Aereo Antennas In A Row

Aereo

Last month, online television company Aereo lost in a major case before the Supreme Court. The Court's 6-3 decision in ABC v. Aereo treated the company, and its unique antenna arrays, as just another cable network. In court documents filed yesterday, Aereo argues that it's allowed to keep operating. Only this time, Aereo will explicitly be a cable company.

Here's how the technology of Aereo works. An Aereo user logs into Aereo online, and selects a show they would like to watch. If the show is currently airing, a dime-sized antenna in Aereo's Chicago warehouse picks up the signal from over the air, and then streams that show to the customer at home. If the show hasn't aired yet, the customer can use Aereo like a DVR, and record the show with their little antenna to watch later. In essence, Aereo is a broadcast television antenna rented over the internet, with included storage. 

While a previous court affirmed Aereo's right to opterate that way, the Supreme Court instead found that Aereo was basically a cable company. In the statement filed yesterday, Aereo accepted this new status, and argued they should now be allowed to operate like a cable company. Here's the key part of Aereo's statement:

The Supreme Court has now ruled that “having considered the details of Aereo’s practices, we find them highly similar to those of the CATV systems in Fortnightly and Teleprompter. And those are activities that the 1976 amendments sought to bring within the scope of the Copyright Act.” ....

Aereo has been careful to follow the law, and the Supreme Court has announced a new and different rule governing Aereo’s operations last week. Under the Second Circuit’s precedents, Aereo was a provider of technology and equipment with respect to the near-live transmissions at issue in the preliminary injunction appeal. After the Supreme Court’s decision, Aereo is a cable system with respect to those transmissions. No additional discovery is needed to decide the Section 111 question, and its resolution at the threshold will eliminate the need to litigate, and take discovery with respect to, a wide swath of issues in the case.

It's unclear exactly how this will play out, though Aereo is arguing for the right to operate the same service they were before, but now under different legal rules.

This is a drastic change for the company, but one that makes sense in light of the Court's decision. The rules for renting an antenna that catches over-the-air broadcast television from another company over the internet are vague, and in ABC v. Aereo, the court compared it to test driving a car instead of using a valet service. The dissent, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, instead called Aereo "a copy shop that provides its patrons with a library card." Treating Aereo as a separate technology required the court to bend metaphors in an effort to understand it.

The ruling in ABC v. Aereo wasn't decided on the basis of Aereo being a copy shop or Aereo being a valet service. Instead, Justice Stephen Breyer treated Aereo like a cable company. And so, while Aereo argued previously that they were not, in light of this ruling, Aereo has now expressed its intent to operate under the already-defined rules for cable companies. At the same time, Aereo is urging its subscribers and supporters to contact Congress and argue that access to over-the-air broadcasts, key to its previous business model, remains an American right.

Saving the world through spirulina

Players of the online post-apocalypse game Viridis control the workings of a real algae farm, hidden somewhere in the mountains of France.

viridis.guru

In the wake of a mysterious disaster that destroys human civilization, a poisonous mist has spread over the land. The only way to gain immunity to the deadly miasma is by consuming spirulina, called the "Viridis," a blue-green algae loaded with protein and nutrients. Spirulina can be cultivated, so your mission is to scout this devastated world and scavenge the needed materials to build and manage a new algae farm. But you'll need the help, or at least the cooperation, of fellow survivors. 

Will the new farm fall apart as individuality confronts community decision-making? Or can people work together well enough to survive, when their ultimate welfare is at stake?

That's the narrative set-up for Viridis, an online game out of France that combines contemporary networked communications technologies with the ancient technology of agriculture, with a couple intriguing twists: Using data supplied by sensors, game players will make decisions that affect an actual spirulina farm, set in a greenhouse somewhere in the southern Cevennes mountains of France. And there's a time limit on the action, as Viridis launched in mid-June and will close some time in October.

As the French-language independent game news site Indius reports (and as I translate badly with my high school and college classroom French),

...the development of this farm will not be set by one, but by many players, who will collectively make decisions to bring about this center of production. Their choices will be reflected by the artists present on-site: What size to make the pond where the algae will grow? What type of liquid? How much light? All this is in your hands, and those of the other players. Don't worry if you don't know anything about algae farming; the Guru, an experienced farmer, will be your mentor during the game and tell you what you need to know to make decisions.

"[T]he interdependence between game and actual farm fuses the experience between virtual reality and the real world," according to its creators.

Viridis is reminicent of one of the earliest of Internet artworks: the TeleGarden or Telerobotic Garden, which also combined the 'net and agriculture. Established in 1995 (and in operation until 2004 or so) by a team of artists and engineers, the TeleGarden let user-community members manipulate a robotic arm set over a tabletop garden. Its creators wanted to learn more about people's conceptions of "reality" online -- Would users put time and care in the garden without knowing that it really existed? Why did they think it existed when they had no tangible evidence of it? -- as well as observing the extent to which people would collaborate vs compete in growing plants, since in the limited space only cooperative behavior would allow most plants to thrive.

