"The Tolling of Pavlov's Bells" by Seanan McGuire

Illustration by Lisa Kay

This is an excerpt from Popular Science's special issue, Dispatches From The Future. Visit iTunes to download the edition onto your iPad, or return to our list of excerpts.

POINT OF INFECTION +61 DAYS

I suppose there are things one can only learn through experience; the fever is coming on faster than I had expected, making it difficult to organize my thoughts.  In the distance, I can hear them ringing, louder than the sirens, louder than the screams.  Can you hear them, my daughters?

Can you hear the bells?

POINT OF INFECTION +50 DAYS

They hold my trial in absentia; an empty gesture intended only to placate the screaming public.  The growing silence outside the courthouse walls only serves to illustrate the pointlessness of the proceedings.  It takes three days to present the evidence: the charts, the lab results, the videos.  It would take longer, but after the fourth prosecutor fails to return from recess, the court decides to pass judgment on the case as it stands.  There is enough—more than enough—to convict.

Each time the court is called to order, they add the name of every person who succumbed to my daughters between sessions to the charges already against me.  More than enough.

I am found guilty of treason, fraud, bioterrorism, and sixteen million counts of murder.  The sentence is broadcast over every channel and every radio frequency in the world, in every language someone might be listening for.  No one cheers.  There would be no point.

They all know that they’ve been beaten.

POINT OF INFECTION -13 DAYS

It’s another meaningless late-night talk show, another opportunity not every author gets, as my agent is only too happy to remind me.  “They love you,” she says, in that breathless bedroom tone she uses when she wants to convince me to do something.  I’m fairly sure she thinks I’m a lesbian.  It doesn’t matter.  This exercise takes me away from the lab, but things aren’t at such a crucial juncture that I can’t leave Alan and Jeremy to watch them, and every bit of publicity helps.  We must keep the public reading, after all.  Isn’t that what every author wants?

The lights are too bright and the leather couch stinks of sweat.  I perch as prettily as I can, feeling the pancake makeup crack on my cheeks as I force myself into a rictus of a smile.  The host is unfamiliar, but I can’t say whether that’s because he’s new or because I didn’t bother to remember him the first time.  He’s nowhere near worth the trouble of committing to memory.

“As a special treat for the intellectuals among us tonight, we’re joined by Dr. Diana Weston, whose latest medical thriller, Symptom, is holding strong at the top of the New York Times Bestseller List.”  The smile he flashes at the camera doubtless cost more than most workers will make in a lifetime: a false, artificially white advertisement of genetic superiority.  “Thanks for coming on the show, Doc.  I’m thrilled that you’re here—see, I’ve been having this pain in my side….”

He trails off as the studio audience erupts into laughter, comic Vesuvius spewing mirth into the air like ash.  My smile stiffens a bit more, manicured nails biting into the skin of my palms.  I must endure this.  I have come so far, worked so hard, and I will not be defeated at the eleventh hour by some buffoon only looking for a cheap laugh.

“I’m not that kind of doctor,” I reply, with as much amusement as I can muster.  “But if you have an interesting boil you’d like me to take a poke at—”

This time the laughter is mine to command.  My host isn’t pleased.  He recoils with exaggerated fright, putting up his hands.  “On second thought, Doc, I’m feeling fine.  Just fine.”

“If you’re sure,” I say, still smiling.

Even sharks can smile.  The host looks genuinely uncomfortable now, but also deeply confused.  I am, after all, an attractive woman—I work hard enough to maintain my camouflage—and successful besides.  My smile shouldn’t be enough to turn his bowels to ice, and yet it does.  His hindbrain recognizes what his thinking mind can’t, and it knows enough to be afraid.

“I’ll let you know if I change my mind,” he says, finally.  More chuckles from the audience.  “Now, Doc, in Symptom, you’re going back to some themes you’ve visited a time or two before.  The horrible virus, the brilliant, attractive CDC doctor—”

Knowing laughter from the studio.  They assume I model my heroines on myself, living out my intellectual lust for adventure in the safe confines of the story.  They’ll learn the truth soon enough.  Soon enough.

“—and of course, the sexy federal agent who’s standing by to help her when it seems like modern medicine will fail.  Do you feel like you’re running out of stories?”

 “Not at all.”  For the first time, my smile is sincere.  That doesn’t seem to ease his nerves.  “My readers know what they like, and what they like is the triumph of individuals over seemingly impossible odds.  At the same time, I truly believe that most spectacular advances in medical science have been made outside the strict confinement of the lab, outside the boundaries of protocol.  We learn by getting right out in the heart of things and letting ourselves truly experience the threats around us.”

“I understand you’ve received some criticism from the medical community over your portrayal of quarantine procedures.  Why do you think that is?”

Careful, careful; this is the baited hook, and I’m too close to the finish to let myself be caught.  I lean back into the couch, shake my head, and say, “Quarantine is important—we’ve known that since the Middle Ages—but it’s a scalpel, not a hammer.  No one should suffer alone.”

“But doesn’t suffering alone mean that your loved ones will live?”

I give him a pitying look.  “Would your loved ones give up on you that easily?”

He nods and moves on, answer accepted.  More senseless questions, more pre-programmed banter.  I laugh, smile, play the part he scripts for me, and let my thoughts drift to the lab, where even now Alan is watching the cultures, checking the settings on the incubators, feeding the test subjects.  My beautiful daughters are growing up.

This show will be canceled soon…along with all the others.

To keep reading, visit iTunes and download our Dispatches From The Future special issue onto your iPad.

Sorry, Big Guy

A Macaca fuscata in Osaka, photographed in 2010

KENPEI on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Following the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, monkeys living in nearby forests have been found to have lowered blood cell counts, according to a new study. What that means for people living—or who once lived—in the area is unclear.

Because these Japanese macaques are closely related to humans, the results suggest similar exposure to radiation might affect humans similarly, according to the study's authors, a team of veterinarians from several Japanese research institutions. The monkeys aren't ill, but their altered blood cell counts may make them less resistant to infections, the team wrote in their paper, published yesterday in the journal Scientific Reports.

However, a few researchers the Guardian talked with disagreed. "Unfortunately, this is yet another paper with insufficient power to distinguish real effects and relevance to human health," Geraldine Thomas, a biologist at Imperial College London who studies cancer in people living in Chernobyl, told the Guardian.

Studies of the effects of the Chernobyl meltdown on people and other animals have been controversial, too. I'm not sure why. Are such studies difficult to perform well? Have Chernobyl scientists been sloppy or negligent? Or do some scientists worry about panicking "the public" about nuclear meltdowns?

