Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument

NMFS/NOAA

With a State Department-sponsored ocean summit (#OurOcean2014) underway this week, the science-related policy announcements are coming thick and fast:

President Obama today announced (although some word was leaked last night) the administration's intention to enlarge the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument, from almost 87,000 to nearly 782,000 square miles.  The White House also announced a new presidential-level task force aimed at getting seafood harvested via illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing off the U.S. market, as well as to stop “seafood fraud”: mislabeling one kind of fish as another, more commercially desirable species.

Marine Monument A Last Refuge For Many Species

According to an official fact sheet, the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument is one of “the last refugia for fish and wildlife species rapidly vanishing from the remainder of the planet, including sea turtles, dolphins, whales, pearl oysters, giant clams, coconut crabs, large groupers, sharks, humphead wrasses, and bumphead parrotfishes." The reserve's new area under the White House plan would double the area of ocean worldwide under some form of formal protection; currently that amount is somewhat less than 2 percent.

According to this fine explanation of the proposal at The Washington Post, "environmentalists are hoping President Obama will be tempted to trump George W. Bush's record as the U.S. president who has protected the most area in the ocean." Then-president Bush used an executive order in 2009 to establish this marine national monument, a designation that generally prohibits all commercial uses and even recreational fishing.

An official "national marine sanctuary," by comparison, may allow some commercial activities, including oil and gas exploration. Earlier this month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a branch of the Department of Commerce, announced that it will begin taking public nominations for new marine sanctuaries, including proposals for the Great Lakes, for the first time since 1995.

The Pacific island nation of Kiribati has also announced that it will end fishing in its Phoenix Islands Protected Area, as well as other areas, at the start of 2015.

Stopping Trade In Illegal Seafood

The new illegal fishing task force will have six months to do its work, and involves over dozen federal agencies that have some role in regulating seafood imports, managing trade, or protecting fish and wildlife.

Illegal fishing is a global business worth tens of billions of dollars annually, according to Beth Lowell, who directs a seafood fraud campaign for the marine conservation group Oceana. “We think they already have the tools in the toolbox,” to increase the transparency and accountability of the existing system, she says, by using un- or under-enforced provisions of existing laws, as well as the reporting system that U.S. fishers must use to log when, where, what, and how much they catch.

“Pirates are on the high seas, avoiding all laws, taking advantage of our ocean resources,” says Lowell.  A recent study estimated 30-32 percent of wild-caught seafood sold in the U.S. is illegally fished.

“Around the world and in the U.S., we set up rules to guide fishing practices,” Lowell says. “You can only catch this amount under a scientifically based catch limit, or you need to avoid a certain area because it's a spawning area. Or you need to avoid catching sharks or turtles that are endangered. Illegal fishing ignores all that,” ultimately draining income and profits from operators who are following the rules and operating safely, she says, as well as hurting efforts to manage fish stocks sustainably.

Reporting over the past few years by the Guardian has also linked illegal fishing to modern-day slavery.

As for seafood fraud, Oceana's independent testing found nationwide evidence that up to one-third of seafood in the U.S. is mislabeled, making a strong case for better tracking of fish “from boat to plate,” says Lowell.

As Popular Science reported in 2011, some restaurants have committed to including “DNA barcodes” on their menus to prove that the wild salmon or Atlantic cod you're paying for is the real deal.

Dr. Oz

Wikimedia Commons

Dr. Oz is having a bad day. The celebrity doctor went to Washington, D.C., today to testify before a Senate subcommittee. The committee chastised him about the unscientific claims he makes about weight loss treatments on his popular show. Members of the committee, which is about consumer protection and product safety, worried that Oz's statements fuel a predatory industry of supplement-sellers.

Subcommittee chair Senator Clair McCaskill talked about the "Oz Effect." After Oz endorses unproven products such as green coffee extract and raspberry ketone, businesses often use his own quotes to help them sell products that are ineffective at best and dangerous at worst. The weight-loss supplement industry is notorious for false advertising and tainted products. Yet it's no wonder they quote Dr. Oz. He's well known and liked, and his endorsements already sound like copy lifted from a dubious infomercial, although they never mention brands. "You may think magic is make-believe, but this little bean has scientists saying they found the magic weight-loss for every body type," he once said about green coffee extract.

The Consumerist and The Hill have some great quotes from McCaskill's questioning:

Oz defended his favorite products, saying they help people ease into more sensible diet- and exercise-based weight-loss plans: "We search for tools and crutches; short-term supports so that people can jumpstart their programs." He also defended what he called "flowery" language, as if his pseudoscience were just, like, an overlong description of a sunset: "When I can't use language that is flowery, that is exulting, I feel like I've been disenfranchised." 

Order 'im Up!