The greenhouse at the center of Viridis appears to be real, to judge from photos online (scroll down past the "informations") and in its press packet -- admittedly, slim evidence of existence. There's also a firmly grounded array of institutional partners in the project, however, including the European Union.

Viridis may be a direct descendant of the Telegarden, but one that is exploring very tangible issues of resilience, cooperation and individuality in this era of disrupted climate -- an invisible force that is demonstrably wiping out, some of our long-held agricultural certainties.

The Seven Dwarfs.

Seven newly discovered dwarf galaxies encircle the (previously known) spiral galaxy M101.

Yale News

Technically, the galaxies have probably existed for billions of years, but these seven had slipped under the radar until now. They’re dwarf galaxies, so-named because they contain only a few billion stars, compared to galaxies such as our own Milky Way, which may contain up to 400 billion stars. Dwarfs are the most abundant galaxies in the universe, but they’re hard to detect because their light is dim and diffuse.

Now Yale astronomers are reporting they’ve overcome this problem by plugging together eight off-the-shelf camera lenses. They used 400mm f /2.8 Canon IS II telephoto lenses, which retail at a whopping $11,500 apiece, but are still a heck of a lot cheaper than other research telescopes, which can cost millions or billions of dollars. By coating the camera lenses in a special nanomaterial, the scientists reduced the scattering of light within the telescope by an order of magnitude, allowing for a sharper image of the stars.

The Dragonfly Telescope.

Yale News

“It may be that these seven galaxies are the tip of the iceberg, and there are thousands of them in the sky that we haven’t detected yet,” said lead author Allison Merritt in a press release.

The new galaxies look like they’re orbiting spiral galaxy M101—it’s typical for dwarf galaxies to get pulled around by a larger galaxy’s gravity. But it may be that the galaxies aren’t associated with M101 at all—that perhaps they’re freewheeling in front of or behind M101. If that turns out to be the case, the findings would add to the latest evidence indicating that there’s a lot that scientists don’t yet understand about dwarf galaxies.

Next, the team will be making observations with the Hubble Space Telescope to try to figure out just what those galaxies are up to.

The paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters in June. A free version of the paper is available on the Arxiv. 

Desert elephants in Namibia

Greg Willis via Wikimedia Commons

Poaching threatens the continued survival of African elephants, with 30,000 to 38,000 animals killed every year. This activity is typically illegal. In a concerning move, the country of Namibia (in southwest Africa) has now issued nine permits to hunt desert elephants, of which perhaps only 100 remain, according to the Conservation Action Trust. The permits are for shooting adult males--and the trust estimate there are only 18 of these bulls remaining. In other words, the move could wipe out half of them. 

Namibia's environment and tourism ministry, however, claims that there are 600 desert elephants left, and that the desert population is no different from the country's other groups of African elephants. So, no big deal. 

But conservationists--and scientists--disagree, as John Platt writes at Scientific American: 

The first of these permits was already executed, when hunters shot a "virile young male elephant" on June 21. 

NYPD helicopter patrolling New York City

Photo taken from the Empire State Building Observatory.

Refueled Dot Net, via Wikimedia Commons

Earlier this week, the New York Police Department arrested two men under charges of reckless endangerment for flying a drone close to a police helicopter. Recordings from the helicopter's cockpit reveal that the NYPD pilots in fact never feared the drone, and instead actively pursued it with their police helicopter.

This new evidence undermines the reckless endangerment charges. Pilots reported seeing the drone flying level with them at 800 feet in the air. While flying drones over 400 feet is against model airplane recommendations, willfully flying a helicopter dangerously close to a small flying object is also probably ill-advised.

Notable in the recording is the pilots' lack of familiarity with drones. On the recording the officers express surprise at the drone's ability to "do a 180", an easy feat for quadcopters, and they claim that the drone went from 0 to 2000 feet, a challenging task given the limited battery power and small engines on the DJI Phantom drone in question.

All of this adds to a murkier case in an area where the law is lacking and unclear. Drones like the one in the case are available for $500, and the future will only see more drone-and-manned-aircraft interactions. 

Genetically modified apples may soon hit the market

Photograph by Travis Rathbone; Stylist: Sarah Guido for Halley Resources

Later this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture may approve the Arctic Granny and Arctic Golden, the first genetically modified apples to hit the market. Although it will probably be another two years before the non-browning fruits appears in stores, at least one producer is already scrambling to label its apples GMO-free.

The looming apple campaign is just the latest salvo in the ongoing war over genetically modified organisms (GMOs)—one that's grown increasingly contentious. Over the past decade, the controversy surrounding GMOs has sparked worldwide riots and the vandalism of crops in Oregon, the United Kingdom, Australia, and the Philippines. In May, the governor of Vermont signed a law that will likely make it the first U.S. state to require labels for genetically engineered ingredients; more than 50 nations already mandate them. Vermont State Senator David Zuckerman told Democracy Now!, "As consumers, we are guinea pigs, because we really don't understand the ramifications."

