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Lost: Huge Chunk Of Europa's Icy Crust

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europa, jupiter, nasa
Europa
This 44-by-19-mile close up of Europa, a moon of Jupiter, shows ice structures on its surface. The white and blue areas are blanketed in fine particles of ice, while the red-brown area indicates the presence of minerals. The image was taken by the Galileo probe.
NASA

Europa, long one of the Solar System's most fascinating worlds, might be subject to forces very similar to those that form the surface of Earth: plate tectonics.

One of the four largest moons of Jupiter, Europa is covered by water ice, and likely has a free-flowing water ocean below. The water is kept liquid by Jupiter's immense gravitational force, which creates tides in Europa's core -- keeping the rock hot enough. Additionally, Europa's surface, one of the smoothest in the solar system, shows few signs of impact craters. This has long suggested to experts that the moon's ice crust is very young on a planetary age scale and that something has been causing the ice to disappear and re-form over time.

Now two scientists have made a convincing argument that Europa's surface has been formed by icy plate tectonics. Studying high-resolution images collected over a decade ago by the Galileo spacecraft, geologist Simon Kattenhorn and planetary scientist Louise Prockter have found evidence that Europa’s surface ice mantle is composed of plate-like sections moving over a layer of somewhat warmer ice, similarly to how the giant rocky plates on Earth's surface move about on a layer of weaker mineral formations. Their findings have just been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Europa's ice surface is “crisscrossed by this network of features, fractures and ridges and features we call bands, in all different orientations and in a pattern that's very distinctive,” says Kattenhorn. “If you took a photo and printed it out, and cut it into chunks and threw it in a pile like a jigsaw puzzle, you'd be able to put them back together. We took the pieces and moved them backwards in time, to create the original picture” of Europa's surface.

"Like a jigsaw puzzle, you'd be able to put them back together."

On Earth, spreading seafloors have created gaps between once-unified land masses; on Europa there are similar features called dilational bands. “You can close the bands, just like you'd take away the ocean basin on Earth to move the continents back together,” says Kattenhorn, and in some places piece together matching edges. Some of the Europa ice plates also show evidence of moving laterally, creating transform faults like California's San Andreas Fault.

But in some locations, “when we [virtually] moved some of those plates back to create the original pattern, there was a big gap in the picture," says Kattenhorn, "as if two of the pieces fell on the floor and you couldn't find them.” This, he says, indicated that some of what was once on Europa's surface had disappeared.

On Earth this would be evidence of a subduction zone: an area where one continental plate is sliding downward beneath another, to be reincorporated back into the planet's rocky mantle. On Europa, Kattenhorn and Prockter argue, it suggests that a plate of super-cold surface ice is moving downward to be reincorporated into the moon's ice mantle, which is slightly warmer. They call these areas subsumption bands.

“We're not suggesting [that] the plates subduct and then melt,” says Kattenhorn. “We're saying it's subsuming” – or being recombined with the ice below by the forces of heat, pressure, and possibly chemical reactions as well. On the edges of these missing gaps were very distinctive surface features -- tabular zones termed subsumption bands, broad flat areas of ice a few tens of kilometers wide, where deformation occurred. Similar land deformations happen along Earth's subduction zones.

Jupiter's Moon Europa
Wikimedia Commons
On the topmost ice plates, the researchers also found signs of “cryolavas”: slush-like substances that erupted onto the surface and then froze. But the analogies with Earthly lava pretty much end there. “Even on Europa, water is denser than ice," says Kattenhorn. "To get liquid water to the surface, you have to force it through material that is less dense." So while subduction pressure may be forcing water to the surface of Europa, the origins of these cryolavas remain a mystery.

“Maybe there are already pockets of fluid within the ice shelf – a paper was published on that a few years ago – similar to subglacial lakes in Antarctica,” he says. “And if they're squeezed in some way, those fluids are being brought up to the surface.”

Kattenhorn and Prockter will continue to use data from Galileo to study other sites on Europa for signs of plate tectonics. But “these images are already over a decade old,” he says. “There is still plenty to rediscover [in them], but we are starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel. We need new data.”

Kattenhorn, who has been studying the Jovian moon for nearly two decades, hopes that that the evidence of tectonic activity on Europa -- the only body in the Solar System besides Earth to show signs of them -- will help increase the momentum behind NASA's Europa Clipper proposal for a new scientific mission to Jupiter's moon.

“I just see this as the culmination of 16 years of work, a labor of love really,” he says, “to unravel the mysteries of what happened on Europa.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly described some of the surface features along subsumption bands on Europa as compared to those along subduction zones on Earth. We regret the error.


Enormous Carbon Capture Project Begins Construction In Texas

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photo of the W. A. Parish coal plant in Texas
The W. A. Parish Power Plant, where the Petra Nova system will be added

What will eventually be the world's largest carbon capture facility has started construction near Houston, Texas.

The Petra Nova system will collect carbon dioxide leaving an existing coal plant by spritzing the plant's exhaust with a chemical solvent. The purified carbon dioxide then gets compressed into a liquid and piped 80 miles away to an active oil field. Once there, the carbon dioxide gets piped underground, where it helps force oil to the surface. So, yes, Petra Nova captures carbon dioxide to help people mine ever more oil, which creates its own emissions once it's burned to make electricity.

That's not ideal, but experts who support such projects say they're a necessary step. Projects similar to Petra Nova, in the U.S. and elsewhere, have been stymied by their high costs, Yale Environment 360 reports. Petra Nova's engineers hope the system will eventually pay for itself because it's linked to increased oil production, the Houston Chronicle reports. That, in turn, could encourage other companies to adopt the technology and improve it.

Critics worry sequestered carbon dioxide will eventually find its way up to the surface of the Earth and back into the atmosphere, as NPR reported in 2012. Oil field-linked projects may also prove unhelpful to global warming in the long term, if it encourages people and nations to continue to use fossil fuels.

The project is expected to capture 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, which equals about 40 percent of one of the coal plant's units, the Houston Chronicle reports. The plant, called the W. A. Parish Plant, has four units.

Besides Petra Nova, a handful of similar projects are underway around the world. Yale Environment 360 reports there are pending projects in Saskatchewan, Mississippi and Illinois, plus 34 "proposed or operating" projects outside of North America. The Saskatchewan system is supposed to go online later this year. Petra Nova is slated to open in 2016.

[Houston Chronicle, Yale Environment 360, NPR State Impact]

Egypt Comes To Google Street View

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Mosque of Muhammad Ali
Built in the first half ot he 19th century, the Muhammad Ali Mosque's Ottoman styling broke with traditional Egyptian architecture.
Google

Ancient meets ultra-modern today on Google Street View, as several of Egypt's most popular monuments premiere on the service.

