Courtesy Maxis

When producers at Maxis wanted to make Sims appear less robotic, they filmed employees at a staff party moving between groups, telling jokes, and responding to awkward situations. They used the footage to help build a model of human behavior that—in combination with other new software—led to a more realistic virtual world. 

Multitasking

One major improvement in The Sims 4 is the characters’ ability to navigate multiple interactions at the same time. In previous versions, a Sim would stop one behavior before starting another, but now the characters can flirt while also dancing or running next to each other on treadmills at the gym. 

Experiencing emotions

Sims now act out cascading emotional responses—meaning their feelings have a true-life trajectory and don’t just come and go. Your Sim might do something in the morning, like burn a piece of toast, which upsets him. Depending on the character’s predetermined personality, the emotion could reemerge later, prompting the Sim to, say, pick a fight on the street.

Interacting gracefully  

To improve the Sims’ ability to socialize naturally, Maxis’s software engineers built behaviors that mirror how most people act—incorporating, for example, the concept of personal space. This lets the characters do things like intuitively walk in groups and have casual conversations in a shared space, like a bar. 

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

A Pipistrel Panthera In Flight

Pipistrel

An important part of plane design is making sure the plane still works even if the pilot doesn't. In this flight test video from Slovenian aircraft maker Pipistrel, two crew members and two passengers ride a new Panthera plane through a series of spins. Waving calmly to a camera on the port wing, the crew then hang on tight while the aircraft rotates 10 times. In addition to the one on the wing, cameras in the cockpit and one on the tail capture the spins, showing the nerve-wracking and nauseating experience from multiple angles.

Spin tests are recommended for pilots, and there's a long-runningdebate if they should be required. For airplane makers, certain kinds of acrobatic airplanes are required to recover from a series of six spins. In the video, the Panthera and pilot pass with flying colors. Really, the only thing underwhelming about this performance is the soundtrack. If they're going to send a plane into a wicked spin and then recover, they should set it something far more metal. For future Panthera tests, I recommend Pantera.

Watch the spin test below:

Asteroid 433 Eros, visited by NASA's Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR-Shoemaker) spacecraft in 2000.

NASA

In last week’s (fairly divisive) piece Everyone Hates NASA’s Asteroid Capture Program, we detailed the sentiments we’ve heard from a number of experts who care about space exploration. They all seem to agree: The Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is a waste of time and money.

It’s important to note that ARM isn’t going to save us if an asteroid is headed towards Earth to kill us all. While most people think that should be the focus of the project, ARM is actually about capturing a very tiny piece of an asteroid (with a big bag) and bringing it closer to Earth--all in the name of helping humans get to Mars.

That logic doesn’t make much sense to the members of the Small Bodies Assessment Group (SBAG), an organization of planetary scientists founded by NASA to "identify scientific priorities and opportunties for the exploration of asteroids, comets, interplanetary dust, small satellites, and Trans-Neptunian Objects." In a rough draft of their findings from a meeting in July, the SBAG Steering Committee agrees with MIT Professor Richard Binzel’s critique:

Nancy Chabot, a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University and chair of the SBAG Steering Committee, says the group will finalize their assessments within the next few weeks and send them to NASA. 

So what comes next, now that this NASA-sanctioned assessment group thinks ARM is essentially an asteroid-to-nowhere mission? A whole lot of nothing is likely, at least in the near future. 

SBAG is meant to provide “findings to NASA Headquarters, but does not make recommendations,” meaning they don’t have any official sway over the space agency. NASA has no obligation to respond to these assessments, and if it does, the responses are typically posted to the SBAG website at the time of their next meeting -- which is six months from now.

Washington Burning

This image, taken by equipment on NASA's Aqua satellite on the evening of August 11, 2014, shows a dozen wildfires burning across the state of Washington (as well as a couple in Montana to the far right).

