Cyber Shield Course

Two trainees participate in an Israeli Defense Forces cyber-defense course.

IDF Spokesperson's Unit

The FBI started investigating while first responders were still rushing to the scene. Within three days -- just 101 hours -- the bombers were apprehended.

FBI agents sifted through 13,000 videos and more than 120,000 photographs, drawn from surveillance cameras and onlookers' cell phones. To sort through the piles of footage, law enforcement turned to new technology that can condense an hour of video into just a minute of playback time.

The method, called video synopsis, was invented by an Israeli company called BriefCam, which counts all the right three-letter agencies as clients. (The FBI declined to comment on the specifics of the Boston investigation.)

Video synopsis works in a variety of ways, but most programs layer actions that occur at the same place at different times, making it possible, for example, to see simultaneously every person who walks in a door on a given afternoon. Other notable inquiries have also used BriefCam, like Norway's national security service after Anders Breivik bombed a children's camp there in 2011.

Shmuel Peleg, a co-founder of BriefCam and a professor of computer science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, says the original intention for the tool was a long way from law enforcement. "One of my students had three kids," he said, and was hoping to come up with a better way of viewing their home videos. The eureka moment came when "one of our friends said most video on earth comes from stationary cameras," Peleg said. "He was in the military at the time," Peleg explained, and immediately thought of surveillance footage. Security cameras at Israel's borders watch for tunnel activity, but it can be hard to identify suspicious behavior in real time. "BriefCam makes it possible to integrate information that happens in a large temporal space," Peleg says, making it perfect for consistent monitoring.

But that a civilian idea was immediately put to military use is not surprising. BriefCam's origin story reveals a common trend in Israel. "The general awareness people here have for risk is always present," Peleg says, and this mentality has made its mark on the country's business climate, influencing technological developments. "Maybe Israelis learn less things [in school] but they know how to come up with ideas, how to manage to survive," Peleg said. "Every one of us is concerned with security." Military life has left an indelible mark on Israel's booming start-up scene, leading the country to the frontlines of the tech ecosystem in odd ways.

This sway manifests most obviously in the security world. After spending six years in an elite tech unit in the Israel Defense Forces, Giora Engel, another Hebrew University alumnus, co-founded a start-up called LightCyber. LightCyber detects computer glitches in corporate environments, focusing on a new wave of electronic threats, which have moved past malware to specifically targeting companies ("like the Target data breach this last November," Engel says.) While in the Defense Forces (IDF), Engel, who has bright red hair and freckles, managed high-risk projects, including coding mission-critical systems. He says Israel is leading the world in cyber-security because people leaving the Army bring "expertise that was previously only found in the defense industry." He continued, "The nation-state cyber-breaks we were accustomed to in the military have now proliferated into the [tech] industry."

Peleg echoed Engel, saying that because of Israel's mandatory army participation, "my students are often called away from their research for reserve service." He said, "You can't think creatively while in service. You only care about survival." But upon his students' return, "new ideas come," enriching research programs.

Shmuel Peleg

In addition to fresh thinking, working in an environment where there are often immediate applications of new developments has driven quick innovation. Mantis Vision, a company that uses 3D imaging for a variety of mapping applications, had the Israeli government as an early client for a confidential project. "What I can tell you is this wasn't a product developed for a lab, but a real product that was used," said co-founder Amihai Loven.

Israel is an environment where "there's zero tolerance for work-arounds," Loven said. Part of what's pushing the country's tech boom, he said, is that "there's a lot of pressure to develop something something that actually works, and not just in lab environments." This provides a primal urgency that headquarters in Silicon Valley strewn with kegs and Ping-Pong tables can lack.

"Look at the recent conflict," Loven said, referring to July's deadly flare-up between Hamas and Israel. "The Iron Dome performance is like nothing you can develop in an R&D environment without a threat." The anti-missile system is designed to blow up incoming missiles before they land, and has been deployed frequently in the last month. Despite concerns the Iron Dome is actually less effective than the IDF claims, and setting aside much debate about the imbalance of force between the two sides of the conflict, the Iron Dome is far more sophisticated than alternative anti-rocket systems.

In the long run, the perceived pressure to make things that actually work can be a good thing for the market. "Products need to start high-end from the beginning in order to mature into consumer products," Loven said, citing GPS's beginnings as a defense tool. "If it's just starting as a gadget, there's a glass ceiling" on its utility, he explained.

So perhaps it makes sense there's an unusual amount of governmental support for new ideas. Giora Engel of LightCyber says government organizations are often slow adopters, taking their time in using new technology. But Israel was one of the first countries to develop a cyber-security division, all the way back in 1997. Since then, the country's quietly dominated all sorts of cyber projects -- not least Stuxnet, the notorious computer worm designed in a joint project between U.S. and Israeli forces that took out a fifth of Iran's nuclear centrifuges in 2010.

More recently, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu upped the ante, in 2011 creating the National Cyber Bureau (NCB), which reports directly to Netanyahu's office and increased the country's cyber-defense budgets by 30 percent. He made no bones about its purpose, saying, "We established the National Cyber Bureau for the purpose of transforming the state of Israel into a cyber superpower." NCB trickle-down extends to the startup world: "There's a lot of support for new technology from the government," Engel said, "because they realize that startups can bring them the most cutting edge technology and are valuable to the economy." Statistics suggest the strategy is working: 14.5 percent of all firms worldwide garnering cyber investment are owned by Israelis.

Of course, there are disadvantages of running a business in a region plagued by violence and dominated by the military. Engel said that in July, while business has continued, more or less as usual, in the startup scene, "Some people have been called to their reserve duty in their military units. And it's hard to have conference calls when any moment you may have to run to a bomb shelter."