It is true that when societies think about whether to support nuclear energy, they should weigh many factors. Taken alone, studies like this one might suggest nuclear power plants are dangerous or not worth it. But it's important to keep in mind that calculations of how likely power plants are to fail are separate from studies like this. You might still come to the same conclusion after weighing the risks, or you might not.

Smart decisions after a power plant failure may also help stave off effects like those the Fukushima macaques suffered. A report published by the World Health Organization last year found that people in Japan have very low increased risks for cancer because of the Fukushima accident. That's thanks, in part, to a government ban on food grown in the area. The macaques, on the other hand, spent their winters eating radiation-contaminated tree bark and beetles.

Okay, let's say you care about what happened to the monkeys for their own sake. They are pretty cute. They're of a species, Macaca fuscata, that's common throughout Japan, so they're kind of a national icon. One population of them is even famous for lounging in hot springs, just like people do. What happened to the ones in Fukushima?

Japanese Macaques in a Hot Spring, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, 2009

Asteiner on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0

Compared to Macaca fuscata living in Shimokita, about 400 kilometers away from the Fukushima Daiichi, monkeys living 70 kilometers away from the damaged power plant:

• Had detectable levels of radiocesium in their muscles. The Shimokita monkeys didn't.

• Had fewer red blood cells and white blood cells. They also had lower levels of hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that helps the cells carry oxygen.

• Had the same levels of platelets, which help make blood clots when animals, including people, are injured. All the monkeys also had the same amount of body fat.

These data come from 92 monkeys veterinarians captured between April 2012 and March 2013. (The disaster occurred in March 2011.) About two-thirds of the monkeys lived in Fukushima, while the rest lived in Shimokita.

It's impossible to prove, from this study, that the differences between the Fukushima and the Shimokita monkeys were caused by the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. One small study published in 1967 did find that macaques from different regions of Japan all had similar blood measures, suggesting the Fukushima and Shimokita monkeys are supposed to be the same. However, the scientists are missing a major measure. They don't have measurements of the Fukushima monkeys' blood cells from before the disaster. That's understandable; taking blood samples from bunch of Fukushima macaques before the meltdown would have taken rather more foresight than anybody had. 

The Guardian covers more of the debate about whether radiation exposure led to the Fukushima monkeys' lowered blood-cell counts. Outside scientists say other things could have caused the difference, while the research team says they haven't been able to find anything else to explain it.

A schematic of the structure, on the left; the sponge making steam, on the right.

MIT

The researchers don't claim the device could be used to create electricity, at least not yet. But it could relatively easily be scaled up to make fresh water out of salt water via distillation, for example, or to sterilize medical or food-processing equipment in areas of the world where electricity is hard to come by, said MIT researcher Hadi Ghasemi in a statement.

The spongey device is made of graphite on top, with a carbon foam on the bottom. The graphite is highly porous and fractured, a crown of flakes, created by putting the material in a microwave oven and allowing bubbles to come to the surface and burst, in a way "just like popcorn," the researchers said.  Graphite absorbs the sun's rays and heats up. This creates a pressure differential that sucks water from the bottom into the top, where it vaporizes. This sponge converts 85 percent of the solar energy in sunlight it absorbs into heat, the authors wrote in the study, which is extremely efficient. 

Current methods to create steam involve heating liquids or using a system of mirrors to concentrate sunlight, which are both more expensive and inefficient--whereas the graphite and carbon used in this sponge are relatively easy to get your hands on, the scientists said. 

Telepresence Robots Do the 'Wave' by Holding Up LED Signs

Hanwha Eagles

The Hanwha Eagles of Daejeon, Korea, have been on a long losing streak, the BBC reports… but they are winners in our hearts here at Popular Science. That's because they have decided to amp up their fans by giving them access to three rows of telepresence robots. Not able to score a ticket to an Eagles game? No problem. These robots will be able to cheer, chant, show the faces of remote fans on their own screen faces, and hold up LED panels showing encouraging texts from fans.

I mean, that's exactly what I would have thought of if I were trying to drum up support for a baseball team. Go Eagles!

[BBC, Korea Bizwire]

Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes the plague.

NIAID/Flickr

Yesterday, Chinese authorities finally lifted a nine-day quarantine of 151 individuals from the northwestern city of Yumen, instituted after a 38-year-old man died of a bubonic plague infection last week. Entry and exit points were also sealed off, trapping nearly 30,000 residents. In the end, no other cases of bubonic plague developed.

During the same time frame, health officials quickly treated and released four Colorado patients who had been hospitalized and diagnosed with the more lethal and more contagious pneumonic plague, the respiratory form of the disease. Still, no other cases have been reported.

The two contrasting responses from opposite ends of the globe highlight the dramatic steps China is sometimes willing to take during such situations.

Bubonic plague – the cause of the “Black Death” pandemic that killed 50 million Europeans from 1347 to 1351 – is not the death sentence it used to be. According to the World Health Organization, the bacterial disease spread by flea-infested rodents can be treated effectively with antibiotics, although mortality rates still hover between 8 and 10%. China itself has been relatively “plague-free” in recent years, having only 12 confirmed cases since 2009.

Chinese officials clearly took no chances. But despite the horror still associated with the black death, quarantine is an extreme step to take. Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center of Infectious Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, explained to Popular Science“there is really a very limited use for quarantine today.”

Quarantine restricts the movement of individuals who are possibly infected in order to prevent the spread of a disease. But in the modern era of infectious disease response, “the concept of quarantine has just changed so much since it was first used,” says Osterholm. “We can follow people to see if they have signs or symptoms, and quickly have them seek medical care. We have antibiotics, drugs, and rapid detection tests. We don't need to hold individuals for 40 days to figure out whether they are going to be coming down with that disease.”

In addition, patients' rights and needs have become more prioritzied today. "We now see people as victims, not just as vectors of disease," says Dr. Martin Cetron from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Howard Markel from the University of Michigan believes a quarantine for one confirmed case of bubonic plague is somewhat extreme – “certainly not something we would do in the U.S.” But he’s not surprised that a country like China, which exhibits a much tighter rule over its populace, would take such measures, least of all waiting seven days before making a public announcement. "China has been very proactive since the SARS outbreak in 2002," he says.

Still, there’s no guarantee a quarantine is a sure way to keep the public safe and helathy. In 2009, China was on the receiving end of a heap of criticism for implementing mass quarantines during the swine flu pandemic, which proved largely ineffective.

