At this moment, the Rosetta spacecraft is about 250,000,000 miles away from Earth and quickly approaching the (not-so-poetically named) comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The European Space Agency launched Rosetta in 2004 with a plan to send it to 67P and drop a robotic lander onto a comet's surface for the first time ever. But as Rosetta flies nearer and nearer to the comet, it has made an unexpected discovery.

When Hubble imaged 67P back in 2003, scientists concluded the comet was a giant three-by-two mile football-shaped rock. So, this is apparently what ESA expected to see once Rosetta got there:

An artist’s impression of Rosetta orbiting Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, back when ESA thought the comet was normal-shaped.

ESA, image by AOES Medialab

Scientists began noticing something weird in the photos Rosetta sent back about a week ago. As the spacecraft approached within 23,000 miles of 67P, it started to look like the comet had three big bumps on its surface. 

Now Rosetta is less than 8,000 miles from the comet, and it looks like 67P actually is composed of two distinct structures. “This is unlike any other comet we have ever seen before”, Carsten Güttler, who manages Rosetta's imaging system, said in a press release. “The images faintly remind me of a rubber ducky with a body and a head.” 

So far scientists aren't sure where 67P got its irregular structure from, but an ESA blogger came up with four possibilities:

1) Two comets slowly collided together

2) A single comet was pulled into the weird shape by the gravity of the Sun or Jupiter. "Perhaps the two parts of comet 67P/C-G will one day separate completely," the writer speculates.

3) A single comet deformed as the ice in its nucleus evaporated

4) A huge chunk of something slammed into the comet and ripped off big pieces of it. 

Scientists hope to find out more about the mysterious rubber ducky's composition when Rosetta's lander touches down on the comet's surface in November. 

2014 USGS National Seismic Hazard Map, displaying intensity of potential ground shaking from an earthquake in 50 years (which is the typical lifetime of a building).

USGS

Will there be an earthquake near you in the near future? Well, I won't claim to be able to tell the future, but the U.S. Geological Survey has just released a new map using the the most up-to-date hazard assessments for a temblor in your region, which incorporates "more than 100 years of global earthquake observations, widely accepted seismology-based principles, and a long history of scientific analyses in the science and engineering communities," the USGS noted.

This is the first comprehensive map since the last one, made in 2008. Since then, new research--and information provided by earthquakes themselves, which can tell geologists much about the structure of deep underground faults when they rupture--has suggested that relative to 2008 scientists think there is an increased risk of earthquakes in the Carolinas, the Northeast generally, San Diego and San Jose, California. For our Midwestern friends, scientists think that the New Madrid Seismic Zone, which encompasses a broad area around southern Illinois to northern Louisiana, is more likely to yield a quake over a broader area than previously assumed.

However, geologists have slightly downgraded the risk of an earthquake in Irvine, Santa Barbara and Oakland, California, as well as New York City.

While all state have a slight chance of a quake, 42 of the 50 states have a reasonable chance of experiencing damaging ground shaking from an earthquake in the next 50 years, the USGS noted. The 16 states at highest risk are Alaska, Arkansas, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

Cover Of The 'State of the Climate in 2013' Report

Super Typhoon Haiyan's deadly impact on the Philippines was a standout indicator of climate disruption in 2013.

The cover image of "State of the Climate in 2013," makes the impact of the report, which was released today, clear. Taken in late November on the island of Leyte, Philippines during the aftermath of Super Typhoon Hainan, it shows a wrecked mini-bus sits askew in a debris-scattered field, its front hood curved like a sneering lip, beneath a sky half-full of bruise-colored clouds. Just beyond, a shirt flutters on a clothesline tangled in the jagged remains of a collapsed building.

The global data and analysis compiled in "State of the Climate in 2013" show that last year the Earth's surface continued to warm beyond the historic norms found in records going back hundreds or even thousands of years, sometimes with catastrophic results. Among the notable indicators of climate disruption noted in the report:

• Globally, the Earth's combined land and sea surface temperature was between the second and sixth warmest since record-keeping began in 1880. But 2013 saw a plateau in the cooling effect of cyclical “La Nina” conditions over the Pacific Ocean.  Scientists are now on watch for the start of “El Nino,” the cyclical warming trend that could further intensify the rate of global temperature increases.

