Wide Eyed

Jason Schneider

There’s no direct evidence that TVs, computers, or cell phones cause nearsightedness. Yet worries about the effects of staring at illuminated screens persist. Our eyes adjust their shape to focus on “near work” with printed text or digital displays, so it seems plausible that extended bouts of reading might lead to lasting damage. But Kathryn Rose of the University of Sydney says this hypothesis has not been borne out.

That said, staring at screens can cause discomfort, says Mark Rosenfield of the State University of New York’s College of Optometry. In a study conducted by his lab, about 40 percent of office workers from a sample in Manhattan reported having symptoms of eyestrain for at least half the time they’re on duty—a condition he calls “Computer Vision Syndrome.”

Rosenfield blames this not necessarily on screens, but on small print and shorter distances between our eyes and the material being read. Smartphones and tablets may make eyestrain worse because we typically hold them closer to us and more directly in front of our faces than we do books. But the exact roots of Computer Vision Syndrome remain mysterious: “We don’t have a good handle on the underlying causes,” Rosenfield says.

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

Scuba

Chen Wu via Flickr CC By 2.0

160 times: Oxygen compression of this chemical versus ambient air, which researcher hope could render the SCUBA tank obsolete.

80 cm: resolution of a new Chinese imaging satellite, CHEOS, their most powerful yet.

63 years: time since a cloud was last added to the World Meteorological Organization’s Cloud Atlas. But enthusiasts expect a new one to be added soon.

(GIF cut from video by Alex Schueth)

1 trillion: watts of power sea monkeys may be pumping into the oceans, enough to impact the climate.

Sea Monkey Swirls.

This timelapse image shows the circulation patterns as the sea monkeys (white) move through the water and glass particles (yellow).

M. M. Wilhelmus and J. O. Dabiri/Caltech

145: Bison from Yellowstone National Park up for grabs in a bid to save their lives.

2000 lbs: weight of just one bison.

Oh give me a home...

U.S. Department of Agriculture, via Flickr CC By 2.0

1000 times: magnification of this 3D-printed smartphone microscope.

DIY Microscope at Work

The phone screen here shows onion cells magnified 350X. On the right is a pile of 3-D printed plastic housings.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

12 to 18: people believed to be at risk from the American Ebola patient.

21: days until patients under observation can be cleared.

1: number of shotguns used by this New Jersey man to bring down his neighbors drone.

McDonald Observatory

Flickr CC by 2.0

Today is International Astronomy Day, so lets celebrate by looking up. Created in 1973, the holiday’s mission involves sharing the joy of astronomy with the general public; astronomy clubs, planetariums, leagues, and observatories will offer anything from free admission to telescope rentals. You can look for IAD events at your local observatories and planetariums or check out NASA’s Night Sky Club to find astro-events and star parties in your neighborhood.

Don’t have the leisure to go sky watching in person? There are some apps for you. Fly through space, get a 3-D view of the Crab Nebula, or walk on the moon. These fun and innovative apps are sure to wake up your inner astronaut. Lift off in T-minus 3… 2… 1...

Unmanned Patrol Boat

Look ma, no crew!

U.S. Navy Photo

Call them sea drones, dronaughts, or roboats, the Navy demonstrated a swarm of remotely-controlled boats on the James River in Virginia this August. As if animated by the same mind, the 13 patrol boats all moved in unison, their crewless decks painting a picture of what warfare may soon become. The project, by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), wants to save both lives and costs, keeping sailors out of harms way while still keeping boats in the water.

Here’s what that exercise looked like:

Key to the boats is a program named Control Architecture for Robotic Agent Command and Sensing, or CARACaS. According to the ONR, CARACaS “allows boats to operate autonomously, without a sailor physically needing to be at the controls—including operating in sync with other unmanned vessels; choosing their own routes; swarming to interdict enemy vessels; and escorting/protecting naval assets.”

In the demonstration, the Navy boats first escorted a “high value unit,” simulating a ring of robotic bodyguards around a vessel in a narrow part of the sea. Then, with the support of a manned helicopter overhead designating a “contact of interest” for the boats to intercept, they swarmed around their target.

Tow Unmanned Patrol Boats

U.S. Navy Photo

The boats' autonomy is enabled by a sort of hive-sense. The unmanned surface vessels are linked, and together, they share information from their sensors. Each boat knows its own surrounding environment and the location of other vessels, and it shares this situation awareness with the other ships in the swarm.

On the phone with media, Read Admiral Matthew L. Klunder and ONR program manager Robert Brizzolara confirmed that, while the robot ships had the ability to move on their own, there is “always a human in the loop” before the robot boats fire their weapons. And that human may very well be singular; the 13 ships of this demonstration were all controlled by one sailor. Should the signal with the controller be lost, the boats will stop themselves. There’s also another kill switch that the controller can press to make the robot boats stop dead in the water.