But the truth is, GMOs have been studied intensively, and they look a lot more prosaic than the hype contends. To make Arctic apples, biologists took genes from Granny Smith and Golden Delicious varieties, modified them to suppress the enzyme that causes browning, and reinserted them in the leaf tissue. It's a lot more accurate than traditional methods, which involve breeders hand-pollinating blossoms in hopes of producing fruit with the desired trait. Biologists also introduce genes to make plants pest- and herbicide-resistant; those traits dominate the more than 430 million acres of GMO crops that have already been planted globally. Scientists are working on varieties that survive disease, drought, and flood.

So what, exactly, do consumers have to fear? To find out, Popular Science chose 10 of the most common claims about GMOs and interviewed nearly a dozen scientists. Their collective answer: not much at all.

1) Claim: Genetic engineering is a radical technology.

Humans have been manipulating the genes of crops for millennia by selectively breeding plants with desirable traits. (A perfect example: the thousands of apple varieties.) Virtually all of our food crops have been genetically modified in some way. In that sense, GMOs are not radical at all. But the technique does differ dramatically from traditional plant breeding.

Here's how it works: Scientists extract a bit of DNA from an organism, modify or make copies of it, and incorporate it into the genome of the same species or a second one. They do this by either using bacteria to deliver the new genetic material, or by shooting tiny DNA-coated metal pellets into plant cells with a gene gun. While scientists can't control exactly where the foreign DNA will land, they can repeat the experiment until they get a genome with the right information in the right place.

That process allows for greater precision. "With GMOs, we know the genetic information we are using, we know where it goes in the genome, and we can see if it is near an allergen or a toxin or if it is going to turn [another gene] off," says Peggy G. Lemaux, a plant biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. "That is not true when you cross widely different varieties in traditional breeding."

2) Claim: GMOs are too new for us to know if they are dangerous.

It depends on how you define new. Genetically engineered plants first appeared in the lab about 30 years ago and became a commercial product in 1994. Since then, more than 1,700 peer-reviewed safety studies have been published, including five lengthy reports from the National Research Council, that focus on human health and the environment. The scientific consensus is that existing GMOs are no more or less risky than conventional crops.

3) Claim: Farmers can't replant genetically modified seeds.

So-called terminator genes, which can make seeds sterile, never made it out of the patent office in the 1990s. Seed companies do require farmers to sign agreements that prohibit replanting in order to ensure annual sales, but Kent Bradford, a plant scientist at the University of California, Davis, says large-scale commercial growers typically don't save seeds anyway. Corn is a hybrid of two lines from the same species, so its seeds won't pass on the right traits to the next generation. Cotton and soy seeds could be saved, but most farmers don't bother. "The quality deteriorates—they get weeds and so on—and it's not a profitable practice," Bradford says.

4) Claim: We don't need GMOs—there are other ways to feed the world.

GMOs alone probably won't solve the planet's food problems. But with climate change and population growth threatening food supplies, genetically modified crops could significantly boost crop output. "GMOs are just one tool to make sure the world is food-secure when we add two billion more people by 2050," says Pedro Sanchez, director of the Agriculture and Food Security Center at Columbia University's Earth Institute. "It's not the only answer, and it is not essential, but it is certainly one good thing in our arsenal."

5) Claim: GMOs cause allergies, cancer, and other health problems.

Many people worry that genetic engineering introduces hazardous proteins, particularly allergens and toxins, into the food chain. It's a reasonable concern: Theoretically, it's possible for a new gene to express a protein that provokes an immune response. That's why biotech companies consult with the Food and Drug Administration about potential GMO foods and perform extensive allergy and toxicity testing. Those tests are voluntary but commonplace; if they're not done, the FDA can block the products.

One frequently cited study, published in 2012 by researchers from the University of Caen in France, claimed that one of Monsanto's corn GMOs caused tumors in lab rats. But the study was widely discredited because of faulty test methods, and the journal retracted it in 2013. More recently, researchers from the University of Perugia in Italy published a review of 1,783 GMO safety tests; 770 examined the health impact on humans or animals. They found no evidence that the foods are dangerous.

6) Claim: All research on GMOs has been funded by Big Ag.

This simply isn't true. Over the past decade, hundreds of independent researchers have published peer-reviewed safety studies. At least a dozen medical and scientific groups worldwide, including the World Health Organization and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have stated that the GMOs currently approved for market are safe.

 

7) Claim: Genetically modified crops cause farmers to overuse pesticides and herbicides.

This claim requires a little parsing. Two relevant GMOs dominate the market. The first enables crops to express a protein from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is toxic to certain insects. It's also the active ingredient in pesticides used by organic farmers. Bt crops have dramatically reduced reliance on chemical insecticides in some regions, says Bruce Tabashnik, a University of Arizona entomologist.

The second allows crops to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate so that farmers can spray entire fields more liberally yet kill only weeds. Glyphosate use has skyrocketed in the U.S. since these GMOs were introduced in 1996. But glyphosate is among the mildest herbicides available, with a toxicity 25 times less than caffeine. Its use has decreased reliance on more toxic alternatives, such as atrazine.