Viewers around the world can now feast their eyes on Street View's trademark sharp, panoramic views of some of Egypt's most famous ancient monuments, like the Great Pyramids and Great Sphinx of Giza, Cairo Citadel, the Hanging Church and more.

The sites were shot using a 75-megapixel camera, toted on the back of a technician in areas where motor vehicles were prohibited.

According to Google, there are over 10 million still images covering 7.2 million miles of terrain in more than 59 countries (plus Antarctica) contained in Street View.

Here's our gallery of highlights from Egypt on Street View.

Adaptive, Programmable Headlights Cut Through Rain, Illuminate Without Blinding Other Drivers

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photos showing a headlight looking very bright, then dimmed
Prototype Headlight at Work
The headlight senses oncoming cars and automatically dims beams of light reaching those cars' drivers' eyes.
Carnegie Mellon University

This is perhaps the only optical illusion you would want to see while you're driving. A team of university engineers has created a vehicle headlight that adjusts itself so that drivers can keep their high beams on even when other cars are coming toward them. To the driver, the light still looks extra-bright. But from the point of view of the oncoming driver, it's automatically dimmed.

That's not the only thing the prototype headlight is able to do. It's also able to project arrows or lane markers onto the road. It can sense upcoming street signs and shine more light onto them. And it can make raindrops or snowflakes seem to "disappear" from its beam, to clear the vision of the driver—a trick that this team of engineers, from Carnegie Mellon University, has been working on for a few years now.

How does it all work? The headlight is actually made up of not just one beam of light, but one million tiny, individual beams. The individual beams are created the same way pixels on a projector are. There's a semiconductor chip that has an array of a million tiny mirrors on it. The mirrors flip to modulate each pixel's brightness.

This way, the system can turn off some beams sometimes without the driver noticing too much. To make raindrops "disappear," the system tracks falling rain, predicts where the drops are going, and then turns off the beams that would otherwise reflect light off the drops. To make headlights appear dimmer to oncoming drivers, the system tracks other cars and turns off only the beams that are aimed at those drivers. To make arrows on the road, the beams project their light accordingly. It's like having a football field full of dorky marching-band players that you can rearrange into whatever patterns you like. (I was in marching band in high school).

illustration showing smart headlights turning off light beams aimed at other drivers
Throwing Shade
Illustration showing how the prototype headlight is able to look dim to others while bright to the driver.
Carnegie Mellon University

The headlight's on-board computer reacts to what it senses—whether it's cars, raindrops, street signs or anything else—within 1 to 2.5 milliseconds, according to Carnegie Mellon University. That's an improvement from last year, when the university had only a raindrop-disappearing light, that worked with a 13-millisecond delay.

Some car companies have already created and sold high beams that appear dimmer to other carss. (Although they seem to be illegal in the U.S.) Those adaptive high-beams work in much the same way, aiming many beams of light at the world and dimming only those that point at other drivers. However, CMU emphasizes that its programmable light is able to project any number of custom arrangements, not just the dim-for-others program.

CMU's versatility comes at a price. It's too large (and probably too expensive and delicate) to go into cars now. The university plans to install it into a truck for testing next year. It will take a few more years yet to miniaturize the light enough for ordinary cars. 

Quantum Mechanics Saves Grandfathers From Time Travelers

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Chrononauts Time Travel Card Game
Mess up enough history, and the paradoxes will overwhelm the space-time continuum, ending the world.
EUS, via Wikimedia Commons

Mention time travel at a nerd party, and other guests will immediately respond with a grim conundrum: What happens if a time traveler goes back in time and kills one of his ancestors? This is the “Grandfather Paradox.” In a simulated environment, a team of mathematicians tested the paradox, and made a remarkable discovery: In time travel simulations, at least, history repeats itself.

The Grandfather Paradox makes a mess of time travel. A murderer kills his ancestor, preventing his own birth, thereby preventing the murder, thereby being born, thereby committing the murder, and so on. To observe it, a team of researchers, led by Martin Ringbauer, created a simulation. Instead of firing up a DeLorean to 88 miles an hour, they sent photons through a “closed timelike curve,” or CTC. The photons are paired up so that one follows the other. It works like this:

In their new simulation Ralph, Ringbauer and their colleagues studied Deutsch's model using interactions between pairs of polarized photons within a quantum system that they argue is mathematically equivalent to a single photon traversing a CTC. "We encode their polarization so that the second one acts as kind of a past incarnation of the first,” Ringbauer says. So instead of sending a person through a time loop, they created a stunt double of the person and ran him through a time-loop simulator to see if the doppelganger emerging from a CTC exactly resembled the original person as he was in that moment in the past.

After the simulation, they found that the second photon exited the simulation the same as the first. An earlier conjecture held that, even with 50/50 odds that a time traveler kills his grandparent, that's enough uncertainty to make survival likely. This new simulation adds in observation: because the second particle behaves like the first, the existence of the grandchild is evidence that the grandfather lives.

So don’t worry about time traveling descendents coming back with criminal intent. Odds are it’s safe.

First-Ever Human Trial Of An Induced Pluripotent Stem Cell Treatment Set To Begin

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close-up photo of a blue eye
Human Eye
Cassi Saari

A Japanese patient with severe eye disease is set to become the first person to be treated with induced pluripotent stem cells, Nature News reports. Cells of this type have been considered promising for future treatments since their creation eight years ago, which was itself a milestone. This human test is set to be a historic moment in biotechnology.

It's also an anxious one. Stem cell therapies carry the risk of creating tumors, although Nature News reports the scientists in charge of the Japanese trial found their treatment did not cause tumors in mice and monkeys. In addition, there might be other risks to the treatment that scientists aren't yet aware of; stem cell therapies of all types are only just being tried in humans.

Induced pluripotent stem cells are special because they're not made from embryos. Instead, they come from harvesting skin cells from people, then treating those cells with genes that reverse the cell's life stage back to its stem cell state. That means scientists are able to make induced pluripotent stem cells from cells taken from a patient's own body. The resulting cells should be well matched to the patient's own genetics, although it's possible the "induction" part of the process introduces genetic aberrations into the cells.

The patient in this Japanese trial has macular degeneration, a progressive disease in which people lose the light-detecting cells in the retinas in their eyes. Scientists have also tried embryonic stem cells as a treatment for the disease. (Here's an update on that effort.)

