funding site KissKissBankBank, Rougerie and his team have raised $475,000 to begin construction of the orbiter’s eye later this year. If they can inspire deep-pocketed donors to fund the full amount—a big if, admittedly—they hope to finish the ship by the end of 2016.

  1. The Eye: From this post, scientists could track migrating birds and sea life and conduct long-term meteorological studies.

  2. Topside Operations: Pilots would control SeaOrbiter’s remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) from above the waterline. The outdoor operations area would also serve as a staging area for dives from the surface. And a decompression chamber would ease the transition for SeaOrbiter members living at saturation. Solar panels and wind turbines would provide energy to help power the ship.

  3. Wet Lab: Each year, marine biologists discover about 2,000 new marine species, a number SeaOrbiter aims to increase. A wet lab filled with tanks would allow researchers to perform experiments and transport certain live specimens to more-sophisticated land-based research facilities.

  4. Four-Car Garage: The underwater hangar would house a two-person submersible, two ROVs, and an autonomous drone that can dive to 6,000 meters. The hope is to use these vehicles to search the ocean depths for not only new life but also plankton, bacteria, and viruses that could help treat disease.

  5. Data Hub: Communications Center Nemo, named after the anti-hero of Jules Verne’s sci-fi masterpiece 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, would serve as a broadcast studio for SeaOrbiter to share its discoveries with the world. The studio would also house a pipe organ, the favored musical instrument of Verne’s mad captain, who swore off life on land to pursue the mysteries of the abyss. (One crazy French science-fiction writer’s dream is apparently another French explorer’s reality.)

  6. Undersea Quarters: Six crew members would live in a pressurized zone underwater, allowing them to dive all day to 100 meters. By living at saturation, they could complete experiments much more efficiently than land-based marine biologists do, and they wouldn’t need to bother with decompression stops upon returning to the ship. The pressurized quarters could also double as a simulator for space agencies to test operational protocols and perform psychological studies on long-term close-quarters living for future trips to space.

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

Read the rest of Popular Science’s Water Issue.








Video: Fabien Cousteau Answers Your Questions About Life Under The Sea

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Fabien Cousteau, grandson of explorer Jacques Cousteau, is spending 31 days living in the world's only undersea habitat research lab, Aquarius. Last Thursday, we video chatted with Fabien to ask him about life under water, including how he deals with constant humidity, cramped quarters, and two atmospheres of pressure. 

(In the video above, a shark swims past the porthole at 6:43.)

Fabien also gave us a tour of the station, which sits on the ocean floor off the coast of Key Largo, Florida.

You can read about what happens to the human body—physically and psychologically—during a month under the sea in this article by Brian Lam.








What Happens To A Human Who Spends A Month Under The Sea?

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Outside Aquarius
Brian Lam
On June 1st, Fabien Cousteau, grandson of Jacques Cousteau, swam down to the last existing undersea habitat research lab in the world, Aquarius, in the Florida Keys. He'll live there for 31 days, which is a day longer than the time his grandfather spent living in his undersea habitat, Conshelf II, roughly 50 years ago. Since then, undersea bases have been created all over the world, and have since lost their funding and ceased operation. Aquarius stands as the last.

The aquanauts joining Cousteau on "Mission 31" are photographers, scientists from Northeastern and MIT specializing in marine biology and underwater engineering, and Aquarius staff. They'll all experience the unique challenge of living underwater for over a month in the pressurized saturated diving environment.

Saturated diving is a type of diving which allows the body to gradually soak up inert gases by staying at depth for a long period of time. These gases would harm a standard scuba diver by expanding like the bubbles in a shaken bottle of soda when the diver returns to the surface, causing pain, paralysis, and sometimes death. With the team sleeping in the base, at depth, and never surfacing, the divers are free to experience the most useful part of living in Aquarius: the ability to dive for 2-8 hours a day (as opposed to about an hour maximum per day that a regular scuba diver can achieve) without suffering from decompression sickness. At the end of the mission, the entire base is slowly brought back to normal pressure so that the gases can escape the diver's bodies safely, at which point the divers are free to resurface.

To find out what the human body and mind go through living in an underwater habitat, I spoke to various experts on living underwater, such as John Clark, Scientific Director for the U.S. Navy Experimental Diving Unit, who researches the effects of deep dives to 1,500 feet and Navy saturation diver Marc Chase who has worked on salvage jobs like the recovery of the USS Monitor's wreck. I also spoke to Mark Patterson and Brian Helmuth, Mission 31 science advisors who have spent working time in Aquarius, and Mark Hulsbeck, the oceanographic field operations manager who will have spent 200 days in the base overall by the end of this mission.

In the end, because research about long, relatively shallow underwater living is limited, there are a lot of theories as to the effects of living underwater on human beings, but much of it is controversial, anecdotal, and unproven by even those who study it and have experienced it.

Skin

"There are two kinds of divers, those that pee in their wetsuits and those who are liars."

The greatest malady that occurs on these undersea expeditions, according to Mark Hulsbeck, is what some aquanauts call "creeping crud." This ranges from acne to rashes to diaper rash, experienced by divers that pee in their wetsuits. (Given the extended diving time afforded by saturation, urination in a wetsuit is nearly impossible to avoid. Mark Hulsbeck told me "There are two kinds of divers, those that pee in their wetsuits and those who are liars.")

