Michael Habib

Illustrations by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

Guessing that pterosaurs might launch into the air differently than modern birds, Habib compared CT scans of both animals’ leg bones and then ran simulations to illustrate how they would have moved. His analysis suggested that, rather than leaping from two legs like birds, pterosaurs launched from all fours like bats. Though his theory provoked controversy at first, the recent discovery of fossilized flight tracks could confirm it. Habib also used computer modeling to calculate that pterosaurs could reach much larger sizes than previously known—a prediction validated when a giant pterosaur was unearthed last year. Now he’s using a similar approach to study the locomotion of early birds, the fins of extinct swimming reptiles, and the flight dynamics of tiny, bug-eating pterosaurs. 

The applications of Habib’s research are surprisingly far-reaching: With colleagues, he is designing a stretched-material wing that mimics the structure of pterosaurs’ limbs and could reduce the vibrations that cause today's gliders and parachutes to collapse. 

But he’s most excited by the effect his work has had on museums, which have begun reworking dinosaur exhibits to incorporate his findings. “That made me squeal a little bit,” he says of the day he saw a company selling museum mounts of pterosaurs launching from all fours. “That’s like the paleontology Nobel Prize."

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

A Light Touch

Study volunteer Igor Spetic wears an experimental prosthetic arm, plugged into his electrode implant.

Russell Lee

Years after they had lost parts of their arms in industrial accidents, Igor Spetic and Keith Vonderhuevel once again felt sensations -- such as the fuzz of a cotton ball, or a trickle of water -- seemingly on the backs of their prosthetic hands. The touches were lab-created, done as part of a study on how to electronically re-create touch for people who have lost their hands.

The study, published yesterday, is the first to create such natural-feeling sensations artificially. "I knew immediately it was cotton," Spetic said in a statement. Cotton balls, he explained, used to give him goosebumps; he said he used to make his family open pill bottles for him to avoid them. This sensation gave him goosebumps as well.

Other groups of researchers have tried to re-create a sense of touch for amputees by buzzing their nerves with electricity… but study volunteers have always reported the resulting sensation was weird, like the pins-and-needles feeling you get when your foot falls asleep. It was as if those old experiments weren't speaking to the brain in the right language, says Dustin Tyler, a bioengineer at Case Western University and the lead researcher in the study involving Vonderhuevel and Spetic. "We're beginning to speak the right language now."

Tyler and his colleagues' study is a step toward creating prosthetic hands and arms that convey a natural sense of touch to their users. Engineers are still a long way from making a true feeling prosthetic hand, and there's no guarantee one will ever work. Feeling prosthetics are a hot field of study, however, because they could make everyday tasks so much easier for people with prosthetics.

Grape Demonstration

A study volunteer pulls a grape off its stem with a prototype feeling-enabled prosthetic hand.

Dale Omori

So how do you give a man without a hand feelings in his hand? It requires a bit of a commitment, on the study volunteer's part. Spetic and Vonderhuevel both had to receive surgical implants of arrays with more than a dozen electrodes in their arms. At one end, the electrodes surround major bundles of nerves in their arms. At the other end, the arrays lead to a little plug on the surface of their upper arm, which is necessary for the research process. It's like having a permanent catheter, like those that chemotherapy patients have. Hopefully, in the future, such implants will work wirelessly.

Most of the time, Vonderhuevel and Spetic's implants don't do much for them. Instead, they use their regular, commercially available, non-feeling prosthetics, just like any other prosthetic user does. But once or twice a month, they visit Tyler's lab to test the electrodes' ability to give them feelings. In lab, researchers plug their own device into the implant to send little electrical buzzes to the volunteers' nerves.

Tyler and his colleagues have been testing which electrical patterns are best to create natural-feeling sensations. Each buzz they send is less powerful than the electric shock you might accidentally give your cat sometimes while petting it. Tyler and his colleagues aim to keep the intensities low, which Tyler thinks helps the sensations feel more natural. "We only interact with the nerve as much as the nerve is happy to interact," he says.

Although the electricity is technically coming in through Spetic and Vonderhuevel's upper arms, they report that the sensations seem to originate in their prosthetic hands. "If we get it correct, the brain interprets it that it's coming from the hand in the first place," Tyler says. "The brain doesn't know we cheated it."

Different intensities and patterns of buzzes can create different overall sensations, such as that cotton ball, or the stream of water.

In a little demonstration of how sensation like this might be helpful in the future, Vonderhuevel and Spetic participated in an experiment in which they wore an experiment prosthetic hand equipped with sensors. The hand plugged into their implants. The men tried taking the stems off cherries and grapes -- a delicate task.

Blindfolded, with their implants turned off, they were able to pluck cherry stems 43 percent of the time. When researchers turned the implants on, the volunteers' success rate shot up to 77 percent. "That's a very nice, practical demonstration that their sensor prostheses could help someone if they had it in a clinical device," says Joseph O'Doherty, a bioengineer at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the study.

"When the sensation's on, it's not too hard," Vonderhuevel said. "When it's off, you make a lot of grape juice."