The induced pluripotent stem cell trial will test a treatment developed by Masayo Takahashi, an opthamologist with a Japanese research institute called RIKEN. Takahashi has been making induced pluripotent stem cells and growing those cells into a sheet of replacement retinal cells. He then surgically attaches the sheet onto the retina. He and his colleagues have previously demonstrated that this treatment works in monkeys.

[Nature News]

How A Guy Who Failed Physics Is Reinventing Higher Education

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Anant Agarwal's early success with online teaching gave edX a template for labs, a key feature for science and engineering courses.
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images for The New York Times

As a freshman at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in the late 1970s, Anant Agarwal was one of the only students to fail the physics midterm. The setback, he recalls, made him see that his small high school in Mangalore hadn’t prepared him for college. “I realized that education is very different in different parts of the world,” says Agarwal, who went on to become a computer scientist. “Some people have access to really high-quality material, but others—simply by virtue of what they have or where they are—don’t.” 

Nearly 25 years later, Agarwal was teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when he and colleagues began augmenting their classes with online videos and discussions. He then built a prototype website so he could virtually teach his introductory electronics and circuits course, complete with an interactive version of a real-world lab. Its success inspired the university to launch MITx in 2011. The platform rolled out with Agarwal’s circuits class and now offers more than 30 free courses that span the institute’s five schools. 

Through a nonprofit called edX, MIT also shares the platform with other colleges. Today, edX offers free massive online open courses (MOOCs) from 53 institutions; 2.6 million people from 196 countries have registered to take them, from employees interested in career advancement to high school students looking for an edge in college to curious folks who want to learn something new. Recently, edX made its code open-source so developers around the world can continue to improve it, and so other institutions can create their own versions. “Anyone with an Internet connection can take these courses,” says Agarwal. “Education should be available to everybody, just like the air we breathe.”

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

Read the rest of Popular Science’s education feature.

Lasers Reveal Underground 'Super Henge'

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A new, detailed map of the Stonehenge area, including the newly-discovered "super-henge"
© LBI ArchPro, Wolfgang Neubauer

Near the prehistoric Stonehenge monument, archeologists have found the buried traces of a "super henge" more than 4,900 feet in circumference. That's about as big around as the Astrodome and Cowboys Stadium combined -- and 14 times larger than the iconic stone circle.

The super henge is comprised of dozens of newly discovered features, including an array of up to more than 50 ten-foot pillars, some of which may still be deep underground. The surveyors also uncovered 17 ritual monuments, including "massive prehistoric pits" that may have been dug along astronomic lines, and a "long barrow" -- a huge wooden building believed to have been used as a mortuary for bodies after "defleshing."

Archeologists believe the Stonehenge complex was built and modified over a period of 11,000 years. Questions about the function of its various structures remain.

Because most of the clues about the ancient construction lie deep underground, the archeologists developed new techniques for finding the traces of pits and pillars. They beamed radar and lasers into the ground, and wheeled scanners over a vast area to study subtle changes in the Earth's magnetic field. 

Not everything discovered at the site is millennia old. The surveyors were able to pinpoint practice trenches dug during the First World War to prepare troops for battle, as well as traces of a military airbase -- one of the U.K.'s first -- built at the site a few years later.

Ground penetration
A tractor pushes an antenna array designed to study buried remains of monuments.
© LBI ArchPro, Wolfgang Neubauer

3D Reconstruction
A 3D rendering of a "long barrow" burial site based on traces of the wooden posts detected during the survey.
© LBI ArchPro, Joachim Brandtner

Animals Were Wearing Fitness Trackers Before It Was Cool

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More and more human beings are strapping fitness trackers to their bodies as the devices become more useful and prices plunge. This week, consumer electronics powerhouse Apple got in on the action with the Apple Watch, which includes a built-in accelerometer and heart rate monitor. But it turns out that long before any person carried one of these devices around all day, researchers were strapping them to wild beasts to collect data. 

Nature reports:

First widely applied as the sensors that trip air bags in cars, accelerometers contain tiny weights that shift with a change in speed. When biologists initially packaged them with data loggers and batteries to measure animal motion, the devices were unwieldy. In the late 1990s, Williams put flipper cuffs and the equivalent of small scuba tanks on Weddell seals (Leptonychotes weddelli) in Antarctica. “It was a pretty exotic piece of equipment,” she says.

As costs plummeted, however, companies began to offer ready-made accelerometers combined with memory chips that record dozens of data points each second for weeks or even months at a time. And wildlife biologists immediately saw an opportunity to fix them to animals. Since 2009, more than 130 papers have been published using accelerometers to study animal behaviour. “It's really exploded in terms of interest and technology,” Williams says. “Now we can sample so much, we know every time an animal takes a stroke or a paw hits the ground.”

For more on the ways scientists are using fitness trackers to understand creatures ranging from lumbering polar bears to barely mobile scallops, head over to this post on Nature.

Map Maritime Treasures At The Bottom Of The Sea

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Students help retell history through shipwrecks.
Courtesy NOAA ONMS

More than 150 confirmed wrecks lie deep beneath the waters surrounding the Hawaiian Islands. And since 1996, under-graduate students under the guidance of Hans Van Tilburg, a maritime archaeologist with the Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, have donned scuba gear to document these technological relics. “This is a way to survey cultural resources and tell part of the historical story,” Van Tilburg says. 

Over the years, the University of Hawaii students have surveyed fighter planes, landing craft, and bomb-ers lost during World War II. This summer, they spent two weeks diving to a landing craft submerged near Pearl Harbor. The field course teaches them how to measure a wreck and the surrounding ocean floor using baseline trilateration, a mapping method that doesn’t require permanent grids. They also produce underwater drawings, photographs, and videos. The maps the students create will help state and federal agencies monitor the sites and protect them from looters, preserving their place in history. 

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

Read the rest of Popular Science’s education feature.

Rosetta Takes A Selfie

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rosetta
Self-Portrait With Space Probe
Rosetta snapped this image on Sept. 7, 2014.
ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA

The Rosetta robotic space probe has sent back this amazing photo of itself, illuminated in the sun's light.

From the left, the edge of Rosetta is visible swathed in a protective covering, followed by one of its 15 yard-long solar wings. In the upper center sits Comet 67P, also called Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, just 30 miles away.

Although five seemingly smooth potential landing sites have been chosen for the mission, the choices are narrowing as Rosetta nears Churyumov-Gerasimenko and its rough surface becomes easier to see. The target site will be announced next week for this first-ever attempt to land on a comet. Meanwhile, researchers have made a colorful map of 67P's various geographical regions.

The European Space Agency's 'rosetta blog' states that two images taken at two different exposures, both made on September 7 by the CIVA camera on the mission's Philae landing craft, were used to acheive a result that would show the most detail.