In this case, quarantines may have prevented bubonic plague from spreading or transforming into pneumonic plague, but that still hasn’t left it unscathed from scrutiny. “Just consider the social and economic implications for doing that in a major coastal city – I cannot recall the last time any provincial government did that,” Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Guardian.

While Cetron emphasizes that "quarantine needs to be used with refinement and nuance" rather than as a “broad hammer," he points out that different governments and authorities have different practices and principles, relative to the kinds of resources that are readily available. Responses to outbreaks "are dependent on capabilities" he says.

In any case, this probably won’t be the last time we debate the use of quarantine against the plague, in China or elsewhere. The World Health Organization reports about 1,000 to 2,000 cases a year worldwide, and just seven months ago, scientists published a study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases that raised concerns about the possibility of another plague outbreak.

The USS Honolulu Interrupts Some Polar Bears

Chief Yeoman Alphonso Braggs, US-Navy via Wikimedia Commons

Polar bears are the largest land predators in the world. Confined to arctic climes, they are huge, powerful swimmers, and deadly hunters. In addition to being the second-best bear, they risk going extinct from global warming's environmental changes. Thanks to an offering by a luxury cruise line, customers can take a cruise through the newly navigable arctic, and try to see polar bears struggling to stay alive on what remains of Arctic ice. 

Call it "environmental disaster tourism." Crystal Cruises is selling an Arctic cruise on the ship Crystal Serenity, which sounds more like a tea sold to tourists in Santa Fe than an ocean-going vessel. Crystal Serenity weighs over 68,000 tons, is 13 decks tall, and can house 1,070 customers.  Bargain-basement book-now prices run just shy of $20,000, though more discerning disaster-watchers can pay $44,000 for a penthouse suite on the inaugural northwest passage trip. The cruise will leave from Alaska, travel along the waterways north of the Arctic Circle that were historically too filled with ice for safe travel by boat, visit Greenland, and then arrive in New York 32 days later. 

Incidentally, the carbon footprint of a cruise ship, per passenger, is three times larger than that of a 747 flight. For a trip focused on witnessing first-hand environmental catastrophe largely caused by carbon dioxide, it's odd that the phrase "carbon footprint" appears nowhere on the page announcing the special offer, or the cruise's FAQ.

Long Service

U.S. National Atmospheric and Atmospheric Administration volunteer Richard Hendrickson looks out over the Atlantic Ocean sometime in the 1930s. Hendrickson still volunteers today.

D. L. Hendrickson

150,000: the number of weather observations that have been recorded by a 101-year-old farmer, the U.S. National Weather Service's longest-serving volunteer, who has called in temperatures, rainfall and other measurements from his home for 84 years.

50,000 degrees Fahrenheit: temperature of a lightning bolt.

10,000 degrees Fahrenheit: temperature of the surface of the sun.

30 percent: proportion of lightning strikes that are fatal. Lighting may spark across the skin without fatally damaging internal organs, Flora Lichtman reports.

Lightning in Victoria, Australia

Photo by Thomas Bresson, November 2008

52: how many years ago, this week, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin first stepped on the moon. Read Popular Science's original 1969 coverage of the event.

$5 million: the per-flight cost DARPA is aiming for in its Experimental Spaceplane 1 project. For comparison, Orbital Sciences charges an estimated $30 million to $40 million for a single flight on a Pegasus XL rocket that carries 1,000 pounds. DARPA is hopes XS-1 will carry 3,000 to 5,000 pounds.

$40 million: how much the U.S. Navy has spent trying to develop a laser to shoot down missiles.

$1: how much one shot from this laser should cost to deploy.

American Concept Art Of Soviet Laser.

From 1986.

Edward L. Cooper, via Wikimedia Commons

8.3 inches: wingspan of what is reportedly the largest aquatic insect ever discovered. (Aquatic insects are insects that spend some part of their life cycles in the water.) The new big man in town has not been identified beyond its order, Megaloptera. The second largest aquatic insect discovered is a helicopter dragonfly, with a wingspan of 7.5 inches.

Sweet dreams

This is reportedly a giant Dobsonfly, the world's largest, with a wingspan of 21 centimeters (8.3 inches), large enough to cover your face.

China News Service/ Zhong Xin

"Nightfall" by Isaac Asimov

Illustration by Ryan Inzana

This is an excerpt from Popular Science's special issue, Dispatches From The Future. Visit iTunes to download the edition onto your iPad, or return to our list of excerpts.

To keep reading, visit iTunes and download our Dispatches From The Future special issue onto your iPad.

Pills with different components don't always look this different.

Alexandra Ossola

As a traditionally Catholic country, Peru has been slower than most to accept contraceptives. Over the past decade, most citizens’ ideology has gradually stretched to accommodate the need for birth control, but emergency contraception (AKA the “morning after” pill) is still highly controversial in Peru. Although some question the pill on moral grounds, others are starting to question it based on sinister scientific findings: some of the pills are not the pill.

With a growing number of “verified” emergency contraceptives being registered in Peru over the past few years, leaders of Prosalud Interamericana, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness about sexual health, became suspicious that some of the birth control being sold in Peruvian pharmacies was not the pill described on the packaging.

“While each product had been registered by the authorities, it was well known that the registration procedures were not very stringent,” said Alan Lambert, the president of Prosalud Interamericana. Fearing that the pills were faulty, the organization contacted researchers in the United States to investigate what exactly was in them. What they found, as they reported in a recent study, alarmed them: one in four of the emergency contraceptives they sampled wasn’t what it appeared to be. In fact, one wasn’t even birth control at all—it was just a cheap antibiotic being sold as birth control.

But how did these drugs get into the supply chain? How can fraud like this be prevented, and what can women do to be sure they’re not getting fake pills?

Facundo Fernandez, a professor of biochemistry at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, applied his experience detecting counterfeit antimalarials to this new challenge. His team purchased samples from different pharmacies all over Lima. “When you buy drugs, and the pharmacist smiles at you, you don’t expect anything to be wrong,” he said.

With faulty pills, the stakes are high; some simply don’t work, while others could contain toxic compounds or combinations that could endanger the patient’s life. Fernandez said many of the female postdocs and grad students who were working on this project were deeply disturbed by what they found—and for good reason. Most women trust their contraceptives, assuming that the production and regulation is sound enough to protect their reproductive health. For the women of Peru, that sense of security may prove to be a false one.