The best cure for these skin maladies is to shower off after every dive and use antibacterial soap, as well as the fresh towels that are frequently delivered to the base in pressure-cooking pots, sealed with bolted lids. Proper hygiene, in other words.

Ear infections are also common, but antiseptic solutions made with aluminum acetate are used to take care of them quickly before the infections can worsen.

Some aquanauts swear that the high-pressure environment, which is 2.5 times the normal pressure at sea level, increases healing times like hyperbaric chambers do, and that cuts can heal overnight. Others believe that to be untrue; hyperbaric chambers that provide oxygen therapy have a much higher level of oxygen in them than the atmosphere in Aquarius.

Besides that, other side effects of living in underwater bases include paleness and reduced vitamin D production, from lack of exposure to the sun. When aquanauts return to the surface, they are distinctly aware of the sensation of wind, which they might have not even realized they were missing.

Taste and Hunger

Many aquanauts have reported that their sense of taste diminishes in the habitat. Mark Patterson theorizes that the higher density of air in the habitat, means that there are fewer parts per million of food odors diffused in the air for the nose to detect. Regardless of what the actual science is, many aquanauts resort to putting hot sauce on everything.

Both the extended dive time and thicker in-habitat air pull heat from divers much more rapidly than a normal sea level atmosphere would, and so their metabolisms must work harder to maintain body temperatures. People tend to eat a lot as a result. In the old days, when the habitat was positioned near land in St. Croix, near land, aquanauts were catered fresh local food like beans, rice, and lobster. After the base was relocated to the Florida Keys (after a hurricane struck St. Croix), aquanauts relied on MREs, with choices diminishing as the season progressed. (Brian Helmuth says that the Salisbury steak was particularly not good.) These days, under the management of Florida International University, Aquarius's aquanauts eat rehydrated freeze-dried camping food, which is high-calorie and varied. Hulsbeck expects the aquanauts to get sick of it before their 31 days are up.

Occasionally, aquanauts receive deliveries of pizza, hamburgers on special request (or lasagna made by Hulsbeck's wife) which are brought down in sealed containers by support divers, but those meals are rare.

 

 

Sleep

In the habitat, because of the exhausting nature of being in the water several hours a day and because even time inside the habitat is busy, everyone sleeps really well at night. One aquanaut, professional photographer Kip Evans, complained that silver fish called tarpon swimming near the bedroom porthole, reflecting outside habitat lights back into the bunk room, made it difficult to sleep. The habitat does, however, have plenty of white noise from carbon dioxide scrubbers, and the general static of reef creatures like snapping shrimp and other animals living their lives on and around the base, which has become an artificial reef.

Breathing and Speaking

The greater air density causes aquanauts' speech to become slightly higher pitched when they first enter the base, but either the pitch adjusts or people's ears adjust to the higher-pitched conversation.

Navy divers, Marc Chase told me, take great care to not get respiratory diseases from their dive gear, because the sick person can't be evacuated without the entire team having to also be slowly brought to normal pressure (decompressed) and leaving, too. And in close quarters, it's easier to contaminate each other. They are careful not to let anyone who has an existing cold down into the habitat, and have never had to evacuate the lab because of infection.

Restrooms

Aquanauts use a little hut outside the moonpool, the part of the base with an open floor that gives the aquanauts access to the sea, which they call the gazebo. The gazebo has an air pocket inside of it, and to reach it, aquanauts have to hold their breath and walk or swim over, wearing a swimsuit. Bathroom breaks are often not private as the fish have learned that when a diver enters the gazebo, it's feeding time. After one too many particularly nerve-wracking incidents with fish getting nippy, the Aquarius staff have set up a bubble curtain powered by compressed air to keep the fish away.

Seeing

Other than having to get accustomed to lower amounts of light, people don't report noticing that living underwater affects their vision.

Thinking

Some aquanauts report feeling nitrogen narcosis, a syndrome not uncommonly experienced during diving, wherein at a certain depth a diver can feel drunk. Some have theorized that the depth the habitat is at is not deep enough to cause this effect immediately, but after the aquanauts' bodies become saturated with nitrogen in the habitat after 24 hours, a sense of giddiness occurs. Mark Hulsbeck believes that it might not be nitrogen narcosis at all, but just a sense of joy from doing something as cool as living in an undersea base for a few days.

Psychological Stability

The aquanauts aren't screened for psychological stability or vulnerability to claustrophobia, antisocial behavior, or cabin fever.

Navy saturation divers who plan to be on long missions spend the preceding weeks together to vet out incompatibilities in personality and work ethics, however.

Isolation and Boredom

Back in the day, there were no internet connections in Aquarius, and aquanauts could only read books or stay busy to stave off boredom. Now they can watch Netflix and call their loved ones as often as they want.

Limits

When asked if an aquanaut could stay in the base indefinitely, Mark Hulsbeck offered that it's not known what the limits are, but given the higher density of air and relatively higher amounts of oxygen taken per breath, there would be eventual damage to a human's circulation systems, which Hulsbeck referred to as "pulmonary toxicity." The relatively shallow depth of the base was chosen so that longer saturation missions like this one could be feasible, but rarely do missions come as close to being as long as this one will, as most are only 7-10 days.

 

 








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