8) Claim: GMOs create super-insects and super-weeds.

If farmers rely too heavily on Bt or glyphosate, then pesticide resistance is inevitable, says Tabashnik. That's evolution at work, and it's analogous to antibiotics creating hardier bacteria. It is an increasing problem and could lead to the return of harsher chemicals. The solution, he says, is to practice integrated pest management, which includes rotating crops. The same goes for any type of farming.

 

9) Claim: GMOs harm beneficial insect species.

This has been been partly debunked. Bt insecticides attach to proteins found in some insects' guts, killing select species. For most insects, a field of Bt crops is safer than one sprayed with an insecticide that kills indiscriminately. But monarch butterflies produce the same proteins as one of Bt's target pests, and a 1999 Cornell University lab experiment showed that feeding the larvae milkweed coated in Bt corn pollen could kill them. Five studies published in 2001, however, found that monarchs aren't exposed to toxic levels of Bt pollen in the wild.

A 2012 paper from Iowa State University and the University of Minnesota suggested glyphosate-tolerant GMOs are responsible for monarchs' recent population decline. The herbicide kills milkweed (the larvae's only food source) in and near crops where it's applied.

10) Claim: Modified genes spread to other crops and wild plants, upending the ecosystem.

The first part could certainly be true: Plants swap genetic material all the time by way of pollen, which carries plant DNA—including any genetically engineered snippets.

According to Wayne Parrott, a crop geneticist at the University of Georgia, the risk for neighboring farms is relatively low. For starters, it's possible to reduce the chance of cross-pollination by staggering planting schedules, so that fields pollinate during different windows of time. (Farmers with adjacent GMO and organic fields already do this.) And if some GMO pollen does blow into an organic field, it won't necessarily nullify organic status. Even foods that bear the Non-GMO Project label can be 0.5 percent GMO by dry weight.

As for a GMO infiltrating wild plants, the offspring's survival partly depends on whether the trait provides an adaptive edge. Genes that help wild plants survive might spread, whereas those that, say, boost vitamin A content might remain at low levels or fizzle out entirely. 

The Rise of GMO Crops

In the U.S., farmers have been planting increasing amounts GMO crops since the seeds became commercially available in 1996. Corn, cotton, and soy—which together occupy about 40 percent of U.S. cropland—are the three crops with the highest GMO fraction by area, each more than 90 percent in 2013.

The GMO fraction by area of corn, cotton, and soy in the top states that grow those crops.Data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Graphic by Rebecca Lantner.

Mohajer-4 Computer Model

Aspahbod, via Wikimedia Commons

Here's a roundup of the week's top drone news, designed to capture the military, commercial, non-profit, and recreational applications of unmanned aircraft.

A Deadly Russian Seadrone Model

The Chirok UAV is a fat-bottomed craft, with engines above the body and an almost cartoonish shape. It looks like a child's bath toy. The reason for the weird shape? Chirok will be a hovercraft-bottomed plane, allowing it to take off and land on water, snow, soft ground, and marshes, instead of runways. It will also be a lot less cute in application. The finished version is expected to have cameras and sensors for surveillance, and according to Russia defense consortium Rostec, "another feature of the vehicle design is that its weapons can be installed within the body." Right now there is only the model, but Russia expects to present a full-sized version at an air show next year.

Chirok UAV

A scale model of the drone.

United Instrument-Making Corporation

The Fifth China UAV Show & Conference

In Beijing this week, Chinese industry is showing off their native drones. While Chinese police use drones to catch polluters, their military drones lag behind American ones. The Fifth China UAV Show & Conference is a chance to show off the range of drones currently made in China, and evaluate how far they've come to matching their rivals across the Pacific. The show features civilian quadcopters, rail-launched military scouts, old-school target drones (pictured below is the S-300 subsonic drone), and many other types of unmanned aerial vehicle.

Chinese Target Drones On Display

From a small gallery of drones on the trade show floor.

Xinhua news Agency

Found Poems About Drones

Martha Stewart has a drone, and uses it to take aerial pictures of her vast property. Recently, she posted a gallery of these photos to her blog (they're lovely), and in the comments people responded. The Hairpin read these comments and combined them into an equally lovely found poem about drones. Here's an excerpt:

As far as drones go, I guess we take the good with the bad.
Just like with anything else, can be used for "good" or "evil".
What can you do???

The Drone shot reminds me of standing
On the viewing deck of the Eiffel tower looking down at Versallie
We all long to be “Martha”

Fireworks Filmed, In A Probably Illegal Way

On the Fourth of July, Jos Stiglingh used a DJI Phantom drone to film a fireworks show...from within. It's incredible, amazing, beautiful, and almost certainly illegal. Watch below:

Insurgents Shoot Iranian Drone

Islamic State, the horrifically violent insurgent group formerly known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, released an image of a Iranian drone they shot down in Iraq last week. Iran is currently assisting the government of Iraq in their fight against the Islamic State, and while the downed drone is an Iranian model, it's marked by an Iraqi flag. The photo, released on the July 4th, superimposes the drone next to an IS machine gunner. While hard to do, it's possible to shoot drones down with machine guns, and that could well be what happened here.