"In this crazy country, you're always under pressure," Loven said. "If it's not defense, it's to win in the market."

A Wiffle ball cannon

Photograph by Brian Klutch

At this year’s Labor Day picnic, don’t yawn through another game of Wiffle ball. Instead, transform the low-key sport into a battle of batter versus machine. With only cheap plumbing supplies and a leaf blower, you can build a Wiffle ball cannon that will barrage players with an endless volley of howling pitches.

The project hinges on a key component: a PVC plastic fitting called a “low-heel inlet elbow,” available at most hardware stores. Although it’s typically used to vent bathroom plumbing, by a miraculous quirk of fate, the elbow happens to be the ideal tool to transform a leaf blower into a Wiffle ball pitcher. 

One inlet of the 3”x3”x2” fitting accepts a 3-inch-diameter PVC barrel—the ideal size for a regulation Wiffle ball. The 2-inch inlet connects to most round leaf-blower nozzles (with the help of duct tape). And the third opening supports a vertical loading tube.

That’s where the action starts. Hold a Wiffle ball at the top of the loading tube and wait for it to be sucked in. The stream of air from the leaf blower will blast the ball through the elbow and out the barrel with a speed of about 50 mph. Batter up!

The unassembled parts, ready for greatness.

Photograph by Brian Klutch

Build It

Materials:

• 3”x3”x2” low-heel inlet elbow

• 10-foot-long, 3-inch-diameter PVC pipe

• 18-inch-long, 3-inch-diameter PVC pipe

• 4-inch-long, 2-inch-diameter PVC pipe

• 2 small screw eyes

• 2 bungee cords

• 3 sawhorses

• Duct tape

• Leaf blower with 2-inch-diameter round opening

Instructions:

1. Drill two 1⁄8-inch-diameter holes into the thick part of the inlet elbow (A). Insert screw eyes.

2. Attach the 10-foot-long PVC pipe to the elbow’s 3-inch opening (B) in line with the 2-inch one. Don’t reduce the barrel length—it provides range and velocity.

3. Attach the 18-inch-long pipe to the other 3-inch opening (C) on the inlet elbow. This is the Wiffle ball–loading tube.

4. Center the assembled pipes on the sawhorses and rotate them so the loading tube is vertical. Attach bungee cords from the sawhorses to the screw eyes to hold the loading tube in place. 

5. Insert one end of the 4-inch-long pipe into the 2-inch hole (D) on the inlet elbow. Align its other end with the leaf-blower nozzle and use duct tape to securely seal the connection.

6. Turn on the leaf blower, insert the Wiffle balls in the loading tube, and watch them shoot out! You can elevate the barrel with wood blocks to fine tune your pitch for the strike zone.

Here's how you make it happen.

Illustration by Trevor Johnson

How It Works

It’s not just gravity that feeds Wiffle balls into the pitching machine. The dynamics of air flow fuel the rapid-fire action.

Ready: Even when air seems still, its molecules constantly jiggle in random directions. But when molecules speed out of the leaf blower, the energy that was fueling the random motion instead focuses on traveling in a single direction.

Set: The random motion of molecules contributes to air pressure. Without it, the focused air streaming from the leaf blower has a lower pressure than the jiggling air in the vertical loading tube. This pressure difference sucks air from the loading tube into the elbow.

Action: Drop a Wiffle ball in the loading tube, and the pressure difference will pull it into the elbow, along with the air around it. Then the flow from the leaf blower shoots the ball out the horizontal barrel like a blast froma cannon.

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

On the Surface

This illustration shows quantum vortices on the surface of a nano-droplet of superfluid helium. In the background is a wheel-shaped superfluid helium drop.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

With a temperature below -268 degrees Celsius, liquid helium keeps MRI machines and particle accelerators properly cooled (yay!). Take liquid helium's temperature even lower than that, however, and things start to get a little less practical -- and a lot more weird.

At lower and lower temperatures, greater and greater fractions of liquid helium become superfluid. Superfluid helium can do some seemingly impossible things, like climb up the walls of containers or leak through pores that are too small for normal liquid helium to pass through. At this point, superfluid helium is demonstrating the effects of quantum physics, which makes it especially tantalizing to physicists. Now, in a new study, an international team of physicists has taken images of tiny droplets of superfluid helium, finding that even very small amounts of superfluid helium act unusually.

First, the team fired nano-size droplets of superfluid helium across a vacuum. Meanwhile, they aimed a free-electron laser across the vacuum so that the laser would intercept the drops and take images of the drops as they went spinning past. Those images revealed that the droplets each contained more than 100 quantum vortices -- tiny whirlpools that fill the droplets in a 3-D array. The vortices help maintain the structure of the droplets so that even when they're spinning at speeds that would cause normal liquid drops to fly apart, they remain stable, single droplets. That said, the high spinning speeds of the drops did make many of them take on an egg shape, instead of a spherical one. One percent of the drops even took on strange wheel shapes.

Don't expect anything practical like MRIs to come immediately out of research like this. Instead, superfluid helium studies are generally meant to be windows into quantum mechanics, because all the atoms in a superfluid are in the same quantum state. This means they create larger, quantum mechanics-driven effects that scientists might not be able to see otherwise.

Quantum mechanics, in turn, has occasionally found its way to practical applications. This kind of physics has helped scientists figure out lasers, transistors and superconductors. In fact, the name "superfluid" comes from the word "superconductor." The idea was that superfluid helium conducts heat very well, the way superconductors conduct electric currents very well.