• CO₂ levels hit 400 ppm on May 9, 2013, for the first time in the history of monitoring at the Mauna Loa Observatory (the famous-to-climate-geeks Keeling project)

• Temperatures:
  • Australia had its hottest year since record-keeping began in 2010, while some parts of North America saw lower than average temperatures.
  • Fairbanks, Alaska saw a record-breaking 36 days with temperatures at 80°F or higher. “I can tell you that that many days at such high temperature is not a pleasant experience,” said Martin Jeffries, a scientist with the Office of Naval Research, “not the least because there is not a lot of air conditioning in Alaska.”
  • Some permafrost monitoring stations in Alaska's North Slope and Brooks Range recorded the highest temperatures ever documented.
• Snow and ice cover: Globally, 2013 saw no change in the overall trend. Snow cover at the end of winter is dropping by nearly 20 percent per decade compared to the the 1981-2010 average.
  • Global glaciers receded without gaining back snow or ice for the 23rd consecutive year.
  • In Eurasia, may saw a new record low of snow cover of 27 percent below the 1981-2010 average; June's extent was the second lowest since 1967.
  • In North America, the April extent hit a 16 percent high above the 1981-2010 average, but in June snow cover extent hit 34 percent below average.
• Sea level:
  • Global average sea level hit a record 1.5 inches above the 1993-2010 average.
  • The change was unevenly distributed thanks to factors like ocean currents and trade winds, with Australia and Southeast Asia seeing higher levels and parts of the North American and Japan coasts seeing lower.
• Flooding:
  • Intense rainfall in Central Europe led to flooding along the Danube, Elba and Rhine rivers that killed at least 24 people and caused billions of dollars in damages to infrastructure and croplands.
  • Passau, a city in Germany, saw the highest river levels in over half a century, while Budapest experienced a 100-year flood.
• At the poles, seemingly contradictory phenomena are making for exciting times for polar scientists:
  • Arctic summer sea ice extent shrunk down to 2.0 million square miles in September 2013, 18 percent below the 1981-2010 average, but greater than 2012's record low.
  • Arctic winter ice extent was 5.8 million square miles, about 3 percent below the 1981-2010 average, with about 80 percent of it first-year ice, which is thinner and weaker than multi-year ice.
  • In Antarctica sea ice continued its overall 1 percent increase a year over the 1981-2010 average.
  • This is not to be confused with conditions on the Antarctic continent itself, however, where surface summer melting was more “extensive and intensive” than in the previous seven years, and almost doubled the rate of the previous year.

2013's record high sea level may have contributed to Super Typhoon Haiyan's devastating force. The storm, which made landfall on November 8, 2013, is the deadliest in Philippines history, with around 6,300 people killed and over 1,000 yet missing. Haiyan also left 4 million people homeless, and affected 16 million people overall.

The Category 5 storm is likely to go down as the strongest-at-landfall tropical cyclone ever recorded, with one-minute sustained winds at 170 knots (196 mph) when it first hit islands in the southern Philippines. The low-lying coastal city of Tacloban was destroyed by the storm's 24.6-foot sea surge. 

Sea level around the central Philippines has risen 7.9 inches since 1970, according to NOAA.

NOAA has put the report's highlights online at climate.gov, and the full report is up at the National Climate Data Center.

(This isn't actually Bertrand Might, though the child did require repeated hospitalizations.)

Philippe Put via Flickr CC2.0

When young Bertrand Might was born, his parents at first thought nothing was amiss. But then they began to worry, as his body appeared to be constantly moving, a state they called "jiggly." Then, he seemed to be constantly distressed, and the efforts of his father Matt to calm Bertrand "enraged" him. Matt and his wife Cristina had a series of tests done on Bertrand, which first indicated brain damage. Then that theory was ruled out, and more tests suggested Bertrand had a fatal "error in metabolism". But that hypothesis got nixed too. The whole saga is told by Seth Mnookin in The New Yorker, and you should read it. 

After what sounds like an unimaginably difficult time, the parents finally found a team of researchers who found the source of Bertrand's ills--a mutation in a group of genes called NGLY1 that make an enzyme vital for recycling cellular waste. But the bad news, which the parents already basically knew, was that this was an incredibly rare disease, and nothing could really be done unless more patients were found.

The Mights took action. Matt authored a blog post about his son's "killer" that went viral. This helped connect him with other patients around the world that also turned out to have NGLY1 mutations, and the Mights, along with another family who has a child with a similar disorder, the Wilseys, have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars funding research on the topic. That culminated in a gathering of NGLY patients at a meeting of the Rare Disease Symposium at Sanford-Burnham earlier this year, which was solely devoted to NGLY1. It's an inspiring story of parents' willingness to do anything to help their children, and a demonstration of the immense power--and limitations--of science.

[The New Yorker]

A poop for the ages.

Copyright Chait.com

Remnants of prehistoric beasts are top-ticket items at auctions worldwide. Objects ranging from eggs to imprints of their skin have found new homes in museums and private collections. But a new paleontological oddity has made its way to auction, and it’s a biggie: a coprolite, or piece of fossilized feces, that is allegedly the longest ever to go on sale.

The fossil is being auctioned by the I. M. Chait gallery in Los Angeles, California. It was uncovered in a formation in Washington State that dates back to the Miocene and Oligocene epochs, between 33 and 5 million years ago.