Despite the fact that these contraceptives had gone through the necessary regulatory procedures (which mostly involved an inspection of the paper trail before the pills got to Peru), some of them were outright falsified. A falsified medication is one that is intended to look like the original drug, but it doesn’t interact with the human body in the same way, Fernandez explained.

Many of these falsified medications are wrapped in deceptive packaging that is almost identical to the original product, and the pills are only distinguishable when compared side by side. In developing countries, sometimes these fake pills are sold in “informal outlets” like open-air markets. In some that Fernandez has seen in Africa, customers select their medications from a huge bag of loose pills based simply on color, size and shape. Sometimes, these falsified meds are sold in pharmacies, and the pharmacists often don’t know they’re fakes.

Look Closely.

Packaging for counterfeit drugs is dangerously similar to the real thing. The top box is an authentic version of this weight loss supplement, while the one on the bottom is a knockoff filled with who-knows-what kind of pills.

FDA

This was the case with the emergency contraceptives from Peru that Fernandez tested. His team purchased 25 different batches of emergency contraceptives across the capital city of Lima, sampled across 20 pharmaceutical brands that are produced in nine countries. Fully functioning, legitimate pills contain the active ingredient levonorgestrel, a hormone that inhibits ovulation. To determine whether the pills were falsified or not, Fernandez and his team compared the pills’ unique molecular fingerprint to those of known formulas for emergency contraceptives and could quickly see which were real and which were fake.

Medications can be compromised in a number of different ways. The most common method is to fill a pill with cheaper drugs. In some cases these cheaper drugs appear to be working like the real drug, but they almost always fail to achieve the intended effect. “Instead of a hormone, you can put a cheap antibiotic,” Fernandez said, which was the case with a few of the contraceptives that he tested. Other types of pills use a different type of coating, which can cause the active ingredient to release too quickly or too slowly into a person’s bloodstream.

Fernandez found both types of falsification in his samples. Seventy-two percent of the batches of pills he tested had the correct chemical composition for emergency contraceptives. But six of the 25 batches released levonorgestrel too quickly or too slowly, either because the pills didn’t contain enough of the drug, or because their coating agents changed how the pills acted in the body.

Most disturbingly, one of Fernandez’s samples had no levonorgestrel in it at all—instead it was identified as the antibiotic sulfamethoxazole, which is commonly prescribed to treat infections in the urinary tract and sinuses. A woman who takes this kind of pill may still become pregnant, and she may realize it too late to take a functional version of the pill. Making matters worse, there’s also a chance she could suffer a serious or even fatal allergic reaction to the chemicals she unwittingly consumed. And in other cases the drug substitute could be straight-up toxic. (Fernandez did not detect a toxic combination in his sample.)

The culprits behind these falsified medications, Fernandez said, are mostly international gangs that have turned away from producing and distributing narcotics. “For any criminal who wants to make money, it’s safer to make counterfeit medicines than to be in narcotics,” he said. If a group is caught manufacturing narcotics, they can be put to death in many places. “But for counterfeit drugs, the laws are not up to date. You may get a few years [if you’re caught], but not the death penalty.”

Roger Bate, an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. who recently wrote a book on the trade of falsified drugs, agrees: “For [the gangs] it is a safe business.”

To get their drugs sold in stores but avoid regulators, counterfeiters try to find gaps or weaknesses in the supply chain. “It’s very easy to target a pharmacy, but what’s really hard is intercepting products in the middle of the supply chain,” Bate says. In the globalized economy, the pharmaceutical supply chain can span several continents and dozens of countries. Each time chemicals are combined with others or are shipped from place to place, regulators and pharmaceutical companies verify their legitimacy with signed documents and occasional inspections.

But this process isn’t perfect. Sometimes, the added chemicals can be so similar to the legitimate pill’s ingredients that they actually pass the inspection, which happened with the anticoagulant Heparin in 2008. But in many cases, the paper trail becomes too convoluted to follow, especially when the drugs pass through free trade zones like Dubai that offer minimal oversight. Counterfeiters often seize on these opportunities, supplying falsified documents to customs agents.

When regulators don’t notice, the medications arrive in their destination country with the same credentials as the real ones, seeping into pharmacies all over the world. Sometimes, Bate noted, they even make their way to the United States. “At every possible step there is someone who is thinking about how to infiltrate that supply chain,” he said.

Right now, experts have very little sense of the pervasiveness of these drugs, says Bate.

He claims Fernandez’s team is the first to investigate the falsification of emergency contraceptives, and even the World Health Organization can’t estimate what percent of drugs—including contraceptives—are falsified around the world. Because researchers in this field aren’t able to do exhaustive studies, they are relegated to studies that offer a quick look at the amount of falsified drugs of one type in a given place at a given moment. Lacking a larger perspective, it’s impossible to estimate the pervasiveness of the fakes, although Bate suspects that, in the worst cases, falsified drugs could be as high as 50 percent.

Much of the fight against falsified contraceptives will happen on a national or international scale, inspired by work like Fernandez’s. But to avoid fakes in the United States, Bate suggests only ordering medications online if they are from a reliable source. It’s much easier for people to spot fakes when they take a medication every day, he notes, and emergency contraceptives present a particular challenge because of how infrequently women take them.

If you’re skeptical of your birth control, ask your pharmacist if you can see another box of the same brand. If you’ve taken emergency birth control before, you could save the pill pod to compare to the new one. Bate said that in the United States, it’s unlikely your pharmacy-distributed Plan B will be fake. “But you don’t want that level of randomness,” he added.

Lambert of ProSalud reminds us that some of the Peruvian women that rely on falsified emergency contraceptive will become pregnant; "had they used a bona fide product," these women would not have become pregnant otherwise. Because Peru has outlawed abortion, they will be forced to carry to term, or, as Lambert notes, "obviously some will seek clandestine abortions"– putting their future reproductive health, and in some cases their lives, at risk.

Ever since NASA established its history program in 1959, the agency has periodically compiled the world’s aeronautics advances into a single report. Assembled mostly from press releases and news stories, the documents recount coverage of budget negotiations alongside milestones like the shuttle program and the moon landing. Data illustrators at the Office for Creative Research distilled the trove of reports from 11,000 pages and 4.9 million words into just over 4,000 discrete phrases. Their illustration charts the frequency of some of the most important terms, colored by topic and arranged by time, and presents a new view of how NASA took humanity to the stars.

Explore the graphic with your mouse: zoom in and out with the scroll wheel; click and drag to pan; and click on the words that appear in white to see the terms in the original historical reports. Need more pixels? View the piece full-screen. And read more about the illustrators' process in a companion post.