NASA Rapid Response MODIS

One of the fires that began in mid-July -- dubbed the Carleton Complex, in north-central Washington -- spread into the largest wildfire in the state since record-keeping began. The Carleton Complex has burned 256,108 acres of federal, state and private forest lands. Hundreds of people fled area towns at the fire's peak in late July; one resident of Pateros, Wash., described the blaze as "a funnel of fire."  As of yesterday, close to 1,000 firefighters -- including a crew of hotshots -- have been working on the fire (down from around 2,000 in late July), which is now considered 100 percent contained, according to the joint agency Incident Information System.

This year's burning season in the western states has so far been the quiestest in a decade, as reported by The Daily Climate, with around 1.7 million acres burned compared to an average of 4.4 million for the prior nine years. But the National Interagency Fire Center reports that wildfire potential remains high (PDF): Temperatures in the western states are 2 to 4 degrees Farenheit warmer than the norm overall, and in some places, 6 to 8 degrees above normal, with extraordinary drought in California, western Nevada, and the Texas Panhandle. The governors of California, Oregon and Washington have all declared states of emergency this summer, which empowers them to call up the National Guard to help fight wildfires.

James Maki, left, was the second American to receive a full facial transplant.

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The human face is now officially an organ, at least according to a change in U.S. federal health policy that went into effect last month. The change codifies faces as transplantable, and thus could make the process easier to perform from a bureaucratic point of view. The first facial transplant in the United States took place only three years ago, on Texas resident Dallas Wiens. 

Here are the details, as described by the medicine and science site Somatosphere: The agencies that oversee America's transplant system--the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network and the United Network for Organ Sharing--have defined the face as a VCA organ. This stands for "vascularized composite allograft," which refers to the various types of tissue that accompany a transplantation, such as skin, muscle, blood vessels, and nerves. These transplantations are complicated and usually require putting patients on immunosuppressant drugs to get the body to accept the new tissue as its own.

The law has some (academic but still interesting) implications, as Somatosphere notes: 

Far out! For what it's worth, other studies already established the visage's organ-ness: The "human face is a highly specialized organ for receiving the sensory information from the environment and for its transmission to the" brain, one 2011 study noted.

Clear upgrade: Although the PonoPlayer is made for hi-fi music, it will play any digital music file—and make it sound better.

Courtesy Pono Music

Beginning around 2000, some music no longer sounded as clear or rich as it once did. The problem wasn’t the artists; rather, it was the MP3, a technology designed to maximize portability. MP3s employ audio-data compression to reduce file bandwidth, which lets you carry thousands of songs in your phone but limits the music’s dynamic range. That’s why some audiophiles began returning to LPs, which better replicate a song’s sonic footprint. Last year, vinyl sales increased by 33 percent. But you can’t carry a record player around.

The solution? High-resolution downloads. The format has become more viable as storage capacity increased and download times dropped on sites like HDtracks.com. The latest innovation comes from Neil Young’s start-up, PonoMusic. The goal of Pono (which means “righteous” in Hawaiian) is to give consumers access to music files at a you-are-there sound-quality level in a portable form. On Young’s classic 1972 album, Harvest, you’ll hear how a snare drum buried on lower-resolution versions of “Heart of Gold” emerges as taut and vibrant; this iteration will be available when the online PonoMusic Store launches in October.

The $400 PonoPlayer uses Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) music files that contain six times the amount of musical information of MP3s. The albums will cost $15 to $25 and encompass the full dynamic breadth of original master recordings while nullifying noise and distortion.

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

San Andreas Fault, California

wlscience on Flickr

But it turns out that the Los Angelenos who live closest to the San Andreas Fault are more affluent than those living further away. The key reason appears to be a law that was originally passed to reduce damage during a major quake, according to a new paper in the journal Earth's Future, which is published by the American Geophysical Union.

In the wake of the terrible damage caused by 1971's San Fernando earthquake, California passed the Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning Act, or AP Act. The law mandated a 50-foot buffer zone around earthquake fault zones, to prevent building on lands most likely to crack open during a major quake.