The superfluid helium-studying team published its work last week in the journal Science.

Researchers Investigate an Ebola Outbreak in Uganda in 2012

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Public and private donors in the U.K. have launched an emergency fund for researchers studying Ebola. They want a quick turnaround time for the research they bankroll. Applications for the fund are due September 8 and funders are hoping studies will finish within two months, the Guardian reports. The tight timeline is designed to make a difference in the current outbreak in West Africa, which Doctors Without Borders expects to last longer than six months.

The Guardian describes what kind of research they're looking to fund:

And:

This is the latest push to speed up Ebola research. The World Health Organization has declared that it is ethical to use experimental drugs in this outbreak––allowing some potential treatments to skip clinical trials that would validate the drug's safety and efficacy––and U.S. federal agencies want to fast-track human trials of a promising vaccine. If all goes well, the vaccine may be available sometime in 2015, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told USA Today.

The U.K. fund comes from a pool worth $10.8 million (6.5 million British pounds), although it's unclear exactly how much funders will use at this time. The pool comes from the Research for Health in Humanitarian Crises program, which is a joint effort of the Wellcome Trust and the U.K.'s Department for International Development.

Experts from the United Nations, the World Health Organization and universities will review grant applications, the Guardian reports.

Popular Science, September 2014

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Popular Science reader Dave Herbert had a blast building and playing with the DIY Wiffle ball cannon from our September issue. But the retired Marine also added his own twist.

In the cannon’s original design, a leaf blower sends a stream of air through a PVC pipe assembly, drawing in Wiffle balls through the loading tube and then pitching them out the barrel at speeds of up to 50 miles per hour. But it can be used for more than that. “I also found the low heel elbow [a joint used in the machine] can be used for another scientific experiment,” Herbert told Popular Science. Starting at 3:16 in the video, he removed the cannon’s long barrel, reversed the placement of the leaf blower, and left only one opening free: the loading tube. As a result, a column of air from the leaf blower made foam balls levitate over the tube, even when tilted at an angle.

Herbert also tried loading his PVC cannon with water balloons (starting at 4:29). Although the machine proved to be an adept launcher, Herbert's ingenuity ultimately turned against him when his wife bombarded him with a Wiffle and water balloon salvo. 

3-D Printed Vertebra

Liu Zhongiun, Director of Orthopedics at Peking University, holds the 3-D printed piece of vertebra.

Peking University Third Hospital

Doctors at Peking University Third Hospital have successfully implanted the first ever 3-D-printed section of vertebra into the young patient. The boy, named Minghao, had developed a malignant tumor on his spinal cord, and some of his bones needed to be removed. So, during many hours of spinal cord surgery, surgeons at the hospital replaced part of the cancerous vertebra in his neck with the implant.

Placed between his first and third vertebra, the implant will allow Minghao to lift his head in the coming months. The artificial bones were made with a titanium powder, which is also used in many other orthopedic implants. But, unlike conventional implants, 3-D printed structures are created from a virtual design based on the the patient's actual vertebra, making them pretty similar to the existing bones and allowing them to integrate more naturally.

It also means surgeons didn’t need to use cement or screws to hold it in place, as they do with traditionally manufactured implants; instead, they made tiny holes in the implant so that surrounding bones can grow into the print and secure it in its spot.

Though this surgery is a world’s first, 3-D printed orthopedic transplants have been gaining momentum within the past couple years. In June 2011, the first 3-D printed jaw was successfully implanted in Belgium, and in April 2013, the Mayo Clinic used a 3-D printer to create a customized artificial hip.

As for Minghao, he had been lying in the orthopedics ward for more than two months before surgery. Five days after the operation, he still could not speak but was said to be in good spirits. He’ll have to wear special gear for the next three months, and it’ll be a while before doctors know how the implant holds up.

[Forbes, CCTV]

Taser Axon Wearable Security Camera.

Taser

Surveillance cameras permeate modern life. Mounted in convenience stores, retail outlets, bars, clubs, ATMs and elsewhere, silent observers record everything from the mundane to the criminal. The cameras serve a dual function as both deterrent and instant legal record. In light of the police shooting of unarmed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, national attention has focused on wearable cameras for police officers. For the (less lethal) weapon manufacturer Taser, there is opportunity in this civic need.

At $400/unit, the Axon Body is Taser’s main entry into the field of wearable cameras. The Axon is chest-mounted and records 640px by 480px in a 130-degree arc. American Photo, which is owned by the same company as Popular Science, recently talked to Taser’s VP of communications Steve Tuttle about the camera. Tuttle highlighted one major difference between video recorded by the Axon and video recorded by onlookers with cell phone cameras:

For law enforcement, recording the full incident from the perspective of the officer could protect her against contrary recordings that start later. It could also protect citizens by deterring police from using excessive force. American Photo also talks about the experience of Rialto, California, where after police adopted wearable cameras “police officers used force 60 percent less often and complaints about officers shrank by 88 percent,” though the profile notes that the sample size of complaints in Rialto was small. 

It's also not clear whether the cameras will work as intended. In March, the Albuquerque Police Department captured national headlines when an officer’s camera recorded the fatal killing of a homeless man camped out in the foothills on the edge of the city. A Department of Justice investigation into the Albuquerque Police Department found that “Officers failed to record some incidents even when it was the officers themselves who initiated the contact, making their failure to switch on their cameras or recorders before beginning the encounter especially troubling.”

Still, there can’t be implementation and training for proper use without a camera. Taser’s Axon Body, and other wearable cameras like it, could add silent, mechanical witness to police patrols. Read the full profile of the Axon Body here.

When learning languages, the earlier the better.