IS Downs A Drone

The drone pictured appears to be an Iranian Mohajer-4.

Islamic Caliphate

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

HIV

CDC

The Mississippi baby who had been "functionally cured" of her HIV infection now has detectable levels of virus. It's a sad turn of events, but not necessarily a surprising one.

You can read more about the Mississippi case in Popular Science's 2013 explainer. In short, the baby received an aggressive course of standard anti-retroviral treatment just 30 hours after she was born. Then, because her mother stopped bringing her to the doctor, she didn't get treated for a few months. Yet once doctors saw her again, they found no evidence that HIV was replicating in her blood—an unprecedented result. So researchers began hoping that perhaps aggressive early treatment could help other babies born with HIV. They set up a clinical trial to test this.

At the same time, the Mississippi baby's doctors did find fragments of HIV DNA in her blood, a sign that she could still be infected. Commentators warned how unlikely it was this was a true, lifelong cure. Surely the girl's doctors knew this, too. It was a watch-and-wait situation, but everyone was hopeful.

Now, the girl is almost four years old and she's having "an unequivocal relapse" with significant numbers of virus in her blood, as AIDS expert Dr. Anthony Fauci told the New York Times. Her caretakers can still manage the virus with anti-retrovirals, but if her infection is like others' and HIV treatments don't improve, she'll take those drugs for the rest of her life. That's not a terrible fate—many folks in the U.S. live with HIV—but it has its challenges.

Researchers will now reconsider how they'll run the clinical trial they set up for other babies born with HIV, the New York Times reports. 

[New York Times]

Constructing The Run

Tilting Point

Popular Science checked in with Doar throughout the build to gain some insight into his creative process. The project’s start was fairly simple. After sketching out his concept, Doar gathered his regular crew, including Trevor Yamamoto, T. J. Lewis, and Paul Thompson, and went shopping for materials. In this case, they relied mostly on wood, especially two-by-fours, which connected with the game’s rough-hewn, Old West look. “It has this tendency to look sophisticated but at the same time unsophisticated,” he says. “You can tell some skill has gone into building it, but it’s a little more accessible.”

Once he had his materials, Doar and his crew headed out to the set, an old, largely abandoned paint factory a few hours drive from Los Angeles. “I have a mobile shop that I bring, including a table saw, a chop saw, a band saw, a drill press, and more,” he says.

The initial construction took several days, but the real challenge was getting everything to work as well as it did in his head. Two days before the final video shoot, for example, Doar was struggling with one leg of the journey in particular, visible at the 53-second mark. “We've got one thing that is probably the most finicky,” he said at the time. “A sledgehammer drops and hits a teeter-totter and launches a ball up and banks it off a shovel and shoots it into a net.”

Sounds simple enough, right? The sequence would work perfectly, then fail, for no apparent reason. “I'm pretty sure we're controlling every element, but every once in a while the ball completely misses, and I have no idea why. It might just be a question of humidity and temperature.”

Brett Doar And His Machine

Tilting Point

Another tricky feat was the loop-the-loop, seen at the 1:00 mark. The ball--Leo--had to be moving fast enough to complete the circuit without falling, but if it gathered too much speed on the circular track, it would fly straight off the course. For Doar and his crew, that meant bending and re-bending pairs of quarter-inch steel rods until they formed the perfect circumference. After several trials, though, they managed to get it right.

Once the entire contraption was working, a second crew came in to dress up the set, and make it look more like the game, before the video shoot. That required additional tweaking on Doar’s part. For example, the set dressers stained some of the wood. “I figured staining would be fine,” he says. “But the stain caused some of the wood to swell.” That, in turn, changed the speed of the ball, so Doar and his crew worked late into the night before the final shoot, realigning the tracks, changing the angles to assure the ball would move at the proper pace.

After two weeks of work, and never quite figuring out why the ball was missing the net on occasion, Doar’s final obstacle was more mundane. In the closing shot, the rolling ball picks up a sticker with glasses and a moustache, so that he resembles Leo, the character in the game. “You need to figure out the endpoint so he’s looking directly into the camera,” Doar says. To get it right, they had to set the sticker in exactly the right spot, so that the ball would roll over it, pick up the tape, complete a 3/4 turn, then stop at the end of the track.

Yet it did end up functioning as they’d hoped, and all those little errors along the way were actually highlights of the experience.  “Something always goes wrong,” Doar says. “You feel cheated if it doesn’t. If everything goes perfectly, you wonder, ‘Were we really pushing ourselves?’”

IBM is putting $3 billion towards new chip research.

Christina Welsh/Flickr

So what’s going to happen? No one is sure yet, but chipmakers are already making moves to safeguard the future of hardware development. This week, IBM announced plans to allocate $3 billion over five years to chip research. While the company's overall R&D expenditures will remain the same, there is a new focus not only on miniaturizing circuitry to 7 nanometers, but also on replacing silicon chips with alternative technologies.