So instead of being developed, AP Act areas in Los Angeles became parks, green open spaces that have attracted more well-off residents to the surrounding residential neighborhoods. Homes abutting the parks -- de facto the lots closest to the San Andreas Fault -- are today the most valuable parcels of land in these neighborhoods.

[T]he amenities of open space, greener neighborhoods, and parks outweigh the apparent hazard of seismicity in the lifestyle choices make by privileged southern Californians. The AP Act, designed to identify and regulate earthquake hazards, has generated significant neighborhood-scale environmental amenities...Because of setback regulations, a narrow strip of park space extending for more than a kilometer in length along the San Andreas Fault...is landscaped, irrigated, has a walking path, and a reservoir with a fountain. The space is also associated with a community recreation center which includes a pool.”

The researchers used GIS analysis to map earthquake hazard zones, and in particular areas identified in the 1972 law, against census data for income and ethnic or racial group. The analysis also confirmed that communities become more impoverished and more likely to include toxic release facilities the farther they are from the fault line, and much less likely to have easy access to a park.

Sense

Hello Inc.

Chances are that, if you're reading this article on this site, you're after the perfect present for your future-forward college student.

Worry not. We've scoured the web to round up 10 gift ideas for your grad's dorm room, including a maintenance-free bike, a set of gender-stereotype–busting toys, and even an upcoming, crowdfunded cooler that lights up, plays music, charges phones, and blends mixed drinks.

See all of the products here.

An Array Of Materials NASA Is Testing In Space

The super-black material appears in circle "D."

NASA/Bill Squicciarini

A sample of one of the world's blackest materials—so dark, it's impossible to see when it's folded—is now getting tested in space.

The material absorbs 99.5 percent of the visible light and 99.8 percent of the infrared radiation that hits it. (And you thought black T-shirts got uncomfortably hot in the sun.) Engineers are hoping to coat space telescope components with the newly invented material. The idea is that the coating would absorb unwanted light, keeping it from entering telescopes' sensitive light detectors.

Space Experiment

This tray contains a number of devices and materials that NASA is testing in the International Space Station's unpressurized cargo bay. The super-black material appears on the left. (Click here to see this amazing image larger.)

NASA Goddard/Chris Gunn

Before they slapped their black coating on an expensive telescope, however, NASA engineers wanted to check that it was able to withstand extreme radiation, free-radical oxygen, and other harsh stuff in space. So NASA sent a little round of the coating to the International Space Station, aboard a flight that also carried experimental robotic systems for fixing satellites in orbit. The entire payload arrived at the space station yesterday. The coating will stay on an unpressurized platform on the station for a year, before astronauts send it back down to Earth for analysis.

The black coating is similar to the world's blackest material, which a U.K. company called Surrey Nanosystems announced it had made last month. Both are made with a vertical array of carbon nanotubes. Just imagine the nanotubes are arranged like the fibers in a carpet. The complex combination of tiny air spaces and individual carbon atoms in a carbon nanotube array helps trap light and prevent it from reflecting off the surface of the material.

[NASA]

NSA's Utah Data Center

A view of Monstermind's physical lair, photographed from an Electronic Frontier Foundation airship

Parker Higgins, Electronic Frontier Foundation

In the high desert near Bluffdale, Utah, there lurks a creature made entirely of zeroes and ones. Called "MonsterMind", the project is an automated cyber weapon, perched atop the data flows into the National Security Agency's Mission Data Repository. According to recent revelations from former government contractor and NSA leaker Edward Snowden, Monstermind is both tremendously powerful and easily fooled. Here's the skinny on the biggest revelation from Wired's recent profile of Snowden. Author James Bamford writes:

As described, MonsterMind is a brute force approach to covert cyber war embodied in one program. In order to function, it scans a huge amount of electronic communication, all passing through the 247 acre facility, and looks for attacks. That's the scary part. The dumb part is how it automatically decides where to strike back. Spoofing, as Snowden mentioned, is a relatively simple technique for hiding where an attack comes from. It's the online equivalent of throwing a pebble to distract the prison guard while the plucky protagonist runs away. 