Illustration by Jason Schneider

Studies found that Lenneberg was on to something with the latter point. When scientists compared the English skills of immigrants who arrived in the U.S. at different ages, the ones who showed up earlier in their lives seemed to have a clear advantage, even if they’d spent the same amount of time immersed in English overall. That’s not to say that child learners end up with perfect second-language skills: Some who picked up English very young still grew up with certain linguistic quirks. But as a rule they were much better at pronunciation than their older peers.

Why is that the case? Some have argued that a child’s brain has special qualities that make it more adaptable or nimble. We can’t rule this theory out, says James Flege, professor emeritus at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, but several other conjectures might explain the data just as well. Flege believes children have an easier time with second languages because their minds are not as cluttered with a first one. The more trained we are to native vowel sounds, the more automatic those sounds become, and the harder it is to produce strange new ones. It’s like trying to learn tennis when you’ve spent your life playing badminton, he explains. The movements are different, but they’re close enough that you might be tempted to substitute one for the other. “It’s so simple that very few people understand it,” Flege says. “The biggest difference between a young child acquiring a first language and an older child acquiring a second language is that the first child doesn’t have another language to compete with.”

It’s also possible that children simply have more and better sources of input when they’re learning languages. When older immigrants arrive, they may socialize with fellow speakers of their native tongue. They may also be distracted by the necessity of working for a living. But young immigrants typically go to schools where they’re forced to interact with English-speaking children, and they can focus on their studies. They’re also given more leeway on their efforts to express themselves. While an adult with meager English skills might provoke annoyance or derision, “no one expects a child to be perfect,” says Flege. “The learning situation provokes less anxiety. Kids get a lot of credit just for trying.”

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

Pooger Source

Photo by Lance Cheung, U.S. Department of Agriculture

Before 2012, outbreaks of so-called "influenza A variant" infections in the U.S. only popped up once in a while in the medical literature. The strain normally infected pigs and was rarely seen in humans. Then, in 2012, healthcare workers across the U.S. reported 309 human cases of influenza A (H3N2) variant, also known as H3N2v. Sixteen people were hospitalized, and one woman in Ohio died. Researchers think there were likely thousands of cases of H3N2v that year that went unreported or unconfirmed.

Epidemiological studies indicated nearly all of the people who became sick with H3N2v in 2012 caught it from prize piggies shown at county fairs. However, this kind of research only draws conclusions based on people's sickness and their behaviors. Now, a new, in-depth study of the genetics of H3N2v in swine and humans in Ohio shows the epidemiological studies were right.

Samples of flu viruses taken from pigs and from people in Ohio during the 2012 outbreak were genetically close to one another, according to the study, which involved swabbing the insides of 834 pigs's noses. (We've decided pig boogers = poogers.) That means the outbreak really did come straight from infected pigs. In addition, all of the cases recorded across the state were more than 99.5 percent similar to one another genetically, indicating that it was just one flu strain that took residence in humans and swine alike.

It's a little funny to think of getting a flu from a pig at the county fair. That's not exactly the kind of scene you imagine for the beginning of a sci-fi movie about the next big pandemic. Yet pigs are a crucial petri dish in which influenza viruses evolve. Swine are susceptible to avian, human and swine flus, and these virus can circulate inside pigs for varying lengths of time with no signs of illness. This makes them great meet-markets for flu viruses to exchange genetic material. The H1N1 flu that reached pandemic proportions in 2009 first spent some time circulating among pigs in Asia, Europe and North America.

Luckily, H3N2v doesn't readily move between people, which limits its ability to spread. People mostly catch it directly from swine. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend that people who are susceptible to complications from the flu -- such as young kids, older adults and pregnant women -- avoid pig barns at fairs. Keeping away from sick-looking pigs is important, but not adequate. Many of the pigs found to be carrying H3N2v looked healthy. The CDC also has a bunch of recommendations about hand-washing and not eating in pig barns, which doesn't sound appetizing, anyway, but I can imagine if you just nabbed yourself some funnel cake, you might be tempted. (Don't do it!) Nobody recommends avoiding agricultural fairs altogether. You can't get H3N2v from eating pork.

The study did find the virus was pretty widespread. Out of 40 unnamed fairs where researchers swabbed piggy noses, 10 had more than one animal that carried H3N2v. Seven of those 10 fairs were associated with reported human illnesses. And even more scary, six of those seven fairs didn't have any sick-looking pigs. Public health departments should monitor pigs closely for influenza A viruses, the study authors wrote in their paper, which was published in the September issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. That probably means more investigators gathering poogers at fairs.

Fortunately, the number of H3N2v infectious seems to have dropped since 2012. In 2013, authorities reported just 19 human cases.

Advanced Hypersonic Weapon Concept Launch Test

From the November 18, 2011 test.

Courtesy photo, U.S. Army

The art of the war is complicated, but the science of war is often just a matter of shooting something pain-inducing at the other guy faster and from further away. The Army’s Advanced Hypersonic Weapon program wants to do just that, by creating a missile that moves faster than Mach 5, or almost 3,800 miles per hour. That hypersonic future may be just a little further away than expected. During testing of the weapon in Alaska early Monday morning, the rockets propelling the missile exploded four seconds after liftoff. No one was injured, but the cause of the failure has yet to be determined. 

The U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command conducted the test at the Kodiak Launch Complex on Kodiak Island in Alaska. Here's what the facility looks like after the explosion:

The missile was designed by Sandia National Laboratories, in part as an alternative to Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs. ICBMs are a mainstay of America’s nuclear arsenal, so while they can cover great distances quickly, it’s hard to know until they hit their target whether the warhead they’re carrying is nuclear or not. The hypersonic missile is designed to carry a conventional warhead, so it doesn’t look like a nuclear missile but still allows the military to attack quickly and hit something that’s far away. Not looking like a nuclear attack is important because it's less likely to provoke an immediate nuclear retaliation.