Despite the research's success, there's always the risk that the implanted array will damage their nerves or that their catheter-like site could get infected. It seems things have gone well so far, however. The men have camped and chopped wood after getting their implants. Vonderhuevel has had his implant for 16 months. Spetic has had his for two years. If all goes well, they will wear their implants for the rest of their lives.

Drinkwell

Winner of the For-Profit Social Impact award

The annual South by Southwest Eco conference held its climactic event Tuesday night, announcing the winners of its Startup Showcase competition and Place by Design awards. Now in its fourth year, SXSW Eco has entered a sweet spot in its growth, with a lot of big thinkers and promising startups in attendance but a less overwhelming crowd than the March music, film, and interactive SXSW conferences. We were there to meet the award winners.

There were two main categories of awards, with a few awards in each category. Place by Design awards honor visionary sustainable design work on public spaces, with a goal of getting people to engage in their environment. The Startup Showcase is a Shark Tank-style competition in which competitors pitch a panel of expert judges (venture capitalists, industry leaders, and, ahem, PopSci Editor in Chief Cliff Ransom), on their concepts, and then endure a rapid-fire grilling. Winners are the startups most likely to succeed and to have a positive impact on their communities and the planet. Here are the winners in each category:

PLACE BY DESIGN: COMMUNITY IMPACT

Libros Libres is a Dallas outfit that pairs area residents with volunteer local designers to create small free library spaces in order to promote literacy in needy neighborhoods. Ten mini libraries are already up and running, and five more are in the works. The project is the work of a partnership between arts education group Big Thought, the design-focused non-profit bcWorkshop, and the Dallas Public Library.

PLACE BY DESIGN: GLOBAL POTENTIAL

London-based Pavegen makes a unique flooring product that converts the kinetic energy from people’s footsteps into electricity to power everything from lighting to communication networks to batteries. In dense urban areas where there’s scant room for space-hogging solar and wind installations, footfall energy is a compelling option. The product works by flexing almost imperceptibly when stepped on, which generates up to 8 watts of power per step.

PLACE BY DESIGN: TRANSFORMATIVE DESIGN

+POOL is a project to build a floating public swimming pool in the rivers of New York City. Not just any pool: The walls act as filters that let in the natural river water and clean it in the process, without using any chemical additives. As much as half a million gallons of water can be cleaned in this way every day. The plus-shaped design allows for separate kids, sports, lap and lounge areas, or each of the areas can be combined to create an Olympic-length pool.

STARTUP SHOWCASE: NOT-FOR-PROFIT SOCIAL IMPACT

Open Water Foundation, based in Fort Collins, Colorado, is a social enterprise that builds open-source software that helps people and organizations conserve water resources. The collaborative, open-innovation model frees groups from relying on government funding or self-funding to build smart water solutions. The result, in theory, is a focus on solving shared problems, which increases both cost-effectiveness and overall usefulness.

STARTUP SHOWCASE: FOR-PROFIT SOCIAL IMPACT

Boston-based Drinkwell combines a proprietary water-filtration tool with a franchise business model whose aim is to create a network of clean-water micro-entrepreneurs in developing nations. The easy-to-operate water filter uses a resin-based absorbant to remove toxic arsenic, while wasting far less water in the process than current solutions such as reverse osmosis. The franchise model leverages the profit motive to engage local entrepreneurs in maintaining the system, thus reducing the risk of system failure over time, a common problem in purification systems in the developing world.

STARTUP SHOWCASE: GREENTECH (TIE)

PAX Pure is a San Rafael, California, startup whose patented water-purification technology makes distillation more energy-efficient and cost-effective by simulating high-altitude conditions, where the boiling point is lower because of lower pressure. The so-called vacuum condenser unit employs no moving parts, membranes, or chemicals, which means it requires less maintenance over time than competing systems. What’s more, the lower boiling point means lower energy needs, so the unit can run on solar power or waste heat from industrial sources. Applications include seawater desalination, agriculture, and food and beverage manufacturing.

STARTUP SHOWCASE: GREENTECH (TIE)

Picasolar improves the efficiency of photovoltaic solar cells by addressing both the cost of cell production and the energy conversion rate. The Fayetteville, Arkansas, company makes something called a Hydrogen Super Emitter that reduces production cost by requiring fewer silver grid lines, which are the most expensive part of making solar cells, and increases the total watts produced by 15 percent in the lab.

STARTUP SHOWCASE: CLEANWEB

Cincinnati-basedLagoon makes a sensor and mobile app that homeowners can install themselves in 60 seconds to the outside of their main water pipe. The simple-to-use system allows customers to gather data about their water use and gain a better understanding of how to make smart changes—gamifying their habits, for instance, by setting goals, and ultimately avoiding surprise big water bills.

Rooftop solar panels

Wikimedia Commons

Virtually all homes point their solar panels south, where they can best capture rays from the sun when it rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest. That way, residents collect the most power possible throughout the day, which they can use in their own homes or sell to the grid (if they have any power leftover). But critics say the panels would actually do more good facing west, where they could capture sunlight during the midday and afternoon when energy is most needed.

While south-facing solar panels are the most profitable for panel owners, they actually raise the demand for other power sources that they simultaneously put out of business. Relying on morning and evening sunlight means that solar panels aren’t producing as much as they could during the middle of the day, when communities need the bulk of their power. Therefore, homes with solar panels continue to rely on other power sources to support them during the middle of the day.

