Ebola Virion

An electron micrograph of an Ebola virion, with added color.

CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith, downloaded from Wikimedia Commons

Two Americans who contracted Ebola have been injected with a serum that hasn't yet been tested in humans, CNN reports. Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol got sick while volunteering at an Ebola clinic in Liberia. American officials recently evacuated Brantly from Africa to Atlanta, Georgia, for treatment, making him the first patient from this Ebola outbreak to enter the U.S. Writebol is supposed to fly in for treatment tomorrow. Before either of them left Africa, they received experimental injections made by a company called Mapp Biopharmaceutical.

Using an untested drug in this way is uncommon, but not unheard of. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration even has a special legal pathway to give patients access to experimental drugs, if their lives are in danger and they have no reasonable alternatives. Still, that legal pathway hasn't been opened to the hundreds of people in West Africa infected with Ebola. Efforts to do the research to get Ebola vaccines and treatments to market—to take them from "experimental" to "FDA approved"—have been slowed by the disease's rarity, Science magazine reported a couple of weeks ago.

Typically, a drug developer isn't allowed to give experimental drugs to people until they've submitted a detailed study plan to the FDA for approval, plus data from experiments done in monkeys and mice. Even then, a "Phase I" human trial of a drug usually doesn't measure whether a drug heals people, only whether its side effects are tolerable. After that, a drug has to make it through "Phase II" and "Phase III" trials before the FDA will allow a company to market it.

The treatment Brantly and Writebol received—at doses meant to cure them—has only been tested in mice and a few monkeys. You can see the results of one of those monkey trials here. Both volunteers responded well to the treatment, CNN reports.

Their cases fell under what the FDA calls its "Expanded Access" or "compassionate use" program. Expanded Access allows patients with life-threatening conditions to legally take experimental drugs (although there's no guarantee a company will agree to sell an untested drug in this way). Federal researchers have talked extensively about using compassionate use to get promising Ebola treatments to West Africa, Science reported in July.

However, doctors on the ground say they're already dealing with a lot of distrust and even violence from locals, who sometimes believe healthcare workers actually bring the disease to them. Throw rumors of an "untested injection" into the mix and, well, organizations such as Doctors Without Borders think it would be counterproductive. 

The U.S. does plan to send at least 50 experts to West Africa to help doctors and hospitals there, the BBC reported this weekend. It sounds like they'll be using the supportive treatments and containment techniques already proven to help with Ebola outbreaks. 

[CNN, Science]

Well, this is a bit creepy: Researchers have shown that they can recover various types of audio, including human speech, by filming and analyzing the tiny vibrations that sound creates in objects nearby. In one example, a person recited words, and this sound vibrated a nearby bag of potato chips. The researchers filmed the bag of chips with a high-speed camera, through sound-proof glass, and were then able to reconstruct what the person was saying with relatively good quality--you can make out the words, and recognize the person's voice.

Check out the video explaining the research, mostly done at MIT, here: 

The scientists could also reconstruct speech and sounds by filming vibrations on the surface of glass, aluminum foil, and even a house plant, according to the statement.

For these analyses, the researchers used a high-speed camera that captures 2,000 to 6,000 frames per second. But they showed that an impressive amount of information about the audio (although not its content) could also be recorded with a regular DSLR that films at 60 frames per second: the gender (and possibly even the identity) of the speaker, as well as how many people are talking. 

This is the most impressive--and somewhat disconcerting--demonstration of eavesdropping without a microphone that I have seen. But there are also laser "microphones" that can reconstruct speech or audio by measuring vibrations in objects near a speaker, from a long distance away.  

The researchers will present their work at SIGGRAPH, the computer graphics conference.

RoboShipbuilder

Daewoo, via New Scientist

The South Korean company Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering is trying out something new: equipping workers with robotic exoskeletons. Workers are only testing prototypes for now, but future shipbuilders might strap on exoskeletons as easily as they don hard hats.

The exoskeleton fits workers who are between 5 feet 2 inches and 6 feet tall. It weighs almost 62 pounds, but thanks to its hydraulic joints and electrical motors, the suit supports itself. It has a three-hour battery life and can help workers lift up to 66 pounds. 

Daewoo's lead engineer on the project says they ultimately want a suit that can carry 220 pounds, to turn the taxing task of moving heavy objects into almost effortless work. There are other hurdles to overcome–for example, the suit is hard to use on slopes or slick surfaces. If the suit can overcome those challenges, there's a bold future of wearable robots ahead.

REMUS SharkCam: The hunter and the hunted from Woods Hole Oceanographic Inst. on Vimeo.

Want to see what it looks like when you get chomped on by a great white shark? Of course you do.