Bamford describes this attack as Strangelovian, in reference to the Stanley Kubrick film about nuclear war. In the film, the Soviets develop a nuclear deterrent system that automatically attacks America if Russia gets hit first. The deterrent fails in part because the Americans didn't know about it, and the film ends with a montage of nuclear explosions, as an accidental American first strike triggers the apocalypse. The automatic strike-back mechanism and obscurity of Monstermind resemble this device, but the stakes are at least an order of magnitude less severe than all-out nuclear war.

Cyber attacks at present are mostly the theft of private data or bank information, with the occasional rare instance of actual industrial sabotage breaking a machine. None of this makes an automated strike-back system great, but it's still a far cry from the world-ending threat of thermonuclear war.

Read this and other revelations, including one about a contractor router that broke Syria's internet, at Wired.

The Bomb That Ends The World, Dr. Strangelove

Still image from Stanley Kubrick's Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.

Stanley Kubrick

The gray wolf hasn't been seen in California in 90 years... until recently.

Alexandra Ossola

In 2011, a male gray wolf called OR-7 left his pack in Oregon and traversed over 1,200 miles. While this sort of travel isn’t atypical for gray wolves, the terrain that OR-7 covered set him apart from the pack; he became the first confirmed wolf in California in almost a century, making him an apple of the public eye.

Since OR-7 broke away from his group -- the Imnaha pack in northeast Oregon -- his life looks different. OR-7 traveled a small way back North and found a mate in the Cascades of southern Oregon. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) has confirmed that the pair produced at least three pups, although there may be more.

But OR-7’s notable route to fatherhood has reawakened a debate in California that is almost as old as the state itself: how to manage the gray wolf. With OR-7's wolf family knocking at California’s door, the state must make a plan for how to manage a species that inspires an entire range of emotions within California's population.

“The public is fascinated by the issue of wolves in the West,” said Karen Kovacs, Wildlife Program Manager for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). “People have some perceptions of how wolves are that are oftentimes not compatible with the regulatory authorities of the states that manage [the wolf population].”

As recently as the 1970s, the West had no wolves at all. That's a stark contrast to the 1800s, when settlers found their livestock populations constantly ravaged by wolves. In each state, extermination programs were put in place to ensure the total eradication of wolves; before 2011, the last confirmed sighting of a wolf in California was in 1924.

But after a small wolf population reappeared in Montana in the 1980s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) was inspired to reintroduce an “experimental population” of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. The ecosystem there, it appeared, was out of balance without wolves at the top of the food chain: elk populations were out of control, and overgrazing drastically reduced the amount of vegetation. The flow of rivers had even changed, as barren river banks eroded more easily.

Much of the public was enamored with the idea; a 1985 survey of visitors to Yellowstone National Park showed that three quarters of those polled were in favor of reintroducing wolves. And since then, the praise has only become more frenzied. Videos and op-eds abound singing the wolf’s praise, calling it a keystone species and “an American hero.”

But not everyone was so happy. A small group of dissenters -- especially farmers -- were very much against the plan, believing their livestocks would be targeted by the new predator. An intense public debate ensued, but after a nearly decade-long fight, the U.S. Secretary of Interior signed the decision for the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone; wolves were then captured in Canada and transported to the national park.

Since wolves' reintroduction, studies have shown they've had a mostly positive impact on the ecosystem: “Preliminary data from studies indicate that wolf recovery will likely lead to greater biodiversity throughout the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem,” according to the National Parks Service page. The experiment has also led to their proliferation, as wolves are now found throughout Colorado, Washington and Oregon. Biologists keep track of wolf populations with radio collars, and they gather DNA (usually in the form of scat, or feces) to trace wolves’ lineages. Each state has created a unique management plan to keep the wolf population at a level where both wolves and their human competitors can thrive. Many states have decided to list the wolf as an endangered species, which gives it a unique level of protection.