Georgia Tech computer scientist Tom Conte tells Popular Science that 7-nanometer transistors are “basically the size of large atoms. There are a lot of unknown quantum effects” that can’t be controlled, so chipmakers can’t guarantee reliable function.

Intel can currently make transistors at 22 nanometers wide, and plans to offer 14 nanometers next year. Moore’s Law has generally held true -- we've been increasing the number of transistors on chips for decades now. But according to Conte, "there's been no big benefit for a while now." From 1994 to 1998, maximum CPU clock speeds rose by 300 percent. Between 2007 to 2011, those speeds increased by a mere 33 percent.

Conte predicts “silicon’s days are numbered. We’ve hit a place where we need to step back and rethink how we design computers.” IBM seems to agree. Their recent announcement cited several different burgeoning technologies that could lead to breakthroughs in chip development, making them not only smaller, but also more efficient and more reliable.

One is quantum computing, where the goal is to increase a computer's operational capabilities. Tradidtional bits of information have values of only 0 or 1, but quantum bits can hold values of 0, 1, or both at the same time, enabling a system to process millions of calculations at the same time.

Another option is to pursue neurosynaptic computing, which uses circuitry that is “based on the structures we see in the brain,” says Conte. The idea is to make computers emulate certain processes that neurological systems excel at, like pattern detection.

Nanophotonics (also known as silicon photonics) process information using pulses of light rather than electrical signals. In their announcement, IBM expressed hopes that nanophotonics could provide “a super highway for large volumes of data to move at rapid speeds between computer chips in servers.”

The current structure of microchips might also remain the same, save for silicon. Carbon nanotubes– single atomic sheets of carbon rolled up into tubes – reportedly perform better 10 times faster than silicon, and could act a simple replacement for transistor material.

None of these technologies, however, have had enough testing. Furthermore, some experts remain ardently skeptical that silicon is even on its way out. “I wouldn’t bet a dollar on of this stuff,” says MIT computer scientist Srini Devadas. “The quantum stuff is just so far out,” he says, and he doesn’t believe carbon nanotubes or nanophotonics could feasibly compete with silicon in the near future. Transistor miniaturization will probably still slow down considerably once we reach 7 nanometers, but Devadas believes there's still a lot of room for innovation using existing materials. “Why not just develop a variant of silicon that works?” he asks.

Devadas also points out that the $3 billion IBM has pledged is “small peanuts” compared to the hundreds of billions chipmakers like IBM and Intel are already putting into research for silicon innovation. He believes that as silicon transistors continue to shrink, people are anxious to see other technologies usher in a “post-silicon” era, making IBM’s announcement seem more significant than it actually is.

Regardless of how promising other technologies turn out to be, it's pretty clear that silicon is here to stay for at least the next few years. “It’s the incumbent,” says Devadas. “Nothing else can compete.”

Beach sand, on the left, and purified sand in the middle. The right image shows vials of the former two, and a third made up of nano-silicon used to make the battery.

Scientific Reports

Sink your toes into this: Beach sand can be used to make lithium-ion batteries that last three times longer than current models, according to a study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

“This is the holy grail: a low-cost, non-toxic, environmentally friendly way to produce high performance lithium-ion battery anodes,” said Zachary Favors, a graduate student at UC Riverside, in a statement.

The idea came to Favors when he was sitting on the beach after surfing, and realized the material was made up of a high percentage of quartz, or silicon dioxide. Typically the negative side, or anode, of lithium-ion batteries are made with graphite. Silicon has been eyed as a replacement material, since it can store about 10 times more energy--only it's difficult to produce in large quantities and degrades quickly. But perhaps the silicon in sand could provide a cheap, abundant source of silicon. 

After finding a reservoir of sand with an even higher fraction of quartz, in Texas, Favors processed it in the lab, as described by Gizmag:

The researchers have filed patents for the technology, and used it to produce a coin-sized lithium ion battery. The technology would allow phones to last for about three days on one charge, as opposed to the current average of about one day per charge, according to the business newspaper Mint. Let's hope this technology turns out to be as exciting as it sounds. 

Golden Rice

Compared to regular white rice, "golden" rice, at the top, has been genetically modified to produce beta carotene, a precursor to vitamin A.

International Rice Research Institute via Wikipedia

1,700: the number of peer-reviewed safety studies that GMO foods have undergone. Learn more about the research behind GMOs in this month's Popular Science.

$550: how much it will cost you to build a drivable tank for your goldfish. So worth it.

16 years: how long this new prototype hormonal birth control implant is designed to last. A remote control lets users click the implant on or off, depending on whether they want to get pregnant at a certain time.

Fish on wheels

Photograph by Studio diip

6: the number of vials U.S. federal labs found this month containing unauthorized samples of smallpox virus.

7: the number of new dwarf galaxies astronomers recently discovered.

8: the number of lenses on the telescope the astronomers used.

Eight-Lensed Dragonfly Telescope

Yale News

305: the number of exoplanets that will be up for public naming next year. Sign up to vote!