The Ozone Layer Is On The Mend

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ozone layer, nasa, antarctica
Ozone Hole Over Antarctica
In this false-color image of total ozone over the South Pole on September 8, 2014, blues and purples are areas of least ozone, and yellows and reds show where the ozone layer is thickest.
NASA

An international agreement to phase out use of chemicals that damage the ozone layer appears to be working. A new report finds that ozone-depleting substances in the atmosphere are down by 10 to 15 percent, and that the ozone layer is by and large getting thicker.

The reason is that nations have followed through on commitments made under the Montreal Protocol and related pacts to phase out use of chloroflurocarbons (CFCs) and halons, according to the new assessment (PDF) released this week by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization. About 300 scientists contributed to the report.

The ozone layer is a thin film of gas in the stratosphere. It protects the Earth from the Sun's ultraviolent rays, which can cause skin cancer, eye damage, and other forms of ill health for both animal and plant life on Earth.

CFCs and halons were common in products like refrigerators, fire-fighting foams and aerosol spray cans. But from the early 1970s onward, evidence mounted that UV radiation broke down these compounds in the mid-stratosphere (about six miles above the Earth's surface), resulting in the release of chlorine and bromine atoms that break down ozone (O3) molecules. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one chlorine atom can rip apart over 100,000 ozone molecules.

ozone layer chart
Ozone Layer Progress
The ozone layer has shown signs of recovering from human-caused damage since a worldwide ban on ozone-destroying substances began in 1989.
UNEP/WMO

After the Montreal Protocol came into effect in 1989, countries began phasing out manufacture and use of ozone-destroying substances. There have been signs in the past 10 to 15 years that the atmosphere's "ozone column" is thickening in places, suggesting that the ban is working. The new report estimates that by 2050, the ozone layer in the Arctic and middle latitudes should return to roughly the condition it was in in 1980. Because natural atmospheric conditions cause air pollutants to concentrate over the poles, the seasonal ozone hole over Antarctica each spring (which has caused changes in the summer climate of the Southern Hemisphere) will take longer to heal.

A side benefit of CFC reduction is that it may be helping to blunt the progress of global warming, since CFCs are also powerful greenhouse gases. The assessment estimates that in 2010, lowered emissions of ozone depleters equated to keeping around 10 metric gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere, “which is about five times larger than the annual emissions reduction target” for 2008-2012 under the Kyoto Protocol climate treaty.

There are some warnings in the report as well. Some of the compounds being swapped in for ozone depleters – such as hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) – are also potent greenhouse gases. If their use increases as predicted, they will contribute quite a lot to surface temperature rises.

As well, carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) levels remain unexpectedly high, even though the substance was banned under the Montreal Protocol. Participants in the treaty reported no new emissions of CCI4, which was used in fire fighting and dry cleaning, between 2007 and 2012. NASA credits the high levels to "unidentified industrial leakages, large emissions from contaminated sites, or unknown CCl4 sources."

The UN assessment also warns that the options available for stopping future damage to the ozone layer are becoming limited as most of the most straightforward actions play themselves out. These have ranged from ending the production of ozone-harming substances, to the destruction of "banks" of destructive chemicals and upgrading to appliances that don't contain CFCs.  Presumably more ingenuity will be required on humanity's part to continue making progress -- by coming up with new, safe chemicals and technologies --  as well as not repeating the mistakes of the past.

What You Need To Know About The Solar Storm Headed For Earth

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Solar Flare Eruption
An intense, X-class solar flare erupted from sun spot AR2518 on Wednesday afternoon.
NASA / GSFC / SDO

The sun has been regurgitating a lot of solar flares these days, and now, a couple will be knocking at Earth’s door this weekend.

The originator of these flares is a particularly complex sunspot called AR2518, which is currently facing our planet. Late Monday night, the spot produced a minor solar flare (class R1) that lasted for six hours, but then on Wednesday at 1:45 p.m. EST, it upchucked a whopping X1.6-class solar flare, which is pretty darn strong.

Both flares have launched large outbursts of magnetic fields, known as coronal mass ejections– or CMEs – at high velocity straight toward Earth, according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center. The CME associated with Monday’s flare is expected to hit tonight, while the more intense CME is expected to arrive Friday afternoon to evening. Earth experiences CMEs all the time without issue, but if they're strong enough, CMEs can cause geomagnetic storms and sometimes, extreme radio blackouts. 

Although Wednesday’s solar flare was somewhat strong, the magnitudes of these incoming CMEs aren’t that intense, historically speaking. (Although, as the Sun is nearing peak activity on its 11-year solar cycle, we may be seeing more -- and stronger -- storms soon.) What makes this event so unique, however, is that Earth will experience two CMEs in close succession to one another – a situation that is pretty rare. That means scientists are being cautious about what to expect. “The two CMEs could be interacting on their way to Earth’s orbit, or beyond Earth’s orbit,” says Thomas Berger, director of NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC), meaning the flares could potentially amplify each other in some way.

Ultimately, no one really knows how these storms will impact each other. Given this uncertainty, NOAA has issued a moderate to strong G3 geomagnetic storm watch for Friday. The rating indicates that the incoming magnetic fields may cause some problems with radio communications, as well as voltage irregularities in northern latitudes of the United States. Grid operators and even FEMA have been notified, just in case.

Fortunately, NOAA doesn’t expect the impacts of the CMEs to be unmanageable. “There’s really no concern for electronics down here on the ground,” says William Murtagh, program coordinator of the Space Weather Prediction Center. Murtagh notes that some studies have implied that electronics at higher altitudes and higher latitudes, such as planes flying near the poles, might be more vulnerable to geomagnetic storms. The biggest concern with electronics on the ground would be a loss of power, but Murtagh says the storms aren't strong enough to cause such a blackout.

Still, they’ll be watching the events closely. Additionally, Wednesday’s eruption also produced an Earth-bound solar radiation storm, but that has only amounted to an S1 rating (the lowest on the NOAA scale). When solar radiation storms reach a level of S3 or above, NOAA will advise the FAA to start rerouting flights away from the poles to avoid radiation exposure. NASA mission control will also direct astronauts into more hardened portions of the International Space Station.

Meanwhile, there is one pretty awesome byproduct of these two solar flares. The storms could produce some pretty intense auroras, which may be visible in northern parts of the United States tonight and tomorrow. So if you living in Maine or the Dakotas (or even New York), make sure you have your camera handy. Chances are your DSLR will work just fine.