OR-7's most recent photo, snapped with U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service trail camera.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Even before OR-7’s arrival in California, the state had been formulating its own management plan for the species, combing through plans that had worked elsewhere as well as its own historical data. But California is no Yellowstone, Kovacs noted. “When you bring in a creature that was extirpated 100-plus years ago, where you’re bringing it back is nowhere near the same as when it left,” she said. “Where you have wolves in California, you have them on public and private land.”

This “mosaic” of natural and altered landscapes means that wolves can’t exist untouched in California. They’re constantly elbow-to-paw with humans, which could threaten them both. “Trying to take what we learned from a large national park to California may not be the right kind of comparison,” she added.

OR-7’s arrival (and subsequent celebrity) meant that the public needed to be involved in California’s new management plan. But, as Kovacs and her colleagues rapidly learned, “the issue around wolves is about so much more than wolves.”

People enchanted by the idea of wolves tend to be those who usually don’t have to come into direct contact with them, Kovacs noted. Some have started a grassroots campaign to rename OR-7 “Journey,” and the nonprofit Wild Peace Alliance has created a trek for nature-loving fans to retrace the wolf’s steps. The California Fish and Game Commission in Fortuna, California, convened earlier this summer to discuss listing the gray wolf as an endangered species. The meeting brought out some particularly vehement supporters: the “passionate and at times tearful testimony” crescendoed when “some in attendance wore wolf costumes, and one commenter broke into an a cappella ode to wolves,” reads a June story in the Los AngelesTimes. The panel decided to list the species as endangered, contrary to a previous recommendation by the CDFW.

Motion-activated trail cameras captured images of three gray pups, born in April and sired by OR-7.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Although they may be less creative in vocalizing their opposition, the constituents with livestock threatened by wolves are just as passionate about the population’s strict control. Wolves threaten their livelihood, and conflicts are inevitable. Some plans have suggested human control of wolf populations by allowing wolves to be hunted for sport, a practice that many wolf supporters find abhorrent. And because the California landscape has drastically changed since wolves were last on it, Kovacs and her colleagues aren’t convinced that the ecological changes that wolves cause will all be positive from a human perspective.

CDFW hopes that giving constituents a voice in the wolf management plan will help the agency find a middle ground in a minefield of emotions and opinions. As ODFW has learned, the middle ground is the only option. “We would never have been successful if we were trying to manage these animals from a polarized perspective,” said Russ Morgan, Wolf Program Coordinator for the state of Oregon. “When you have an animal that has some of those social strings attached to it, an ability to work in the middle area is really key.”

Since OR-7 has settled in Oregon with his mate and pups, it’s unlikely that he’ll cross over into California again, Morgan said. But if -- or when -- wolves return to California to stay is anyone’s guess. “Wolves were in California natively, and OR-7’s travel to California, although it was brief in the larger scope, means that wolves can be there,” he said. Morgan was reluctant to use the word "inevitable" to describe wolves' return to California, but he agrees that CDFW is smart to plan ahead.

As the USFWS considers delisting the gray wolf nationally, California’s listing and management plan could tip the scales. “Ultimately it’s our plan, and we want to see if we can reach a consensus on the likely contentious issues,” Kovacs said. She and her colleagues are expecting a lot of debate when the plan is released for public comment early next year. “The public is captured,” she said. But what that means for wolves in California remains to be seen.

Read more of PopSci's coverage of the gray wolf.

Correction (8/13/2014, 5:00pm ET): The original story misstated the names of the California and Oregon Fish and Wildlife Services. They should be the Departments of Fish and Wildlife and have been corrected. We regret the error.

"XV-58 Manta" design by students at the Georgia Institute of Technology

AHS International Image

Does this illustration look a little sci-fi to you? It should: It's a design for a plane that takes off vertically, like a helicopter, but that flies about three times faster than any helicopter today. Yes, those are rotors in the wings.

A team of graduate students from the Georgia Institute of Technology came up with the idea, which won first place at this year's American Helicopter Society International Student Design Competition. There's even a little PDF brochure about the aircraft, which you can browse if you feel like pretending you (and it) are in the position to buy one. The brochure suggests potential buyers might include search-and-rescue teams, the military, hospitals and corporate bigwigs.