A phrasal history of aerospace. Source: NASA History Program Office; additional data from the New York Times (for relative importance of keywords). Data analysis and visualization by the Office for Creative Research.

The final graphic

Office for Creative Research

For the July issue of Popular Science, we—the Office for Creative Research—created a data visualization celebrating NASA’s long history of aerospace innovation. Since 1959, NASA has published a document called “Astronautics & Aeronautics Chronology” nearly every year, compiling news coverage of science, technology, and policy at the agency. In these compilations, NASA is reporting its own history. What kinds of stories do these documents hold? How has their language changed over the last six decades? To explore these questions, we created “The Whole Brilliant Enterprise,” a text-based visualization drawn from—by our count—4,861,706 words of NASA history.

The first step was to dig through the NASA chronologies by hand. We discovered that while the reports were an extremely descriptive history of aerospace, they lacked a hierarchy—they were simply straightforward timelines recounting events. A story about the hiring of a new NASA employee might appear alongside a story of a shuttle launch, representing chronological order but not relative importance. That mixed-up quality makes the documents wonderful to skim, but difficult to visualize.

To address the hierarchy issue, we turned to the archives of The New York Times, seeking out NASA-related headlines and articles. We took the articles’ placement in the paper of record—was it front-page news or did the story appear at the back of a section?—as a proxy for cultural impact. Then, we mapped that importance rating back onto the NASA archives, and used it to pull out the text of just the most consequential stories to act as the foundation of the visualization. It was in compiling these results that we realized that the piece should not be a rigid timeline of key NASA events, but instead a rolling impression of the agency’s eras, created by displaying some of the more popular and important terms within the articles.

Once we had the structure in place, the challenge became finding the balance between a term’s chronological location and the type size that would represent its place in the “cultural impact” hierarchy. We also had to space the individual terms evenly along a curved path. It took many iterations of the code that generated the graphic to strike that balance, but eventually we settled on a process that produced an image with the character that we had originally envisioned.

We followed a circuitous path to generate the graphic—the extent of which is evident in our sketches [below]—but we felt it was an appropriate process given the breadth of the archive. The value of our explorations is—like the histories themselves—more striking when viewed in hindsight.

A Small Gallery of Our Sketches and In-Progress Images

Counting the number of NASA-related New York Times stories

We used articles in the New York Times to establish a hierarchy within the stream of stories that NASA compiles in its (almost) annual history reports. Dots here each represent a story, and are arranged by quarter. The most Times stories were published around the July 1969 moon landing.

Office for Creative Research

A selection of NASA-related New York Times stories, plotted by their length and location in the paper

Each dot here represents a NASA-related New York Times story. Page number of the story runs along the x-axis, and the y-axis is the story length in words. Bigger dots are stories that appear in a month that contained lots of other NASA stories—presumably meaning it was among was a flurry of noteworthy events. Lines connect consecutive stories in time. This view allowed us to determine whether our page-ranking algorithm would work to establish a hierarchy of stories in the NASA documents: If the same terms appeared in the NASA stories as in the most important Times stories, those NASA stories are likely more significant.

Office for Creative Research

A quick visualization of the interconnectedness of select New York Times story abstracts on different NASA topics

The white rays around the outside of the ring represent a selection of NASA-related Times stories. Longer stories create longer white radial streaks. When a single term appears in two stories, those stories are connected by an arc. The colors are randomly assigned.

Office for Creative Research

Identifying the most important terms and beginning to sort them by topic

At one point we used a word-cloud approach for our own internal examination of the text. The words are pulled from the NASA reports, and loosely arranged by time on the x-axis. Larger words have a higher importance index, based on our analysis of New York Times articles. They’re colored by category.

Office for Creative Research

A process shot, as we calculate allowable text heights along the curves of the graphic

Before we could fit text along a the curved paths of the graphic, we needed to calculate two parameters: the curvature of the line at each point (so we can lay down text that follows the curves smoothly) and the height between one curve and the next (which tells us how big the text needs to be to fill the space). This image is a screen shot of our algorithm in progress.

Office for Creative Research

A study of our path-generation algorithm for the flare of “-ing” words running across the background

One of the more fanciful elements in the graphic is the streaming white “-ing” words that appear in the background, evoking the flames that propel the spacecraft forward and giving a sense of flow and direction to the piece. This was the output of an early version of our program for generating the paths that we would eventually flow the “-ing” words along. 

Office for Creative Research

Distributing the curves that will corral the text for on each topic in the final graphic

The height of the curve is based on the number of stories in the NASA archive in each of the categories we chose to feature. Here, we’re testing how the streams would look for a handful of different category options.

Office for Creative Research

Finding the perpendicular lines at the curves’ inflection points, for running text along the curves later

With the final category streams in place, we then had to assess the shapes of those curves so we could flow the final text along them. 

Office for Creative Research

Before bows and arrows, language, and even vertical foreheads, some of our ancestors survived by industriously chipping rocks into sharp tools. Today we take metal knives for granted, yet few are made to survive a world without order. 

There are two ways to make a knife: Heat up a hunk of metal and hammer it out, or cut out a rough shape and file it to a sharp edge. The latter seemed easier, and I already had some leaf-spring steel from my days as a craftsman of crossbows [see “Rebuild,” April 2014]. But the metal proved too stubborn to cut with a hacksaw. 

I needed a forge. The heat would soften the steel and ready it for shaping. I had only a wimpy workshop blowtorch, which can barely melt solder. But if I could trap its heat in one place, the temperature would rise and rise. So I took an empty paint can, punched a hole in the bottom, and screwed in a conduit fitting to hold the blowtorch in place. Firebrick and rock wool (available in most large boiler rooms) insulated my forge extremely well, and in less than 10 minutes, the leaf spring glowed cherry-red.

The softened steel yielded quickly to my hacksaw and files, and I fashioned the knife with a hollow-ground edge for easy sharpening. I also notched out some serrations, which drew blood even before I finished the project. 

Now I had a knife-shaped piece of steel, but a durable blade—hard enough to stay sharp and tough so it doesn’t crack—must cool properly. I used prewarmed canola oil to give my blade the right temper.

Did it work? I submitted my knife to the American Bladesmith Society’s punishing test. The blade had to sever a hanging rope with one swipe, chop through a two-by-four, shave off some hair, and bend at a 90-degree angle without breaking in two. To see how it fared, check out the video above.

Photograph by Ray Lego

Diatoms.