To learn more about solar storms, check out our previous coverage:

Throwback Thursday: Musical Cakes, Windshield Wiper Fluid, And The End Of The World

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On this Throwback Thursday, we go back 75 years to the Popular Science of September 1939

The Magazine Cost 15 Cents

But it was worth 25! (In 2014, each copy will cost you $5 on the newsstand.)

September 1939
Popular Science

Things We Take For Granted Now Were Brand New, Like...

Cameras in Police Cars

Movie Camera In Police Car Puts Evidence On Film.
There's no arguing with the testimony of this movie camera.
Popular Science

And Windshield Wiper Fluid

This Windshield Wiper Washes It, Too!
Windshields are automatically washed and scrubbed with clean water by a new automobile accessory available on a popular make of car. Turning a dashboard switch sends a stream of water from a small reservoir tank across the windshield glass, and the standard wiper blade completes the cleaning operation.
Popular Science

Some Inventions Were Not So Great

Like this baby walker, for parents who never want to touch their children.

Engineer Builds Baby Walker.
To teach his young son to walk, a Swiss engineer built the curious apparatus shown above. Pairs of wooden arms are strapped at one end to the infant's legs and at the other to the legs of an adult, so that the latter can control the baby's leg movements. A harness connected to a pulley on an overhead wire holds the child upright while it is taking its first steps.
Popular Science

And behind-the-back cigarette holders. (Seems perfectly safe.)

Novel Cigarette Holder Keeps Smoke From Eyes.
If smoke getst in your eyes, or you are warned to stay away from cigarettes, you may welcome the solution to both these problems adopted by the Englishman pictured above. Using a length of semiflexible metal tubing to put distance between his cigarette holder and its mouthpiece, he heads upwind to read his paper, undisturbed by falling ashes or eye-watering tobacco smoke.
Popular Science

Other Inventions Were Awesome, But Never Made It

Doughnut Dunkers!

Because food on a stick is always a good idea.

Handle On Doughnut Is Boon To Dunkers.
Major hazards involved in the popular indoor sport of dunking doughnuts in hot coffee are said to be greatly reduced by the invention of a new type of "sinker" with a baked-in handle that should prove a boon to all dunking enthusiasts. Triangular in shape, the improved doughnut is fried around a wooden handle, making it far easier to maneuver in and out of a steaming draught of Java.
Popular Science

And air-conditioned bedding

All-Season Quilt Is Air-Conditioned
By means of an electric fan, air that is artificially heated or chilled is blown through a flexible hose into the lining of the coverlet. Here the air is distributed evenly over the entire area of the quilt through branching air ducts, finally filtering through the porous inner lining.
Popular Science

And musical cakes.

Musical Cake Plays A Tune.
A diminutive music box is embedded in the bottom of the cake, and set off when a string is cut with the knife that cuts into the cake. Eighteen separate tunes are available, ranging from "Rockabye Baby" all the way to "Who's Afraid Of The Big, Bad Wolf?"
Popular Science

Long Reads

A feature-length article documents researchers who were putting patients into a coma to try to cure their cancer. Read it in its entirety (and absurdity) here: Can "Frozen Sleep" Cure Cancer?

Popular Science examines how the world will end. (Hint: Burning, freezing, and the exploding Moon are some possibilities.)

You can read the full September 1939 issue here

COLLISION
"A giant meteor running wild through space... may strike the Earth and spread havoc with its impact and scorching breath."
Popular Science archives

Want Your Crops To Survive Extreme Heat and Drought? Add Fungus

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corn crop
Corn Crop
According to AST, these trays of 3-week-old corn plants were subjected to eight days of drought. The BioEnsure-treated plants on the right continued to thrive, while the untreated corn on the left shriveled.
Adaptive Symbiosis Technologies

 

The global population continues to grow, and climate change is already tangibly reducing food harvests. Can agriculture adapt to be both more productive and more resilient?

One answer to that question may be "add fungus.” Issie Lapowsky reports today for WIRED that a Seattle-based startup named Adaptive Symbiotic Technologies is almost ready to put a fungi-based product on the market that enables rice, corn, and other crops to bear up amazingly well during drought and temperature extremes.

According to Lapowsky, the product, called BioEnsure, is a blend of microscopic fungi that AST founder Dr. Rusty Rodriguez and his wife, Dr. Regina Redman, first discovered in the 1990s. They had been trying to figure out how some plants were able to grow in the barren soil and peak 150 degree-Fahrenheit temperatures at the center of Yellowstone National Park. They discovered that fungi had colonized the plants and essentially lent them extra resilience. When the fungi were removed in the lab, the plants failed under the same heat.

Since 2008 Redman has been tweaking fungi blends to work with wheat, soybeans, rice, and corn crops.

BioEnsure has been proven in real-world conditions, Lapowsky writes:

During the drought that destroyed much of the cropland in the Midwest in 2012, for instance, BioEnsure-treated corn crops generated 85 percent more yield than plants that were not treated. And in temperate climates, BioEnsure has been proven to increase output by 3 to 20 percent. What’s more, says [AST vice president of business development Zachery] Grey, BioEnsure appears to be particularly effective on organic crops, which aren’t treated with chemicals and other additives for protection.

AST has been nominated (along with 16 other contestants) for a Securing Water for Food award by the U.S. Agency for International Development. The young company's next big hurdle may not be extreme weather, reports Lapowsky, but the influence of the agriculture-industrial complex that reaps massive profits from chemicals that BioEnsure could render unnecessary.


Watch This Squishy Robot Get Run Over By A Car

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Soft Robot
Screenshot from Youtube video courtesy of R&D Magazine

The archetypical robot is a man of metal, a harsh mechanical construct contrasted sharply with the soft fleshiness of the humans that built it. A team of engineers, led by Michael T. Tolley of the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory, created instead a soft robot. Using a flexible body, the robot moves like a flailing starfish over all terrain.

Their work was recently published in the journal Soft Robotics, and curiously it highlights something the robot lacks: a tether. While previous attempts at soft robots used tethers for better communication with their flopping mechanical beasts, if a robot is to truly navigate the world, it can’t have anything holding it back. This new robot, a flopping pink "X", has an optional electrical power tether, but can use a battery pack as well.

The robot’s body is mostly silicon, with hollow glass beads added to lighten it. Inside, a series of cavities and tubes formed six “pneu-nets”, or pneumatic network inside the robot. Actuators inside the central part of the robot inflate and deflate these nets, making the robot move. Controls were mounted on an Arduino, and the soft robot had a GoPro camera as a visual sensor.

DARPA funding in part supported the design of this robot. While there’s no immediate application yet, a robot that can survive in ice, over fire, and under great pressure has potential as a future rescue tool.