But here's where things get funky. Plants that depend on selling electricity around the clock suffer, because all solar panels are producing energy during the same non-peak hours. Nuclear power plants in particular don’t have the ability to produce energy only at certain times of the day, and solar power sources often drive them out of business, according to The Times. That leaves natural gas power plants, which are cheaper and have more flexibility in terms of production, to pick up the slack during the middle of the day.

So in essence, homeowners who installed rooftop solar panels to promote sustainable energy are actually bolstering the natural gas industry. Probably not what they had in mind.

Nissan BladeGlider

Courtesy of Nissan

Your grandfather’s 165-horsepower Buick just doesn’t cut it anymore.

New automobile prototypes feature dashboards that look like fighter jet cockpits and augmented reality windows that respond to your gestures. Some will drive themselves, and others will keep your life organized so you can stay calm behind the wheel.

Learn how the car is becoming much more than a vehicle with an all-new, immersive reading experience from Popular Science. And get excited, because there’s more to come...

October 1989 Cover

Popular Science

On this Throwback Thursday, we go back 25 years to the Popular Science of September 1989.

In the waning months of the 80s, Popular Science asked what the most important concerns of Americans from that time were, and it seems we came up with three answers: global warming, the Soviet Union, and robbers. Our reporters went out and found the technologies that were designed to deal with each.

Digital Dog

Mechanical Mastiff Illustrated

Popular Science

Tired of getting burglarized? Hate flesh and blood pets? Boy, did we have a product for you. The Barking Dog from Heath was a home security system that combined infrared sensors, FM transmitters, and voice synthesizers to ward off thieves. If a warm body crossed one of the sensor lenses, it sent a message to a speaker that "barks its head off" at would-be wrongdoers.

"I'm holding it in my hands," our reporter wrote, "It's not alive, definitely not cute, and, at the moment, not ferocious."

The system, and others like it that were just coming on the market, could also dial 911 on its own and report particular emergencies. Of course, there was one more feature that set it apart from the pack:

The spirit of Barking Dog lives on in a range of road-less-travelled security systems still on the market.

Refrosting Earth

Distribution Of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions In The 1980s

Popular Science

Climate scientists knew the changing climate was a huge problem even 25 years ago. Models of global warming were not as complete as they are today, but researchers were already alarmed enough to call for drastic efforts to reduce carbon emissions while there was still time to prevent a major cataclysm. In our third installment in a three-part feature on the impending problem, "Saving The Planet," we addressed the technologies—outlandish and otherwise—that could fight greenhouse gas effects:

Of course, it was clear even then that these proposals all faced serious obstacles, but we pointed them out—serious ideas by serious scientists—to illustrate the emergency at hand. In the time since, some progress has been made in curbing emissions, but not as much as we hoped—or enough to avert a significant shift in the global climate. Climate change is now understood to be unavoidable. Critical current research focuses on mitigating and adapting to the effects.

Stealth Scandal

A B-2 Stealth Bomber In July 1989

Popular Science

One threat does seem to have passed: imminent nuclear war with a communist empire. The B-2 Stealth Bomber program had passed from secrecy into public view, and we covered its capabilities and controversy.

The flat, flying-wing attacker, with its 172-foot wingspan and radar-penetrating capabilities is famous today, but in 1989 its look was radically new. For almost a decade, everything we knew about the project had come from "a few official announcements, a handful of leaks, and a rigorous application of the laws of aerodynamics and electronics." That all changed in July 1989 when the bomber made its public debut. "We have seen an actual airplane sitting in the sun, taxiing, and flying," our reporter wrote. The craft could carry multiple nuclear or conventional weapons deep into Soviet airspace without detection, and could have, in the event of nuclear war, attacked moving or buried targets too hard for intercontinental ballistic missiles to target.

It wasn't all good news for stealth backers. The program costs, agreed in secrecy in 1981, had ballooned from $36.6 billion to $70.2 billion for 132 planes—$134.5 billion in 2014 dollars. That's enough to buy every NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL team in North America with a couple tens of billions left over. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 drastically reduced the demand for the program. In the end, 21 of the aircraft were built, and 20 are now in service. (One, the Spirit of Kansas, crashed in 2008.)

You can read the complete September 1989 issue here.

Chicago Street Sweepers Wear Masks To Protect Against Spanish Flu

Popular Science, December 1918

This year marks the centennial of the start of World War I. To honor it, Popular Science is combing through our archives to bring you the best of our original war coverage--from the emergence of tanks, airplanes, and other military tech, to essays examining the relationship between war and eugenics. 

Just as the First World War was winding down, another disaster struck: The so-called "Spanish flu," an influenza virus with unique mutations that made it unusually virulent and deadly. Anywhere between 20 percent and 40 percent of the world's population contracted it. An estimated 50 million people died, including about one person out of every 160 in the U.S. War conditions hastened the disease's spread, as troops moved around the world and the war effort left few healthcare workers to administer to civilians.

The pandemic left a lasting mark on societies and science, so we thought contemporary issues of Popular Science might have some interesting reporting on the phenomenon. They did. But, we discovered, some of it was peculiar.