This video, made by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, shows great white sharks near Guadalupe Island, Mexico. In 2013, Woods Hole researchers equipped a Remote Environmental Monitoring Unit, A.K.A. a REMUS-100 robot, with five cameras to find sharks and tag them. When the researchers sent REMUS underwater in Mexico, they got an eyeful of the sharks' territorial and predatory behaviors. The sharks snuck up under the robot in much the same way they stalk and nab seals, the video explains.

REMUS-100s are versatile, underwater vehicles that are able to drive in little surveying patterns on their own. They come in different sizes and engineers are able to attach different instruments to them, including everything from sonar to radiation sensors to bioluminescence sensors. Woods Hole engineers invented them and the institute rents them out to research and military groups for ocean monitoring, seafloor mapping, and missions to find and clear underwater mines. Popular Science has written about their use in searching historical shipwrecks. (Plus, see a REMUS-100 deployment here).

In this case, the Woods Hole researchers were doing their own work with a specially-outfitted REMUS. This conference presentation from 2012 shows they've been preparing a REMUS to tag sharks for some time. The paper explains how the vehicle is programmed to spot and stalk sharks on its own, but doesn't mention the possibility of sharks stalking it.

A razor clam, left, which inspired the RoboClam, right.

Donna Covey/MIT

In nature

To burrow, a razor clam begins to squeeze its shells together. Surrounding sand falls into the newly created space. Further squeezing draws water into the mix, making a pocket of quicksand that the clam pulls itself through with ease.

In the lab

The RoboClam works similarly.In version 2.0, now in progress, an electric actuator expands and contracts three aluminum wedges to turn nearby sand into a slurry. A weight allows the cylindrical unit to sink slightly, and the process repeats.

Results

“A razor clam can dig one third of a mile through underwater soil on the amount of energy in a double-A battery,” says mechanical engineer Amos Winter. RoboClam 1.0 uses 10 times as much, but since it has more mass, its efficiency is comparable. And unlike existing industrial diggers, Robo-Clam doesn’t use exponentially more energy as it goes deeper.

Application

Winter envisions RoboClam anchoring undersea robots, blowing up underwater mines, securing transoceanic cable, and exploring alien oceans.

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

Talking About Watson

IBM researchers discuss Watson-based mobile apps in January 2014.

IBM Communications on Flickr

The folks at IBM are fine-tuning their Watson computer system to be able to offer solutions and suggestions at business meetings, MIT Technology Review reports. During a demonstration that a MIT Technology Review reporter watched, Meeting Watson learned about a company's strategy by reading a memo and responded to complex requests such as, "Watson, show me companies between $15 million and $60 million in revenue relevant to that strategy." The whole story is definitely worth a read.

Since Watson won Jeopardy in 2011, IBM researchers have put it to work on a wide variety of tasks. It has analyzed complex biomedical data, including genomic data and electronic health records. Researchers have also tried making Watson into a chef, chemist and a customer service agent.

What makes Watson so versatile? It learns from example, so it's able to learn patterns such as the correct form for Jeopardy answers, or the usual therapies doctors choose from when treating patients with certain cancers. It also uses natural language processing, which helps it understand questions and information it hears or reads. (It's worth noting that one Watson can't do it all. There are many Watsons, and researchers usually teach each system one specific skill set.) Still, IBM has struggled to commercialize Watson's abilities, as a fewdifferent outlets reported earlier this year. Real-life problems are more difficult to understand and solve than Jeopardy questions, as it turns out. Hopefully, with more development, Watson will soon find its niches. 

Last Transmission

The Allen Telescope Array’s webcam sent this transmission on August 2 at 7:43 p.m., just before the Internet went out.

Located at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Hat Creek, California, the Allen Telescope Array is caught in the middle of two wildfires. The Eiler and the Bald fires, sparked last week, together have torched more than 100 square miles of Northern California. They are just two of more than a dozen fires that began in the state last week when excessive lightning met the drought-dry underbrush.

According to state fire spokesperson Captain Amy Head, 209 square miles have burned since last week. The severity prompted Governor Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency Saturday. And now FEMA has authorized the use of federal funds to help control the Eiler Fire in particular.

Still only 10 percent contained, the Eiler has already razed eight homes, charred two fire engines, forced towns (and a hospital) to evacuate, and closed the only highway in and out of Hat Creek. In addition to the emotional, structural, and financial costs of such a devastating event, this one has taken a scientific toll, too.