Of course, the aircraft hasn't been manufactured, nor will it be. The American Helicopter Society International hosts this competition to encourage engineering students to study vertical takeoff and landing. The specifications that designs must meet include that they're able to hover without using too much fuel, fly significantly faster than helicopters today, and carry "useful loads." The Georgia Tech craft claims to have a maximum payload of 1,741 pounds–not bad, although some helicopters can carry 5,000 pounds or more. 

The competition also offered cash prizes, totaling $10,000 for first, second and third-place designs in both undergraduate and graduate categories. Here's the first-place undergraduate design, from Saint Louis University:

"Heli-Fast" design by students at St. Louis University

AHS International Image

Want to join next year's competition? The American Helicopter Society hasn't put out a call for next year's entries yet, but here's the competition page. The competitions are usually sponsored by a different aircraft company every ear, but next year, the U.S. Army will sponsor, according to the society.

A Navy Performance During Boston Harborfest, 2007

This is very much not the Boston Calling concert, but it's at City Hall Plaza and surrounded by the same brutalist architecture.

Dave Kaylor, U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons

The Boston Calling Music Festival in May 2013 had a great lineup: Fun., Dirty Projectors, and Of Monsters and Men, to name a few. The event also included ten cameras that recorded over 50 hours of video surveillance footage on the thousands of concert goers at Boston's City Hall Plaza. An investigative series by the Boston area free weekly DigBoston recently unearthed this surveillance, which was done on behalf of the city. 

Of course, video surveillance is nothing new. What's particularly interesting about this footage is that it was used in conjunction with a new type of "people-parsing" software. For these concerts, IBM provided the city with a software dashboard for surveillance, and it went beyond just recognizing faces. A "people search" tool available in the dashboard shows that the software recognized and categorized a number of searchable facets about concert attendees. These include "'baldness,' 'head color,' 'skin tone,' and clothing texture," making it possible to search the footage for images of everyone by outfit as well as by race.

According to Boston officials, the tests at both the May and September 2013 Boston Calling concerts were to evaluate the new software for managing large public events, and they used both existing cameras and existing data storage technology. Saying the tests were just for evaluating software is a tad misleading. With the right software, an off-center picture of a face can be reconstructed into a 3-D image accurate enough for police use, and facial recognition software is increasingly sophisticated. New software isn't just a part of how surveillance is done -- it's what transforms video from an formidable 50 hour block of time into a database of searchable images.

Courtesy of DigBoston, watch a small slice of the surveillance footage below, taken from the concert's beer garden, below:

Read the first part of the revelations at DigBoston, and look for Part Two there tomorrow.

Popular Science, September 2014

Letter From The Editor

Knowledge Is The Best Investment

Peer Review

Feeding The Beast

Features

War Of 0's And 1's

See. Learn. Do.

• Earth In A Lab
• Investigate Alien Life—Without Leaving Earth
• The Code Crusader
• Learning by Making
• Map Maritime Treasures At The Bottom Of The Sea
• Gaming Education
• The Education Equilizer
• The Dream Investor
• Test Space Medicine In Zero Gravity
• What My Mother Learned From Einstein

Bill Nye Fights Back (coming soon)

A Shift In Nuclear Powers

Pushing Our Limits

Now

• The Helmet That Could Change Football
• The Rise Of Crypto Technology
• The Electric Hog
• A Pocket Zen Master
• Technology Gets Nostalgic
• A Space Game Gets Real
• Google Can Now Delete Your Past. But How Much Should Be Erased?
• The 10 Best Things From September 2014 (coming soon)

Next

• Gamers Reveal Inner Workings Of The Eye
• King Of The Carnivores
• The Alien Whisperer
• How The World Wastes Food
• Can This Mineral Power The Planet?
• This Pill Can Stop HIV

Manual

• Hurl Wiffle Balls At 50 MPH--With A Leaf Blower
• An Origami Microscope For Less Than A Dollar
• Three Projects That Make LEGO Toys Into High-Tech Tools
• Imaginary Mechanical Engineer
• Raise Your Own Edible Crickets
• Supersize Your DIY Computing

Ask Anything

• Why Don't Woodpeckers Get Brain Damage?
• Why Is Picking Up A New Language Easier As A Kid?