Our earliest Spanish flu story took an unusual, but serious angle on the story. It looked at how the outbreak prompted the city of Chicago to give its street-cleaners simple masks to wear at work. The masks were akin to early gas masks developed for the war. "Germs May Be Just as Deadly as German Gas," was the somber headline. That was in December 1918.

Chicago was not the only worried workplace. An unnamed factory put wire cages around its drinking fountains to ensure workers kept their mouths at a sanitary distance from the pipe opening, the magazine reported in April 1919. (But what kept their mouths off of the wires, we wonder.)

A Wire Cage for a Lightbulb, Repurposed for a Drinking Fountain

Popular Science, April 1919

Some cities began requiring residents to wear gauze masks, which, in reality, provided no protection against the virus. Popular Science was not a fan of such measures, complaining in May 1919 about "localities where the authorities think that influenza can be cured by legislation." So the magazine published a how-to for making a mask that allows the wearer to smoke while wearing it. However, to comply with flu-mask laws, the DIY prophylactic had no outlet for exhaled smoke. You were just supposed to swallow.

A Flu Mask Modified For A Smoke

Popular Science, May 1919

Lastly, the March 1919 issue noted that orange-sellers inflated their prices during the pandemic. We covered that story by delving into the thoughts and feelings of an orange:

See that whole story here.

By March 1942, the magazine was reporting that new vaccines against yellow fever, influenza, typhus fever, and measles would protect people during the Second World War.

We were never able to find a straightforward, contemporary feature about the spread of the Spanish flu. Perhaps other news outlets covered those kinds of stories, at that time. Generations later, however, the magazine dedicated a page to the re-creation of that historic flu strain.

Manu Prakash

Illustrations by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

Rather than starting with off-the-shelf components, Prakash lets the problem guide the design. For example, when he set out to build a diagnostic microscope for health workers, he knew it would
have to be cheap, rugged, and easily produced. Faced with these constraints, Prakash developed a pocket-size paper microscope that is powerful enough to detect a malaria parasite in a drop of blood, yet costs just 50 cents. 

Prakash’s newest device, inspired by a music box, leverages punch cards and a hand crank to carry out complex chemical analyses. Changing the holes on the cards determines which chemicals will be released when. Prakash envisions scientists using the apparatus to test soil chemistry or detect different kinds of snake venom, but it could be modified to run almost any kind of assay. “We’re going to make them very widely available and let other people build their own apps on top,” he says. 

Prakash’s inventions may be designed to address complicated problems, but their low cost and simple designs make them accessible to everyone. “Scientific tools have been built and designed and kept in the silos of universities,” Prakash says. He wants to bring them to the masses.

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

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

Tesla Model S electric car

Shal Farley

Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors promises the car of the future today. In September, the billionaire promised something new for his electric vehicles: autopilot, mostly. Well, “90 percent of your miles can be on auto.” Left unsaid is how exactly that’s going to happen.

The goal of a self-driving Tesla car is not new. Back in September 2013, when Elon Musk first announced his goal of a “90-percent autonomous” car, Popular Science noted that “Musk reserves his public bluster mostly for Tesla, even individually responding to negative reviews of Tesla's cars.”

Bluster is great, but alone it can’t overcome the fundamental technical challenges of a self-driving car. And those are many! Cars have to talk to one another, or at least know where other cars are. Besides other vehicles, it’s important for cars to understand other objects near the road, both static ones like fire hydrants or movings ones like people. It’s huge, and Google, which is in many ways in the lead on this technology, is still testing cars in both a virtual world and the real one.

It’s at best unlikely that Tesla will have a self-driving car next year, but the timeline is almost less important than the goal. With tech companies urging automakers in this direction, the question isn’t if cars will drive themselves, but when.

[IEEE Spectrum]

Slow loris

Wikimedia Commons

What’s slow, fuzzy, and deadly like a cobra? The slow loris, of course! Researchers are arguing that these endangered Asian primates evolved to mimic venomous snakes.

An article published in the Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases suggested slow lorises adopted serpentine markings and movements as defense mechanisms.

Its big doe eyes, furry face, and tiny grasping hands are a deceptive mask for its deadly nature. Slow lorises are the only known venomous primate, secreting toxins from a gland located along the crook of their inner arms. When threatened, a slow loris will hiss and retreat into a defensive posture with its paws clasped on top of its head. In this position, the slow loris’s upraised arms combined with dark markings on its face look remarkably like the expanded hood of an angered Spectacled cobra.

To add to the effect, slow lorises can even undulate in a serpentine fashion. This unusual movement is made possible by an extra vertebra in their spines. The defense posture also allows slow lorises to suck the venom from their armpits and strike quickly. The bites of these tiny primates have caused anaphylactic shock and even death in humans.

Slow lorises in defensive posture

Nekaris et al. Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases

For eight million years, slow lorises and cobras have coexisted in the same parts of Asia. Together, they weathered through drastic climate changes, which may have forced the traditionally tropical forest dwelling slow loris to adapt to an open savannah-like environment by mimicking venomous snakes.

In 1905, naturalist John Still wrote one of the first accounts of coming across a slow loris and mistaking it for a cobra in Sri Lanka.