The Allen Telescope Array spends its time detecting radio waves from space and scanning exoplanets for evidence of extraterrestrial civilizations. The SETI Institute, located in Silicon Valley, owns the telescope and hopes it will answer one of humanity’s oldest and biggest questions: Are we alone? But right now, the only answer they’re getting is radio silence. The antennas sit idle, dusted with ash, unable to receive commands, and at risk of destruction. Because the road is closed, astronomers are unable to check on the array’s status. The SETI Institute scientists can only get word of how their telescope's surviving from U.S. Forest Service Twitter updates and embedded local news reporters, the same way the rest of us do.

At the intersection of US 89 and the turn toward the Allen Telescope Array, astronomers and engineers sometimes stopped for milkshakes at Hat Creek’s only restaurant: the amazing Bar K. Now, all that’s left of Bar K is scorched earth.

According to the latest Forest Service maps, the Eiler Fire’s eastern edge is just 1.8 miles from the Allen Telescope Array. The Bald Fire is just 5 miles to the west. The Allen Telescope Array is in a cleared section of valley, making the probability of damage much lower. Hopefully, the biggest loss at the astronomical site will only be productivity. But California is home to many scientific facilities, and between the earthquakes, the mudslides, the volcanoes, and the fires, there’s always a chance that a multimillion-dollar facility, poised to make a huge discovery, will have to start over.

The SETI scientists and radio astronomers who use the Allen Telescope Array surely get heart palpitations imagining their life’s work going up in smoke. But they know well the fires’ impact here on earth, where terrestrial civilization has been devastated. The Hat Creek Radio Observatory and its personnel have been part of the local community (now all evacuated) since the 1950s.

With 44 percent more acreage already burned in California than this time in an average year, and 58 percent of the state in “exceptional drought,” the firestorm seems likely to continue.

To keep an eye on the Eiler and Bald fires, or any others, visit the U.S. Forest Service’s “Incident” website.

To see satellite-based maps of active fires across the US, check out Active Fire Maps.

Earlier That Day

A pair of wildfires is burning near the Allen Telescope Array in Hat Creek, California, seen here a few hours before the webcam’s feed lost connection.

This image of algae in Lake Erie was taken by the Landsat 8 satellite on Aug. 1, 2014.

NASA

Testing of water supplies revealed toxins in the water supply of Toledo, so over the weekend, authorities ordered people not to drink the water, leaving about 500,000 to scramble for bottled drinking supplies. The order has since been lifted, as testing has revealed that levels of toxins have dipped to allegedly safe levels--although the results haven't been released to the public. This may be because the bloom has slightly dissipated or because the water is not mixing enough to bring the usually top-dwelling algae down toward the lake bottom where Toledo's water-intake pipes reside. But concerns remain, and it could get bad again, as algae blooms usually peak in August and September.

Some have likened the algae blooms to the past environmental woes of Lake Erie, such as when Cleveland's main river--the Cuyahoga--went up in flames in 1969. But some fear that recent algae blooms are equally as bad, or even more concerning, because these toxins can have serious health effects, and algae blooms seem to get bigger by the year. "This is worse than the Cuyahoga River burning," Carol Stepien, director of the University of Toledo's Lake Erie Center, told USA Today.

The above image was taken by the Landsat 8 satellite on Aug. 1. The second image, below, was taken by NASA's Aqua satellite on Aug. 3 and shows Toledo, Ohio and Maumee Bay on the lower left and Detroit at the top left on the shores of Lake St. Clair.

NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this image, showing milky green algae in Lake Erie, on Aug. 3, 2014.

Anti Satellite Weapon Concept Art

from 1983.

Department of Defense, via Wikimedia Commons

Japan's military plans to take defense to the heavens in 2019. According to a report by Japan's Kyodo News Agency, Japan's Self-Defense Forces plan to add a space monitoring branch, to be jointly run by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and Air Self-Defence Force. The "fourth battlefield"–space–contains a lot of stuff that's worth protecting, and Japan is hardly the first military to consider it.

Space is big business. A 2013 report from the Satellite Industry Association says that satellites made $189.5 billion in revenue in 2012. Besides the sheer value of the business, these satellites perform valuable functions for humans on earth. Since the launch of Telstar in 1962, satellites have relayed terrestrial communications, and today both cars and smartphones rely on GPS satellites to know exactly where they are. Japan's proposed space force would monitor Earth's orbitals with radar and telescopes, looking for harmful debris that threatens satellites. This isn't an inherently apolitical, altruistic task. In 2007, regional rival China blew up one of its own satellites, proving that it can in fact destroy satellites, and creating harmful debris for other geo-stationary machines. In May, Japan's Aerospace Exploration Agency signed an agreement with the United States where they promised to give information on space debris to U.S. Strategic Command. NASA, together with the Department of Defense, already have progams in place monitoring space debris.