Images a and b are raw diatoms; c and d are fossilized, and e and f are fossilized diatoms that were frozen but not shot.

Mark Burchell et al., Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

There’s someevidence that microbes living inside a rock could be blasted from their home planet, travel through space, and then crash-land on a new planet relatively unscathed. Throughout the ALH84001 debate, scientists assumed fossils could also withstand the grueling journey, but it looks like nobody actually set out to test it—until now. 

In a new study, physicists at University of Kent tested the hypothesis with a big gun. More specifically, they took powdered diatoms (a type of microscopic algae with a hard silica shell), packed them inside a nylon bullet, added water, and froze the sample. Then, they loaded the bullets inside a light gas gun and fired them at a sack of water at speeds ranging between 0.25 and 3.1 miles per second.

When they looked in the water afterwards, the researchers analyzed the whole and partial remains of the little diatom fossils. They concluded that small fossils could survive a meteorite impact, and that if they exist, then it’s possible to find them inside meteorites.

But there are a few important caveats.  At impact speeds above 0.62 miles per second, none of the diatom fossils survived in one piece—they broke into tiny shards. And the faster they crashed into the water, the tinier the diatom bits became.  That’s a problem for any potential fossils that would fall to Earth from other planets, because meteoroids enter the Earth’s atmosphere at speeds between 6.8 and 44.7 miles per second before they hit Earth, according to the American Meteor Society.

The other important limitation is that the diatoms were shot frozen in ice, meaning they potentially behave differently during impact than they would if they were encapsulated in rock.

So the jury is definitely still out on ALH84001, and it probably will be for many years. Even if tests provide stronger evidence that fossils can travel between planetary bodies, it doesn’t necessarily mean they did.

What is pretty neat is that, because meteorite impacts tend to be slower on the Moon, it looks like fossils that have been smashed off from Earth could survive a collision with our natural satellite.  The authors conclude that the lunar surface could be a good place to scout for fossils, and those terrestrial transplants may be better preserved on the Moon than if they had remained on Earth.

No word yet on whether a dinosaur fossil could survive the impact. (Dinosaurs on the Moon? That would be crazy awesome.)

Detail From Top 10 Mapathon India Winners

The number one is in Pathankot, which is very near the disputed territory of Kashmir.

Google

India's Central Bureau of Investigation is questioning an open-source map project sponsored by Google. Google's possible crime: Revealing information about sensitive military installations. Relying on locals to document the area around them, Google's contest may have documented what was known to locals but unavailable on previous maps of India.

India, like most countries engaged in a long and frustrating military stalemate over territory disputed by a nuclear-armed neighbor, wants to keep details about its own military installations out of the public eye. The government's Survey of India is responsible for maps, and that responsibility includes making sure the Open Series Maps, designed for general consumption, don't contain information from the classified Defense Series Maps.

Google's 2013 India Mapathon project came with no such military purpose behind it. Instead, the internet giant provided mapping tools to contest entrants. Top prizes included Samsung Galaxy Note tablets and cash. Notable in the terms of the contest are the specific features Google wanted map makers to label:

The top ten winners of the contest are shown on the home page for Mapathon 2013. Vishal Saini, ranked number one in the contest, mapped the city of Pathankot, in the northern part of Punjab province. Pathankot is the last Indian city on the national highway to the contested state of Jammu and Kashmir, and has come under military attack before. During the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, while the two countries fought over control of Kashmir, Pakistan bombed the Indian Air Force base in Pathankot and attempted to attack it with paratroopers.

Now, if you look up Pathankot on Google Maps, in addition to the city, there's a large section of land labeled "military area." The Survey of India claims Google didn't ask for permission before launching their map project. Crucially, the Survey of India claims a monopoly on mapping sensitive and restricted areas, and the appearance of places like Pathankot Military Area on an open map undermine that monopoly, and the national security interest behind it.

Pathankot Military Area

Google

The site isn't quite there yet, even though I think this product is pretty cool.

Screenshot of amazon.com by A. Ossola

This week, Amazon announced its new 3-D printing store. We were immediately giddy, imagining the endless possibilities of being able to upload any design and, in Amazon fashion, have it shipped to us in solid form overnight. But the online book purveyor that has diversified to sell basically everything on the planet seems to have squandered its opportunity to transform the 3-D printing movement; the products in its new online marketplace are not customizable, fairly expensive, and slow to be delivered. 

The new 3-D printed store allows “customers [to] become designers” with a variety of goods ranging from home décor to jewelry to electronics accessories. “The introduction of our 3-D Printed Products store suggests the beginnings of a shift in online retail - that manufacturing can be more nimble to provide an immersive customer experience,” said Petra Schindler-Carter, Director for Amazon Marketplace Sales, in a press release. This may represent a shift towards the future of online retail, but Amazon isn't doing it right. At least, not yet.

The first issue is with how customizable these products really are. Some have nearly infinite varieties, like this super cool quark pendant (Mom, note this one for my Christmas list), and really do grant the customer a fair amount of creative control. But many other products, including most of the electronics accessories and some décor, simply aren’t customizable at all. Why do I want these things 3-D printed, anyway?

Price, you say? Maybe these 3-D printed items are cheaper than their conventionally manufactured counterparts. That would be a great argument, except that it’s wrong. Take, for example, this 3-D Printed Nexus 7 Stand. The 3-D printed version sells for $52.59. A slightly more sophisticated version, on sale in another corner of Amazon’s infinite marketplace, would run you $20.48, including shipping. You can attest that price difference to “the coolness factor” of 3-D printing.

The amount of time the products need to ship, too, is long for those of us who have been spoiled by Amazon’s inhuman delivery speeds, requiring a tortoise-like 6-10 days in most cases. That’s too long for me to wait to get my “hanging ‘dawg’” sculpture.

As it stands now, the site is missing out on the best feature of 3-D printing: its infinite capacity for invention. In an ideal world, customers would be able to design something, based on their own plans or ones provided by an external company, and Amazon would print and ship with its trademark alacrity. That would make this new marketplace into a truly exciting gamechanger, bringing the power and ease of 3-D printing to people who have never had it before.

Syringe

Wikimedia Commons

When you get a vaccine, it's typically injected into the muscle below the skin with a needle. But vaccines administered through the skin can use smaller pin-prick methods that could be useful for those afraid of needles, such as children. These cutaneous vaccines have the potential to be relatively painless, and could also possibly require less vaccine material. Unfortunately, the chemical adjuvants used in intramuscular vaccines can cause scarring and ulceration, and therefore new adjuvants for cutaneous (skin-administered) vaccines are "urgently needed," as various researchershave written. Adjuvants are chemicals like aluminum salts and oils which work by mimicking components of pathogens (like bacterial cell walls) that the immune system has evolved to recognized and react to. 