What Kepler-186f Might Look Like If It Has Clouds and Seas

NASA Ames/SETI Institute/JPL-CalTech

3.5 million: the number of guinea worm infections reported around the world annually in the 1980s.

17: the number of guinea worm infections reported around the world so far this year.

The Guinea Worm. Creepy, but still here... for now.

Coastal Courier

42 percent: the proportion of English words that are loanwords from other languages.

91 percent: similarity between the proteins found on the surface of dog tumors and on the surface of human tumors. The discovery helped researchers develop the first antibody therapy for canine cancer.

Seeds of Sweet Corn

Photo from the USDA

Sometimes even a high-tech heist requires a little digging around in the dirt.

Earlier this month, a federal court indicted a Chinese national for trying to steal GMO corn technology from DuPont, Monsanto, and AgReliant Genetics. The scientist's arrest is just the latest in a series of indictments against six other people linked to a Beijing seed-development company called Dabeinong Technology Group Co. The FBI alleges the Dabeinong staff were part of a years-long seed collection effort that sometimes involved some low-tech methods. Science magazine reports:

And from Chemical & Engineering News:

What's at stake here aren't the genetically modified seeds that farmers buy and plant. Presumably you could get those by pretending to be a farmer and signing an agreement with a GMO company (although that might present its own difficulties: What if a company representative comes to check on your "farm"?). Instead, the FBI alleges Debeinong staff tried to steal the seeds and seedlings of the "parent" plants that companies crossbreed to create the seeds they sell to farmers.

Parent plants are much more valuable than the GMO seeds farmers buy. A farmer who plants a cross-bred GMO corn crop could keep the resulting seeds and re-plant them, if she wanted. (I mean technically she could, because the seeds aren't sterile, as is often alleged, but she would likely face legal repercussions.) However, a crop grown from cross-bred seeds will contain a mix of corn types, most them inferior in quality. Parent plants, on the other hand, breed true generation after generation, carrying the traits companies engineered into them. The sequences of parent plants' genes represent some of the companies' most important intellectual property.

[Science, Chemical & Engineering News. See also these court documents from December 2013, posted by NPR]

This is not the Wiki bot; the real bot is a computer program, which just looks like a string of random letters and numbers.

Golfi1812 / YouTube

You might think writing 10,000 articles per day would be impossible. But not for a Swede named Sverker Johansson. He created a computer program that has written a total of 2.7 million articles, making Johansson the most prolific author, by far, on the "internet's encyclopedia." His contributions account for 8.5 percent of the articles on Wikipedia, the Wall Street Journal reports. 

But how can a bot write so many articles, and do it coherently? As Johansson--a science teacher with degrees in linguistics, civil engineering, economics and particle physics--explained to the WSJ, the bot scrapes information from various trusted sources, and then cobbles that material together, typically into a very short entry, or "stub." Many of the articles cover the taxonomy of little-known animals such as butterflies and beetles, and also small towns in the Philippines (his wife is Filipino).

Johansson's creation, known as Lsjbot, is certainly not the only bot to write articles meant for human eyes. For example, the Associated Press just announced that it will use robots to write thousands of pieces, and other news outlets use programs to write articles, especially finance and sports stories. And on Wikipedia, half of all of the edits are made by bots. 

Several long-time members of Wikipedia are not happy that so many articles are being written by non-humans. But Johansson defends his bot, pointing out that the articles it writes are accurate (although there have been some glitches that he claims have been corrected), and can very useful. For example, Lsjbot wrote a stub about the town of Basey, in the Philippines. When Typhoon Yolanda hit the town, causing deaths, people were able to visit this stub and find out more about the town and its location.

25 percent of teens identify themselves as victims of cyberbullying

Flickr/workingword

In March, a new blog called the Vancouver Taddler popped up on Tumblr. Reportedly inspired by TV’s Gossip Girl, it was billed as a tool for teens to exact revenge on one another. The blogger posted pictures of teens defaced with scribbled genitals, gossip about drug use and sexual exploits, and even private text messages. Within a week, local authorities identified the culprit, and the blog was taken down. But the damage to reputations and psyches has undoubtedly remained. The incident, and others like it, prompts a question that’s now all too common: What can stop cyberbullying?

Bullying is a growing threat on the Web, particularly as social media and online gaming continue to grow. Take, for example, Facebook. According to a survey conducted by anti-bullying charity Ditch the Label, bullying is twice as likely to happen on Facebook than on any other site. To help curb the problem, Facebook rolled out a Bullying Prevention Hub last November. There, users can learn how to deal with, report, and block bullies. Once alerted to a problem, Facebook administrators might take down offending posts and warn or even remove offenders. Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, and others have similar reporting systems in place.

Those tactics are better than nothing, but they still have a fundamental flaw: They can’t stop attacks before they happen. This spring, Microsoft took a step in that direction by introducing a reputation-tracking system in the Xbox Live community. Multiplayer online games, such as Call of Duty and League of Legends, are home to more than one-quarter of all reported bullying incidents, according to one survey. In Microsoft’s system, an algorithm monitors how frequently a player is muted or blocked and assigns him a color—green indicates a “good player,” yellow marks one that “needs work,” and red shows ones to avoid. Jerks risk losing privileges, such as the ability to broadcast gameplay, and they’ll have a harder time finding people to play with in the future.