Here's the gallery's full description for your reading pleasure:

Feces become coprolites when they are petrified, or when the organic material is replaced with minerals. Paleontologists have found coprolites of lots of different animals, including dinosaurs, cats, and even humans. Typically the petrification process takes a few thousand years, but you can get your hands on this one for an estimated $8,000-$10,000. Have your credit card ready. 

Correction: an earlier version of this post suggested that the coprolite came from a dinosaur's rear end. Since dinosaurs died out long before this item was excreted, it is obviously the output of some other creature.

Wasp Prime Test From Operation Teapot

Wikimedia Commons

You've seen what a nuclear winter looks like, as imagined by filmmakers and novelists. Now you can take a look at what scientists have to say. In a new study, a team of four U.S. atmospheric and environmental scientists modeled what would happen after a "limited, regional nuclear war." To inexpert ears, the consequences sound pretty subtle—two or three degrees of global cooling, a nine percent reduction in yearly rainfall. Still, such changes could be enough to trigger crop failures and famines. After all, these would be cooler temperatures than the Earth has seen in 1,000 years.

Let's take a detailed look at some of these super-fun conclusions, shall we?

First, what happened?

The team imagines 100 nuclear warheads, each about the size of the atomic bomb the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, detonate over the Indian subcontinent. The team members are imagining an India-Pakistan nuclear war. It seems unfair to single out these nations, but I guess they're the poster children because they have relatively small nuclear stockpiles compared to countries such as the U.S., Russia and China. The idea is, If these lightweights can do this to Earth, imagine what the bigwigs can do.

After the Indian-Pakistani nuclear exchange…

• Five megatons of black carbon enter the atmosphere immediately. Black carbon comes from burned stuff and it absorbs heat from the sun before it can reach the Earth. Some black carbon does eventually falls back to Earth in rain.

• After one year, the average surface temperature of the Earth falls by 1.1 kelvin, or about two degrees Fahrenheit. After five years, the Earth is, on average, three degrees colder than it used to be. Twenty years on, our home planet warms again to about one degree cooler than the average before the nuclear war.

• Earth's falling temperatures reduces the amount of rain the planet receives. Year five after the war, Earth will have 9 percent less rain than usual. Year 26 after the war, Earth gets 4.5 percent less rain than before the war.

• In years 2-6 after the war, the frost-free growing season for crops is shortened by 10 to 40 days, depending on the region.

• Chemical reactions in the atmosphere eat away Earth's ozone layer, which protects Earth's inhabitants from ultraviolet radiation. In the five years after the war, the ozone is 20 to 25 percent thinner, on average. Ten years on, the ozone layer has recovered so that it's now 8 percent thinner.

• The decreased UV protection may lead to more sunburns and skin cancers in people, as well as reduced plant growth and destabilized DNA in crops such as corn.

• In a separate study, published in 2013, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War estimated 2 billion people would starve in the wake of a 100-A-bomb war.

Okay, I know I've just made your day with this list. Still, there's a point to all this doom and gloom, the modelers write in their paper. The scientists want to motivate countries to destroy the estimated 17,000 nuclear weapons they still hold.

Will this work? Well, scientists and artists have been imagining the dire consequences of an atom-bomb war for decades. The very idea of a "nuclear winter" entered the popular imagination in 1983, when a study, authored by a team including Carl Sagan, first proposed that soot from fires after a nuclear war would block sunlight from reaching Earth.

Twenty-five years later, environmental scientists began using modern climate models to figure out what might happen after a nuclear war. Yep, these are the same models that scientists use to predict the effects of human-driven global warming. This new paper combined a number of those state-of-the-art models. If you check out the paper, published in the journal Earth's Future, you can see how these conclusions compare to previous climate-model-based calculations. Different modeling efforts have come up with slightly different years for when the Earth would be coldest after a nuclear war, for example, but they generally agree that the effects would be, well, severe and long-term.

Algal Blooms Along Canada's West Coast

Left: George dumping iron into the ocean (via New Energy Times). Right: This August 2012 NASA satellite data shows relatively high concentrations of chlorophyll as yellows and oranges in the region of the Pacific where George claims to have dumped more than 100 tons of iron.

Giovanni/Goddard Earth Sciences Data and Information Services Center/NASA

California businessman Russ George made headlines in 2012 when he, in cooperation with a group from a Native Canadian community, dumped more than 100 tons of iron sulfate into the Pacific, some 200 miles off shore. The iron then triggered a bloom of plankton. He apparently didn't ask anybody's permission, violated two United Nations conventions, and was widely condemned for taking on such a large project, a type of geoengineering, to alter the environment as he saw fit.

Iron causes blooms of plankton to form because the element is required for the tiny plant-like cells to live, and is usually only present in small quantities at the surface. Places with strong upwelling currents--such as areas off the U.S. West Coast--often have higher levels of iron brought up from the deep ocean, and for that reason often have abundant plankton and sea life. George's idea was to create this bloom to both absorb carbon dioxide (the plants need this greenhouse gas to grow) and to provide food for local salmon stocks. After the tiny cells capture carbon dioxide as they're growing, they eventually sink to the bottom and die, removing the gas from the atmosphere. 