Weight loss ad featuring Dr. Oz, from garciniacambogianaturally.com. We do not recommend visiting the site.

In honor of celebrity physician Dr. Oz's visit to the U.S. Senate yesterday, we thought we would collect some Dr. Oz Googlisms. Mehmet Oz is a polarizing figure. He's well beloved by fans, but draws sharp criticism from many doctors, scientists and journalists. We thought Googlisms would be an interesting way to see the spread of opinion.

What is a Googlism? Many years ago, a site called Googlism.com was popular. The site pulls random sentences from the Internet that fill in the sentence "[Search term] is . . . ." Below are some of our favorite "Dr. Oz is" sentences from the web. Please note, we cannot vouch for whether these are true statements.

Dr. Oz is a renowned heart surgeon

Dr. Oz is a very intelligent guy

I think Dr. Oz is working hard

Dr. Oz is host of The Dr. Oz Show 

Dr. Oz is a pioneer in the field of hawking products 

Dr. Oz is back, but not in his usual blue scrubs

Dr. Oz is Coming!

Dr. Oz is a big sports fan

Dr. Oz is also our wonderful friend—and my personal exercise buddy

Dr. Oz Is Lying to You

Dr. Oz is 52, so he knows what he's talking about

Dr. Oz is not the first celebrity to kit himself out in a fat suit, either

Dr. Oz is no longer a doctor who cares the least bit about science

Dr. Oz is not to be trusted

Dr. Oz Is a Mean Old Neighbor

Dr. Oz is unrivaled in cutting through the clutter 

Dr. Oz is here to save the day

Oz was called to Washington, D.C. for his role in encouraging predatory weight-loss supplement businesses, which use his unscientific claims to promote their products.

Photograph by Jonathon Kambouris

The Challenge

Maintaining a perfect cellular water balance is crucial for our bodies to function as they should. That’s the job of tiny proteins known as aquaporins, which channel water across cell membranes. Recently, scientists discovered that aquaporins are present in tumors and may accelerate the growth of certain cancers. Researchers have also discovered that Devic’s disease, an incurable autoimmune disorder that can lead to paralysis, is caused by antibodies that attack aquaporins.

The Big Idea

Multiple labs are targeting aquaporins as they work to develop new treatments for disease. For cancer, that means identifying a molecule that can block aquaporins in tumor cells. It’s a difficult challenge. “Water always finds a way in,” says Dr. Alan Verkman, professor of medicine and physiology at the University of California at San Francisco. The leading inhibitors are heavy metals, like mercury. While too poisonous now, they are still fertile ground for researchers and may be viable in the future. Closer to realization may be a therapy for Devic’s disease, which in addition to paralysis can cause rapid blindness and loss of bladder and bowel control. Verkman’s lab has identified a molecule that can block the antibodies targeting aquaporins, and it has shown promise in preclinical trials. Water gives life, as the saying goes, but understanding and manipulating how it moves through cells may prove to be a hallmark of 21st-century medicine.

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

Read the rest of Popular Science’s Water Issue.

The Double Bubble

NASA

An MIT team has turned a multi- million-dollar NASA contract into the most advanced rethink to date of the classic passenger jet. The design, nicknamed the Double Bubble, calls for an extra-wide fuselage and rear-mounted turbo­fan engines. The configuration would allow the craft to burn 70 percent less fuel than a Boeing 737 while producing significantly less noise and nitrogen oxide, a pollutant that causes acid rain. 

So when can we board? NASA says it would like to see the 180-seat craft airborne by 2035, when air traffic is projected to double. Engineers will push toward that goal this summer, when they subject a scale model to a second round of wind-tunnel tests at Langley Research Center. Here’s a look at some of the fuel-saving features they will scrutinize.

Comparison with a Boeing 737

Illustration by Don Foley

Photographic evidence

A model of the Double Bubble aced its first wind-tunnel tests at NASA's Langley Research Center last spring.

NASA

3-D print your very own Double Bubble Airplane

You can download the design files for this 3-D model in .LWO, .OBJ, and .STL, file formats. For full instructions on printing and assembling this model, see artist Don Foley's guide.

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

Prototype Google Self-Driving Car

Google

It may be another decade before most ordinary folks use self-driving cars to get around town. But some of us may have already seen them around town, at least: Over the past few years, car companies and other research groups have begun testing their autonomous car technology on public roads, in normal traffic. Here, we've collected news reports of public tests of self-driving cars. Germany's Autobahn and California's Pacific Coast Highway are just a couple of the world's roads that robot cars have traversed.

How well did each of these tests fare? It's hard to say just from looking at news reports. Some of these drives may have only tested parts of an autonomous system. In addition, public drives always include a human in the driver's seat to monitor the car. We aren't sure how often humans had to intervene in each of these drives.