Carried inside a rocket, the hypersonic missile is released at high altitude, screaming through the atmosphere in a flight pattern that's clearly different from that of an ICBM, which launches into space from silos in the ground or submarines, traveling at speeds of over Mach 20, before returning to Earth.

Besides for not looking nuclear, the hypersonic missile has the advantage of being able to fly fast past the advanced anti-aircraft defenses that threaten the much slower B-1 and B-2 bombers, both of which top out at around Mach 1. This is a big plus for hypersonic weapon proponents, who see the missile playing a valuable role in potential future conflicts between the United States and China. For their part, China appears to be actively pursuing similar technology.

Failure with high speed weapons has precedence. The weapon is similar to a DARPA program for a hypersonic aircraft that could travel at over 13,000 miles per hour. In 2012 the test vehicle failed when the hypersonic part accelerated through its own skin. So far, the Army version has been the most successful hypersonic weapon platform, but following Monday’s failure to launch, it remains to be seen if the program can deliver on its promises, or if it’s just overhyped.

In Momentum, set in 2043, a former fighter pilot enters a rally race featuring magnetically levitating hover cars. Simons outfitted the star vehicle, the Maggy, with a set of shock-absorbing boom arms. Momentum is directed by Michael Chance with VFX by GOMA.

Photo courtesy of Robert Simons, Peggy Chung, Mark Yang

Robert Simons intended to design real cars for a living. But when his sketches drew Holly-wood’s attention during an internship, he turned to sci-fi instead. This year, the 25-year-old concept designer created a weaponized exoskeleton for The Amazing Spider-Man 2. But he’s most excited for the levitating racecar in Momentum, which is due out in December.

How did you get into imaginary vehicle design?

I grew up on job sites with my dad, around backhoes and huge trucks, but I didn’t draw them. I’d look at the parts and draw robots based on them.

What does a concept designer do?

My job is to get the ball rolling. Normally I’ll crank out two or three sketches a day and we’ll go back and forth until we get something the client likes. 

Do you ever think about whether these machines would actually function?

Definitely. It’s the only way I could design them. The Momentum team had a friend who worked at [NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory], so we ran everything by him to make sure it made sense.

Your work is mostly digital. Do you ever use paper?

My girlfriend just bought me a sketchbook. I started drawing on it and I thought, “Oh, this is weird. I don’t have an undo button.”

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

Every year, the planet loses nearly a third of its food—a staggering 1.4 billion tons. That’s according to a 2011 United Nations study that assessed food networks in 152 countries. The researchers’ results reveal where in the food-supply chain farmers, engineers, and consumers might more effectively get comestibles into mouths. 

Food waste, by production stage and food type

Click to see larger image.

Katie Peek

Katie Peek

What to do about it

The planet may have to feed a global population of 10 billion people by 2050. With that milestone looming, organizations like the U.N., the National Resources Defense Council, and Food Tank are working on ways to make food systems more efficient.

Agriculture

Problem: Agricultural loss particularly plagues industrialized nations, where farmers often need to overproduce in order to guarantee a steady supply to grocery stores.
Solution: With better food labeling—for example, using a spoils-on date rather than a sell-by date—markets could keep their stock longer and ease demand on farmers.

Post-harvest

Problem: Food loss after harvest is a bigger problem in developing countries—where food infrastructure is often less modernized—than in industrialized ones.
Solution: Improving roads would enable unrefrigerated perishables to reach market faster, cutting down on spoilage. Investment in cold-storage facilities would also prevent losses.

Processing

Problem: Developing countries lose the most fruits and vegetables at the processing stage because it’s expensive to maintain facilities big enough to handle large seasonal influxes.
Solution: If the owners of processing facilities enter into contracts with individual farmers before they sow seeds, the timing and size of the harvest may be more predictable and manageable.

Distribution

Problem: If a supermarket rejects food once it leaves a processing plant—say, for having too many tomatoes already—the truck driver may not be able to find another buyer before the food spoils.
Solution: New mobile-phone apps, including one called Food Cowboy, help drivers locate nearby food banks that might take the shipment.

Consumption

Problem: At the last stage, consumers in industrialized countries waste five times as much food as those in developing ones. In the U.S., that means 35 million tons of food each year head to landfills and incinerators.
Solution: In the U.K., a public-awareness campaign cut household losses by 20 percent, by encouraging actions such as taking more frequent shopping trips to prevent groceries from spoiling.

Data used to develop this graphic come from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) report ©FAO 2011 “Global Losses and Food Waste,” part of the Save Food initiative. 

The Future of Food Preservation

To tackle food waste, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and partner Worrell Water Technologies developed a one-square-inch packet that extends the refrigerated life of fruits and vegetables by up to five weeks. Each permeable packet contains Curoxin vapor, a proprietary disinfectant that releases slowly inside a clamshell container and envelops fresh food in an antimicrobial cloud. The effect? Water loss and fungal growth are significantly arrested, which maintains produces’ firmness, color, and taste. Currently in trials, Curoxin should be available in 2015. —MATT JANCER

What's That Smell?

NASA

In 1969, mankind got its first few whiffs of the lunar surface after astronauts tracked moon dust into the Apollo lander.

