Mmmmm, beer

Martha Harbison

It's a love story—so who cares if the lovers are a little unattractive? We can't all be Snow Whites and Prince Charmings. I'm talking about the love affair between fruit flies and brewer's yeast, which scientists so kindly described in a paper published last week in the journal Cell Reports.

In a series of experiments, biologists from several institutes in Belgium demonstrated that brewer's yeast makes fruity, floral smells to attract fruit flies. In the wild, yeast might live on rotting fruit and entice flies to come to them there. Yeast and flies' relationship benefits them both, the biologists found. Previous studies have found that eating yeast helps fruit fly larva develop faster and survive better. This new study found that fruit flies help spread yeast to new environments, like a bee spreading pollen. I guess getting munched is worth getting spread around on little fly feet?

Beersci Logo

Todd Detwiler

By the way, those fruity, floral smells are some of the same ones that make beers fragrant and appealing. That's right, you and fruit flies are attracted to some of the same smells. Not only that, but brewer's yeast didn't evolve those scents to make beer delicious. They evolved them for fruit flies. People just happened to sneak in to take advantage of that evolutionary relationship. Humanity: the creepy third wheel.

The Belgian study is a fun demonstration of the co-evolution of two species that even non-scientist humans frequently encounter. It's also an interesting addition to decades of research into a strange topic. Because scientists have used fruit flies as lab animals for more than 100 years, science actually knows a lot about what smells fruit flies like. We know they like ethanol, which appears in rotting fruit, and acetic acid, the main smell-producing molecule in vinegar. We know they won't like vinegar as much if it has geosmin in it, an earthy smell produced by bacteria that sometimes contaminate vinegar.

Like A Bee Spreading Pollen

This photo is a close-up of a fruit fly leg, with cells of yeast caught in the leg's hairs. The yeasts have been colored green.

Cell Reports, Christiaens et al.

Identifying these fruit fly-appreciated scents has helped scientists figure out some basics in neuroscience, because scientists can set up studies to find what parts of the fruit fly brain react to different smells. That, in turn, sheds a little light into one way brains might work in general.

Fruit flies are really into smells, as it turns out. They use smells to find things in the world; that's how they are inevitably able to find that banana you forgot about on top of the fridge. So researchers have even set up Pavlovian responses in fruit flies in response to smells. (The point of that study was to learn more about memory.)

Brewer's yeasts have a gene called ATF1 that helps make "fruity metabolites" such as isoamyl acetate and ethyl acetate, the Belgian scientists found. The biologists used genetic engineering to create yeasts with no ATF1 gene and found fruit flies were much less likely to walk toward those mutant yeasts, compared to normal yeasts, and were less likely to spread them around. The fruit flies' brains even reacted differently to those mutant yeasts.

I'll toast to that.

Boston Public Library Combination Lock

rpongsaj, via Wikimedia Commons

Thanks to a pair of Melbourne security researchers, the cost of opening safes just hit a new low. Using an arduino platform and 3-D printed parts, the pair has created a contraption that can open many combination locks, like those on ATMs and gun safes. The device costs just $150 in parts, but people shouldn’t throw out their safes just yet: it takes about four days to crack the lock.

Brute force attacks, as the term is commonly used in cybersecurity, involve trying lots and lots and lots of possible answers to open a lock. Online, brute force attacks try to guess passwords by putting in literally every word in the book... and then some. (There are other, more gruesome ways to brute force crack a password)

To brute force open the combination locks on a safe, the cheap safecracker is mounted around the lock. A gripper holds onto the knob of the lock, and programming tells the step motors to turn the gripper in sequence as it runs through possible lock combinations. Brute forcing a lock like this can take a while, with the security professionals saying it can take up to four days to find the right combination.