Still, it's cool to see where in the world driverless cars have driven. The locations mostly track with the world's major car-making regions, alongside places known more for their computer science research than their auto-making.

Did we miss a test drive? Let us know and we'll add it to the map.

P.S. The first public drive of a modern automobile probably occurred around Mannheim, Germany, where the car's inventor, Karl Benz, lived. In 1888, Benz's wife, Bertha, took the car on a 66-mile drive between Mannheim and Pforzheim to visit her mother. Her stunt generated invaluable PR for her husband's Benzes.

Gold Nanoparticles

This scanning electron micrograph shows gold nanoparticles magnified 250,000 times.

Andras Vladar, NIST

For at least a decade, researchers have tried to develop practical ways to use gold nanoparticles to kill cancer cells. But perhaps you'll see the nanotechnology in a cosmetic surgeon's office before you see it at the oncologist's.

A new startup, NanoLipo, is working on a gold nanoparticle-based liposuction alternative, Chemical & Engineering News reports. The idea is that doctors would inject their patients' unwanted fat with the particles, then use a laser to heat up the particles, which would melt the fat around them. Doctors would use needles to suction out the liquefied fat. Researchers have investigated heating gold nanoparticles to kill cancer cells, too.

While this might sound just too strange—that one treatment could work for both an elective procedure and a life-saving one—medicine is actually full of stories of one treatment working for disparate conditions. One of my favorite examples is Botox, which has an impressive list of indications. Before Botox began freezing the foreheads of famous actors, it treated eye spasms and other neurological conditions. It's now also FDA approved for excessive underarm sweating and urinary incontinence associated with multiple sclerosis. 

So which application of gold nanoparticles will find its way to practical use first? Cancer or trimming those last 10 pounds? The two indications seem to be neck and neck in stage of development, although cancer treatments have been under study for several years longer. NanoLipo has tested its methods in animals, but not in people, Chemical & Engineering News reports. Gold nanoparticles for cancer have undergone some early stage human trials.

[Chemical & Engineering News]

Steve Delaire's Metal 3-D Printer During a Movement Test

Photo from Molten3D

Sure, manufacturing companies have 3-D printers that are able to weld metal pieces. You can even send designs to Shapeways to get them printed in steel. But wouldn't you want your own metal 3-D printer at home? One California man is making it happen. DIY hobbyist Steve Delaire is working on making a home 3-D printer that lays down wire, layer by layer, and welds it together.

Delaire has shown his machine at a San Francisco Bay Area Maker Faire, where Slashdot talked with him and filmed his machine. Delaire posts his problems and progress on his blog. A few days ago, he wrote about why he wants a 3-D metal printer:

For those looking for a short-term solution for making metal designs at home, Make magazine recently published a story about how to make plastic molds that are able to cast metal, using a conventional home 3-D printer.

[Slashdot]

Mike Cassidy

Photograph by Brad Wenner

Mike Cassidy works at Google X, the company’s self-described “moonshot factory,” as the leader of Project Loon. His team’s goal is to deploy a global network of thousands of Wi-Fi–connected balloons that will provide affordable Internet access to everyone on the planet. Ambitious much? We asked how they plan to pull it off.

Popular Science: What was the inspiration for Project Loon?

Mike Cassidy: People have talked about high-altitude communications platforms for a long time, but they all had the same concept: a tethered balloon, or a vehicle that kept itself in one spot over the ground. We said, “We can let the balloons move with the wind.” As one balloon moves away, another comes and takes its place.

PS: How did you develop the right balloon for the job? 

MC: Initially, the team put a regular router on a weather balloon. They modified the router to make it work at 12 miles, as opposed to 50 feet. But weather balloons are designed to race up into the stratosphere, then pop. We wanted ours to last 100 days or more. To do that, you need to design what’s called a super-pressure balloon. We use load-bearing tendons made out of a Kevlar-type material that can bear 100,000 pounds of force.

PS: What kind of technology makes this possible? Any breakthroughs?

MC: I believe we’re the first to have an altitude-control system that works on a steady basis. The balloons have solar panels for power, GPS so we know exactly where they are, iridium antennas for communication, and onboard computers to receive commands, which guide them to where we want to have coverage. Ground control monitors the balloons 24/7.

PS: These balloons travel quite a distance. One circumnavigated Earth in 22 days, right?  

MC: That balloon has now gone around the world twice. That’s the whole goal of the project: to provide coverage all over Earth.

PS: Bill Gates said, “When you’re dying of malaria, you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it will help you.” Thoughts? 

MC: Every 10 percent increase in a country’s broadband coverage elevates its gross-domestic-product growth by about 1.4 percent. For a country with a 3 percent GDP growth rate, boosting coverage by 20 percent could double that rate. That jump is associated with higher standards of living, higher education levels, and better health.