In an article on Space.com, Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt describes the Moon’s scent as being similar to spent gunpowder. Buzz Aldrin of Apollo 11 says it smells like charcoal, or fireplace ashes sprinkled with water. And scientist Larry Taylor, director of the Planetary Geosciences Institute at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, thinks he knows where the lunar regolith -- the layer of dust, sand, and rock on the Moon's surface -- derives its scorched aroma: the broken electron bonds between atoms. Columnist Leonard David explains:

Apparently the rest of space smells like a Nascar race for similar reasons.

For a more detailed account of astronauts’ first encounters with moon dust (including the fact that they were worried it might explode inside the cabin), check out the Space.com article. 

Unencrypted Connection

Les Goldsmith

His mobile security team also found that the version of the Android OS that comes standard on the Samsung Galaxy SIII leaks data to parts unknown 80-90 times every hour.  That doesn't necessarily mean that the phone has been hacked, Goldmsith says, but the user can't know whether the data is beaming out from a particular app, the OS, or an illicit piece of spyware.  His clients want real security and control over their device, and have the money to pay for it.

To show what the CryptoPhone can do that less expensive competitors cannot, he points me to a map that he and his customers have created, indicating 17 different phony cell towers known as “interceptors,” detected by the CryptoPhone 500 around the United States during the month of July alone.  Interceptors look to a typical phone like an ordinary tower.  Once the phone connects with the interceptor, a variety of “over-the-air” attacks become possible, from eavesdropping on calls and texts to pushing spyware to the device.

“Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated,” Goldsmith says.  “One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found 8 different interceptors on that trip.  We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.”

Who is running these interceptors and what are they doing with the calls?  Goldsmith says we can’t be sure, but he has his suspicions.

“What we find suspicious is that a lot of these interceptors are right on top of U.S. military bases.  So we begin to wonder – are some of them U.S. government interceptors?  Or are some of them Chinese interceptors?” says Goldsmith.  “Whose interceptor is it?  Who are they, that's listening to calls around military bases?  Is it just the U.S. military, or are they foreign governments doing it?  The point is: we don't really know whose they are.”

Ciphering Disabled

Les Goldsmith

Interceptors vary widely in expense and sophistication – but in a nutshell, they are radio-equipped computers with software that can use arcane cellular network protocols and defeat the onboard encryption.  Whether your phone uses Android or iOS, it also has a second operating system that runs on a part of the phone called a baseband processor.  The baseband processor functions as a communications middleman between the phone’s main O.S. and the cell towers.  And because chip manufacturers jealously guard details about the baseband O.S., it has been too challenging a target for garden-variety hackers.

“The baseband processor is one of the more difficult things to get into or even communicate with,” says Matthew Rowley, a senior security consultant at Matasano Security.  “[That’s] because my computer doesn't speak 4G or GSM, and also all those protocols are encrypted.  You have to buy special hardware to get in the air and pull down the waves and try to figure out what they mean.  It's just pretty unrealistic for the general community.”

But for governments or other entities able to afford a price tag of “less than $100,000,” says Goldsmith, high-quality interceptors are quite realistic.  Some interceptors are limited, only able to passively listen to either outgoing or incoming calls.  But full-featured devices like the VME Dominator, available only to government agencies, can not only capture calls and texts, but even actively control the phone, sending out spoof texts, for example.  Edward Snowden revealed that the N.S.A. is capable of an over-the-air attack that tells the phone to fake a shut-down while leaving the microphone running, turning the seemingly deactivated phone into a bug.  And various ethical hackers have demonstrated DIY interceptor projects, using a software programmable radio and the open-source base station software package OpenBTS – this creates a basic interceptor for less than $3,000.  On August 11, the F.C.C. announced an investigation into the use of interceptors against Americans by foreign intelligence services and criminal gangs.

An “Over-the-Air” Attack Feels Like Nothing

Whenever he wants to test out his company’s ultra-secure smart phone against an interceptor, Goldsmith drives past a certain government facility in the Nevada desert.  (To avoid the attention of the gun-toting counter-intelligence agents in black SUVs who patrol the surrounding roads, he won't identify the facility to Popular Science).  He knows that someone at the facility is running an interceptor, which gives him a good way to test out the exotic “baseband firewall” on his phone.  Though the baseband OS is a “black box” on other phones, inaccessible to manufacturers and app developers, patent-pending software allows the GSMK CryptoPhone 500 to monitor the baseband processor for suspicious activity.  

So when Goldsmith and his team drove by the government facility in July, he also took a standard Samsung Galaxy S4 and an iPhone to serve as a control group for his own device.

”As we drove by, the iPhone showed no difference whatsoever.  The Samsung Galaxy S4, the call went from 4G to 3G and back to 4G.  The CryptoPhone lit up like a Christmas tree.”

Though the standard Apple and Android phones showed nothing wrong, the baseband firewall on the Cryptophone set off alerts showing that the phone’s encryption had been turned off, and that the cell tower had no name – a telltale sign of a rogue base station.   Standard towers, run by say, Verizon or T-Mobile, will have a name, whereas interceptors often do not.

And the interceptor also forced the CryptoPhone from 4G down to 2G, a much older protocol that is easier to de-crypt in real-time.  But the standard smart phones didn’t even show they’d experienced the same attack.  

“If you've been intercepted, in some cases it might show at the top that you've been forced from 4G down to 2G.  But a decent interceptor won't show that,” says Goldsmith.  “It'll be set up to show you [falsely] that you're still on 4G.  You'll think that you're on 4G, but you're actually being forced back to 2G.”

So Do I Need One?

Though Goldsmith won’t disclose sales figures or even a retail price for the GSMK CryptoPhone 500, he doesn’t dispute an MIT Technology Review article from this past spring reporting that he produces about 400 phones per week for $3,500 each.  So should ordinary Americans skip some car payments to be able to afford to follow suit?