The architecture of space has always had a military underpinning. American nuclear submarines, hiding out at sea, used geo-locating satellites to calculate target trajectories, so that they could reliably hit the same points on earth from anywhere. Even as American troopers started fighting in Afghanistan, the Department of Defense was floating ideas about "Space Control" to make sure that nothing in space threatened the important American satellites already there.

This new development out of Japan does not come unheralded. In 2008, the country passed a Basic Space Law, which changed previous laws regarding space in a key way: "Non-military use" became "non-aggressive use." This allows Japan the possibility of defensive military action in space, where before the country was limited by previous law and their constitution's intensely pacifistic Article 9. While on Earth, Japan has slowly grown its military, it's unlikely that a new space force means we'll see Japanese war satellites anytime soon. Japan, like the United States, is one of 89 countries that signed the Outer Space Treaty, which formally prohibits putting and testing weapons in space.

Darwin's Famous Finches

Wikimedia Commons

It's been nearly 20 years since the publication of The Beak of the Finch. Now, author Jonathan Weiner has an update. The husband-and-wife biology duo that the book follows, may have witnessed the birth of a new species, Weiner reports for the New York Times.

"I think it's fantastic, the most exciting research finding I've read in the last decade," Jonathan Losos, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University who was not involved in the new research, told Weiner. The finding tops off decades of field observations that have provided crucial empirical evidence supporting the theory of evolution. Before Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton University began publishing their work, scientists didn't think evolution happened quickly enough for one researcher to watch it happen in his or her lifetime.

The update is also just exciting to hear as a Beak of the Finch fan. The 1995 book is one of my favorite popular science books, and I'm not the only one. The book is undoubtedly the funnest (real scientific term) way to learn about evolution, the basic tenet of biology. It weaves together a scientific story alongside a human one, following the extraordinary dedication of the Grants, who have camped, every year, on a tiny, rocky, waterless Galapagos island for more years than I've been alive. The book also lays out the scientific evidence for readers to evaluate on their own. It treats readers as intelligent and trustworthy, although it was published at a tough junction for science. In the mid-90s, nearly half of the U.S. didn't "believe in" evolution. (That number has since fallen to about a third, but beliefs have become more polarized by political party over time.)

The Grants were in their 50s in The Beak of the Finch. They're 77 now, and they've written their own book on their work called 40 Years of Evolution. They've started having trouble carrying all their equipment and fresh water to their campsite, like they used to. Sure, this is an "update" on The Beak of the Finch, but it may be an epilogue, too, as the Grants prepare to hang up their work boots.

[New York Times]

Like a collection of oddly-shaped glow-sticks

Courtesy of Eleanor Lutz

On warm evenings in late summer, some of us may recall quaint memories of catching lightning bugs, rushing to put them in hole-riddled jars. What our childhood selves may not have known is that fireflies glow at night because they are bioluminescent, meaning they are able to produce and emit light on their own. 

Even though fireflies may present the most famous example of bioluminescence, the biological ability to light up is shared across different kingdoms. An enormous diversity of organisms luminesce using various biological tactics. For example, glowing sucker octopi twinkle a blue-green color due to special structures called photophores, or light-up suckers. And minuscule sea snails glow a faint green, because they contain the enzyme luciferase (as does the firefly).

Seattle-based biologist-turned-artist Eleanor Lutz created a chart of select bioluminescent species, detailing the different compounds that make them glow. Even if the chart isn't exhaustive, you can get a pretty good sense of the huge range of organisms that are bioluminescent just by taking a peek. 

Brain-Sensing Headband

Interaxon

When I was in college, I participated in as many research studies as I could. It was easy money, so I gladly sat at computers and answered survey questions and allowed research assistants to cover my head in a net of EEG sensors and goop that glommed on to my hair. Sometimes I would fall asleep. (They put me in a dark enclosure and had me sit in a comfy chair, maybe that was what they wanted?) But during the EEG (electroencephalography) studies in particular, I would be so distracted by what the researchers might see in my brain waves that I often failed to perform the tasks they were trying to monitor. 

When I went to try out Muse, the new brain-sensing headband created by InteraXon, I had forgotten the feeling of someone monitoring something I had little control over—my brain activity.

Muse uses a similar EEG technology to monitor your brain activity–thankfully, without any of the goop. It's designed for daily use, either to calm down after a stressful day at work, or even as a brain break during a particularly tense moment. During a particularly busy Wednesday afternoon, I headed over to a loft space in Manhattan to try it out for my anxious self. 

Before I struggled to correctly position the headband, I thought, or maybe just hoped, Muse could work magic and calm me down. 