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

NASA/SDO

On March 29 at 1:48 p.m. EST, the sun issued a massive X1 flare that caused a brief radio blackout on the sunlit side of Earth. Because the atmosphere insulates technology from most solar-weather effects, flares of this magnitude don’t typically have a drastic impact on the planet. But, says Dean Pesnell, project scientist at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, “Our vulnerability to solar flares will become more personal as we increasingly rely on GPS—or even as the overloaded power system has more problems.” For this reason, scientists are studying the phenomena in unprecedented detail. NASA announced in May that the X1 event, captured by the SDO in extreme ultraviolet light, is the most comprehensively observed flare to date. 

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

Aculight Laser

Lockheed Martin

Popular Science sat down with Lockheed Martin's Chief Technology Officer Ray Johnson to talk about the future of war and the future of technology. The conversation started with lasers, worked its way through 3-D printing, and ended with a perspective on the military aircraft of the future. 

Popular Science: What current thing are you most excited about, what’s the big shiny thing you talk to people about?

Ray Johnson: The work that we’ve been doing for the last few years to develop a fiber-based laser that uses beam-combining technology to achieve higher power levels of a particularly high quality beam. We purchased a company a few years ago called Aculight. Aculight has been developing this fiber laser technology for a number of years and every year they have increased the power levels and goals and they recently conducted a 30-kilowatt demonstration.

From analysis of the physics behind the components of the laser it looks like there are no physics challenges to achieve 100kw and possibly, to be determined, 300kw looks quite feasible. I’m expecting that over the next few years we’ll achieve the 100kw capability.

It’s game changing. Should you develop an operational weapon that operates at Mach a million, that’s game changing.

PS: What do you see as the main way these lasers will get used?

Johnson: Ground, ship, and airborne capabilities for defense. Think about, for example, a ship defense system. Rather than throwing out a wall of lead, you could be more precise, because of the speed. You say “fire” and it's there. You don’t have to wait for flyout. If an object got closer to you you could still impart energy and destroy it. You don’t have the early warning component, which is where we get caught sometimes.

It can operate with the electrical power that could be generated on an aircraft. You could certainly see it go on bomber-sized aircraft and as the technology develops and size/weight/power are reduced, our notion is to see it get to the point where it can go on fighter-sized aircraft. Whether it's a special-purpose fighter, or how that would work, I don’t have the details. Maybe he’s a wingman to an F-35 or a flight of F-35s.

A Harrier Fighter And A Predator Drone

The Harrier is a US Marine Corp fighter. They are here training in Nevada.

U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Larry E. Reid Jr., via Wikimedia Commons

PS: Is there a limit to the size of what you could shoot down? Would it be possible to stop bullets?

Johnson: I think we’re working on things that have a vulnerability that’s related to the laser. Generally speaking, bullets are traveling fast and it’s a kinetic impact. The damage mechanisms on a bullet, you can heat it, you can do a lot to it and it doesn’t care. Whereas a missile has a fuel source and command and control and fins and things like that: the damage sources on the missile are much greater.

I think you have to think through what the damage mechanism or the kill mechanism is. The power required to do that damage, how much time the laser has to be focused on the target to do that damage.

Here’s a really important thing: unlimited magazine. It might be that because you have an unlimited magazine you don’t have to be quite as discerning about “am I wasting a bullet, am I wasting ammunition” on something that is not threatening.

PS: Earlier you mentioned a laser drone flying with F-35s. What do you see as the future of air war over the next half-century?

Johnson: I believe manned and unmanned systems will be working together for the next 40 to 50 years. During that time period, I think the roles and missions that unmanned systems are able to take on will be in large part driven by increases in autonomy. As autonomy capabilities increase--you can call it AI--as they are able to execute more complex missions, they will be allowed to execute more complex missions. Some of the capabilities that we are developing that will have a big impact as the systems themselves are the way that you use unmanned systems. Moving away from the one-to-one operator, to a platform.

As autonomy increases, I think we’ll get to the point where you trust the platform to do much more on its own. You set the strategy, monitor performance, and get called in if something goes wrong. Rather than there being the one-to-one relationship between you and the platform. That’s important, because they may be unoccupied but they are not unmanned. The logistics requirements are often equal to or greater than for a manned platform conducting the same mission. This capability is an important one to reduce the cost.

There's also multi-platform control--having an operator control an air, sea, and land system with the same command and control network. That's really important.

PS: Do you see the roles of aircraft evolving from bomber and fighter?

Johnson: I can see it going both ways--more of a multi-mission aircraft, with a variety of capabilities on board. Or it could go to specialization, with an unmanned aircraft flying with F-35s with a directed energy weapon on it to protect them. That’s its job, it just helps them get where they need to go. You could also see an aircraft, we have fighter-bomber aircraft traditionally, maybe with this capability or others, take on a broader set of roles or missions.