Despite all of its cunning evolutionary traits, the slow loris is an endangered species, as the exotic pet trade threatens wild slow loris populations. "Knowledge of loris venom and its danger to humans, we hope, will help curtail the growing illegal pet trade," Anna Nekaris, the author of the article and a professor of anthropology and primate conservation at Oxford Brookes University, tells Popular Science in an email. Nekaris says she hopes more research will show people the slow loris is a rare and complex creature, not a cute face to domesticate.

Potential mimicry of spectacled cobras in Javan and Bengal slow lorises

1). Javan slow loris (2) Spectacled cobra (rear view) (3) Spectacled cobra (front view) (4) Bengal slow loris.

Nekaris et al. Journal of Venomous Animals and Toxins including Tropical Diseases

Correction (10/10/2014, 1:45pm ET): The original story referred to slow lorises' toxins as poisons. They are actually venomous, not poisonous, and it has been corrected. We regret the error.

WASP-43b

A temperature map of exoplanet WASP 43b. The white-colored region denotes the super-hot daytime side, while the dark regions denote the somewhat cooler nighttime side.

NASA/ESA

About 260 light years away from Earth, there is a wild exoplanet about the size of Jupiter -- but with double its mass. Known as WASP-43b, this huge planet orbits its host star, an orange dwarf, in just 19 short hours, meaning its “years” are shorter than Earth’s days.

Oh, did we mention it’s unbelievably hot? Just like the Moon, WASP-43b is tidally locked to its parent star, so one side of the planet is in perpetual light while the other side remains dark. On the day side, temperatures reach about 1,500 degrees Celsius (around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit), which is hot enough to melt iron. The night side temperatures aren’t much better, reaching about 500 degrees Celsius (about 900 degrees Fahrenheit).

Well now, a team of researchers is learning even more about the crazy conditions on WASP-43b, providing vital clues as to how such a planet could have formed in the first place. Using the Hubble Space Telescope and two different forms of spectroscopy, the scientists have made detailed maps of the planet’s weather, as well as the amount of water in its atmosphere. They published their findings in two different studies in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Spectroscopy is an oft-used method for studying distant planets. It involves dissecting an object’s light into its component colors, revealing a lot about the object’s temperature, mass, water composition, and more.

n the first study, the researchers used a technique called transmission spectroscopy, in which they studied light from the orange dwarf as it filtered through WASP-43b’s atmosphere. By analyzing this light, they were able to figure out the amount of water in the planet’s atmosphere in the regions bordering the day and night hemispheres.

A technique known as emission spectroscopy was utilized for the second study, allowing the researchers to map the planet’s atmosphere at different longitudes. Using Hubble’s very precise instruments, they were able to subtract more than 99.95 percent of light from the host star, which enabled them to study light that was coming just from WASP-43b. They did this as the planet orbited the star, mapping the water abundance and element composition of the atmosphere at various longitudes along the way.

According to the researchers, all of the water in the planet’s atmosphere is vaporized. On Jupiter, water is condensed into icy clouds, but space probes have been unable to penetrate Jupiter’s atmosphere, so not much is known about its water abundance. Additionally, most of the water on the other planets in our solar system are trapped away as ice, making it difficult to study. Since all of WASP-43b’s water is in gas form, it’s much easier for researchers to measure.

Water is believed to play an important role in the formation of giant planets, and knowing the dispersion of water in WASP-43b’s atmosphere reveals a lot about how it formed. Many astronomers believe that asteroid-like bodies crash into these planets long ago when the planets were still quite young, delivering water and other molecules that we observe today.

Prepare For Cyber Attack

Cats do not have the best business sense.

PBS Cybersecurity Lab Screenshot

It was my first day on the job as chief technology officer for "SnapCat," and the hostile attacks on our servers came at us fast. With proper coding and security measures, I blocked some, but my cat boss informed me after that attack that about a third of our users were driven away from the site because of our poor security. In PBS’s online Cyber Lab game, players select avatars and fictional companies, and then learn the basics of cyber security through simple exercises.

One easy way to get a company’s secrets is to convince people within that company to just hand it over. At the Cyber Lab, these attacks are grouped under “social engineering challenges”, and they most often represent phishing scams. Cyber Lab teaches players how to distinguish between real and scam emails, genuine and imposter websites, and to tell if an offer over the phone is really a trick. One level showed a Google homepage next to an imposter site, and I had to spot the five differences between them before determining which was fake. The old logo, lack of an "https" padlock, and typos on the imposter’s page gave it away, but it was still a great fast lesson in how scammers dress up their schemes as trusted sites.

A Partial Cyber Attack Success

Depicting cyber attacks visually is always tricky. In this game, players see a server with two sides, and have to erect barriers to different types of attacks from different sides. There's no prior knowledge before an attack about the defenses needed, so the game encourages players to build up as many defenses as possible first.

PBS Cybersecurity Lab Screenshot

Another problem facing SnapCat was password security. Password cracking challenges teach players how to write a secure password while also showing the dangers posed by brute force attacks. These rounds play as a duel, with the player creating a password to guard their information, and then selecting a cracking technique to break the opponent’s security. Special characters, numbers, and capital letters are all encouraged, but when possible, players are especially rewarded for coming up with long passwords.