From The Archives

• The Perpetual Potential Of Nuclear

Matt Guthmiller in Cairo

Limitless Horizons on Facebook

Matt Guthmiller is a young man who went on a sort of old-fashioned adventure. He circumnavigated the globe, becoming, upon his return, the youngest person to do so alone in an airplane. Congrats, Matt!

The journey took approximately 44.5 days. Guthmiller, who is 19, flew a 1981 Beechcraft A36 Bonanza. He stopped in 15 countries along the way. He's been using the trip to fundraise for Code.org, a nonprofit that offers free computer programming lesson plans for elementary and middle school teachers. (His website, Limitless Horizons is still open for donations.) Guthmiller himself studies programming at MIT.

WorldView-3 Ready for Launch

Ball Aerospace

Finer-than-ever satellite images may soon be available to anyone in the U.S. who's willing to pay for them. This is a development that depends on both technology—the ability to see stuff that small from space—and politics—whether U.S. regulations will allow a commercial company to sell high-resolution images of the Earth.

Previously, the sharpest (commercial) eye on Earth was the GeoEye-1 satellite, which has a resolution of 41 centimeters and belongs to a Colorado-based company called DigitalGlobe. (Some militaries have satellites at a resolution of 15 to 20 centimeters, the BBC reports.) For the past 14 years, U.S. regulation kept companies such as DigitalGlobe from selling images with resolutions finer than 50 centimeters to anybody but the military. However, DigitalGlobe asked for permission to sell sub-50-centimeter-resolution images in 2013, Space News reports, and has received the go-ahead from the U.S. Commerce Department to begin selling 31-centimeter-resolution images six months from now.

The images will come from DigitalGlobe's WorldView-3 satellite, which launched yesterday. With WorldView-3, "we can actually tell you, for each individual tree, how healthy it is," said Kumar Naulur, DigitalGlobe's director of next-generation products. Commercial satellite imagery customers often include groups that monitor crops and orchards, for predicting future food prices. Others include oil and gas companies, which use the photos to seek new sites. DigitalGlobe also already sells images to Google and Bing maps.

Meanwhile, the six-month delay on releasing WorldView-3 images for sale is so that federal agencies have time to figure out whether the sharper images will pose any problems for national security that they didn't foresee, the BBC reports. The U.S. intelligence community previously recommended DigitalGlobe be allowed to sell images as sharp as 25 centimeters in resolution, Space News reported in April.

[BBC, Space.com, Space News]

Ebola Virus.

Ebola filaments (red) bud from a cell (blue).

NAIAD via Flickr CC BY 2.0

We caught up with Steve Morse, an epidemiologist at Columbia University, to talk about the outbreak and where it might go from here. Below are four key things we learned:

1. The outbreak in Africa will get worse before it gets better.

“I anticipate we’re going to see this epidemic continue in that area for a while,” says Morse. The number of new cases doesn't seem to be slowing down, and other epidemiologists are predicting that it could take months to get the outbreak under control.

2. Ebola will make it to the U.S., but it will be quickly contained.

“I expect people with Ebola will come to the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe,” says Morse. “Like Kent Brantly, they may be health care workers who didn’t know they were infected.” But because the virus can only spread through direct contact with an infected person—touching an Ebola patient’s blood, for example—those cases will be quickly isolated before the disease can spread. It would probably be similar to the way the U.S. handled the 2003 SARS outbreak, Morse says. “We need to take Ebola seriously, but we know how to control it. It’s the health care workers and family members of infected people who are most at risk.”

3. It won’t suddenly evolve to be airborne.

“Ebola is not airborne, and it’s extremely unlikely that it will mutate to be airborne,” Morse says. Although it’s theoretically possible, it’s incredibly rare for a pathogen to change its route of transmission.