The boats are all patrol craft, typically crewed by four to five sailors. Replacing the crew with robotic controls means the Navy needs 40 to 50 fewer people for a 13-ship exercise. That means more lives out of harms way, as well as saved costs on personnel. The boats are existing Navy craft, and ONR said they were armed with a variety of weapons -- from .50 caliber machine guns to high-powered microwave weapons.

Autonomous Boat Swarm

U.S. Navy Photo

For the immediate future, this means that the Navy can do more with less. They can perform more patrols, since unmanned swarms of up to 20 boats can be controlled by one sailor at a time. And they can use fewer people; round-the-clock patrols only require one new sailor at the controls every few hours, instead of 50 sailors out in the water every time.

More patrols with small ships surrounding big ones will make larger vessels safer, as well. Multiple times during the media call, Klunder and Brizzolara mentioned al Qaeda’s suicide bombing attack on the destroyer USS Cole in October 2000. As the Cole refueled at a Yemeni port, a small foreign craft approached the side of the destroyer and exploded, killing 17 sailors and injuring 39. Klunder specifically stated that “the systems we put on the water would have prevented" such a terrible tragedy. Klunder didn't specify how the robotic patrol boats would have saved the Cole, but it's possible that an unmanned robot boat could intercept a vessel full of suicide bombers. Then, the robot could either disable the attacking vehicle or cause any explosions to detonate prematurely, with no American lives lost.

Protecting the fleet is the first and most obvious use of CARACaS, but autonomy and swarming have the potential for so much more than just intercepting small boats. Klunder says that while people might not accept CARACaS on a destroyer soon, the technology would work for merchant vessels and larger ships. If the trend on the sea is moving away from crew (as seen in both military and commercial vessels) in favor of automation, CARACaS is leading the way. First patrol boats, then the high seas.

Watch a video of the exercise from ONR below:

Super Mario Couch

Jason Schneider

There have been scattered accounts of people victimized in role-playing games such as Second Life or World of Warcraft and suffering in the aftermath. But no large-scale academic study has ever been written up, Kirwan says. And even if a player were to have a disturbing experience, he could avoid compounding the stress by steering clear of that game, or online games altogether, in the future.

"I think that somebody would have to be psychologically compromised to begin with to mistake the events that go on in the virtual world for real events," says Skip Rizzo, a psychiatrist at the University of Southern California. That doesn't mean virtual experiences aren't powerful, though. In fact, Rizzo uses virtual-reality (VR) environments to help patients with PTSD relive controlled versions of traumatic events in order to move past them.

The first such work was done in the mid-1990s, when researchers put people afraid of heights onto virtual footbridges and balconies to expose them to the source of their fear and gradually help them overcome it. Later, the same type of therapy recreated scarring scenes from the Vietnam War and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center so survivors could come to terms with the events. Rizzo's team also built a system for veterans who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which participants could be subjected--under a clinician's care--to more than a dozen different scenarios from the Middle East.

To create the most immersive VR therapy experience, Rizzo incorporates extra sensory stimuli. He adds realistic sounds such as boots on gravel, military banter, and even indigenous birdsong. But it's not yet clear if these bells and whistles make the treatment significantly more effective. "We have a smell machine, but does it really matter?" Rizzo asks. "That's a good empirical question. We just go ahead and use it."

In any case, veterans traumatized by war are more likely to find sympathy--and treatment--than World of Warcraft gamers. People tend to blame the victims of virtual assaults, Kirwan has observed. "They might ask, Why didn't you just turn off your computer?" While online victims may not have PTSD per se, they could still benefit from therapy. Shaming just makes them harder for psychologists to identify, highlighting the need for more research. "If anybody has experienced this, they'll want to know that they're not alone," Kirwan says. "It happens, and it's not okay."

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of Popular Science.

A Lab-Made Urethra

From the same lab as the engineered penis described below

Courtesy Wake Forest University

Are you ready? A team of scientists say they're getting ready. They want to implant lab-grown penises onto human volunteers within the next five years, the Guardian reports. The pensies are designed to work for people who have lost theirs due to birth defects, cancer treatment, or injury. The team will seek approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to conduct the human tests.

This isn't the first time this team, led by Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina, has built human organs for transplant. The same team has made urethras and vaginas in lab and tested both in human patients. Like the lab-grown urethras and vaginas, these man-made penises will be grown from samples of patients' own cells (which means they require a biopsy from an existing penis, so unfortunately, this transplant won't work for transgender men who want new organs altogether).