A new study in the Journal of Plankton Research suggests that the plan may have actually worked better than previously thought to increase the number of crustacean zooplankton upon which young salmon feed. And, in turn, the number of salmon in this area has approximately doubled since 2010. But it can't be proved that there is a causal relationship between the iron seeding experiment and the increased numbers of fish. Historically populations of fish have varied for many reasons, some of them unknown. It also isn't clear how much carbon dioxide the experiment sequestered. 

Chlorophyl is shown in red. The second image shows a bloom (of chlorophyl-containing plankton) in the area in which the iron was dumped.

Remote Sensing of Environment

Wilf Luedke, Canada’s chief of salmon stock assessment for the south British Columbia coast, told Andrew Revkin at the New York Times that he has nothing against careful tests of deep-sea iron fertilization, but worries that debate out this geoengineering solution could distract from more proven methods for increasing salmon numbers and absorbing carbon dioxide, such as "conserving carbon-absorbing eelgrass beds in coastal inlets and continuing to restore salmon rivers and streams long beset by dams, careless logging and encroaching development."

“We can’t fix oceans in the short term,” Luedke said. “But how we deal with rivers and watersheds, that we can fix right now.”

But there is other evidence that iron fertilization isn't all that geoengineering supporters might hope. There have been natural occasions when levels of iron have shot up, for example when the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted in 2010, spewing iron-rich ash into the ocean. Scientists studied the plankton blooms triggered by the eruption, but found that they soon died (because they ran out of another nutrient, nitrogen) and didn't absorb much carbon dioxide.

DARPA ELASTx Microchip

ELASTx stands for "Efficient Linearized All-Silicon Transmitter ICs"

DARPA

The future of silicon transmitters looks a lot like an 8-bit adventure game. Developed by DARPA, the Efficient Linearized All-Silicon Transmitter ICs (ELASTx) is a complete, all-on-one chip system that operates at 94 gigahertz. This means it transmits in the millimeter-wave frequencies, which are a relatively untapped part of the electromagnetic spectrum that's particularly useful for radar, guidance systems, and other military tech. It's the first time those frequencies have been achieved on a silicon-only chip, which is lighter and cheaper than the gallium-based alternatives.

Essentially, the ELASTx chip boosts the power of transmitted signals, to deliver large amounts of data at fast speeds. Satellites, especially, could take advantage of this breakthrough because of its high power and miniscule weight. The transmitter can also change the frequencies it uses, so it can communicate across different types of waves.

Just a regular nose on somebody's face.

David Goehring via Flickr CC 2.0

Eight years ago, doctors took nasal tissue samples and grafted them onto the spines of 20 quadriplegics. The idea was that stem cells within the nasal tissue might turn into neurons that could help repair the damaged spinal cord, and the experiment actually worked a few of the patients, who regained a little bit of sensation. But it didn’t go well for one woman in particular, who not only didn’t experience any abatement in her paralysis, but recently started feeling pain at the site of the implant. When doctors took a closer look, they realized she was growing the beginnings of a nose on her spine, New Scientist reports.

This is hardly the first case of adverse side effects from a stem cell transplant. The New Scientist article points to several cases where people developed tumors after participating in clinical trials—including one 50-year-old man who, after receiving an experimental treatment for Parkinson’s disease, developed a brain tumor with hairs and cartilage embedded within it.

The nasal tissue experiment took place at a mainstream hospital in Portugal, and there are thousands of legitimate stem cell trials taking place all over the world, but so far only a few stem cell therapies have been approved by the FDA. Stem cells have the potential to treat everything from baldness and diabetes to cardiovascular disease and Parkinson’s. But stem cells, some of which can differentiate into almost any cell in the body, also have the potential to cause harm.

That hasn’t stopped private companies from peddling unproven stem cell therapies that haven’t been properly tested for safety, may not be effective, and can have dangerous consequences. One woman in Los Angeles, for example, spent $20,000 on a wacky cosmetic procedure that took stem cells from her belly and injected them into her face. She later grew an extra bone that prevented her from opening her eye and scratched up her eyeball. Scientists surgically removed the extra bone in 2012.

Attempts to shut down the scientifically invalid (and possibly fraudulent) companies have met with resistance from patients.

Cold Spring, New York.

An aerial view of the town where NY Representative Sean Patrick Maloney used a drone to film his wedding.

Joe Mabel, 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.

Weddings, Investigated

When New York Representative Sean Patrick Maloney got married in upstate New York in June, he did something fairly common: took video of the wedding, and put it online. The only problem? The camera was on a drone, and now the FAA is investigating to see if it's a case of an illegal use of a drone. The video has since disappeared from YouTube, and so long as the rules remain vague and the FAA enforces selectively, it'll be hard to tell the legality of any drone photography. Of course, Representative Maloney and wedding guest Nancy Pelosi could, as members of Congress, introduce or move legislation to clarify the legality of filming from a drone.