My instinct tells me that the first instantiation will be more of a specific role, rather than a broader role.

Test F-35 Flies At Eglin Air Force Base, Florida.

U.S. Air Force photo by Samuel King Jr., via Wikimedia Commons

K-329 Severodvinsk

An infographic about the submarine from Russian state media in 2010.

RIA Novosti

There are college sophomores who were born after Russia began building its newest submarine. The K-329 Severodvinsk (re-designated the K-560 Severodvinsk in late 2013) is a submarine powered by a nuclear reactor and is made to hunt other submarines, ships, and targets on land. Construction started in 1993; the ship underwent sea trials in 2011; and on Tuesday, Russia finally commissioned the vessel and welcomed it into the Northern Fleet. 

Why did the submarine take so long to complete? Soviet collapse, mainly. The USSR, which had channeled much of Russia's resources into building a military to compete with the United States throughout the Cold War, broke apart in the early 1990s, and when the government fell so did its ability to keep up with military production. In 2008, flush with money from the export of natural resources, Russia announced that nuclear submarines were a top priority. Today, with Russia actively reasserting its role in the world (read: invading neighboring Ukraine), Russia now has evidence that its fleet rebuilding efforts are starting to pay off.

According to Russian state media company RT, the submarine features a large advanced sonar array, which necessitated moving the torpedo tubes away from the nose. Russia claims that the sonar is a spherical array, which can see a larger picture underwater than a simpler cylindrical configuration. The Severodvinsk also carries the supersonic Onyx anti-ship cruise missile and the Kalibr land-attack cruise missile. These are deadly weapons, and make the submarine a threat to far more than just ships on its own. The Onyx has a range of 180 miles and the Kalibr can hit targets as far away as 170 miles.

Curiously, the procurement contract for the missile loader mentions a third variety of missile: the 9K. This is a designation given to either anti-tank missiles or anti-air missiles—since this is a submarine, anti-tank is out of the question. If the Severodvinsk is carrying a 9K anti-air missile, it's likely the 9K38 Igla or a variation thereof, which means this submarine could potentially shoot down airplanes coming to destroy it.

The Severodvinsk is the first of the Yasen class submarines, designed as both a multi-purpose submarine and a direct challenge to the American Virginia-class modern attack submarines, the first of which entered production in 1999 before commissioning in 2004. Since then, the U.S. Navy commissioned ten more Virginia-class submarines, with seven more planned and a total order for 28 submarines. While the completion of the Severodvinsk is a big step for Russia's navy, in order to rival America submarines, production of the next Yasen class subs will have to be about five times as fast.

Jackie Bale/Getty Images

Counter to most vampire lore, there is no magic to the pungent odor of garlic. The stench is the result of four major sulfur-containing compounds, which, when ingested, move into the bloodstream and then out through the lungs and sweat glands. But that doesn’t make it any less repellent. In April, food scientists at Ohio State University published a paper exploring the best foods and beverages to neutralize garlic’s noxious effect. We drew a few practical conclusions:

EAT AN APPLE 

Fruits that brown when exposed to air contain an oxidating enzyme. This compound also sets off a chemical chain reaction that deodorizes offending sulfides.

SIP SOME GREEN TEA

It’s loaded with plant chemicals known as polyphenols, which work through a similar mechanism to neutralize all four sulfide compounds.

SWILL A LITTLE LEMON JUICE

Acidic beverages with a pH below 3.6 destroy the enzyme alliinase, which activates when garlic is crushed and enhances the smelly sulfuric properties.

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

The D-Wave Two Device

Courtesy of D-Wave Systems Inc.

The latest and greatest test of a quantum computing device has found it doesn't solve problems faster than a classical computer. But don't give up hope yet. The researchers who performed the test still think it's likely quantum computers have advantages over classical ones, at least for solving certain problems. Among other things, testers think they just have to find the right problems.

"In hindsight, the problems that were generated were not very hard, perhaps insufficiently hard to clearly distinguish the performance of classical and quantum algorithms," physicist Daniel Lidar tells Popular Science. "So the results of this particular test are inconclusive."

Lidar, a professor and researcher at the University of Southern California, worked with a team of Swiss and American engineers to test a commercially-made device called a D-Wave Two. They published the results of their work today in the journal Science.

Quantum computers are built so that spooky physics phenomena occur inside them all the time. Theoretically, the weird things they're able to do should make them much faster than the classical computers people have now at home, or that labs have in supercomputing centers around the world. However, quantum computing devices are still new. They don't have much memory. They're not able to solve practical problems yet. Most importantly, no one has yet shown that a quantum device is faster than a classical one at solving the same puzzle.