As the Guardian reports, the doctors would take biopsies from the patients, then coax the biopsied cells to multiply in a petri dish. The cells have to come from all the tissue types of the penis, such as muscle, endothelium, and blood vessels. Those tissues are applied, in order, on a collagen scaffolding, which would come from a deceased organ donor. Atala's urethras and vaginas are also built from patients' cells, grown on scaffolds, although those scaffolds don't seem to require organ donors.

The idea behind using biopsied cells is to ensure that patients get a real, live organ that their immune systems won't reject. Whether the organ will work the way patients want—in the case of penises, allowing them to have erections or even father children—remains to be seen.

The team previously made penises in this way and transplanted them onto 12 male rabbits, the Guardian reports. After their surgeries, all of the rabbits tried to mate when placed in a cage with a female. Eight of them ejaculated. Four fathered baby bunnies. Scaling up from a rabbit penis to a human one has been a major challenge, Atala told the Guardian, but he has thus far made six human-size organs that have undergone some durability testing:

[Guardian]

Jonathan Viventi

Illustrations by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

Existing brain implants require individual electrodes to be wired to an external device for data processing. Viventi’s arrays contain transistors that enable the signals to be processed locally, yet they're as thin and flexible as a sheet of cellophane, conforming to the contours of the brain. As a result, the number of electrodes can be increased by an order of magnitude. “We can actually sample with extremely high resolution across a virtually unlimited area of the brain,” Viventi says. In animal studies, this enabled reseachers to recognize the subtle brain signals that seem to give rise to seizures—a capability he hopes doctors can use to better understand epilepsy in humans. One day, he says, the device may even be able to provide targeted electrical stimulation to halt such episodes before they begin.

These arrays have tremendous potential to improve the quality of life for people with many kinds of disabilities. They could enable amputees to control prostheses with their minds, for example, or restore hearing to those with auditory nerve damage. Technology can solve many medical problems, Viventi says. “We just have to plug away and apply what we already know.”

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of Popular Science.

How Can I Help You?

In the 2013 film, Elysium, critical jobs have been outsourced to intractible, inadequate machines, like this automated customer service rep.

Image Courtesy of Elysium: The Art of the Film © 2013 Tristar Pictures

Eugene’s victory was short-lived. Within days, AI researchers had dismissed the chatbot’s achievement as a collection of canned responses. Then they took the Turing Test itself to task. Conceived of as a kind of existential parlor game, the test asks a human and a machine to respond to questions from remote interrogators. A computer mistaken for a person would prove that it had developed the capacity to mimic our own thought processes. 

That all sounds good enough, but “people are easy to deceive,” says Ernie Davis, a computer scientist at New York University. “We’re used to the safe assumption that whoever is talking to us is actually an intelligent person.” So human officiants will likely give the computer the benefit of the doubt. Additionally, chatbots often mask their lack of reasoning by coming across as merely scatterbrained. For example, futurist Ray Kurzweil once asked Eugene, “If I have two marbles in a bowl and I add two more, how many marbles are in the bowl now?” “Not too many,” wrote Eugene. “I can’t tell you the exact number; I forgot it. If I’m not mistaken, you still didn’t tell me where you live.”

In that way, the Turing Test doesn’t foster the development of machines with adaptive, human-level smarts. Instead, it exposes our own gullibility, and spawns programs whose greatest innovation is the tactical use of snarky non-sequiturs and manipulative charm.

The harsh criticism of AI’s most famous benchmark comes at a moment when interest and investment in the field are spiking. Google recently acquired AI firm DeepMind for $400 million, and IBM is investing $1 billion in its Watson system, the former Jeopardy! winner that’s now unraveling the genetics of brain cancer. Even the late Alan Turing is getting the Hollywood treatment this fall, as the subject of the biopic The Imitation Game. Some might say the field of AI doesn’t need the Turing Test anymore. We should just let machines grow smarter on their own inhuman terms.

That would be a mistake. The genius of the Turing Test is that it captured the public imagination and drove innovation. So why not build a new one better suited to the task of proving true artificial intelligence. “Maybe rather than looking at one big hurdle, we should try to understand how to make a bunch of small steps that lead us along the path to something useful,” says Noah Goodman, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University. Machines should have to tackle a range of tasks that emphasize nimble, on-the-spot thinking. Can it describe a video after seeing it for the first time, respond to direct questions with direct answers, and recognize nuances in language? Far more than a gimmick, such a system would finally demonstrate, in Turing’s words, “a machine that thinks.” Eugene was nowhere close. 

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

LEDs!

PiccoloNamek on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Three scientists have jointly earned the Nobel Prize in physics for their work on blue LEDs, or light-emitting diodes. Why blue in particular? Well, blue was the last -- and most difficult -- advance required to create white LED light. And with white LED light, companies are able to create smartphone and computer screens, as well as light bulbs that last longer and use less electricity than any bulb invented before.