Stealth Drone Is Actually Stealthy

BAE Systems, in conjunction with the U.K. Ministry of Defense, revealed this week that their experimental stealth drone Taranis is in fact stealthy, once they remove all the weird and superfluous antennas. The drone, a grey flying "V", is similar to the American X-47B in that it's a testing tool, designed to collect data for future projects. If both Taranis and X-47B are any indication, the future of air combat is flying grey triangles.

Taranis At Night

BAE Systems

Robots On The Outside, People On The Inside

The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction is thinking about having drones watch over their prisons. Under consideration are quadcopters, fixed-wing drones, and unmanned tethered helium balloons. Ohio is also considering infrared cameras for the drones, and says that these drones could stop people tossing contraband (weapons, drugs, tobacco) over the fence at night. That's nothing a second layer of fences couldn't solve, but at least with drones there's the added dystopic feel of robots keeping humans in cages.

There's still plenty of time left in the state's 30-day window for people to submit comments.

Homemade Drone Over Gaza

As part of the ongoing strife in the Gaza Strip, Hamas released video of a drone it claims to have used against Israel. Upon close examination, the drone appears to be a converted toy with fake or ineffectual weapons. For their part, Israel claims that one of their Patriot missiles destroyed a Hamas drone.

Fighting Illegal Fishing

By the nature of their ocean habitats, fish populations are tricky to protect. Laws put in place to cordon off areas or protect certain species are a good first step, but police need a way to catch illegal fishers, and capture them in the act. It's rather hard for boats to sneak up on each other at sea, so in Belize, the people protecting fisheries use small, fast drones to spot criminals.

Watch a video of it below: 

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

250,000,000 miles: how far away the Rosetta spacecraft is from Earth. However, Rosetta is just 8,000 miles from its target, a comet that is called 67P and is surprisingly shaped like a rubber ducky.

2,700,000: the number of Wikipedia articles written by this one bot. That's 8.5 percent of all the articles on Wikipedia. The bot mostly creates those short "stubs" you might have run into on the online encyclopedia.

2,000: approximate number of people who attended this year's Porcupine Freedom Festival, AKA "Burning Man for libertarians." Check out Lois Parshley's story for a look at the scene.

Legged Support System Robot In Hawaii

U.S. Marine Corps photo by Cpl. Matthew Callahan

400 pounds: weight that the four-legged LS3 robot is able to carry. The U.S Marines hope that in the future, LS3 could carry supplies for them during invasions. They tested the robot in Hawaii last week.

3,000 pounds: weight that U.S. Department of Defense's Ares Combat Drone will be able to carry. Ares could undergo test flights as early as next year.

These "fat-rumped sheep" appear in Thomas Pennant's two-volume "History of Quadrupeds," 1793, which were among the books in Darwin's library on the Beagle. "The buttocks appear like two hemispheres, quite naked and smooth," wrote Pennant, "with the os coccygis between scarcely sensible to the touch…[T]hese Cheep grow very large, even to two hundred pounds weight, of which the posteriors weigh forty."

404: the number of books in the library of the HMS Beagle, the ship on which Charles Darwin sailed while gathering some of the key data for his theory of evolution. Room availability being what it is on Victorian ships, Darwin worked and slept in the library. Now you can peruse that whole book collection online.

Vantablack, As Seen Under a Scanning Electron Microscope

Evangelos Theocharous et al., Optics Express, 2014

99.965 percent: amount of visible light Vantablack, a newly invented material, absorbs. Vantablack is the blackest material known to humankind. You can't even see folds in it.

The Color of Pee Inset

Cleveland Clinic

20: the number of times a day a newborn pees. Learn more about baby bladder control (I mean, don't you want to?) from Popular Science's KinderLab.

40 inches: size of this fossilized piece of poop, allegedly the longest to go on sale. Own it for a mere $8,000!

Illustrations by Jason Schneider

Turns out, a few oral sunscreens already exist, based on the theory that antioxidants offer sun protection. Laboratory studies provide some evidence in support of this idea. When scientists feed vitamin E to hairless mice, the animals show less skin damage upon exposure to ultraviolet light. Dermatologist Salvador González Rodríguez has studied an extract made from a fern called Polypodium leucotomos. The substance, which is high in antioxidants, may decrease sun-related DNA damage in humans, he says. But as a consultant for a Spanish company that makes an oral sunscreen, Rodríguez has skin in the game, so to speak. And he admits that oral sunscreens don’t work that well when measured in the standard ways: “If we evaluate protection in terms of how conventional sunscreens are evaluated, then antioxidant-based oral sunscreens provide very low SPF.”