Watch it squirm over fire, across ice, and survive under a car tire below:

Using 'Doom' To Design A Room

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Doom With A View.
Note: There are no actual couches in Doom ... as far as we know.
Wikimedia Commons/Photoshop By Popular Science
Remember that early ‘90s horror-themed video game, Doom, where you roamed around a Martian landscape, killing everything in sight? Well, now the game isn’t just for shooting demons and zombie Marines anymore. A construction company called DIRTT (which stands for Doing It Right This Time) is using software based on the old Doom engine to blueprint hospital walls and office spaces. They’re hoping the technology will eradicate the two most expensive words in the construction industry.

“The two words are ‘change order,’” Scott Jenkins, the president of DIRTT, tells Popular Science. Order changes often happen when construction crews run into unexpected problems, or when contractors underestimate the labor and resources they’ll need to get a job done. DIRTT is hoping to forestall these problems with the help of their Doom engine-based software, named ICE. “We’re going to have cost certainty with ICE,” Jenkins says. 

“We’re going to have cost certainty with ICE.”

The Doom engine is a computer program that can render 2-D blueprints into a 3-D space. Because the engine is open-source, DIRTT was able to adapt it for their own needs--for example, ICE “melts” with other design softwares, including AutoCAD. An engineer or an architect can use ICE to mock up a room, and create a live data set for every aspect of a space, including the electrical engineering, millwork, and piping. When those blueprints are taken into the shop, everything is constructed at the same time and put together so that there are no inconsistencies. Instead of working on each component at different times by different people, they're all done at once by the same machine.

DIRTT says that this process greatly reduces inefficiencies and waste, and decreases the time it takes to construct an interior. “Because of ICE, we don’t have separate teams of manufacturers trying to coordinate with ordered engineering,” says Jenkins. “You’d have to build the materials separately and then put them together later. That’s all electronic for us.” 

Once assembled in the shop, the walls are shipped flat by truck to the construction site. When the panels arrive at their destination, they’re popped into pre-cut aluminum frames which will hold the wall panels upright in the finished building. 

Pre-Made Wall.
A pre-fabricated wall, designed by ICE, contains insulation, electrical equipment, and everything needed for this office to function.
DIRTT
In total, manufacturing and shipping happens in under three weeks. According to Jenkins, it took 11 days to build out the new Levi Strauss headquarters -- an operation that normally would have taken upwards of three months. 

But it’s not only the speed at which the walls are built that’s helpful. Jenkins explains that some buildings, such as hospitals, may need to reconfigure their interior panels quickly to make way for another patient with different needs. Not only that, but they need to be sensitive to rapid technology changes as well. “Hospitals are making decisions for what goes into an intensive care unit 10 years in advance,” says Jenkins. Which is why DIRTT also offers modular walls that are flexible and can be interchanged, like toy blocks. “Our clients should be able to repurpose our walls to reflect those changes.” 

Despite the company’s advancements in construction technology, however, it hasn’t been able to design for the residential market just yet. But DIRTT's videogame background is coming into play once again they are now exploring how the Oculus Rift and other virtual reality viewing systems may integrate with the ICE software -- to further simplify the design process and add more flexibility for homes in the future. Says Jenkins: “Imagine, if you slapped on those Oculus glasses, you could view what changes to make as if you were in the room.”

Is A Simulated Brain Conscious?

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Neurons simulated in a computer
Hermann Cuntz via Wikimedia Commons

Imagine standing in an open field with a bucket of water balloons and a couple of friends. You've decided to play a game called "Mind." Each of you has your own set of rules. Maybe Molly will throw a water balloon at Bob whenever you throw a water balloon at Molly. Maybe Bob will splash both of you whenever he goes five minutes without getting hit -- or if it gets too warm out or if it's seven o'clock or if he's in a bad mood that day. The details don't matter.

That game would look a lot like the way neurons, the cells that make up your brain and nerves, interact with one another. They sit around inside an ant or a bird or Stephen Hawking and follow a simple set of rules. Sometimes they send electrochemical signals to their neighbors. Sometimes they don't. No single neuron "understands” the whole system.

Now imagine that instead of three of of you in that field there were 86 billion -- about the number of neurons in an average brain. And imagine that instead of playing by rules you made up, you each carried an instruction manual written by the best neuroscientists and computer scientists of the day -- a perfect model of a human brain. No one would need the entire rulebook, just enough to know their job. If the lot of you stood around, laughing and playing by the rules whenever the rulebook told you, given enough time you could model one or two seconds of human thought.

Here's a question though: While you're all out there playing, is that model conscious? Are its feelings, modeled in splashing water, real? What does "real" even mean when it comes to consciousness? What's it like to be a simulation run on water balloons?

The Cajal Blue Brain, a simulated neurological system, in the supercomputer Magerit in Spain
CeSViMa via Wikimedia Commons
These questions may seem absurd at first, but now imagine the game of Mind sped up a million times. Instead of humans standing around in a field, you model the neurons in the most powerful supercomputer ever built. (Similar experiments have already been done, albeit on much smaller scales.) You give the digital brain eyes to look out at the world and ears to hear. An artificial voice box grants Mind the power of speech. Now we're in the twilight between science and science fiction. ("I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.")

Is Mind conscious now?

Now imagine Mind's architects copied the code for Mind straight out of your brain. When the computer stops working, does a version of you die?

These queries provide an ongoing puzzle for scientists and philosophers who think about computers, brains, and minds. And many believe they could one day have real world implications.

Dr. Scott Aaronson, a theoretical computer scientist at MIT and author of the blog Shtetl-Optimized, is part of a group of scientists and philosophers (and cartoonists) who have made a habit of dealing with these ethical sci-fi questions. While most researchers concern themselves primarily with data, these writers perform thought experiments that often reference space aliens, androids, and the Divine. (Aaronson is also quick to point out the highly speculative nature of this work.)

Many thinkers have broad interpretations of consciousness for humanitarian reasons, Aaronson tells Popular Science. After all, if that giant game of Mind in that field (or C-3PO or Data or Hal) simulates a thought or a feeling, who are we to say that consciousness is less valid than our own?

In 1950 the brilliant British codebreaker and early computer scientist Alan Turing wrote against human-centric theologies in his essay “Computing Machinery and Intelligence:”

Alan Turing
via Wikimedia Commons

Thinking is a function of man's immortal soul [they say.] God has given an immortal soul to every man and woman, but not to any other animal or to machines. Hence no animal or machine can think.