LEDs are basically semiconductors that have been built so they emit light when they're activated. Different chemicals give different LEDs their colors. Engineers made the first LEDs in the 1950s and 60s. Early iterations included laser-emitting devices that worked only when bathed in liquid nitrogen. At the time, scientists developed LEDs that emitted everything from infrared light to green light… but they couldn't quite get to blue. That required chemicals, including carefully-created crystals, that they weren't yet able to make in the lab.

Once they did figure it out, however, the results were remarkable. A modern white LED lightblub converts more than 50 percent of the electricity it uses into light. Compare that to the 4 percent conversion rate for incandescent bulbs, and you have one efficient bulb. Besides saving money and electricity for all users, white LEDs' efficiency makes them appealing for getting lighting to folks living in regions without electricity supply. A solar installation can charge an LED lamp to last a long time, allowing kids to do homework at night and small businesses to continue working after dark.

LEDs also last up to 100,000 hours, compared to 10,000 hours for fluorescent lights and 1,000 hours for incandescent bulbs. Switching more houses and buildings over to LEDs could significantly reduce the world's electricity and materials consumption for lighting.

A white LED light is easy to make from a blue one. Engineers use a blue LED to excite some kind of fluorescent chemical in the bulb. That converts the blue light to white light.

Two of this year's prize winners, Isamu Akasaki and Hiroshi Amano, worked together on producing high-quality gallium nitride, a chemical that appears in many of the layers in a blue LED. The previous red and green LEDs used gallium phosphide, which was easier to produce. Akasaki and Amano discovered how to add chemicals to gallium nitride semiconductors in such a way that they would emit light efficiently. The pair built structures with layers of gallium nitride alloys.

The third prize-winner, Shuji Nakamura, also worked on making high-quality gallium nitride. He figured out why gallium nitride semiconductors treated with certain chemicals glow. He built his own gallium nitride alloy-based structures.

Both Nakamura's and Akasaki's groups will continue to work on making even more efficient blue LEDs, the committee for the Nobel Prize in physics said in a statement. Nakamura is now a professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, although he began his LED research at a small Japanese chemical company called Nichia Chemical Corporation. Akasaki and Amano are professors at Nagoya University in Japan.

In the future, engineers may make white LEDs by combining red, green, and blue ones, which would make a light with tunable colors, the Nobel Committee wrote.

[Nobel Prize]

The Wait For Space

A look through the open hatch of SpaceX's Dragon V2 capsule, one of two designs chosen for NASA's Commercial Crew Transportation Capability program. Both Boeing and SpaceX have been told to halt production of their space taxi designs until a protest filed by the Sierra Nevada Corporation has been resolved.

NASA

The Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) isn’t going down without a fight – and it looks like they’re taking their competitors down with them. Both SpaceX and Boeing have been told to halt production of their NASA-funded space taxis until the space agency resolves a legal protest issued by SNC.

Last month, NASA finally announced the winners of its Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (CCtCap) program, an initiative aimed at fostering the development of private spaceflight. The two winning companies, SpaceX and Boeing, received contracts with NASA and a combined sum of $6.8 billion to build and operate their own space taxis, which would ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station starting in 2017.

In essence, SNC was the loser of that competition. Their Dream Chaser space taxi was the other major contender for the contract, and the vehicle was thought by some to be on par with SpaceX’s Dragon V2 capsule and Boeing’s CST-100. In a press release, the company claimed that Dream Chaser was actually equal to its competition in technical requirements, and it could be built and operated at a cheaper cost than one of the other company’s spacecraft. (They didn’t specify whom.)

So SNC filed a formal bid protest with the Government Accountability Office, hoping to do a formal review of NASA’s selection process for their CCtCap contracts. But until SNC's protest gets sorted out, it looks like SpaceX and Boeing won’t be developing their space taxis any time soon. According to a report from Spaceflight Now, a spokesperson for NASA says that the legal challenge stops any work that was to be done under the contracts.

"Pursuant to the GAO protest, NASA has instructed Boeing and SpaceX to stop performance of the CCtCap contract," Stephanie Schierholz, a spokesperson for NASA, tells Spaceflight Now.

Unfortunately, SpaceX and Boeing could be waiting a while, as a GAO bid protest can take up to 100 days to be resolved. So unless NASA and SNC figure out an alternative solution before then, the two companies may be sitting on their hands until January 5, 2015.

We still don’t know the exact criteria NASA used to judge the competing spacecraft designs, but in their original solicitation for CCtCap, the agency stressed that the vehicles must be safe, reliable, and cost effective. According to the GAO, NASA has until October 26 to respond to SNC’s claims, by putting together all the documents that are pertinent to their decision. Theoretically, that will include thorough details of the selection process.