4. Doling out experimental Ebola drugs will have long-lasting ethical consequences.

Several companies are revving up to test their unproven Ebola treatments in West Africa by the end of the summer. This fast-tracking means these companies won’t have enough time to thoroughly verify that the drugs are safe or that they even work. That’s a risk WHO is willing to take because this strain of Ebola is killing half of its victims; it would be unethical not to give it a try. But using these experimental drugs now could change the landscape of Ebola treatment in the long-term, says Morse. For example, an experimental rabies treatment, known as the Milwaukee Protocol, may have saved a girl’s life in 2004, and “ever since then we can’t ethically deny anybody this particular treatment, and we don’t know if it actually works,” says Morse. "It’s going to be an interesting dilemma."

Adrenaline

Jfoldmei / Wikimedia Commons CC3.0

When somebody goes into cardiac arrest--meaning that their heart has stopped--it's standard protocol to use CPR and atrial defibrillation, and then to inject them with adrenaline to get the organ pumping again. Perhaps surprisingly, though, there is not enough evidence to prove that adrenaline, also known as epinephrine, actually helps people survive; one study from earlier this year surveyed the research done on the topic and concluded that adrenaline injections did not help people survive cardiac arrest in the long run. 

“It is thought that the short-term benefit of adrenaline in improving coronary blood flow may occur at the expense of other organs,” Dr. Steve Lin, an emergency physician at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, told Cath Lab Digest. “The drug can cause small blood vessels in other organs to contract, such as in the gut, liver, and kidneys, thus limiting the blood flow to these organs.”

A group of British researchers will start a study this fall, the largest of its kind to date, to settle the question. They plan to include 8,000 cardiac arrest patients in the study, to give half of them a placebo treatment, and half of them adrenaline, the BBC reports. They won't seek informed consent for the work, which may seem obvious, since people whose hearts have stopped are not exactly in a position to answer questions, and time is of the essence. Still, though, the work has raised some ethical concerns.

"It is always difficult to conduct a trial in situations where people are too ill to give their consent," Peter Weissberg, of the British Heart Foundation, told the BBC. "But there are well established ethical guidelines for undertaking such studies. What is unacceptable is to continue giving a treatment that could be doing more harm than good."

A similar but much smaller study was done in Western Australia in 2011, in which emergency crews randomly gave more than 500 cardiac arrest patients adrenaline or a saline solution. The study suggested adrenaline might have been helpful, but the results weren't statistically significant, as described by Reuters Health:

Harley-Davidson Project Livewire

Courtesy Harley-Davidson

Several niche companies have marketed electric bikes over the past few years, but Harley’s entry into the market is telling. The manufacturer sees the technology as a way to court new riders. This fall, before the motorcycle goes into production, Harley will take it on a tour of 30 dealers on both coasts to get feedback. If customers approve, the company will sell the bike, or some version of it—a move that could shape the industry for years to come. What remains uncertain: Can anyone still rock a bandanna on a plug-in?

Harley-Davidson Project LiveWire

Engine: Clutch-less electric motor

Horsepower: 74

Fuel economy: n/a

Price: n/a

Range: 53 miles

Charge time: 3.5 hours from a 220-volt outlet

Top Speed: 92 mph

Car News You Should Care About

1) Ford will add adaptive steering into some models in 2015. The technology, thus far limited to luxury vehicles, varies the steering ratio with the speed, making parking easier and adding stability at high speeds.

2) Toyota has donated 208 used Camry Hybrid batteries to Yellowstone National Park, which when paired with solar panels and onsite micro-hydro turbine systems will power a cluster of five remote outbuildings. 

3) San Francisco startup Cruise Automation is making a $10,000 sensor system (due out next year) that mounts to the roof of Audi A4 and S4 sedans, and enables semi-autonomous driving on highways.

4) Honda has started using 3-D visualization technology co-developed with tech firm 3DX CITE for crash simulations. Originally created for animated film, the software also allows for easier design changes.

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