It depends on what level of security you expect, and who you might reasonably expect to be trying to listen in, says Oliver Day, who runs Securing Change, an organization that provides security services to non-profits.

“There's this thing in our industry called “threat modeling,” says Day.  “One of the things you learn is that you have to have a realistic sense of your adversary. Who is my enemy?  What skills does he have?  What are my goals in terms of security?”

If  you’re not realistically of interest to the U.S. government and you never leave the country, then the CryptoPhone is probably more protection than you need. Goldsmith says he sells a lot of phones to executives who do business in Asia.  The aggressive, sophisticated hacking teams working for the People’s Liberation Army have targeted American trade secrets, as well as political dissidents.

Day, who has written a paper about undermining censorship software used by the Chinese government, recommends people in hostile communications environments watch what they say over the phone and buy disposable “burner” phones that can be used briefly and then discarded.

“I'm not bringing anything into China that I'm not willing to throw away on my return trip,” says Day.

Goldsmith warns that a “burner phone” strategy can be dangerous.  If Day were to call another person on the Chinese government’s watch list, his burner phone’s number would be added to the watch list, and then the government would watch to see who else he called.  The CryptoPhone 500, in addition to alerting the user whenever it’s under attack, can “hide in plain sight” when making phone calls.  Though it does not use standard voice-over-IP or virtual private network security tools, the CryptoPhone can make calls using just a WI-FI connection -- it does not need an identifiable SIM card.  When calling over the Internet, the phone appears to eavesdroppers as if it is just browsing the Internet.

Partial Map of the Internet, 2005

"Internet map 1024" by The Opte Project - Originally from the English Wikipedia. Licensed under CC BY 2.5.

If you looked at the news or Twitter this morning -- or perhaps you couldn't, because your Internet was malfunctioning -- you might have heard: Time Warner suffered a major outage in its Internet service at about 4:30 a.m. Eastern. The outage, affecting much of the U.S., lasted two hours, Reuters reported. Maps created by the outage-tracker DownDetector showed problems throughout the country. So how exactly could this happen?

Popular Science talked with Purdue University computer scientist Sonia Fahmy, who researches network performance, to get her guesses on the culprit.

She hypothesizes that Time Warner was updating the software that its routers use to talk with one another and route information. "Typically, these outages are due to the routing protocols," she says. That's the kind of foundational function that, if there's a bug in it, could cause widespread problems.

"Either they upgraded the software on some of the routers, and there was some kind of bug in it, or sometimes, it's a human error," she says. Configuring routers for a software update is a complex task, so people make mistakes.

Routers that are part of the Internet's largest, core networks -- the so-called Internet backbone -- use something called the Border Gateway Protocol to tell each other what paths to use to send information on to the right destination. Fahmy thinks Time Warner could have been updating the software it uses to implement the BGP, which is often involved in major outages.

It's the extent of the outage that makes Fahmy guess the problem was related to software rather than hardware. Service providers such as Time Warner have enough redundancies in their hardware that prevent these kind of widespread issues. A broken router or cable normally causes smaller, more regional outages, she says.

Noticeable, hours-long outages may be becoming more frequent. Fahmy says she's seen reports like Time Warner's occur once every month or two. In addition to software problems, it seems companies' routers are aging and running out of memory -- which is more of a hardware problem, but also, a systematic one.

Researchers are working on making routing protocols less likely to fail. One promising solution is called Software Defined Networking, which lets companies use one machine, called the controller, to configure many routers at once. That way, there are fewer chances for a human expert to make a mistake when configuring a router.

Good luck hacking into this guy.

Photograph by Brian Klutch

Between revelations of NSA spying and a sense that marketers and hackers are picking our digital pockets, we’re all getting a little edgy about cellular security. Hence the rapid growth of the cryptophone industry. Most of the handsets run on “hardened” versions of Android that make privacy the default for app permissions and network connections. Wary users can also employ tools to convert voice or text messages into spy-proof gibberish. FreedomPop ($189) uses a virtual private network, while the Silent Circle tool runs on two products released in June: the Blackphone ($629) and the Vertu Signature Touch ($10,800, with a silent alarm if you’re kidnapped for ransom). The $3,500 GSMK CryptoPhone’s firewall even blocks snoops that can impersonate cell towers.

A Product Guide for the Mildly Paranoid

StartPage Search Engine 

Free on any platform

Pros It allows you to query Google without accepting cookies or giving your IP address, and to use Google as a proxy, clicking through to third-party sites.

Con Proxy surfing feature can be slow. 

RedPhone and TextSecure by Whisper Systems 

Free Android; iOS coming late summer

Pros Apps enable end-to-end encrypted calling and messaging. Open-source code allows for shared fixes.

Con Your callers also need to have the apps installed for the encryption to work.

Tor Browser Bundle 

Free Windows, OS X, Linux, Orbot for Android

Pros The preconfigured browser routes you through a worldwide network of proxy servers, anonymizing IP numbers.

Con NSA views Tor usage as suspicious.

Tails Operating System 

Freetails.boum.org/

Pros Housed on a USB memory stick or a DVD, this Linux variant OS uses only anonymous Tor Internet connections and leaves no evidence of your session. 

Con Some popular software packages won’t run on Linux.

Hidecell Faraday Cage Cellphone Bag 

$40hidecell.com

Pros Storing your phone in a metal-lined bag will eliminate surveillance possibilities by blocking cell-tower signals, along with your Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth connections.

Con Mom can’t get through either.