The Safe Cracker

Taken at Ruxcon in Melbourne

Darren Pauli, used with permission

Few safes are left unattended for four days, so for most enterprising criminals, this cheap safecracker isn’t going to be a good meal ticket. There is, however, a faster way. Safe makers often ship safes that are set to only a few default patterns. The arduino on the safecracker comes with an SD card slot, so an attacker could load a memory card with default safe combinations and make sure the cracker tries those first. If the safe is still using a default combination, the time drops from days to minutes. 

"A lot of these locks have about 10 default combinations which never ever get changed,"said Jay Davis, one of the designers of the safecracker, "and they would be the ones you would want to try out first."

The cheap safecracker doesn’t spell the end of safes, but anyone worried about their locked-up possessions should probably change the default combination on the safe anyway -- just in case.

[The Register]

Active Regions on the Sun, October 8, 2014

NASA/GSFC/SDO

The sun got into the Halloween spirit a little early this year, producing active spots that look like a jack-o'-lantern leer on October 8. The active spots give off more light and energy than the rest of the sun's surface.

This visualization shows the sun's activity in two wavelengths of light, 171 Angstroms and 193 Angstroms. Both wavelengths are in the extreme ultraviolet portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what NASA normally studies.

Extreme ultraviolet light isn't visible to the naked eye, but it can nevertheless affect human life. When the sun is particularly active, the high-energy photons of extreme UV light can heat the Earth's atmosphere, creating additional drag on mankind's orbiting satellites. Or the photons can break apart atoms and molecules in the atmosphere, creating ions that disrupt radio signals. Luckily for life on Earth, the atmosphere blocks most extreme ultraviolet light from reaching the planet.

African Elephants

shankar s. via Flickr CC by 2.0

Lions may be the kings of the animal world, but at least elephants could make for spunky meteorologists. New research is revealing that elephants have a radar-like spidey sense, capable of detecting an approaching rainstorm up to 150 miles off.

While this may seem like an impractical talent, researchers say elephants' weather-predicting could help human conservationists save the animals from poachers.

The elephants’ abilities are rooted in their excellent hearing skills. Elephants can hear sounds at very low frequencies, even those below the human range of hearing. It’s one of the ways they communicate with each other. Thunderstorms also produce low-frequency sound, whether it’s a thunderclap or the pitter-patter of rain hitting the Earth. Scientists aren’t sure which element elephants are listening to, but they know the animals are detecting some signature component of oncoming rain.

An international team of researchers uncovered this uncanny ability after analyzing elephant migrations in the Namibia. “The elephants undergo these sudden migrations that previously have not been explained,” Oliver Frauenfeld, a geology professor at Texas A&M and an author on the study, tells Popular Science. “They’ve been observed to change the places they go and the speeds they go rather quickly.” Frauenfeld and his colleagues were hoping to figure out if an environmental trigger was to blame for changes in the herds’ movements.

The researchers plotted the herds’ movements for a period of seven years, and sure enough, they found that the elephants kept changing course during the region’s rainy season. They used GPS tracking data for nine elephants that carroed receivers. Each elephant belonged to a different herd in the area.

In Namibia, it's mostly hot and dry all year round, but there is a distinct rainy period from January to March. During this time, the researchers observed that the elephants could “sense” thunderstorms that were hundreds of miles off, seemingly predicting rain days before it occurred. The herds would then change their directions to meet the oncoming storms.

“They need the rain,” Fraunfeld explains. “After a prolonged dry season, once the elephants hear the rain, they start moving towards it, and it allows them to get the water sooner.” He also notes that knowing how elephants move could help with conservation efforts. “If we’re better able to determine where the elephants are and where they might go, wildlife officials can monitor the elephants better and make them safe from poaching.”

A recent study in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences found that ivory poachers killed 100,000 African elephants within a three-year period from 2010 to 2012. And in 2011 alone, poachers killed one out of every 12 African elephants. Yikes! Here’s hoping that this research can lower those numbers.

The researchers published their findings in the journal PLOS One.