After some help from the PR representative, my brain waves were plugged in and I then used headphones to listen to the app—aptly named Calm—tell me to get in a comfortable position, but sit up straight and relax my shoulders. For the first minute or so, the app needed to calibrate the seven EEG sensors embedded in the headband. I was prompted to think of actors. Immediately, I panicked. No names came to my head. All that would inexplicably flash in my mind was the opening credits of the TV show Friends. Then, Brad Pitt. Then, Jillian Anderson. I sat there thinking about how I couldn't think of any actors' names. Then I was prompted to think of TV shows. A similar string of thoughts ensued. And finally, I was told to think of shapes. I wasn't sure if I was supposed to think of the actual shapes or the names of shapes, but I wanted to do the right thing. "Rhombus" repeated over and over in my mind. 

Once I had performed mental gymnastics to just come up with a word or two, the app gave me a break. A soothing woman's voice (truthfully, it was the same voice as before, but this time she was just telling me to focus on my breathing) spoke minimally over the sounds of crashing waves. I counted each exhalation, as I was told. 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . 

Before long, my mind wandered. I realized my brain was trying to take note of everything I was experiencing so that I could write this post. I was thinking about when I shook hands with Ariel Garten, the CEO of InteraXon, and how her blue-grey eyes were piercing, yet calming. I was thinking about how I should stop thinking about all of this because the headband I was wearing was picking up all of my brain activity (though as the company notes, Muse can not read your thoughts). 

Once the waves ceased, and my three minutes of calm were up, I saw the graph my brain activity produced. Midlly jagged lines showed a calmer mindset than I expected and the next screen showed a number of points I earned, which meant little to me. The PR representative came over and explained that if you were really calm, you could hear a bird landing. I did not get any bird landings. 

I don't know what I imagined Muse would actually do, but I expected it would somehow use the brain wave data to force a sense of calm into my mind. It was a silly assumption, yes. Mostly, I came away feeling confused. The gamification of calm made me put effort into clearing my mind. For example, if you reach a certain level, you might unlock a new set of background sounds (forests). This might work for some users, but for me, worrying about not reaching the highest possible state of zen is a little counter-intuitive. 

Hermes 450 UAV

A drone of this make and model flew over Gaza on August 3. 

Elbit Systems

Drones are the public face of counter-insurgency. Mechanical, unmanned, distant, they fly above battlefields from Pakistan to Yemen, their unblinking electronic eyes streaming video back to uniformed pilots secure on military bases elsewhere. The United States is the best-known drone operator in the world, but it's hardly the only country that uses them. The Israel Defense Forces are using drones over Gaza as part of "Operation Protective Edge," the IDF's term for their latest anti-rocket operations in the strip.

The Aviationist reports that, for the first time, Israel is deploying a modified Elbit SystemsHermes 450, with a new antenna on top and carrying underwing pods, over Gaza. (To see what it looks like, check out The Aviationist post; the drone pictured above is not the drone in question.) The underwing pods could be fuel tanks for longer flights, though speculation exists that they instead contain either light missiles or guns. According to the brochure from the drone's manufacturer, it doesn't carry any weapons itself, instead using only surveillance and targeting equipment. Many American drones function that way too, providing information and targeting coordinates for other, armed parts of the military. Drones are especially useful against irregular fighters because they can fly for a long time, and catch movement when it eventually happens. Speaking to the recent conflict and the dearth of images of Hamas fighters, New York Times photographer Tyler Hicks recently noted:

If the drone was carrying weapons, it wouldn't be the first time Israel's used an armed drone. During the 2006 Lebanon War, Israeli drone footage showed hellfire missiles, like those used by American drones, in flight. In 2010, the Wall Street Journal ran footage of an Israeli drone strike in Gaza from the 2009 Gaza war, known as "Operation Cast Lead." Israel is a major drone exporter, and at trade shows Israeli companies display both native-made drone armaments and Israeli drones armed with foreign munitions. According to the Pew Research Global Attitudes Project, while much of the world remains opposed to drone strikes, only one country's population supports American drones strikes more than the United States, and that's Israel.

So Science

This is a closeup from a chart that appeared in our May 2014 issue.

Popular Science

In the Internet Age, this shouldn't seem so novel, but… Here is a newly published paper whose graphs and charts can actually change over time. Figure 3 in the paper offers readers two different ways of displaying the same data, ooooh. But wait, Figure 4 is even cooler. Right now, it's a static graph. In the future, however, the paper's authors plan to publish a graph that's programmed to update, in real time, as other research groups send in their own data, replicating the experiments in the paper. At that point, the paper won't just reflect what this pair of biologists discovered at one moment in time. It'll have all the latest data on the topic.

Sounds like something out of Harry Potter, doesn't it? It reminds me of those magical portraits that move and interact. The idea was to make it easier for other scientists to check the paper's data, one of the paper's authors, geneticist Björn Brembs of the Universität Regensburg in Germany, said in a statement. After all, that's supposed to be one of the major reasons to publish papers, so that other scientists can find them, read them, analyze them independently, and critique them.