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

Giant Panda

Flickr CC by 2.0

Ai Hin was all set to be a star. The 6-year-old giant panda had shown signs of pregnancy last month, and staff at the Chengdu Breeding Research Centre in China had planned to film her labor in the first ever live broadcast of a panda giving birth.

Now that momentous occasion has been cancelled, as it turns out Ai Hin’s pregnancy was all just a clever ruse. Chengdu staff revealed that the panda had experienced a “phantom pregnancy” and had likely faked symptoms to get extra attention and food.

"After showing prenatal signs, the 'mothers-to-be' are moved into single rooms with air conditioning and around-the-clock care. They also receive more buns, fruits and bamboo,” Wu Kongju, an expert at Chengdu, tells Xinhua.

Signs of pregnancy for pandas include a reduced appetite, less mobility and an increase in progestational hormone. However, after a two-month observation, Ai Hin’s “behaviors and physiological indexes returned to normal.”

According to Kongju, phantom pregnancy is somewhat common among endangered bears, as they notice the special treatment other bears receive when they exhibit signs of pregnancy. Many other animals, such as dogs, cats and mice, also can suffer phantom pregnancy after they've been in heat (or "estrus").

The incident is also reminiscent of Münchausen syndrome, in which individuals fake certain health issues for attention or sympathy. Perhaps Ai Hin just needed somebody to care.

[Xinhua]

Supercavitating Submarine

South China Morning Post

The submarine of the future may come to America in a super fast bubble, traveling under water. Researchers at China's Harbin Institute of Technology developed a new concept for submarine “supercavitation,” where an underwater vessel creates a pocket of air around itself. Inside this bubble, the submarine can travel much faster without friction of water creating drag and slowing it down. Theoretically, a supercavitated vessel using rocket engines could travel inside that air pocket at almost the speed of sound.

While the exact science of forming an air cavity within a liquid for submarines is complex, the phenomenon is easy to observe in a simple college prank. Clanking one full beer bottle on top of another compresses the beer in the bottom bottle, causing it to release air bubbles rapidly and overflow. For submarines, the bubbles come from a gas ejected out of a special nozzle at the nose, but the vessel has to be going a fast speed--thus compressing the air in front of it--in order for supercavitation to take effect. Once it's going super fast inside a pocket of air, steering becomes hard as the vessel behaves almost like a missile.

The Harbin researchers’ concept may help the submarine get up to the speed where supercavitation can start to happen. First, the vessel releases a special liquid membrane over itself, reducing drag before the supercavitation takes effect. Then, to steer the craft, the drivers alter how much and where the liquid membrane gets replenished, creating areas of lesser and greater friction that turn the vessel. (The finer details of the design and how it works are being kept secret by the military.) 

Membrane steering is a breakthrough for supercavitation, but the scientists at Harbin’s Complex Flow and Heat Transfer Lab acknowledge that it alone isn’t enough to make super fast submarines possible. Such a craft still needs a rocket engine that works underwater, and one that can last long enough to complete the cross-Pacific journey.

Supercavitation itself isn’t new. Military researchers from multiple countries started working on the idea decades ago. In the 1960s Russia started work on the Shkval supercavitating “underwater rocket,” which had a maximum range of about four miles. The United States started working on a supercavitating torpedo in 1997, and DARPA announced a program to develop a supercavitating mini-submarine in 2006. Range and steering posed problems for all of these projects, but the Harbin Institute’s liquid membrane might be the breakthrough needed that lets submarines fly underwater like rockets. With luck, the supersonic submarine will fare better than attempts at hypersonic missiles.

Lab Mouse

Wikimedia Commons

A team of researchers has found a part of the brain that controls how motivated mice are to exercise, according to a new study.

The researchers created genetically modified mice that lacked neurons in the dorsal medial portion of a region of the brain called the habenula.

The major difference was that the mice didn't like to run on mouse wheels, which normal mice love to do, the researchers reported in a paper they published in the Journal of Neuroscience. "They were physically capable of running, but appeared unmotivated to do it," Eric Turner, the study's lead scientist and a brain researcher at Seattle Children's Research Institute, said in a statement. The mice also had "minor" differences in their gait and balance, compared to normal mice.

Why mess with mouse habenulas? The team was seeking a target for future antidepressant drugs. They knew that some strong science indicates that exercise can help people with depression. What if a future drug could mimic the emotional effects of exercise on the brain?

Of course, there's a lot of work scientists will have to do before they know whether it's a good idea to target this brain area for depression. There's the straightforward issue of checking, with replicating studies, whether this brain region really is responsible for making mice want to exercise. Then scientists will have to see if the analogous region in human brains works similarly. They'll also want to study whether targeting this brain region improves depression. (What if it just makes you want to exercise, without resolving your depression?) Lastly, it's always a challenge to design drugs that are safe and effective, even if you've got all your targets lined up.

The lack of running the team documented in the mice may be related to depression, or whatever its murine counterpart might be. The dorsal medial habenula-lacking mice didn't like sugar water as much as normal mice do, which is a measure of mouse depression. However, dorsal medial habenula-lacking mice did perform the same as normal mice in the forced-swim test, which is another common, if weird, test for hopelessness and depression in mice.

The scientists performed one additional set of experiments that indicate the dorsal medial habenula might be a good target for antidepressants. They hooked mice up to a setup that allowed the mice to turn up or turn down their own dorsal medial habenula. (These are different mice from the mice who lacked dorsal medial habenulas altogether, of course.) The brain-controlling mice always chose to turn their dorsal medial habenulas up, suggesting it's rewarding to do so. Now if only you could ask the mice exactly what that felt like.