E-Paper Music Stand

E-Ink

E-readers inspire the kind of polarization usually reserved for religion and taxes. Their detractors call them soulless, shoddy excuses for real paper. But to their fans, their months of battery life, huge libraries, and lightweight frames are just short of magic. Of course, the core technology of the Kindles, Kobos, and Nooks that drive these passions is their textured, paper-like displays. All three major e-reader companies buy their displays from one firm: the eponymous E Ink.

Unlike more common LCDs and LEDs that shine colored light at the viewer to create an image, e-paper screens reflect and absorb the ambient light in a room—just like a page in a book. Once e-paper displays an image, that image remains on the screen until an outside source changes it again—even without power or instructions from a computer.

This happens because e-paper displays rely on moving matter around instead of coloring bright lights, according to Giovanni Mancini, a director at E Ink. In a basic e-reader display, millions of capsules as narrow as human hairs are laid over an electric array. Each capsule is filled with black and white particles. All the black particles share a charge, positive or negative, and the white particles have the opposite charge. The array generates hundreds of tiny electric fields per square inch. Where the field is positive, negatively charged particles sink to the bottom—toward the array—and positively charged particles rise to the surface, where you can see them.

Flip a page and the array switches on for a fraction of a second, rearranging the particles. Then they array quickly turns off, freezing the particles in place and locking a new image onto the screen. Each field on the array becomes a single pixel of black or white, all of which together form the page of your book. Mancini says the displays form grey tones by turning the fields on and off too quickly for the particles to finish rising or sinking, leading to a mixture of black and white.

Because e-paper relies on positive and negative charges to produce each pixel, introducing more than two colors (black and white, blue and white, etc) poses an engineering challenge. Mancini says E Ink is beginning to solve the problem. Color e-paper has hit the market—not in e-readers yet, but as dynamic signs for stores and restaurants that prefer e-paper's muted tones to bright LCDs. (Imagine the chalkboard outside your local coffee shop rearranging itself or displaying animated figures.)

Mancini says three-color-ink displays—the simplest and most common—work by exploiting differences in the speeds that molecules move through a solution. If the red particles move faster than black ones, they can share a charge. When the array turns on and off very quickly, the red ink wins the race to the surface and color pops. Leave the array on for a bit longer and black particles catch up and overwhelm the red, blotting it out. Already, Mancini says, more colors can be introduced by refining the technique.

All that pushing and shoving of particles explains why you shouldn't expect an e-paper television or tablet anytime soon. LCD and LED screens can change their image hundreds of times a second. Ramping up refresh rates on e-paper leads to ghostly after-images. Those particles can't keep up with the demands of video--or even an android desktop. Instead, look for e-paper showing in road signs, billboards, and wearable electronics.

Correction (10/14/2014, 4:05pm ET): The original story referred to Giovanni Mancini as Giovanni Mancinni. It has been corrected. We regret the error.

To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day Popular Science has put together a timeline of Ada's life and accomplishments. Ada Lovelace was a brilliant mathematician and groundbreaking creative thinker whose work was at the vanguard of computer programming a whole century even before the Turing machine.

Teens and Adults, Talking to their Phones

Google

Who talks to their phone? Google recently commissioned a little survey to find out. Below are some of their most interesting findings. Note: The report that Google shared split up its research population into two age groups, 17 and under, and 18-plus, so that's why we've reported them that way.

• The majority of Americans ages 13 to 17 talk to their phones every day (55 percent), as do a large proportion of American adults 18 and over (41 percent).

• The most common reason teens use the voice recognition on their phones is "just for fun" (51 percent). Adults are most apt to ask for directions (40 percent). In general, the most popular answers to this question were for short stretches of speech, such as calling a contact or dictating text messages, but you can use voice recognition for a lot more than that. Back in April, Slate published an essay that I liked, in which author Will Oremus wrote entirely by dictating to his phone. "Our mobile devices have gotten surprisingly good at understanding us—probably a lot better than you remember, if you haven’t tried talking to your phone in a while," Oremus wrote.