SNC claims this is the first time in its 51-year history that the company has filed a legal challenge to a government award. The protest argues that “NASA’s own Source Selection Statement and debrief indicate that there are serious questions and inconsistencies in the source selection process.”

However, a source familiar with NASA’s decision told the Wall Street Journal that SNC “lagged behind the other two bidders in some technical rankings.”

So buckle up, kids. This spaceship catfight is just getting into full swing. Meanwhile, hopefully the Russians will still let us ride shotgun.

OJ

Jeremy Keith via Flickr CC By 2.0

In a handy video, the American Chemical Society has explained why orange juice (and food in general) tastes like soap after you brush your teeth. The basic gist is that a detergent called sodium lauryl sulfate, found within your toothpaste, blocks the sweet receptors on your tongue and ramps up your bitterness receptors. The ACS has a more detailed explanation below:

Next, hopefully they'll tackle the question of why toothpaste makes water taste extra cold. (...Or is that just me?) 

Other gustatory questions you can chew on:

• What Does Water Taste Like?
• Will A Chicken That's Fed Lemons Taste Like Lemons?
• Why Does Coke From a Glass Bottle Taste Different?
• Why Do Kids Hate Brussels Sprouts?
• What Kind Of Dinosaur Meat Would Taste Best?

Feet for Little Shoes

Bay County, Michigan

After getting a uterus transplant, a woman in Sweden has carried and given birth to a baby boy. She's named the baby Vincent, which means "to conquer," signifying his parents' tough path to this moment, the Associated Press reports.

Vincent is the world's first baby to be born from a transplanted uterus. The operation itself had only been tried twice before this January, when the Swedish doctor treating the new, milestone-setting mom gave eight other women similar transplants.

The birth is the major marker of the procedure's success, as transplanted uteruses aren't meant to stay in the patient's body forever. Instead, the idea is that a woman would get a uterus, bear one or two children, and then get the organ removed again. To keep their bodies from rejecting the donated organ, women with transplanted uteruses must continually take immunosuppressant drugs, which leaves them vulnerable to infections. So the sooner they can get off the drugs after having the family they desire, the better.

The boy was premature, but is healthy, the AP reports. "It's a fantastic feeling," the mother told the BBC. "Even if I had years and years of sorrow and loss of hope, at the first touch and when I saw my baby, I just felt as a mother." The woman, who wished to remain anonymous, learned at age 15 that she had been born without a uterus and wouldn't be able to have children on her own.

The uterus came from a close family friend, who is 61 years old. The father called the donor "amazing and selfless." The egg and sperm came from the baby's parents, who are much younger, and were implanted in the womb surgically.

Want to learn more about the science behind the surgery? Check out Popular Science's explainer from February. You'll learn about what makes uterus transplants difficult, what questions scientists still have about these transplants, and why someone would want a transplant at all.

[AP, BBC]

Giant Clam

James Heilman, MD, via Wikimedia Commons

Giant clams loom large on coral reefs, their gaping maws filled with bright lights. On other mollusks, this iridescence is a camouflage, guiding the eye away from the creature’s body. Recent research published in the Royal Society of Science’s journal Interface reveals that these patches of iridescence filter and distribute light for algae that grows inside the clams.

Algae and  giant clams have a symbiotic relationship. Algae are the engine of the sea, turning sunlight into useful nutritional value for almost everything else. Clams host the algae so that they may consume the by-products of the algae's photosynthesis. Algae need sunlight to grow, but too much is harmful, so clams, which have tiny iridescent cells inside their mantles, offer the best of both worlds.

In the paper, called “Photosymbiotic giant clams are transformers of solar flux", Amanda L. Holt and her team show that the iridocytes filter light, sending the wavelengths most beneficial to algae into the mantle, and scattering the more harmful wavelengths away. Algae, in turn, hangs out in the mantle in “micropillars,” maximizing surface area for absorbing the light. The whole system is mutually beneficial.

Beyond the coolness of figuring out that the reason clams shine so brightly is to make little symbiotic farms, there’s a practical application to this knowledge. Algae has a lot of potential as a biofuel, but it often takes novel solutions to get a useful, harvestable oil. New techniques for humans to turn algae into biofuel may filter light like clams do, making a bright future for green energy.

[BioSciBlog]

CO2 Scrubber

NASA

When an oxygen tank exploded as Apollo 13 neared the moon, the three-man crew had to abort their mission, power down the command module, and move into the lunar module for the journey home. Designed to house only two people, the craft quickly filled with dangerous levels of carbon dioxide. 

To save themselves, the astronauts had to somehow attach a square CO₂ scrubber to the circular opening of the lunar module’s filtration system. The ground team designed an adapter from the limited items on board, including hoses from spacesuits, tube socks, and duct tape. 