There are also coding challenges, where players plot out step-by-step movements of a bot through a maze. It’s a simple tool for teaching the principles of coding, but an effective one. Starting with orders like "move" and "turn," players stack blocks together to guide the bot through the maze. Later on, blocks signify "if/do" and more complex commands, allowing a single phrase to determine when and if and how the bot should move forward. As an added incentive, players get a reward for completing the task in a set number of commands, so the game rewards both elegance and effectiveness.

After a morning of fending off cyber attacks from SnapCat, I’d not only grown the virtual company to almost 100,000 users, I’d fended off a DDoS attack and refreshed my knowledge on the basics of cyber security. CyberLab is aimed at children, but I found it a pretty good tool for reteaching adults the basics.

Drone Pilot With First Person View Goggles

Herve Pellarin, screenshot via YouTube

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

Hawk Attacks Drone

A cambridge man flying his quadcopter got an aerial surprise when a hawk attacked his drone midair. The video is brief and the drone-hawk fight even briefer. A modern toy was no match for the skills of a predator that evolved for aerial combat over millennia. Watch the video below:

Who Can Legally Fly Drones

Until the FAA integrates drones fully into regular airspace, they’ve been evaluating and approving sites that apply for special permission to fly drones. A report obtained by MuckRock and reported at Motherboard shows that 935 organizations have applied for permission to fly drones. A quarter of these sites are universities. There are also several requests by police departments, including the Grand Forks Police Department in North Dakota, that are already flying drones.

Patrolling Dubai

Dubai’s Roads and Transport Authority is flying drones to make sure the traffic system works. These drones will inspect hard-to-reach places, like inside subway systems or narrow passes, and the camera footage they provide will better help Dubai civil engineers manage and maintain the traffic infrastructure of the city.

Amazon Wants A Drone Lawyer

In a job listing posted on Amazon, the online retail giant announced it is looking for a “Corporate Counsel, Prime Air.” Last winter, Amazon revealed an ambitious goal of delivering goods by drone, in a program known as Prime Air. The Corporate Counsel for Prime Air will, in part, provide “legal advice and guidance in connection with the design and implementation of the Prime Air vehicles and systems, resolving issues that arise in commercial relationships and identifying opportunities for process improvements.” Engineers can figure out how the delivery drones will navigate the skies, but it’s going to take lawyers to make sure Prime Air can successfully navigate the law.

Drone Racing

In the forests of France, hobbyists gather with their drones to compete in a race inspired by science fiction. The drones all have forward-facing cameras, so pilots see through the eyes of the drone, as they try to steer their robot through three laps faster than their competitors and without colliding with the trees or other obstacles in the woods. It has more than a passing resemblance to the pod--racing and hoverbike scenes in Star Wars, though there’s significantly less chance of any accidental Jar Jar Binks sightings on this course (thank goodness).

Watch below:

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

A6 V1.0 Paper Airplane Gun

Papierfliegerei, screenshot from YouTube

9: paper airplanes folded and launched by this inventor's wonderful gun in its YouTube debut.

0.2 micrometers: the microscope resolution limit Eric Betzig, William Moerner, and Stefan Hell beat on their way to a Nobel Prize in chemistry. Their nanoscopy technology opened up a new, infinitesimal world for researchers to observe.

Antarctic Ice Maximum

Cindy Starr/NASA

7.78 million square miles: extent of Antarctic sea ice recorded in late September. The unexpected new ice around the southernmost continent is helping scientists improve climate models.

$1 billion: IBM's investment in its artificial intelligence, Watson, which has gone from playing Jeapordy! to studying brain cancer.

1: number of babies born from transplanted uteruses so far. Researchers believe more are likely to follow.

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

$6.8 billion: total impact, in disrupted contracts, of the Sierra Nevada Corporation's protest against NASA's space taxi deal with SpaceX and Boeing.

More than 50 percent: amount of electricity in an LED that converts into light, another Nobel Prize-winning technology.

4 percent: conversion rate for alternative incandescent bulbs. Better to go with the LEDs

253 mph: cruising speed of this new military helicopter.

12: number of male rabbits hopping around with transplanted penises, as part of a study that could one day impact humans.

Unmanned Patrol Boat

Look ma, no crew!

U.S. Navy Photo

13: armed patrol boat drones that swarmed together in this Navy demonstration.

100s: Bluetooth beacons one company distributed to phone booths all over New York City in order to track passersby. (The city is now forcing the company to remove the trackers.)

Illustration Showing a Mars Colony with Living Quarters and Solar Panels

Mars One

The students, part of a research group specializing in large-scale multi-billion dollar space programs, used publically available information about the Mars One mission plans to simulate the trip to Mars. They say the problems they uncovered surprised them.

"We tried to keep a completely open mind going into it," says Sydney Do, one of the researchers on the study. He says the idea of space colonization excites him.

Mars One is looking for 25 to 40 pioneers to leave home forever and live out their lives on the red planet, by growing food and using resources from the Martian environment. The non-profit has recieved more than 200,000 applicants, and there are plans to fund their Mars journey with a global reality show.