Before this, scientific journals had long published online versions of their papers. Most online papers come with helpful links to related studies, plus links to download the graphs and charts in the paper for readers' own use. (A scientist might want to use another scientist's graph in a presentation, for example.) However, I haven't yet seen a journal publish interactive or updating graphs. This may be a first.

So what exactly did Brembs' study… study? Brembs and his colleague, Julien Colomb of Freie Universität in Berlin, examined at the behavior of fruit flies, which are commonly used lab animals. Scientists who use fruit flies for research don't just catch them in their kitchens. They order the insects from suppliers or get them from one another. (Yep, you can ship fruit flies in the mail.) Fruit flies that come from the same named "strain" are supposed to all have the exact same genes. Such consistency is important for preparing controls in scientific experiments. They're also important for comparing experiments done in different labs, even labs half a world away from one another.

Colomb and Brembs wanted to see if lab fruit flies of the Canton-Special strain are truly all the same. In experiments, they found that Canton-Special flies from different labs sometimes react differently to the same behavioral tests. Even flies housed in different containers in the same lab acted differently from one another. This could be a problem for fruit fly studies all over the world.

Four other labs have agreed to try to replicate the Canton-Special study, Colomb and Brembs wrote in their paper. Replication will be important to determining whether the problem the German researchers detected is real. Once those results start coming in, the pair will post their programmed, live-updating graph, they wrote. They also invited other labs to try replicating the study and to send them their results.

Science!

Real Vegan Cheese works out of the biohacker space Counter Culture Labs located in Oakland, Calif.

Real Vegan Cheese

A group of Oakland, California-based biohackers believe they can create “real vegan cheese.” Their goal - a cheese made with no animal products that fully evokes the real dairy deal – has struck a nerve: Real Vegan Cheese's crowdfunding campaign Indiegogo has surged many thousands of dollars past its initial funding goal of $15,000. It ends on August 10.

Here's how the group intends to do it, as reported in the East Bay Express:

The team will insert bovine DNA — which is chemically synthesized and does not come from an animal — into living baker's yeast cells, temporarily turning the yeast into a so-called "protein factory" that produces milk protein. The biohackers then extract that protein from the yeast and combine it with water, vegetable butter, and vegan sugar (instead of lactose), to make a milk substitute. Finally, this vegan milk can be turned into Real Vegan Cheese in the same way that normal cheese is produced from cow milk. The final food product will be a semi-hard cheese like Gouda. It will be totally vegan — and lactose-free.

"No animal is tortured in the production of this," said Counter Culture Labs member Ahnon Milham, who is vegan. "You don't have to worry about all the hormones and antibiotics."

Real Vegan Cheese also claims their product could “address future food scarcity concerns,” since “yeast are renewable and the processes to cheese are nearly limitless,” and could also curb dairy farming's impacts on the environment – such as emissions of methane, a greenhouse gas, from cow farts and decomposing manure.

Could the yeast hacks and subsequent processing that Real Vegan Cheese proposes really work?

Responding to our questions via blog post, "Dr. Ricky," the pseudonymous writer behind "Science Based Cuisine" stated that “the campaign makes some scientifically dubious promises" because cheese-making is more complex at the molecular level than Real Vegan Cheese either knows or is letting on.

“Milk is chock full of a structure known as micelles,” Dr. Ricky writes, which form a framework that holds and transports lots of calcium to mammal offspring. This molecular structure is intrinsic to forming curds, a cheese precursor, which won't appear simply as a result of mixing several ingredients into a milk-like fluid.

“And leaving out lactose," Doc writes, "means that the microbes that can be supported would be quite different from the conventional cheese production." Meaning that they might come up with something edible, but what to call it depends upon how you define both "cheese" and "vegan," and whether you call yeast animals or plants. 

But synthetic biologist and writer Christina Agapakis, a postdoctoral research fellow at University of California, Los Angeles, thinks Real Vegan Cheese could work. “It can sometimes be tricky to express proteins at high yield in yeast,” she wrote in email, “but the goals of the project aren't unreasonable.”

The project is likely to encounter the same technical and economic hurdles as any biotech endeavor in scaling up to mass production, however, combined with challenges unique to cultured dairy foods.

“Making good cheese isn't just a matter of getting animal vs. vegetable proteins,” Agapakis writes “but also in the quality of the milk and the way that the cheese is made: the way it's processed, the microbes that are added, and the way it's aged.”

But, notes Agapakis, there is already a food on the market that's comparable to a vegan cheese: tofu. Tofu is made by curdling soy milk, then draining and pressing the results into blocks. Tofu can also be pressed, fermented and aged to create varied textures and flavors, just like different dairy cheeses.