Astronaut Ken Mattingly was supposed to fly on Apollo 13, but he was bumped from the mission after being exposed to German measles. So when disaster struck, Mattingly was on the ground. From there, he assisted with NASA’s rescue efforts, and after the Apollo 13 astronauts moved from the Command/Service Module (CSM) to the Lunar Module (LM), he helped them hack an air filter to fit their new quarters. (The CSM breaks down into two other separate modules: the Command Module (CM) and the Service Module (SM).)

Mattingly gave Popular Science an in-depth account of the ordeal.

Popular Science: How did the air filtration system work?

Ken Mattingly: In any spacecraft—at least the ones that carry humans—control of the atmosphere is a major design consideration. In both the CSM and the LM, the atmosphere flows through a little canister with a filter that is filled with lithium hydroxide. The lithium hydroxide will absorb CO₂. The filter is just to absorb odors and trap dust, so it doesn't clog up some of the small valves that are regulating flow.

PS: How did the system in the Command/Service Module differ from that in the Lunar Module?

KM: The CSM ended up with canisters that were rectangular blocks. The LM ended up with circular disks—just a big circle with gas flowing in and out through a hole in the center. The two canisters are chemically interchangeable, but not physically interchangeable.

PS: After the tank blew, why did the astronauts have to move into the Lunar Module?

KM: When the oxygen was rapidly depleting, that meant two things to the CSM. First, it was going to lose electrical power. When you run out of oxygen your fuel cells quit, as does your life support and pressurization. The CSM also has two small batteries, but you need them to run the Command Module from the time you separate from the Service Module until you get down on the ground. So we were very, very concerned about doing anything that would tap into the batteries. We said, “Okay, we're gonna stuff these kids in the Lunar Module and live off the LM.” The LM has all batteries, no fuel cells.

PS: When did the situation in the Lunar Module become a crisis too?  

KM: About the time we went around the Moon, the LM started getting the high CO₂ light. And they changed out the [air filtration] canister. People started saying, “Hmm, you know, we're going to run out of canisters here in a hurry. What alternatives do we have?" Well, we have this stack of lithium hydroxide in the CSM, but it doesn't fit in the container [of the LM]. So what can you do?

The Apollo 13 Crew.

From left to right: Jim Lovell, Thomas “Ken” Mattingly, and Fred Haise.

NASA

PS: Where the astronauts ready for this type of problem?

KM: As part of our preparation for these missions, the simulation supervisors injected various anomalies and situations we weren't planning for [into the flight plan exercises] to test the contingency and emergency procedures we had developed.

On an early mission—it could have been Apollo 10 or Apollo 9—they created a situation where they had contaminated the atmosphere in the CM, and they had to figure out how to get it out of there. They said, “Well, why don't we move into the LM? And we'll close up and depressurize the CM, get rid of all the cabin atmosphere, then repressurize it, open up the LM, and bring the crew back?”

PS: So how did the team deal with the incompatibility between the CSM canisters and the LM filtration system?

KM: Well, everybody thought the simulation was really a way-out problem. No one could think of any rational way you could get into that situation. But as soon as this [happened to] Apollo 13, somebody said, “You remember the LM lifeboat?” And that jogged everyone's memory and they said, “Oh yeah!”

So how did we do it in that simulation? We cut open some plastic bags that we packaged stuff in and, using just plain old gray duct tape, taped a bag around the canister. Then we inserted it in the suit hose and taped it to one of the nozzles on each end, so you could blow the air through it. It would take some time to run it, but it would run just like if you put it in the manifold itself. We did the same thing [for Apollo 13].

PS: It sounds like it was a fairly calm situation on the ground. Is that really how it was?

KM: The beauty in this whole thing was, these guys were so prepared for even the most implausible things. They knew no one had ever simulated exactly what happened, but they had simulated the kind of stress that could be applied to the system and the people in it. They knew what their options were, and had some ideas already in place about where to go.

In the movie, they played it like nobody ever thought of this. They dumped a bunch of junk on the table and said, "Can you figure it out?" That was the only way the movie could convey how we got there. [In reality,] there was total familiarity with the hardware.

Why Duct Tape?

The secret to duct tape’s versatility, whether in a spacecraft or an Earth-bound garage, lies in its fabric layer. Sandwiched between a flexible polyethylene coating and a sticky rubber adhesive, cotton mesh augments the tape’s tensile strength like steel rebar reinforces concrete. Horizontal and vertical threads, meanwhile, make it easy to tear by hand.

This article was originally published in the October 2014 issue of Popular Science. It has been expanded in this web version.

Even as most of the world's ice is melting due to climate change, Antarctica's sea ice grew this year, to cover more ocean than ever in human memory.