In the future, should quantum computers become practical and truly faster than classical computers, they could help solve a number of problems… and maybe create new ones. Quantum computers are supposed to be good at optimization problems, which include things like image recognition and predicting the shapes of proteins. Quantum computing should also be able to easily break the encryption that secures public online transactions today. Most ordinary folks wouldn't want such encryption broken, but you can imagine it's of great interest to national governments, so research on it is underway.

Incidentally, the D-Wave Two device would not be able to run that type of decryption algorithm, Lidar says. D-Wave Twos only run optimization problems.

A few different things make a computer quantum. The bits that make up quantum computers' memory are able to hold not only the 0 or 1 states that ordinary bits can—they can also hold both states at once. The particles in a quantum computer demonstrate entanglement: anything that happens to one particle also affects the state of its entangled partner, although the two particles may be far apart. There are other counterintuitive happenings inside quantum computers, too. Lidar's previous research has shown that devices made by D-Wave, a company based in Vancouver, Canada, likely truly exhibit quantum behavior. It's not a given, however.

Still, scientists have long known that just because a computer is quantum doesn't necessarily mean it will perform faster than the best classical algorithms, based on 0s and 1s, that we have today.

Lidar thinks he knows how find to a speed advantage for a quantum computer in the future. Priority number one is making up for problems in the quantum phenomena inside D-Wave devices. Interactions with the computer's external environment, or fluctuations inside the device, can erase important properties in quantum machines. The team wants to use quantum error correction in its next test to make up for these losses.

The other plan is to choose problems that are difficult for classical algorithms, but good for quantum ones. There may always be problems that classical computers solve just as well, or better, than quantum machines. The idea is that quantum computers can make headway on different problems.

"Quantum mechanics is this additional ingredient nature has given us. It's been there all along, but we've never been able to exploit it," Lidar says. "If we demonstrate quantum speed-up, then we've exploited nature to the max, in some sense." 

The proposal would protect coral reefs and other sea life

James D. watt

Whether they're caught in the wild or raised in captivity, fish are a major food souce worldwide. Nearly 5 billion people worldwide got 15 percent of the animal protein in their diets from fish in 2011; for another 2.9 billion it was 20 percent. In 2011, that added up to about 132.3 million metric tons of fish.

But the welfare of fish—which are vertebrates just like cows, pigs, and chickens, and possessing evolutionary lineages as long as those of homo sapiens—has been barely discussed. As a result “the potential amount of cruelty we're inflicting is mind-boggling,” says fish biologist Culum Brown, an assistant professor at Macquarie University in Australia. “People need to have a greater appreciation of how smart fish are,” he says. “Just because we're ignorant is no excuse to treat another animal poorly. All the evidence suggests that they're just as sophisticated as other vertebrates.”

Brown makes a scientific case for reform in “Fish intelligence, sentience and ethics,” a paper published in the June 2014 issue of Animal Cognition. The work was partially funded by the organization Farm Sanctuary, under its "Someone, Not Something" project.

Brown reviewed nearly 200 research papers on fish sensory perception, natural cognitive abilities (including “numerality,” or an ability to assess quantity), and abilities to perceive and experience pain, and found ample evidence that fish are intelligent on all counts.

For instance, some fish species use tools. Brown cites research showing that certain types of wrasse use rocks to crush sea urchins in order to eat their softer insides, while cichlids and catfish have been observed gluing their eggs to leaves and small rocks, which they carry around when their nests are disrupted.

Tool use was long considered unique to human beings, but has become well-acknowledged in species such as chimpanzees and New Caledonian crows.

Fish can also learn quickly and can keep memories long-term. Brown's own research found it took only five trial runs for rainbowfish to learn how to swim out of a net via a single hole, and that they remembered the escape route after not seeing the net for nearly a year. “This is remarkable for a fish that only lives for 2 years in the wild,” writes Brown. “Moreover, the more fish present in the group the faster they learn,” just one example he cites of fish displaying “social learning.”

Fish also show “Machiavellian intelligence,” the ability to manipulate the behavior of others via deception, or by reconciling with them. Cleaner fish of the Great Barrier Reef, which eat away the dead skin and parasites on other fish, utilize a “fantastic reconciliation process” when they bite their food carriers by mistake, says Brown. “It turns out, and I think this is very cool, they often give a back rub to their clients.”

To try and understand why, a fish biologist devised an experiment: Install a rotating brush at the surface of an aquarium, and see if fish come up and self-administer back rubs. When they did, the question changed to why they did it. “There doesn't seem to be any physical benefit,” said Brown, “but they looked at their hormones, and it turns out it's reducing stress levels, like some remedial massage. It's bizarre!”