"I think it's great that they are bringing more attention to the impacts of animal agriculture and dairy farming in particular," writes Agapakis, "but I think it's also important (or at least interesting and relevant) to highlight the range and diversity of vegan options that are out there already. I think it's not really fair that they are using the 'vegan food sucks' narrative, mostly because there's such a huge range of things out there that are actually pretty tasty!"

Illustration Showing a Mars Colony with Living Quarters and Solar Panels

Mars One

Is it insane to sign up for a one-way trip to Mars? Mason Peck would like to assure you it is not. He addressed the sanity of Mars colonizers in a post yesterday on the Mars One website. Peck is a Mars One adviser who previously served as NASA's Chief Technologist; Mars One is the company that plans to send one-way missions to colonize the Red Planet starting in 2024.

Mars One is now in the process of interviewing hundreds of applicants, out of an initial pool of more than 200,000. Eventually, the company wants to find just 24 to 40 colonizers to go permanently into space. Meanwhile, the company has launched a forum where experts answer ethical questions about the private mission. Peck's answer to "Is a one-way journey wrong?" is the forum's first post.

"There are many motivations for becoming one of the first settlers on Mars, none of them insane in my opinion," he wrote, before listing four. Later, he wrote, "In fact, I think we may be morally obligated to permit people the freedom to do so, and not impede their desire to realize their dreams by imposing our own fears or superstitions based on uninformed perspectives."

Although it's too late to apply now, you can learn more about the project in Popular Science's April 2013 story about Mars One's recruiting of applicants. You can also meet an applicant and hear about her reasons for wanting to go.

Russian Ka-52 Attack Helicopter

Alex Beltyukov, via Wikimedia Commons

Russia recently ordered a batch of new attack helicopters, including 32 that could go onto a new amphibious assault ship. There's just one hitch: France is building that ship, and following Russia's invasion of Crimea and support for Donetsk separatists in Eastern Ukraine, there's a lot of international pressure for France to cancel the order.

The Mistral class ship is designed to carry up to 700 troops, over 60 land vehicles, and around 30 light helicopters within landing distance of a coast, where they will (in peaceful situations) arrive and rescue storm-rattled populations, or (in wars) go forth and take the beaches. The contract with French shipbuilders specified two Mistral class ships built in France, and then two more built in Russia. They'll be the first amphibious assault ships for Russia. It's likely each of the four ships would only fly eight attack helicopters, so the full order for 32 indicates that Russia expects full delivery of the ships. The first completed vessel is the Vladivostok, and France is set to deliver it late this year. 

It's unclear what military use the Mistral would add to the war in Ukraine, even with the planned Ka-52K helicopters. Dubbed the "Alligator," this chopper is primarily an anti-tank weapon, and is limited to less than 300 miles of range. If Russia were to escalate its involvement in Ukraine's war from supporting separatists to formal participation, Ka-52Ks could strike targets in Odessa and beyond. Or perhaps Russia would use them instead on the other side of the Black Sea, should tensions like the 2008 Russia-Georgia war flare up again. Presently, the Mistral-class ships wouldn't let Russia do all that much more in the wars it's most likely to fight, as Russia shares land borders with the neighbors they're most prone to invade.

Regardless of actual military utility, the international community is less excited about the sale, especially after Russia's seizure of Crimea and Moscow's ongoing support for the separatists that shot down a Malaysian airliner. Officials from the United States, Ukraine, and Japan have all expressed disappointment that France still plans to sell the ships. In a barely subtle move, yesterday Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt hinted that Sweden agrees, tweeting this: 

I salute Germany for cancelling important defence training facility contract with Russia. An example also for others, one might add.

— Carl Bildt (@carlbildt) August 5, 2014

Screenshot From City Of Drones

Pictured: ambient drones, ambient skyscrapers. Not pictured: ambient sounds.

Liam Young, City of Drones

It's a weird sensation, being born in midair. Within seconds, users exploring Liam Young's conceptual art project "City of Drones" find themselves staring out the eyes of an unmanned robot, falling gently towards what appears to be something like the ground. "City of Drones" is as much statement as game, an artful exploration of a world filled only with robots and obstacles.

The project is soundtracked by musician John Cale, who brings a sparse touch to the world, evoking a mechanical wind on a desolate plain, like a Spaghetti Western filmed in an abandoned city. Voices chatter through static, air traffic controller technobabble speaking into a robotic void.