Researchers maintain a catalogue of satellite images of the frozen Antarctic seas that dates back to the late 1970s. While the northern Arctic has lost an average of 20,800 square miles a year in that time, NASA says, the Antarctic has gained an average of 7,300. On an average year, Antarctica's sea ice maxes out at about 7.23 million square miles. On September 20, it peaked at 7.78 million--the most ever. Satellite images show how much of the ocean's surface freezes, but ignore other factors like ice thickness and volume. Massive, ancient chunks of ice have disappeared into the ocean even as this temporary, seasonal, and relatively thin cover has grown.

NASA researchers believe the new record was a product of changes in climate patterns of air and water circulation near Earth's southern pole. Among the possible culprits: shifting winds and ocean currents shoving colder air and water toward the area, and increased snow seeding the ocean with slush that could form a more resilient ice cover. Antarctica, far from other continents, also has few obstacles preventing its ice from expanding in the right conditions.

“It's really not surprising to people in the climate field that not every location on the face of Earth is acting as expected – it would be amazing if everything did,” Claire Parkinson, a NASA scientist, said in a statement. “The Antarctic sea ice is one of those areas where things have not gone entirely as expected. So it’s natural for scientists to ask, ‘OK, this isn’t what we expected, now how can we explain it?’”

[NASA]

Katharina Ribbeck

Illustrations by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

To study mucus in the lab, Ribbeck built three-dimensional matrices composed of mucins, the long, sugar-coated threads that give it structure. Scientists used to believe that mucins behaved like a spider web, trapping anything that came by. But Ribbeck's research indicates it's far more discerning than previously thought. “It turns out the body can change the composition of those threads and build gels with different characteristics,” she says.

Last year, Ribbeck and her colleagues found that pregnant women at high risk for pre-term birth tend to have weaker, more permeable cervical mucus than those who aren’t at risk. The barrier potentially allows pathogens to enter, prompting early labor. Ribbeck hopes to uncover similiar markers for cavities, ulcers, and other conditions. She’s also working to develop artificial mucins—which could provide an alternative to antibiotics by changing microbial behavior on the body's surface. 

“Mucus is probably our largest filter in the body,” Ribbeck says. “But it’s commonly disregarded as snot.” That’s an injustice she hopes to rectify. In fact, she recently began working on a children’s book with a superhero who harnesses mucus power. 

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

Click here to read about the other Brilliant Ten honorees of 2014. 

Eclipsed Moon, October 8, 2014

Chad Horwedel on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Used with permission.

Early this morning, Americas time, the moon underwent a total eclipse. The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles trained its telescope on the moon for the event, then made this wonderful one-minute video out of five and a half hours of footage:

The sudden flick from white to red in the video occurs because the Griffith staff adjusted the "gain" on their camera, making it more sensitive to light.

In general, during an eclipse, the moon appears rusty, coppery red to the naked eye. That's because when the sun, Earth, and moon are lined up, sunlight must pass through the Earth's atmosphere before it reaches the moon. The atmosphere filters out green, blue, and violet light, leaving only the reddish parts of the visible spectrum to reach the moon.

Commentators at the Griffith Observatory noted that today's eclipse seemed darker red than usual. The temperature, humidity, and dust content of the Earth's atmosphere may all affect how dark an eclipse appears.

Here's another way to get a sense of what the eclipse looked like. Chad Horwedel of Bolingbrook, Illinois, made the below image from a series of shots he says he took from his backyard. The redder photos come from him increasing his camera's exposure time. The series shows the moon entering eclipse, but not exiting, as the moon set in Illinois before it exited eclipse.

Lunar Eclipse, October 8, 2014

Chad Horwedel on Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Used with permission.

Microscopy

University of Liverpool Faculty of Health & Life Sciences via Flickr CC by 2.0

In 1873, a German physicist named Ernst Abbe set a boundary on the field of microscopy. He came up with the resolution limit for optical microscopes, which is roughly half the wavelength of light. With a wavelength of 550 nanometers typically used, that means most microscopes can only see about 0.2 micrometers (or about the width of a bacterium), according to Abbe.

But the best thing about limits in science is that they can almost always be surpassed. And when you do that, you usually get a Nobel Prize. This year, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists for their work in circumventing the optical resolution limit. That means they made microscopes even more micro. They’ve actually gone nano.

You see, a maximum resolution of 0.2 micrometers may seem pretty small, but it’s quite large when it comes to observing the tiny, individual molecules in the human body. A small molecule can be just one nanometer long.

With the help of these nanoscopes, researchers have been able to visualize molecules such as those created in synapses in the brain. They can also track protein buildup in numerous degenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s.

In fact, nanoscopy can even be used to visualize the individual proteins in fertilized eggs.