For creeps, the system creates a self-fulfilling prophecy. As their reputation worsens, they’ll theoretically match with fewer and fewer good-natured gamers. Other ranking systems, such as the karma ratings assigned to Redditors, merely suggest whether someone’s posts are worth reading; reputation tracking, by comparison, might actually cordon off people not worth your time.

That said, reputation tracking isn’t a silver bullet, warns Sameer Hinduja, co-director of the Cyberbullying Research Center. If companies wish to punish bad behavior or reward good, he says, the incentives would need to be substantial. And beyond gaming, incentives are hard to come by—there are no bonus levels or new characters to earn. What’s more, bullies probably won’t care if they lose touch with a part of the community. In fact, Hinduja suggests, jerks are just as happy to hang out with other jerks—they may even egg each other on. Still, if the rest of us can work, play, and share in peace, with the creeps out of sight, that’s certainly a good start.

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

Geologic Map of Mars

By Kenneth Tanaka et al., 2014

The ground in Elysium is made of volcanic flows. That's according to the newest geologic map of Mars, above, from the U.S. Geological Survey. Elysium Planitia is a named feature on Mars, but we're guessing the area is rather drier than the mythical Elysium that Homer described as a meadowed paradise.

We'd love for you to go explore the map on your own here. Before you go, however, we'll give you a guide on how to interpret it. All the different colored parts represent areas of crust that were formed at different times and from different processes. For example, the extensive green area near the north pole represents lowland plains formed during the Red Planet's Hesperian Epoch, about 3.7 billion to 3 billion years ago. Scientists think those northern plains are covered in sediment from what were once Martian rivers and lakes. You can learn more about the green area, or any other colored area, in the extensive key on the right side of the map sheet.

One easy thing to spot are impact craters, which are roundish and marked on the map in bright yellow. Can you find Gale Crater, the site where NASA's Curiosity rover landed? Gale Crater is just southwest of Elysium Planitia, which is the mostly pink area on the right side of the map.

NASA scientists made their first global map of Mars in 1978, using data from Mariner 9. Teams have made a few other maps since, as NASA sent more missions to the Red Planet. Compared to previous geologic maps, this new map finds a greater percentage of Mars' crust originated from the first of its three epochs, the Noachian Epoch. The scientists who made this map also dated all the impact craters that are at least 150 kilometers (93 miles) in diameter. Mars' biggest craters formed mostly early in the planet's history—more than 80 of them formed in the Noachian Epoch, 4.5 billion to 3.7 billion years ago, but fewer than 10 formed after that. 

The new map combines data and studies from the 1980s Viking missions onward. Among the data points the map uses are more than 600 million individual altitude measurements from the Mars Global Surveyor. 

Boeing Long Range Strike Bomber Concept Art

Boeing

The U.S. Air Force is quietly ramping up spending on a future bomber, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service published earlier this month. The Air Force also sent requirements for the program to the industry earlier this week. The goal is a new group of bombers to serve two functions: replace the aging bomber fleet, and safely attack despite future defensive weapons. 

Work on Air Force's next bomber began years ago. Here's what Popular Science said about it in 2012:

Patents and bid proposals from Northrop Grumman, maker of the B-2, suggest that the new bomber will be narrower than the B-2 but maintain the familiar flying wing design, which reduces radar reflection by minimizing hard edges. Engineers are also testing new types of radar-absorbing coatings that could be customized to individual defense systems. And so a picture of the next generation of stealth bombers is beginning to emerge.

Such a bomber would greatly expand the ability of the Air Force to hit protected places in enemy countries, places beyond the safe reach of America's still-flying Cold War-era B-52 bombers. The Air Force expects to field between 80 and 100 of the new Long Range Strike Bomber, and they plan to have them ready for action by the mid 2020s.

Lockheed Long Range Strategic Bomber Concept Art

Lockheed Martin

In March, people reported and photographed what appeared to be a new, v-shaped aircraft flying over Texas. This theory meshes well with the Congressional Research Service report, which saw a rapid budget increase and notes that:

the projected LRS-B budget increases more than 10-fold in the current Future Years Defense Program, from $258.7 million in FY2013 to $3,451.2 million in FY2019. Aviation analysts and industry officials confirm CRS's assessment that this funding stream resembles a production program more than a typical development profile. This may indicate that significant LRS-B development has already been completed, presumably in classified budgets. Such prior development would also help explain how the Air Force intends to get the system from a Request for Proposals to initial operational capability in about 10 years, when equally or less-complicated systems like the F-22 and F-35 have taken more than 20.

Despite corporate maneuvering about the contract, both the Air Force and potential industry partners are keeping quiet about the development. In a triumph of blandness, Air Force secretary Deborah Lee James told the U.S. Naval Institute in a statement that "The [Long range Strike Bomber] is a top modernization priority for the Air Force. It will be an adaptable and highly capable system based upon mature technology."