The world itself was constructed by Liam Young, a self-described speculative architect, and the London-based digital art studio FIELD. The world of City of Drones is peopled, as it were, only by buildings and flying objects. Many of these drones take on familiar shapes: flying wings, rotund cigar-like blimps, and the matchstick-with-wings body type common to military drones like the Predator. Others are abstracted further– shiny diamonds, matchstick mutants covered in wings at all angles, discarded origami drifting through space. The drones seem to fly in lanes, keeping neat lines along x, y, and z axes. It's a world that operates in rough imitation to something real, like a first rendering of a Coruscant cityscape background in the Star Wars prequels.

Illah Reza Nourbakhsh, a professor of robotics at Carnegie Mellon, uses the term "robot smog" to describe this kind of future. He writes:

In City of Drones, there is no such interaction, because there are no people. It's the smog without the people breathing it in, the pollution without the ecosystem it's disrupting. It's a fanciful world, and an empty one. If this is the future of drones, what is the future of people? One guess: they're all hiding out in drone-proof cities.

[Citylab]

Skyscrapers And Drones In City Of Drones

There's a reflection of the sky on these windows, but no sky visible to the player's electronic eye.

Liam Young, City of Drones

The View From Rosetta.Credit: European Space Agency/BBC News

Are you ready for your closeup, Comet 67P?

After a 10-year journey, the Rosetta spacecraft finally reached its destination this morning. Launched by the European Space Agency in 2004, the spacecraft has traveled across four billion(!) miles to a comet named “67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko." Now both objects are circling the Sun somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, traveling at 34,000 miles per hour.

Rosetta will be the first spacecraft to orbit a comet, and if all goes according to plan, later this year the spacecraft will also be the first to land a probe on the comet's surface. 

For the next several months, Rosetta will fly around around Comet 67P, mapping its terrain and magnetic field, while trying to find a safe place to drop the 220-pound lander that it’s carrying. The landing may prove to be a tricky one, as Rosetta’s approach revealed the comet’s extremely weird shape; it looks as if two large rocks fused together in the shape of a rubber duck or a boot.

The three-legged lander, named Philae, is scheduled to touch down on the comet’s surface in November. The 2.5-mile-wide comet doesn’t have a strong gravitational field, so Philae will have to harpoon itself to the surface to avoid drifting away and becoming space junk. Once in place, Philae's drill bit will allow it to take samples from eight inches below the surface, and various other instruments will investigate the comet's composition and internal structure. It’ll also be taking photos along the way (which we at Popular Science are particularly looking forward to).

Together, the orbiter and the lander will study 67P for a year while the comet’s elliptical orbit brings it nearer to the Sun. As it approaches, gaseous material in the comet’s surface will boil off and create dust trails. Scientists hope that studying 67P and its vapors will help to reveal whether comets might have brought water – or even the building blocks of life – to Earth.  

“The reason we look at comets is that they were there right at the beginning,” Matt Taylor, a Rosetta project scientist, told the Guardian. “Learning about them gives us an idea of where Earth came from and where the whole solar system came from, what that primordial material at the beginning of the solar system was made up of.”

Rosetta Hurtling Toward Comet 67P. Photos were taken between August 1 and August 6. Credit: European Space Agency/BBC News

Parts of the 3-D Printed CubeSat Camera

This space camera has five to 10 times fewer parts than a comparable camera, made with conventional techniques, would have.

NASA Goddard/Jason Budinoff

NASA is experimenting with small space cameras made almost entirely of 3-D printed parts. One experimental telescope, sized to fit inside a four-inch CubeSat, will likely be finished this September, according to the agency. The telescope will then undergo vacuum and vibrational testing, but there are no immediate plans to send it into space. Perhaps future generations of 3-D printed space cameras will make the journey.

The technology they're using is a bit different from the 3-D printing you might be familiar with if you've used consumer printers. Home desktop 3-D printers usually exude plastic from a nozzle that moves around. In this case, the telescope will be made from powdered aluminum and titanium that a mobile laser sets into a solid. Like 3-D printing with exuded plastic, the pieces are built layer by layer, from the bottom up.

3-D Printing Metal

This photo shows a 3-D printer at the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory that uses metal powder and a laser. CMI stands for Critical Materials Institute.

The Ames Lab

The advantage of making telescope parts this way is that the printer is able to form several parts as one solid piece. A telescope made with 3-D printing could have five to 10 times fewer parts than one made by shaping solid metal with mills and lathes, according to NASA. Fewer parts means a more stable instrument.

Engineer Jason Budinoff is designing the camera under construction now. While most of it will be 3-D printed, it will still have conventionally-manufactured mirrors and lenses. He's working on a technique to make mirrors from laser-set aluminum powder. He's also putting together a larger 3-D printed imaging telescope that's about 14 inches in length, compared to the CubeSat camera's 2-inch size. That's about the size of typical space cameras today.

[NASA]