Whether fishes feel pain is a controversial question, Brown acknowledges, in part because the answer has ramifications for the fishing industry, as well as scientific lab practices. He takes the position that fish have all the neurological hardware they need to sense pain, just like other vertebrate species; they respond to analgesics by displaying fewer symptoms of pain; and appear distracted when in pain. These are all signs that fish experience pain in ways that that humans can relate to, much as we can feel empathy for pain experienced by pet dogs or cats, or cows and chickens raised for food.

Although these days he's more likely to jump into a stream with a snorkel and mask than a fishing rod, preferring to observe fish rather than hook them, Brown does not advocate an end to fishing or aquaculture. “I come from a very long line of anglers,” he says. “My father's family is from Scotland, where they've been fly fishing since God knows when, probably since fishing was invented.”

Rather, he'd like to see “the sort of revolution, the sea-change in attitudes, in aquaculture and industrial fishing” that seems to be gradually improving the treatment of other animals we eat.

“If you're catch and kill an animal, you catch it as quickly as possible with a minimum amount of fuss, and you kill it, dispatch it as fast as you possibly can, with the minimum amount of suffering,” Brown says. “That's what you expect [for] any other terrestrial animal, so I don't understand why people treat fish any differently. And certainly all the data suggest that we shouldn't be.”

Chris Philpot

Engineer Andrew Maxwell-Parish has identified the element every tip jar lacks: Wu-Tang Clan’s masterpiece “C.R.E.A.M.” (“Cash Rules Everything Around Me”). Using a 3-D printer, a laser cutter, an Arduino microcontroller, a speaker, a battery, and other parts, he turned a tin can into a receptacle that plays part of the track every time money goes inside. Maxwell-Parish’s Wu-Tang Can arrives just in time for the group’s 20th-anniversary album, which is slated for release in July. 

Dollar Detector: Beneath the 3-D–printed lid, an LED shines onto a photoresistor. This sensor detects whenever money drops into the can, triggering the Arduino to play a random clip from an audio file of “C.R.E.A.M.”

Time: 1 day

Cost: About $70

Download a PDF of instructions to build the Wu-Tang Can here.

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

Who'll Stop The Rain?

A still from the 2004 climate fiction-disaster epic, "The Day After Tomorrow." Director Roland Emmerich drew on real climate science to imagine the rapid onslaught of global warming impacts like the stall of the Great Atlantic current, catastrophic freezing of the global North, and a world without humor or irony.

Dan Bloom of The Wrap writes that he is organizing new annual film award: the “Cliffies,” given for excellence in “cli-fi” movies, as in climate fiction.

Problem is, few movies about global warming or its impacts appear in any given year--particularly those that deal with them fairly directly, instead of using climate change as a dystopian backdrop to some other kind of story. So for now at least, Bloom's proposition has wobbly legs.

But what would happen if we opened up the field up to other kinds of pop culture, as well as the full lineage of climate-disruption fiction that's appeared over the better part of the past half-century?

Thank you, readers, for answering that question on Twitter and Facebook; even for those nominations I disagreed with. (Good online manners much appreciated.)

We've still got plenty of categories left to cover, though like Directing; Actor, Female; Costumes; Special Effects; and any other movie or TV award categories you'd care to make the case for. And how about the best comic or graphic novel about global warming? The best YA fiction? Best music? Please tweet your nominations to @ejgertz

Here are the un-scientific, un-audited results so far:

Best Movie

Winner: Soylent Green (1973)

Nominated by: Patrick Di Justo

Why: Soylent Green is “the first Hollywood film in which the plot revolves (in part) around the greenhouse effect," writes Patrick. "Extra points for being the first Hollywood film to mention 'greenhouse effect,' ” he says, and includes some gifs to prove it.

Full Disclosure: Patrick and I are longtime companions, and co-authors on two books for Maker Media.

Honorable Mention: The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Nominated by:Jon Lebkowsky

Why:“I don't know that it was the best, but The Day After Tomorrow was big, loud, and about as climate focused as any cli-fi film I can think of. “

Best Novel

Winner: The Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, by Kim Stanley Robinson

Nominated by: @misterinteger

Why: Robinson's characters, mostly heroic and anti-heroic scientists, debate whether and how to change the Red Planet's climate, geology, and environment: “Reds” want to keep Mars wild and largely unaltered, while “Greens” advocate total transformation of the surface to make it more easily human-habitable. Their moral and ethical arguments are proxies for contemporary fights across the spectrum of global warming politics today. “KSR's Mars is a macrocosm of climate policy on earth, a 'take two' which is also fundamentally connected to earth,” writes @misterinteger.

I'd add that Robinson's speculations on how 21st century human societies respond to the pressures of severe climate disruption ring plausible--from government by corporations, to the politics of scarcity, the future of energy, solar system colonization, and geoengineering technologies. Some are already proving prescient.