The MIT research was conducted to build a framework for analyzing other space colonization plans. But flaws in Mars One's plan jumped out as the students ran the numbers.

Mars One expects to grow crops indoors on Mars. Plants produce oxygen--and too much in a closed environment could feed oxygen-sucking fires. Farming would require machines that separate and vent oxygen without losing nitrogen vital to keep up air pressure. But the technology needed to to keep oxygen under control has never been tested beyond our planet, and Do says hardware tested on Earth can fail in surprising ways after liftoff.

A urine recycling system installed on the International Space Station in 2009 returned drinkable water with 90 percent efficiency in NASA laboratories. But on the ISS it broke down. Astronauts lose bone mass in zero-gravity, dumping calcium into their waste, and those deposits gummed up the recycler's works. The system is up and running again, but at only 70 percent capacity. On a trip with no return flight and limited resupply, such failures could be deadly, especially when they involve maintaining oxygen supply.

But Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp says the students used incorrect and incomplete data for their study.

"I've talked to very knowledgeable people--experts with companies like Lockheed Martin--who tell me these technologies will work," he tells Popular Science. He says he hasn't had the time to read the research all the way through, but has looked at the conclusions.

Lansdorp seized on the excess oxygen problem as an example of misplaced alarmism in the research. "This technology has been widely tested on Earth," he says, "and it's very well understood." Similar equipment for scrubbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere has been used in space for years.

But Lansdorp did not have a solution for what Do called the more serious issue uncovered in the research: replacement parts. The students used the failure rates of parts on the ISS to estimate the need for spares in a Mars colony. Without a resupply mission coming for another two years, a huge portion of the mass included in the initial launch would have to be extra materials.

"They are correct," Lansdorp says, "The major challenge of Mars One is keeping everything up and running." Repairing equipment and suits on Mars is a problem Mars One has yet to solve. Unmanned supply missions in advance of a second human launch are expected to land on the red planet a few weeks after the original colonists arrive, and Lansdorp suggests the first crew could take those stocks in a pinch.

"We don't believe what we have designed is the best solution. It's a good solution," he says. He adds that Mars One has done its own research with better results, but is not an aerospace company. He hopes future feasibility studies from groups like Lockheed Martin will provide answers. In the meantime, their in-house data is under wraps.

"We'd love to see what data he has and update the model," Do says.

Ina

The smooth and rough terrain of Ina

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Our cold, lifeless Moon just turned the corner into pretty hot and tempting. It turns out Earth’s satellite was once rife with volcanic activity, and some of its eruptions occurred within the past 100 million years – perhaps even within the past 50 million years. That’s about a billion years earlier than what researchers had originally assumed.

The discovery reveals that the Moon is still somewhat warm, containing more heat than previously believed. This news may alter the perceived timeline of the Moon’s thermal evolution, changing what we know about its origins and how it formed over time.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience, researchers from Arizona State University analyzed landforms on the Moon’s surface using images from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), a satellite that has been orbiting the Moon since 2009. Through their analysis, the researchers discovered up to 70 topographic anomalies called Irregular Mare Patches, or IMPs. IMPs are weird formations in the lunar maria, or basaltic plains on the Moon’s surface. They're thought to be leftover remnants of small volcanic eruptions.

An Array Of IMPs

Red circles indicate either a single IMP or a cluster of smaller IMPs.

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Originally, the researchers had wanted to learn more about one IMP in particular called Ina. The landform was first spotted by Apollo 15 in 1971 and has been somewhat of an enigma for decades. Ina exhibited two distinct textures: smooth deposits mixed with more rough-looking deposits. Researchers believed that the smooth areas are likely old lava flows covering portions of the rougher terrain.

Ina was unlike anything ever before seen on the Moon’s surface. Early investigations revealed that the landform was once a collapsed volcanic vent, and that it was much younger than the surrounding region.

But after looking at the LRO images, the researchers found that Ina isn’t one-of-a-kind after all. The high-resolution satellite images revealed 70 additional IMPs on the nearside of the Moon, indicating multiple regions that had once been home to volcanic activity. The IMPs range in size from 100 meters to 5,000 meters across, and they have the same dual-texture terrain observed in Ina. Sarah Braden, a lead author on the study, tells Science that these landforms are signatures of low-lying shield volcanoes that oozed “soupy lava.”

To determine the age of these IMPs, the researchers measured the number of impact craters on the smooth regions of the landforms. The idea is that the greater number of craters, the older the surface, becauase young surfaces wouldn’t have as much time to be pelted by outside space objects. The crater distribution on three of the largest IMPs indicated an age younger than 100 million years. Ina turned out to be very young, possibly only 33 million years old.

Many researchers believed that lunar volcanism occurred about 3.9 to 3.1 billion years ago and ended abruptly about 1 billion years ago. This latest research throws a huge wrench into that timeline. The IMPs also pose a great target for future space exploration. Just a few samples from these landforms could tell us a lot about our Moon’s origins and overall life.

Ina Closeup

A closeup portion of Ina. Don't be confused: The smooth portions actually set on top of the rough terrain. The direction of the Sun makes an illusion of inverted topography.

NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Hack-'O-Lantern

Designer Shelby Arnold carved these science-loving Muppets at the Brooklyn hackerspace NYC Resistor. Click here to see this amazing image larger.

Sam Kaplan

Start with a type of e-cig called a clearomizer, available online or at your local vape shop. It has a refillable chamber that you can load with the “fog juice” used in standard smoke machines. Inside, a wick draws the liquid past a wire coil heated by a battery, where it’s vaporized. Normally, a person sucks this vapor into his or her mouth, but the smoke machine needs a way to push the fog out. An aquarium air pump attached to the battery end will do the trick.

Unfortunately, a sealed connector between the battery and the chamber blocks airflow through the e-cigarette. Ditch the battery and put a hole through the connector by replacing its solid central pin with a hollow pin from an unsealed connector (sold on websites such as MadVapes). By attaching this to a new power supply-—a universal AC adapter is convenient—you can feed both air and electricity to your device. Then use its smoke for a spooky effect.

How to Make the Mini Smoke Machine

What You'll Need

Cost: $90

Difficulty: Moderate

Materials

• Clearomizer and battery

• Sharp pin or needle

• Fog juice (one part glycerin to three parts distilled water)

• Red and black wires

• E-cig battery connector with hole

• Universal AC adapter set to about 5V

• Aquarium air pump and tubing

• Tape

Instructions

1. Unscrew the clearomizer’s chamber and battery case from its metal base. Run a pin or needle through the center of the base, then remove it. Fill the chamber with fog juice and screw it back to the base.

2. Break the battery case to separate the metal connector. Taking care not to touch the wires and create a short circuit, cut away the battery. Then clean out the connector, removing and discarding the circuit board, any plastic pieces, the o-ring, and the central metal pin.

3. Solder the black wire, which will ground the device, to this connector.

4. Now take the unsealed connector and remove its o-ring and central pin. Solder the red wire to the pin, being careful not to block the hole. This will be the positive lead.

5. Insert the o-ring and the unsealed pin into the original battery connector. Screw the modified connector onto the base of the clearomizer.

6. Run the aquarium tubing up the red wire until it reaches the battery connector. Tape it securely in place so no air can escape. Snip a slit in the tubing and pull out the end of the red wire. Seal the slit with hot glue and secure with tape.

7. Attach the loose end of the tubing to the aquarium pump. Tape the free ends of the red and black wires into the positive and negative holes in the AC adapter. Turn on the power, then the air, and watch the smoke pour out!

Shortcut

If you don’t like e-cigs, go low-tech. Push several nails into the floor of your jack-o’-lantern and place a small foil pie tin on them, with a few tea candles beneath. When you pour a little fog juice into the tin, the candles will heat and vaporize the liquid. This setup can’t control the fog like the modified e-cigarette can, but the effect should be equally impressive.

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

Pumpkin Elements

Sam Kaplan

x-37B Upright

U.S. Air Force

In 2012, the Air Force sent an unmanned robot plane into space. It is scheduled to return today, completing its third voyage into space, one that began way back in the simpler days of 2012. The X-37B (not to be confused with the U.S. Navy’s terrestrial experimental unmanned X-47B airplane) is a known space plane with a secret purpose.

One early guess as to the function of the X-37B? It might ferry future troops into battle, taking them very high and then sending them back to Earth very fast. The fast transport mission doesn’t match the most striking feature of the X-37B's performance, however, which is just how long it can stay in space. The space plane’s first major trip into orbit lasted for seven months, and the plane’s second kept it in space for 15 months. When it returns to Earth today, its third long trip into space, it will have been 22 months since it left in December 2012.

Long, unmanned trips aren’t the stuff of a troop transport. Instead, they’re the sort of things drones do. The U.S. Air Force’s fact sheet lists the official purpose of the craft as “reusable spacecraft technologies for America's future in space and operating experiments which can be returned to, and examined, on Earth.” Speculationabounds that there’s an intelligence purpose to the missions, but the secrecy around the program means whatever the X-37B does besides test orbital re-entry will remain secret for some time.

Welcome back to Earth, secret space robot. 

X-37B On Runway

U.S. Air Force

Update 3:10 10/14/2014: The X-37B has not landed yet. The airspace around the Vandenberg Air Force Base, where the plane is expected to landed, is restricted to only official use through the 17th, and the airspace is closed from 8am to 5pm Wednesday. Expect the X-37B back on Earth not today, but soon.

Nicole Abaid

Illustrations by Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo

After getting her start by studying how schooling fish come to consensus, Abaid has broken new ground with bat colonies. Bats can adjust their signals so they don’t overlap with their neighbors’ frequencies. Abaid suspected they may be able to share information too, so she modeled how they might listen in on each other to better avoid obstacles. She went to China to line the bat cave with infrared cameras and an ultra-sonic mic that could gather data to verify her model. “The big idea is to tell if and how they use each others’ signals,” she says. At the same time, she’s designing bat-inspired ultrasonic sensors to improve communications among robots. 

Ultimately, Abaid hopes to imitate how animals elegantly overcome challenges like radar jamming—research that could some day help us manipulate man-made swarms, such as underwater vehicles that rely on sonar. “Learning about how this biological system works could help us design how we control engineered systems,” she says.

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

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