A new study on various animals suggests that briefly illuminating the area where the vaccine will be injected with laser light could increase the effectiveness of the flu vaccine, by four to seven times, as measured by the number of antibodies produced by the body, compared to using no laser light. This method also has the advantage of not needing the usual chemical adjuvants. Exactly how it compares to a typical human intramuscular flu vaccine is unclear, since this study was done on mice and pigs, although the researchers suggest the technique could translate to humans (since, among other things, pig's skin and immune systems are similar to ours). 

The lasers create small rifts within the skin called "microthermal zones," which heal by themselves within a few days, the authors write in a study describing the technique, published in Nature Communications. Before croaking, the dying cells send out "danger" signals telling the body to respond to viruses and other invaders, which summons a type of immune scout called plasmacytoid dendritic cells. These cells help the body recognize and react to the influenza virus, the authors wrote. The technique also has fewer side effects compared to conventional chemical adjuvants and makes it possible to avoid certain adjuvants, like aluminum, which can be harmful at high concentrations and which is a favorite target (besides mercury) among those opposed to vaccines.

The type of lasers used in this study were originally developed for cosmetic purposes, to make skin appear more youthful, reported the website Neomatica. The small microthermal zones give rise to new growth of epithelial cells, which can give skin a more youthful appearance.

Enceladus's South Pole.

Those things that look like beams of light are actually geysers. Giant, 125-mile-high geysers.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI

A map of more than 100 geysers on the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus has helped scientists determine where those water jets are spouting from—and the results are encouraging for scientists who want to look for life there.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft first spotted the 125-mile-high geysers erupting from Enceladus’ south pole in 2005. Since then, scientists learned that the geysers contain ice and water vapor (exciting news, since on Earth we find life pretty much everywhere there’s water).  The jets burst out of “tiger stripes”, or fractures, that form as Saturn’s gravity deforms the moon’s icy surface.

What has remained a tantalizing mystery is the origin of the geysers. Do they erupt from a subsurface ocean, which is believed to be about six miles deep, buried beneath 25 miles of ice, and potentially capable of sustaining life? Or are they merely a result of frictional heat from the ice fractures rubbing together? The geysers overlap with hotspots on the moon’s surface, but scientists couldn’t tell whether the hotspots cause the geysers or vice versa.

In a paper published today, scientists compared geyser activity with high-resolution heat maps of the moon’s surface. They found that the hotspots were only a few dozen feet across, which is too small for the heat to be caused by the grinding of the 84-mile-long ice fractures. Instead, the scientists think the geysers cause the heat—when the vapor spews out, some of it condenses on the fracture wall and releases heat.

"Once we had these results in hand, we knew right away heat was not causing the geysers, but vice versa," Carolyn Porco, lead author of the paper, said in a press release. "It also told us the geysers are not a near-surface phenomenon, but have much deeper roots."

The team has concluded that the geysers must be coming from Enceladus’ inner ocean. That’s good news for scientists who want to search for alien life, because it means that future missions to Enceladus won’t need to drill through 25 miles of ice in order to sample the water below. Instead, a flyby mission could just swoop through the geysers to taste what’s inside the ocean, and see if it may be harboring any simple life forms. 

Corn Field

AmeriFlux

Crop-munching caterpillars in Brazil are no longer put off by genetically modified plants designed to kill them, Reuters reports. The report is just the latest in a series that have emerged over the past few years.

In this case, the GM plant is Bt corn and the pest in question is the Spodoptera frugiperda, which is native to tropical regions of the Americas. Bt plants are engineered so that they have genes from a soil bacteria called Bacillus thuringiensis. The genes produce crystalline chemicals that kill insect larvae when they eat it. A larva that chows down on a Bt-crystal-producing GM plant soon stops eating. A few days later, it dies.* In addition to Bt corn, Bt cotton is popular.

Yet resistance to Bt crops has been occurring with pest species throughout the world. The first publicly announced case of insects in a field evolving resistance to Bt plants occurred in India in 2009. The first U.S. case followed in 2011. Since then, there have been dozens of similar incidents. In 2013, a team of entomologists and agriculture scientists reviewed 77 previous studies about international Bt crops. The team found that in 2005, only one of the 13 pest species examined could eat Bt plants without dying. But by 2013, five species could eat Bt plants.

The first engineered Bt plant was registered by a U.S. company in 1995, but not long afterward, scientists noted that insects would likely evolve resistance to them. Controlling pests, whether it's with microbes in a hospital or grubs in a field, is always an arms race against evolution. That evolution happens whether you use genetic engineering or plain old spraying.

The rising Bt resistance means that farmers will likely ramp up their insecticide use. One group of Brazilian farmers even wants GMO companies to reimburse them for the additional insecticides they had to use because their Bt crops failed to deter pests. Companies are also likely developing new GMO crops, perhaps with more insect toxins engineered into them, to combat the newly evolved resistance. There is already a second generation of genetically modified, Bt crops that make two Bt toxins instead of just one. Some pests have evolved resistance against those plants, however.

There are some scientifically proven ways to slow bugs' ability to adapt to GMO toxins. Planting a mix of GMO and non-GMO plants helps. So does planting first- and second-generation Bt crops separately. Both strategies lessen the deadly pressure against insects susceptible to Bt poisoning, so they'll evolve more slowly.

Seed company Dow Agrosciences told Reuters that Dow representatives taught Brazilian farmers these strategies. The companies' instructions were confusing, a lawyer representing the farmers told Reuters, and there were not enough non-GMO seeds available for them to really put the strategies to work.

*P.S. What about the butterflies?!: Most non-scientist Americans first learned about Bt corn when a study came out finding that pollen from the corn may kill caterpillars of the monarch butterfly. Later studies have found that Bt corn doesn't significantly affect the numbers of monarch butterflies, although other modern farming practices may.

[Reuters]

Grenade Explosion

U.S. Marine Corps, via Wikimedia Commons

Additive manufacturing, more commonly known as 3-D printing, is inherently creative. Materials are layered together and built up, constructing an object from powder and heat and code. In the future, the U.S. Army wants to turn this innovation to far more destructive ends, by printing new warheads.