That doesn’t mean we’ll be stuck slathering our bodies with goopy lotion as we lurch into a globally warmed future. Many marine creatures that live in shallow water produce chemicals called mycosporine-like amino acids, which function as a natural sunscreen by absorbing UV light. These compounds have been found in bacteria, algae, and fungi. Some scientists think it may be possible to pass the compounds on to humans too, though so far, no one has had much success.  

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

Shocking!

Photograph by Travis Rathbone

When it comes to thunderheads, lightning is the great equalizer. Essentially a giant spark, lightning relieves the charge differentials that build up in storm systems. But it’s also one of the greatest mysteries in atmospheric science. Recently, scientists have started to explore lightning’s lesser-known siblings, which appear in ash plumes, labs, and even on other planets.

Odds of Survival

A typical lightning bolt carries 100 million volts—compare that to the 110 volts in an average electrical outlet. Yet more than a century’s worth of data shows that only 30 percent of lightning strikes are fatal. A charge can spark across skin like electricity across a resistor, causing severe burns but sparing internal organs.  

Types of Lightning

Dark

Some lightning can’t be seen. Gamma rays burst from thunderheads without giving off heat or light, but their radiation is 100 times more energetic than a medical x-ray. Scientists were perplexed by these invisible flashes until researchers recently found that they, too, diffuse imbalanced charges in clouds.

Alien

Extraterrestrial lightning is always tricky to observe. But during Saturn’s 2009 equinox, conditions dampened the rings’ glow enough for the Cassini spacecraft to capture flashes on the gaseous planet. Lightning has also been detected on Jupiter, and radio data suggests it exists on Uranus and Neptune.

Ball

Named for the bizarre orbs that have been spotted during storms, ball lightning was finally caught on camera by scientists in 2012. “We don’t know what it is,” says lightning researcher Don MacGorman. Spectral analysis suggests the balls form when lightning strikes and vaporizes elements in the soil.

Volcanic

So-called dirty thunderstorms are thought to occur when dust particles from a volcanic ash plume collide with ice crystals in the atmosphere. This event is hard to study, so researchers in Germany created a plume in the lab using real volcanic ash. The smaller the particles, the more prolific the lightning.

Lightning By Numbers

50,000°F: Temperature of a lightning bolt. That’s five times hotter than the surface of the sun.

Half an inch: Approximate diameter of a lightning-bolt channel

8 million: Average number of lightning flashes that strike Earth every day

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

The Caribbean reef squid, in the pencil squid family.

Public Domain via Wikipedia

In the most advanced prosthetics--such as this crazy mind-controlled robotic arm--electronic hardware interfaces directly with nerves and muscles in the human body. But getting living tissue to play nice with a circuit board is anything but easy, for a number of reasons. One fundamental obstacle you may not have considered: electronics send signals via negatively charged electrons, whereas many of the communications carried out in living tissues take place through the movement of positively-charged particles, such as calcium and potassium ions. 

Now, though, scientists have discovered a new feature of a protein called reflectin, found in a group of animals called pencil squid. It turns out reflectin conducts protons and may be able to bridge the communication divide between cells and biomedical implants. Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News explains:

It's ability to move around these positive charges and it's "tunability," or versatile nature, could be used to build implants and prosthetics that can more easily communicate with the human body. The fact that it is biological and flexible means that it may be better than existing materials for integrating into the human body, and with a lower chance of being rejected, the researchers (from the University of California, Irvine) said. And since it is a protein, it could be modified in other desirable ways, such as possibly being able to biodegrade after it is done serving a useful purpose, which could help patients avoid additional surgeries. 

The squid protein reflectin is also being investigated to make better camouflage, thanks to its interesting optical qualities.

[Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology News / Nature Chemistry]

Trapped!

An illustration and two microscope images showing the pyramidal self-folding traps and round cells.

From Kate Malachowski et al., "Self-Folding Single Cell Grippers," Nano Letters 2014

Gotcha! These little pyramids are actually microscopic traps designed to gently enclose single cells without killing them. The idea is that in the future, such traps could be a part of a system for capturing and analyzing individual cells, perhaps as a part of cancer monitoring.

The traps, which are made out of silicon oxides, start out as flat, star-like shapes. When they're dipped into a saline solution, the arms automatically begin to fold inward along their hinges, capturing any cells that might be nearby at the time. In a new study, the traps' creators have shown the little nano-stars are able to grip two different kinds of mouse cells without killing them: red blood cells and fibroblasts, which are a type of connective tissue cell.

The traps' lead engineer, David Gracias of Johns Hopkins University, has long worked on making microscopic structures that start out flat, but then fold up by themselves. In addition to minute pyramids, he and his lab members have made all kinds of polyhedrons. They've made self-folding structures that fold in response to heat, instead of a dip in saline solution. They've even made microscopic, self-folding shapes with a kind of glue along the edges so they'll seal themselves once they're folded. You can see some of these shapes in a video they published last year. In their latest study, published in the journal Nano Letters, they worked with engineers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory to make pyramidal grippers that are small enough to capture single cells and have vents so the cells can continue to exchange nutrients and waste with the liquid around them even while they're trapped.