The Nobel Prizes were rewarded for two different methods of enhancing optical resolution. Stefan Hell of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, developed a method known as stimulated emission depletion microscopy, in which two laser beams scan over a sample. One beam arouses fluorescent molecules to glow, while the second beam suppresses all other fluorescence except for that in a nanometer-sized area. The result? Only the nanometer-sized volume is registered by the microscope, and a brightly lit image with better resolution than 0.2 micrometers is revealed.

Eric Betzig and William Moerner received Nobel Prizes for their work in advancing the field of single-molecule microscopy. Though the two scientists worked separately, both of their methods involved turning the fluorescence of individual molecules on and off, using a molecule called the green fluorescent protein (GFP). Isolated from a fluorescent jelly-fish, GFP can be coupled to other proteins in cells, lighting up and revealing where the protein is positioned.

Moerner and Betzig discovered they could turn the fluorescence of GFP on and off at will, showing that it’s possible to control the fluorescence of a single molecule. The position of each glowing protein then can be easily picked up by a microscope.

The methods developed by these three scientists are currently being used all over the world.

[Nobel]

Correction (10/08/2014, 5:50pm ET): The original story misstated the year Ernst Abbe set the limit for microscope resolution. It should be 1873, not 1973, and it has been corrected. We regret the error.

Washington Monument Interior LIDAR Scan

CyArk

History is unwritten by the destruction of great artifacts. Six of the seven wonders of the ancient world are gone, fallen into ruin and sold for scrap, and it is only through historical memory that we know of them. Preserving modern wonders for posterity is the main inititiative of CyArk, a nonprofit that uses 3-D laser scanning to create a digital archive of the world’s cultural heritage sites.

Key to CyArk is a portable, eye-safe laser scanner, made by CyArk founder Ben Kacyra. The scanner is a LIDAR system, which is like radar except instead of bouncing back radio waves it uses lasers. LIDAR systems existed before CyArk, but they were mainly used in labs, where someone would bring an object and get it scanned. (Parts of the music video for Radiohead’s “House of Cards" were recorded this way).

Kacyra's company built a scanner that could work outside, off battery power, and didn’t require special protective shielding for eyes. The scanner is also equipped with a picosecond timing mechanism adapted from one used by Los Alamos Labs to measure underground nuclear tests. This picosecond timer gives the laser scans accuracy down to a millimeter.

A Bamiyan Buddha, Before And After Taliban Destroyed It

Zaccarias, via Wikimedia Commons

With the technology already made, it took a tremendous act of destruction to inspire its use in historical preservation. In 2001, shortly after Kacyra’s company was purchased by a larger firm, destruction on the far side of the world urged him to action. He tells Popular Science:

Yesterday and today at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., CyArk hosted a conference on the CyArk 500, an ambitious project that aims to digitally preserve 500 world heritage sites in the next five years. Asked about preservation in light of the Syrian conflict, Kacyra said:

Some of the sites cataloged are relatively low-hanging fruit, like the Washington Monument. According to CyArk vice president Elizabeth Lee, scanning the whole of the monument, inside and out, took about three to four days. Other sites are trickier. The Rani Ki Van stepwell in India took approximately two weeks to get all the detail.

New Orleans French Quarter

A LIDAR scan of the French Quarter

Here, via CyArk

Still other sites are collected incidentally. Yesterday CyArk announced a partnership with “Here,” a Nokia mapping project. "Here" cars use cameras and lasers to provide detailed travel maps, capturing the curve of the road and details down to a centimeter accuracy. CyArk admitted Here’s maps of historical parts of both New Orleans and Philadelphia into their digital archive, preserving the shape of not just single sites, but whole neighborhoods.

The Washington Monument and New Orleans are not, knock on wood, under threat in the same way as the Bamiyan Buddhas, but there’s still an element of triage to CyArk’s whole project. Lee told Popular Science that “an international panel helps us set up criteria for evaluation sites, looking at risk facing the sites, significance of the sites, and technical benefits of the sites. Risk is a big factor for us, and in certain situations it’s too late to go in safely. Part of the project is trying to be proactive -- to get the sites before they’re gone.”

Some of the sites can be explored online at CyArk, whose homepage currently features a totally not creepy slowly moving Mount Rushmore.

A6 V1.0 Paper Airplane Gun

Papierfliegerei, screenshot from YouTube

Sometimes, a person accomplishes something so great, so revolutionary, that all they can do is smile as wide as humanly possible and show off the thing. This paper airplane gun, crafted by a 3-D printing and paper airplane enthusiast, is such a device. Wordlessly, the operator fires a series of paper airplanes. Then, with the top of the device removed, he reveals the assembly line inside the weapon. The gun folds the paper and then shoots it out the end -- at a rate of almost one a second.

Watch this ridiculous coolness below:

[via Joe Hanson]