The latest issue of Army Technology focuses on 3-D printing. Designing new shapes for warheads is one promising new avenue of research. In "ARDEC investigates how 3-D printed metals could transform Army logistics", U.S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center materials engineer James Zunino explains to author Timothy Rider what additive manufacturing can bring to the science of blowing stuff up. Rider captures the core of it here:

Directing the explosion of a weapon is a big deal, as it can mean both deadlier military tools and more precise attacks. Last winter missile maker MBDA tested a differently shaped charge on a missile whose narrow explosion is designed to hit a target and nothing else. In the future, 3-D printed warheads could do something similar, giving troops and commanders more options about how and to what extent they should blow something up.

While printed warheads are the shiny tip of the spear, it's almost certain that 3-D printing will make a difference with mundane supply tasks like spare parts first. Multiple stories in the issue focus in on this immediate need. In "Getting to Right Faster," Master Sergeant Adam Asclipiadis of the Army's appropriately named Rapid Equipping Force, describes how they used Statasys Fortus 3-D printers in Afghanistan.

Further articles in the issue examine the military applications of 3-D printing in medicine, food, new materials, at supply depots and in building miniatures to better understand a battlefield. There's also a look at 3-D bioprinting human tissue for treating wounds, especially burn wounds, suffered in the field of battle– perhaps in new patterns left by creatively shaped 3-D printed warheads. 

The whole issue is available online here.

Who doesn't love a good mystery, especially one that stumps researchers? 

Popular Science's editor-in-chief, Cliff Ransom, moderated a panel about such seemingly inexplicable phenomena this weekend at Comic-Con in San Diego. The occasion: the debut of the Science Channel's second season of "The Unexplained Files," which premieres tonight (July 29) at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

We thought it was fine occasion to ask, "What are some phenomena that science can't yet explain?" Below are five of our favorite enduring mysteries. 

Yawning

Juanedc via Wikimedia Commons

1. Why People Yawn 

You yawn, I yawn, we all yawn. Reading or thinking about it makes you more likely to yawn. (Did you just yawn?) You can even "catch" yawns from other people, and from other animals like dogs. Thanks, biology—but what purpose does yawning serve?

Ideas abound, but none seem to hold up to scientific scrutiny. One is that yawning helps to cool the brain by increasing blood flow to the jaws, neck, and sinuses, and then removing heat from this blood when inhaling a big breath. Counterintuitively, yawning occurs less frequently in hot weather, when air has less ability to cool the body. In short, yawning "fails precisely when we need it," Dr. Adrian Guggisberg told WebMD. One hypothesis that has not (yet) been discarded: yawns "serve as a signal for our bodies to perk up, a way of making sure we stay alert," Maria Konnikova wrote in The New Yorker. "A yawn is usually followed by increased movement and physiological activity, which suggests that some sort of 'waking up' has taken place."

And why are yawns contagious? A recent study in PLoS ONE suggests they're way of showing empathy. But another newer study concluded the opposite. So it goes.

Patrick Swayze as a ghoul in the movie "Ghost." 

2. Ghosts

"Alright," you might say, "I understand that yawning thing, but ghosts don't exist." Well, a plurality of Americans—48 percent, in fact—believe they do, according to a CBS News poll in 2005. Most women—about 56 percent—believe in ghosts. And more than one-fifth of people CBS polled say they've seen or felt the presence of a ghost. 

Modern scientists haven't delved into this topic all that much, but a few compelling explanations exist. One has to do with infrasound, or low-frequency sounds inaudible to humans but that storms and even household appliances can generate. Such rumbles can vibrate human organs and make people feel a sense of unease. Infrasound vibrations can also mess with vision and make people think they are seeing things. Another idea is that drafts may create "cold spots" thought to be signs of spirits. A final theory is that some observations of ghosts may have been due to hallucinations caused by carbon monoxide poisoning. 

One stage productions' (creepy) interpretation of what déjà vu looks/feels like.

Yohanntd via Wikimedia Commons CC3.0

3. Déjà Vu

You've probably had this feeling before: As something happens, you feel you're reliving a past moment. What causes this eerie feeling of déjà vu? In short: No one is certain, but some ideas exist.

One study, which placed people in a virtual computer world, hints that the feeling triggers most frequently when a person encounters a place that's similar in layout to another place he or she has visited, but doesn't consciously recognize. "One reason for the jarring sense that accompanies déjà vu may be the contrast between the sense of newness and the simultaneous sense of oldness—something unfamiliar should not also feel familiar," cognitive psychologist Anne Cleary at Colorado State University told Scientific American. Another study found that one healthy male subject experienced a strong recurrent sense of déjà vu when he took two drugs to ward off the flu. Déjà vu might also come about when the brain improperly encodes a new memory, or when it misfires when establishing a sense of familiarity.

A grainy image of Sasquatch from the Patterson-Gimlin film, which purports to show Bigfoot.

Wikimedia Commons

4. Bigfoot 

Bigfoot is a creature of many names -- Sasquatch in the Pacific Northwest, Yeti in the Himalayas, "wild man" in Central Asia, and (my favorite) "Yowie" in Australia -- but science knows it as a cryptid: a type of animal whose existence hasn't been proven. Definitive proof of Bigfoot has never been established, but as scientists have been known to say, "absence of proof isn't proof of absence." Many speculate that Bigfoot sightings often involve large animals that could be mistaken for humans, such as bears. One recent study looked at DNA from hairs, which allegedly came from a large human-like beast. The study found that the hairs came from "raccoons, sheep, bears, dogs, humans and more," the New York Times reported. (Bigfoot was not listed.)

Spinal Placebo

Pain relief through the placebo effect may take place in spinal cord cells

Sussex Physio

5. The Placebo Effect 

You surely know about the placebo effect: If you truly think something will have a particular somatic effect (like reduce pain), it probably will—even if it is just a sugar pill and has no pharmacological activity. For this reason, placebo pills are used in all legitimate medical studies, to prove whether or not a drug actually has an effect that isn't psychological. The placebo effect is actually more puzzling than you might expect, though—recent work has shown, for example, that it even works when participants are told they are taking a sugar pill. It also works for sleep. If you believe you got a better night of sleep compared to others who slept the same amount, you are more likely to perform better at a variety of tasks.

There are some clues here and there as to how it might work. For example, one study found that in people given fake pain-relieving cream experienced less activity in pain-sensing regions of the brain. Another found a similar fake cream activated cells in the spinal cord (see the above image). But how the exact process maps across a whole host of experiences—from fighting infection, to performing better on tests, to sleeping better—nobody really knows.