I am unable to accept any part of this … It appears to me that the argument quoted above implies a serious restriction of the omnipotence of the Almighty. It is admitted that there are certain things that He cannot do such as making one equal to two, but should we not believe that He has freedom to confer a soul on an elephant if He sees fit? ... An argument of exactly similar form may be made for the case of machines.

"I think it's like anti-racism," Aaronson says. "[People] don't want to say someone different than themselves who seems intelligent is less deserving just because he’s got a brain of silicon.”

According to Aaronson, this train of thought leads to a strange slippery slope when you imagine all the different things it could apply to. Instead, he proposes finding a solution to what he calls the Pretty Hard Problem. "The point," he says, "is to come up with some principled criterion for separating the systems we consider to be conscious from those we do not."

A lot of people might agree that a mind simulated in a computer is conscious, especially if they could speak to it, ask it questions, and develop a relationship with it. It's a vision of the future explored in the Oscar-winning film Her.

Think about the problems you'd encounter in a world where consciousness were reduced to a handy bit of software. A person could encrypt a disk, and then instead of Scarlett Johannsen's voice, all Joaquin Phoenix would hear in his ear would be strings of unintelligible data. Still, somewhere in there, something would be thinking.

Aaronson takes this one step further. If a mind can be written as code, there's no reason to think it couldn't be written out in a notebook. Given enough time, and more paper and ink than there is room in the universe, a person could catalogue every possible stimulus a consciousness could ever encounter, and label each with a reaction. That journal could be seen as a sentient being, frozen in time, just waiting for a reader.

“There’s a lot of metaphysical weirdness that comes up when you describe a physical consciousness as something that can be copied,” he says.

The weirdness gets even weirder when you consider that according to many theorists, not all the possible minds in the universe are biological or mechanical. In fact, under this interpretation the vast majority of minds look nothing like anything you or I will ever encounter. Here's how it works: Quantum physics -- the 20th century branch of science that reveals the hidden, exotic behavior of the particles that make up everything -- states that nothing is absolute. An unobserved electron isn't at any one point in space, really, but spread across the entire universe as a probability distribution; the vast majority of that probability is concentrated in a tight orbit around an atom, but not all of it. This still works as you go up in scale. That empty patch of sky midway between here and Pluto? Probably empty. But maybe, just maybe, it contains that holographic Charizard trading card that you thought slipped out of your binder on the way home from school in second grade.

As eons pass and the stars burn themselves out and the universe gets far emptier than it is today, that quantum randomness becomes very important. It's probable that the silent vacuum of space will be mostly empty. But every once in a while, clumps of matter will come together and dissipate in the infinite randomness. And that means, or so the prediction goes, that every once in a while those clumps will arrange themselves in such a way perfect, precise way that they jolt into thinking, maybe just for a moment, but long enough to ask, "What am I?"

These are the Boltzmann Brains, named after the nineteenth-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann. These strange late-universe beings will, according to one line of thinking, eventually outnumber every human, otter, alien and android who ever lived or ever will live. In fact, assuming this hypothesis is true, you, dear reader, probably are a Boltzmann Brain yourself. After all, there will only ever be one "real' version of you. But Boltzmann Brains popping into being while hallucinating this moment in your life -- along with your entire memory and experiences -- they will keep going and going, appearing and disappearing forever in the void.

In his talk at IBM, Aaronson pointed to a number of surprising conclusions thinkers have come to in order to resolve this weirdness.

You might say, sure, maybe these questions are puzzling, but what’s the alternative?  Either we have to say that consciousness is a byproduct of any computation of the right complexity, or integration, or recursiveness (or something) happening anywhere in the wavefunction of the universe, or else we’re back to saying that beings like us are conscious, and all these other things aren’t, because God gave the souls to us, so na-na-na.  Or I suppose we could say, like the philosopher John Searle, that we’re conscious, and ... all these other apparitions aren’t, because we alone have 'biological causal powers.' And what do those causal powers consist of?  Hey, you’re not supposed to ask that!  Just accept that we have them.  Or we could say, like Roger Penrose, that we’re conscious and the other things aren’t because we alone have microtubules that are sensitive to uncomputable effects from quantum gravity. [Aaronson points out elsewhere in the talk that there there is no direct or clear indirect evidence to support this claim.]  But neither of those two options ever struck me as much of an improvement.

Instead, Aaronson proposes a rule to help us understand what bits of matter are conscious and what bits of matter are not.

Conscious objects, he says, are locked into "the arrow of time." This means that a conscious mind cannot be reset to an earlier state, as you can do with a brain on a computer. When a stick burns or stars collide or a human brain thinks, tiny particle-level quantum interactions that cannot be measured or duplicated determine the exact nature of the outcome. Our consciousnesses are meat and chemical juices, inseperable from their particles. Once a choice is made or an experience is had, there's no way to truly rewind the mind to a point before it happened because the quantum state of the earlier brain can not be reproduced.

Descartes' illustration of mind-body dualism
Descartes via Wikimedia Commons
When a consciousness is hurt, or is happy, or is a bit too drunk, that experience becomes part of it forever. Packing up your mind in an email and sending it to Fiji might seem like a lovely way to travel, but, by Aaronson's reckoning, that replication of you on the other side would be a different consciousness altogether. The real you died with your euthanized body back home.

Additionally Aaronson says you shouldn't be concerned about being a Boltzmann Brain. Not only could a Boltzmann Brain never replicate a real human consciousness, but it could never be conscious in the first place. Once the theoretical apparition is done thinking its thoughts, it disappears unobserved back into the ether -- effectively rewound and therefore meaningless.

This doesn't mean us bio-beings must forever be alone in the universe. A quantum computer, or maybe even a sufficiently complex classical computer could find itself as locked into the arrow of time as we are. Of course, that alone is not enough to call that machine conscious. Aaronson says there are many more traits it must have before you would recognize something of yourself in it. (Turing himself proposed one famous test, though, as Popular Science reported, there is now some debate over its value.)

So, you, Molly, and Bob might in time forget that lovely game with the water balloons in the field, but you can never unlive it. The effects of that day will resonate through the causal history of your consciousness, part of an unbroken chain of joys and sorrows building toward your present. Nothing any of us experience ever really leaves us.

Top Dogs: Movies May Determine Which Pups Are Most Popular

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Dalmations.
After seeing 102 Dalmatians you’ll probably want to adopt all of them.
Walt Disney LTD
Did watching 101 Dalmatians instill you with a burning desire to fill your home with dozens of monochrome puppies? A new study suggests that may often be the case. The research suggests that all those great canine characters in films have been a prominent influence on the popularity of a breed among dog owners. The Conversation

The impact of 29 films released in the United States was examined, each featuring a different dog breed. Classics such as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Lady and the Tramp (1955), The Fox and the Hound (1981) and Beethoven (1992) were all judged to have influenced people’s choice of dogs. The study traces the popularity of the featured breeds for up to ten years after the film’s release.