There's a lot of work that the cell-grippers' designers would still need to do to put the grippers into a working product. They might want to be able to target certain cells, for example, instead of just capturing whatever happens by. If these traps are something they want to be able to inject in the human body—and that's what Gracias meant when he talked with Phys.org about using this in vivo—then they'll also have to do a lot of safety testing.

Illustrations by Jason Schneider

If humans can indeed smell fear they wouldn’t be unusual in the animal kingdom. Sea anemones, earthworms, minnows, fruit flies, rats, mice, and deer, among others, have all been shown to signal unease through odor. Some responses are even more overt. For example, the offspring of one bird species vomits up a pungent, orange liquid when frightened by a predator; if a parent catches a whiff, it becomes warier in the nest. 

From an evolutionary perspective, a silent signal makes sense. “If you find yourself in a fearful situation, you might want your cohorts to know about it, but without calling attention to yourself by screaming or jumping around,” says Charles J. Wysocki, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The same could hold true for humans. “Primates have become much more visual creatures [over time],” he says, “and I suspect that smell in general, including the perception of the fearful notes, have taken second place. But they’re still there.”

There’s only modest evidence for a smell of fear in people, though. No one has yet found a molecule in human sweat that corresponds to our level of anxiety. Several labs have tried to measure the effects of sniffing someone else’s fear-inspired body odor. First the scientists show people scary movies, and then they collect the subjects’ sweat from cotton pads placed in their armpits. When other people smell the cotton, they respond in subtle and unconscious ways. In one experiment, the smellers became more likely to judge ambiguous facial expressions in photographs as portraying fear. In another, they made fearful expressions of their own. A third found that fear-sniffing subjects blinked more forcefully and seemed more prone to being defensive.

These studies have some big problems. Sweat born from emotion does seem to have a different smell than sweat from exercise. But that doesn’t tell us whether fear-related sweat works differently from, say, happiness-related sweat or the sweat that comes from sexual arousal. “We’re using very crude techniques to study this,” says Denise Chen, a pioneer in this field at the Baylor College of Medicine. Among the limitations of the work is the fact that emotions can be hard to regulate in the lab. “It’s very easy to scare people,” she says, “but it’s not so easy to make them happy.”

Hygiene products pose another problem. The researchers must find subjects who are willing to forgo deodorant for several days before each study. “That’s hard to do in this country because people are so hygiene-conscious,” Chen says. It also raises the question of whether any of this research would even matter in a real-world setting. Given all the fragrances we dab onto our bodies, any signals that sweat might contain would be undetectable.

Or maybe not. Wysocki says there’s evidence that certain people can detect body odor even when masked. He tested about 40 common compounds used to cover smells and arrived at a surprising result. “It’s fairly easy to block the body odor of women in the noses of men,” he says. “But when it came to women, only two of the [masking] compounds were effective.”

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

Blanche in her workshop.

Photograph by Ray Lego

Fran Blanche’s workshop is more than a place to unwind. It’s home. “I put a bed in my office,” she says. Her fashion business is downstairs; upstairs is a music studio and a laboratory with 30 years’ worth of tools. A private collector recently asked Blanche to study part of his Apollo-era Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC), which NASA designed to fly a Saturn V rocket. “All modern boards would come to emulate it,” Blanche says. “Trouble is, there’s no information about how it was constructed.” 

Blanche's workshop in detail.

Photograph by Fran Blanche

1) Tektronix 564B oscilloscope. Blanche owns two, and they help her examine DC- and audio-frequency signals.

2) Articulated dental-exam lamp. Designed in the 1940s, the lamp has a tightly focused beam that gives Blanche a clear view of a project from any angle.

3) Homemade adjustable DC-power supply. Whatever current and voltage a project requires, Blanche’s custom-built device can usually provide it.

4) Heathkit 5-watt resistor substitution box. No schematic is perfect. This device helps test various resistances in a circuit before installing the real deal.

5) 25-watt Weller soldering iron. “I have used this iron since 1978, and it has never failed,” says Blanche.

One of LVDC's page-assembly boards.

Photograph by Fran Blanche

Saturn vs. LVDC: The launch-computer assembly could autopilot Apollo’s 363-foot-tall, 6.2-million-pound Saturn V rockets. Dozens of page-assembly boards like this one comprised each of the LVDC’s three computers. By carefully dissecting a board, Blanche uncovers its components and construction methods.