Robinson is already an acclaimed science fiction great; The New Yorker recently called him "one of the most important political writers working in America."

Honorable Mentions: The Windup Girl by Paolo Baciagalupi; Dune by Frank Herbert; Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver; Arctic Rising by Tobias Bucknell; The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin

Best Actor, Male

Winner: Kevin Costner, Waterworld (1995)

Nominated by: Mary M.

Why: “Not as bad as you remember, though pretty bad.”

In this disaster epic's vision of the future, every bit of land-bound ice on Earth has melted, raising the global ocean and flooding the continents. Humanity is turned out upon the vast sea on a ragtag fleet of ocean-going rafts; fresh water and food become commodities worth killing for. Long, slow, and confusingly written, but worth the watching for a web-fingered Costner drinking his own filtered urine.

Lifetime Achievement Award

Winner: Bruce Sterling, writer, speaker, futurist, design instructor

Nominated by: @rustyk5

Why:“Sterling’s been engaged with climate issues a lot longer than most. I’m thinking of Heavy Weather specifically, but also his work with Viridian Design.”

On a personal note, Heavy Weather is a personal favorite, and the Viridian Movement that Sterling founded in the 1990s was a primary source for the Worldchanging blog and book that I contributed to several years ago.

Most Destructive Cli-Fi

Winner: State of Fear, by Michael Crichton

Nominated by: Climate skeptics

Why: State of Fear, a thriller/polemic by the late TV producer, director, and novelist Michael Crichton, has arguably done more to advance crank global warming science than any other work of pop culture. Among its impacts, Crichton was invited to testify before the powerful U.S. Senate committee on Environment and Public Works in 2005, an opportunity he used to vilify the research findings of respected climate scientist Michael Mann.

“Dead of cancer. And a medical doctor, too. I hate to see people felled by this great scourge. I feel sorry for his family,” wrote Bruce Sterling upon Crichton's death in 2008. “Still – the guy missed an awesome chance to be snatched out of his writing-chair and torn to pieces in broad daylight by a freak climate-crisis windstorm. That might have made up for the harm he did. I’d like to say that Dr Crichton’s contemptibly paranoid view of climate politics will be missed, but… well…”

Anthrax Bacteria Grow in a Petri Dish

Dr. Todd Parker. Ph.D.; Assoc. Director for Lab. Science/DPEI(Acting) and LRN Training Coordinator

In a surprising and scary lapse, around 75 U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention workers may have been exposed to anthrax last week. So far, however, everyone is well and there seems to be little threat outside of those exposed.

The CDC offered its exposed staffers a course of antibiotics and a shot of an anthrax vaccine, reports Reuters, which was the first to break the story. No one has shown any external signs of the illness, which is not contagious. "Based on the investigation to date, CDC believes that other CDC staff, family members, and the general public are not at any risk and do not need to take any protective action," CDC director Thomas Frieden wrote in a letter to workers, which the Daily Beast published.

The exposure was the result of a mistake, Reuters journalist Julie Steenhuysen reported early this morning. (In an earlier report, published Thursday, Steenhuysen wrote it was too soon to know whether the release was intentional or accidental.) She describes what went wrong:

The lower-security labs were performing research on how to detect anthrax in the environment, the CDC said in a statement. Two of the three labs involved could have aerosolized spores of anthrax. The danger there is that people may inhale the spores and get an anthrax infection. People can get anthrax infections in a few different ways, but inhaling it is the deadliest. Among those who inhale anthrax and get a second-stage infection, about 90 percent die.

In 2001, dried anthrax powder was mailed to politicians and newsrooms through the U.S. mail system. The attack sickened 22 people and killed five. The investigation for that attack lasted until 2010, and the FBI's lead suspect committed suicide in 2008. 

It's a good sign that none of the potentially exposed CDC staff have any symptoms of an infection. Their exposure would have happened sometime between June 6 and June 13 and the normal incubation time for an anthrax infection is five to seven days. But there are documented cases of infections happening 60 days after an exposure.

[Reuters, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention]

Aether Cone

Photograph by Jonathon Kambouris

Streaming services are good at playing songs we’re apt to like, but they lack a certain contextual awareness. For example, they can’t tell that a listener may not want Black Sabbath at breakfast or Sinatra while working out. But the Aether Cone can. The Wi-Fi–connected speaker taps streaming accounts, podcasts, and personal libraries, and uses machine learning to create playlists based on habits. Initially, the listener tells the Cone what to play, verbally or through an app. Then onboard software tracks behavior—location, time, volume—and builds a contextual map, which allows it to deliver the perfect track in any situation.

Aether Cone

Battery life: 8 hours

Price:$399

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