The authors used the records of the American Kennel Club, which has been recording the numbers of registration for each dog breed since 1927, and keeps the largest such dog registry in the world. Looking at the effect of films released between 1927 and 2005, the study shows that the number of registrations of a particular breed rose significantly following the release of a film in which the breed had been featured.

Let’s look at an obvious example. The numbers of collies rose from 2331 registered in 1943, the year when Lassie Come Home was released, to 20,006 registered a decade later. The film, which focuses on the relationship between young Joe and his beloved dog Lassie, traces faithful Lassie’s long and difficult journey back to her dear owner after being sold by his family.

The films analysed covered quite a spread of breeds. Other factors you might assume come into play when choosing a dog, such as temperament or health, seemed not to affect the scale of these trends. Alberto Acerbi, one of the authors of the study and Newton Research Fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Bristol, said: “It seems to be pure fashion.”

A connection between the number of film views in the first weekend after its release and the rise in the popularity of the dog breed featured was observed. The study shows that earlier films generally created more widespread trends than the more recent films. The authors conjecture that this could be linked to the rise of home video, as well as the increase in the number of films released featuring dogs each year.

Dog movie stars and popularity.
Ghirlanda, Stefano (2014)

The impact of the films is perceivable, gradually, creating long-term rather than short-term trend changes. Out of the 29 examined cases, 14 show that the popularity of a breed reached its peak ten years after its feature in a film, rather than immediately following the film’s release. So apparently films are capable of influencing long-lasting preferences and inclinations in their audiences.

David Spiegelhalter, a statistician at the University of Cambridge, took a look at the research. He said:

This is a nice use of statistics, as they take into account existing trends before the film, but the results are perhaps not so surprising. Just as Toy Story can sell Buzz Lightyear toys, so 101 Dalmatians can make families want spotty dogs.

So maybe it seems obvious that Lassie made a good name for Collies, or that children started to feel very protective over Dalmatians. But such analysis of causes and patterns behind seemingly random trends further demonstrates just how much fictional narratives influence our beliefs and actions.

“The results can be seen as representative of the general great impact of film on trends,” observes Tom van Laer, consumer researcher at ESCP Europe Business School. Indeed, a similar tendency is evident in the way numerous babies have been named after characters from the Marvel films, the Harry Potter series and television shows such as Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad.

In a recent article, van Laer writes about 76 different studies, which together show that individuals more thoroughly transported into the world of a narrative are more likely to adopt the outlooks and principles of the story.

Many of the films in which dogs play the central part are intended for children. Van Laer said that “under seven or eight years, immersion in fictional narratives is achieved more easily and thoroughly by children". He emphasized that stories are central to children’s development and such immersions in fictional worlds in childhood have deeper and more lasting effects.

But Acerbi warns against taking the results of the paper as proof that our personal choices are to some extent always determined by the media and entertainment we consume:

I do not think social influence is an all-encompassing force. Perhaps choices like dog breeds, or names, are quite ‘neutral’, so their popularity can be influenced by the presence in a movie. But this is less true for other choices with bigger consequences.

Others would disagree. One political scientist recently argued that the values promoted in Harry Potter influenced the politics of its fans. So Homeward Bound may champion the values of friendship and loyalty, and 101 Dalmatians the evils of the fur trade, but be sure to be careful about watching The Ugly Dachshund with your kids unless you want a Great Dane.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Week In Drones: Whale Snot, Tower Inspectors, And More

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Sperm Whale Mother And Child
Gabriel Barathieu, via Wikimedia Commons

Here's a roundup of the week's top drone news: the military, commercial, non-profit, and recreational applications of unmanned aircraft.

Whale Stress Testers 

Want to see if a whale is stressed? Just fly a drone over it! Students from Olin College of Engineering are doing just that, using a drone to collect whale snot as it's blown out of its blowhole. Whale snot contains health indicators about the whale, much like how blood tests reveal information about the inner state of a human.

The best part of this snot-hunting drone story? To test it, the drone first had to get snythetic snot from a fake whale. The Boston Globe reports:

A team from Olin and the Gloucester-based whale conservation nonprofit Ocean Alliance spent the summer gathering data they hope will help them earn a federal permit to monitor whales with their robot. In the Gulf of Mexico, they tested their drone’s ability to harvest pseudo-snot, ejected from a fake whale: an inflatable catamaran fitted with an array of sensors that measured what a real whale would feel and hear when it was being followed by a drone, a small helicopter with four rotors that is bigger than a shoebox but smaller than a minifridge.

Aerial Rat Race

Losing a pet is a sad day for a child. Two Dutch inventors decided that the best way to help a 13-year-old grieve for his dead pet rat was turning that rat into the body of a drone. The rat drone won’t get lonely, though. These same inventors also taxidermied a cat into a drone, making this the grimmest, most cyberpunk reboot of Tom and Jerry possible.

Drones! Read All About ‘Em

The Center For The Study Of The Drone at Bard College published a primer on drones. It’s longer and more comprehensive than most introductory pieces and includes sections on drone strategy, drones in culture, and drone art. It also addresses many of the ethical issues involved with drones, including war and privacy.

Inspector Drone-It

In the Netherlands, cellphone giant T-Mobile is partnering with dronemaker Aerialtronics to test drones as cellphone tower inspectors. T-Mobile will use Altura drones, which are quadcopters with cameras attached underneath, to inspect the cellphone towers at the Galgenwaard soccer stadium in Utretch. Drones are an ideal choice for work like this, because they can easily fly to the tops of towers for visual checkups, while human inspectors stay safely on the ground.

Amazon’s Drone Bazaar

Amazon is more know for testing delivery drones than they are for delivering drones, but a change in their virtual store layout might change that. Amazon consolidated their various drones for sale into a special drone section of the store, with buying guides and videos available for consumers to select their ideal flying robot.

Buzzing The Governor

Forty-one law professors signed a letter by California Assemblyman Jeff Gorell (R-Camarillo), Steven Bradford (D-Gardena), Bill Quirk (D-Hayward) supporting Assembly Bill 1327, which calls for restricting police drone use. Specifically, the bill requires police obtain warrants before using drones in many instances, with exceptions mostly for “emergency situations if there is an imminent threat to life or of great bodily harm.” The bill sets out strong privacy protections for the public, and it notes that unmanned aircraft systems are drones, which is helpful reminder for some California police departments.

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

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