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

A desert woodrat

Kevin Kohl, University of Utah

Desert woodrats are picky, but not in the way you might expect: several woodrat populations in the U.S. Southwest specifically eat a type of highly toxic creosote bush. Another group eats juniper, which is also toxic to many animals. This gives the woodrats (Neotoma lepida) a nice niche, allowing them to dine on a plant that others avoid. But how do they do it? A new study suggests that the microbes in their gut break down the toxic chemicals in the plants, which had been hypothesized but not clearly shown until now. 

To determine whether microbes help digest creosote, the scientists performed a variety of experiments. In one test, they found that packrats (as the animals are also known) fed creosote had much higher levels of bacteria thought to be involved in breaking down the plant's secondary chemicals, whereas those fed rabbit food did not--showing that diet influenced the makeup of gut microbiota. Then they fed two groups of the animals antibiotics, killing off many of their gut microbes. Animals that were fed creosote stopped eating the plant, and lost weight, whereas animals given rabbit food (devoid of toxins) seemed to do just fine, and didn't lose weight.

But it gets better. Packrats regularly feed on other animals' droppings in the wild, and with that in mind, the scientists fed a group of juniper-eating packrats a mixture of rabbit food and feces from creosote-eaters. These animals apparently developed the ability to break down the plant, compared to those just fed rabbit food, who couldn't subsequently eat the toxic plant.

All this work with toxic plants, poo and packrats has wider implications than you might imagine, however. It may be possible, for example, to help livestock feed on toxic plants like juniper, which is spreading throughout the Southwest, or help raise cattle in places where noxious weeds often hurt rancher's productivity. You could, presumably, give the cattle microbes from others that have become accustomed to eating these plants, or perhaps even use bacteria found in the droppings of other animals (here's looking at you, packrats). This kind of intervention, roughly equivalent to a "fecal transplant"--in which poop is transferred from one animal to another, and which has seen growing popularity amongst humans--could also possibly help in re-introducing endangered animals back into their natural environment, since breeding in the lab can cause the animals to lose microbes necessary for digesting certain toxic plant compounds found in the wild.

Eating poo has never sounded so promising.

The study was published this week in the journal Ecology Letters, and authored by researcher Kevin Kohl and colleagues at the University of Utah.

An Anaerobic Digestion Plant

City of Lincoln, Nebraska

One U.K. grocery store plans to power itself using biogas harvested from its own unsold, rotting produce. Yum.

A Sainsbury's store in Cannock in central England is getting access to anaerobic digesters. The store plans to use electricity solely from the digesters, taking no electricity from the U.K.'s national power grid, which is fed by a combination of coal, natural gas, nuclear power plants and other sources. Sainsbury's will even sell any excess electricity it makes back to the grid.

The Cannock Sainsbury's will be the first U.K. store to stop using U.K. grid electricity, the BBC reports. While we've never heard of a big U.S. store doing exactly that, U.S. grocery-store chain Kroger is supposed to have an anaerobic digester that provides more than 20 percent of the electricity needs of its Compton distribution center. And U.S. cities and states have recently planned anaerobic digester systems to take discarded food.

Here's how the Sainsbury's system will work. Food waste from many Sainsbury's stores will get trucked to a central depot. (One store doesn't make enough waste to power itself, so running the Cannock Sainsbury's actually requires waste from several.) From the depot, a waste-management company called Biffa will truck the waste to its Cannock plant.

What happens at Biffa's Cannock anaerobic digester is "what happens inside a cow's stomach after dinner," as this Ohio State University presentation puts it. The food goes into oxygen-free tanks with particular bacteria species inside that thrive without oxygen. Those bacteria break down the food in many steps; during the last step, bacteria produce primarily carbon dioxide and methane gas.

The Biffa plant separates the methane from the carbon dioxide, then uses the resulting biomethane just like natural gas mined from the ground to produce electricity. A 1.5-kilometer-long cable carries the electricity back to the Cannock Sainsbury's store.

Anaerobic digestion does have some drawbacks. It produces some solid and liquid wastes called the digestate. Some of the digestate can be used as fertilizer, but then you have to make sure you have customers for fertilizers nearby (i.e., farmers). Anaerobic digestion is also considered a less favored way of dealing with excess food. From an environmental standpoint, it's better to chop food up into deli salad, give it away to charities, or send it to animal feed. But if there's some food you can't avoid throwing away, anaerobic digestion is a great to take care of it.

P.S.P.S. (Popular Science Postscript): How can a process that produces carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, help reduce global warming? The explanation is a bit academic, but we love you for asking.

The carbon dioxide released from recently dead plants—whether you burn those plants, or stick 'em in a digester—isn't always considered as contributing to global warming. That's because in the natural cycle of things, the next generation of plants should take up the carbon dioxide released by the previous generation of dead plants, so long as there's a new plant grown for every dead plant digested or burned. That's the case for crops, which are plentifully regrown. On the other hand, fossil fuel-produced carbon dioxide is considered different because that CO₂ would have stayed in the ground, had a human not dug it up and burned it.