• Because one screen is not enough, 59 percent of teens and 36 percent of adults said they use voice recognition on their phones while they're watching TV. That's the most common time for both age groups for chatting with their phones.

• Twenty-two percent of teens and 15 percent of adults talk to their phones while they're in the bathroom. I wonder if Siri can tell—because you can totally tell.

• Forty-five percent of U.S. adults said they felt "like a geek" when they talked to their phones, while 56 percent said using voice commands make them feel "tech-savvy." I wonder how well these answers correspond to whether said adults were geeks or popular kids in school.

• When surveyors asked respondents what their dream capability would be for voice recognition, adults most commonly wished for their phones to tell them where their keys were (44 percent), while teens wished for the phone to order them a pizza (45 percent).

Private research company Northstar conducted the survey for Google, gathering answers from 400 people in the U.S. ages 13 to 17, and 1,000 Americans ages 18 and older. The survey respondents' answers were weighted to make them representative of the U.S. in terms of age, gender, region, and level of smartphone use. You can see all the survey questions and answers here.

November 2014.

Popular Science

Letter From The Editor

Life Among Robots

Now

• The Most User-Friendly Monitoring System
• Obsessed
• Space, Time, And The Great Cosmologist
• Pro Quality In A Small Package
• The Pleasure Of Failure
• The First (Truly) Connected Car
• Should I Put My Selfie On That?

Next

• Seeking The Point Of No Return
• A Beach-Storming Behemoth That Leaves No Trace (Coming Soon)
• A Smarter, Fairer SAT
• A Pipe-Bot To Seek Leeks
• Superlice, Coming To A Scalp Near You
• Slacktivism Drives Science Forward

Features

• Friend For Life
• Bas Lansdorp Has A Posse
• Dawn Of The Data Age (Coming Soon)
• The Weight Of War

Manual

• Light Up Your Bike
• Behold! Copper Coins I Minted For Postapocalyptic Currency
• From Concept To FaceTime Tank
• Use Spray Paint To...
• Listen In On A Meteor Shower

Ask Anything

• What's The Hottest Temperature Possible?
• Can You Fix A Machine By Smacking It?

Archives

Evolution Of The Combat Load

NYPD Patrol Car

Wikimedia Commons

Not everyone is happy that police departments nationwide have branched out to NSA-style surveillance, collecting vast stores of ordinary citizens' digital information to mine for future investigations. But lengthy public debate hasn't stopped law enforcement from following in the agency's notorious footsteps. According to a new ProPublica report, police have kept years of controversial surveillance upgrades virtually off the books by soliciting millions of dollars of equipment as “gifts” from private charities. Authors Ali Winston and Darwin Bond Graham write:

Winston and Graham found that departments have been quietly upping their supplies of “spy gear”—ranging from cell phone trackers to the data mining software “not” behind the PRISM scandal—for years. And they’re not the only ones using the equipment: many banks also use software developed by CIA-backed Palantir Technologies, and repo men have found license plate readers extremely helpful. But when some of America's largest municipal police forces arrange to receive the technology as "gifts" in a way that sidesteps oversight, it's a bit more contentious.

By working outside of government funding, police departments can get controversial new technology without going through the usual, lengthy approval process. Officials argue private funding makes sense when budgets are tight. But while they avoid public debate, law enforcement agencies become reliant on the private donors that fund the respective foundations, opening the doors to conflicts of interest. Winston and Graham found numerous businesses that gave thousands of dollars to the New York City and Los Angeles police foundations before securing multi-million dollar contracts with either police department.

While they uncovered no direct evidence of foul play, the net result is communities that don’t realize the degree to which they’re being watched -- or who paid to make it possible.

Read the full report at ProPublica.

Ebola Healthcare Workers

Healthcare workers wear protective equipment in a clinic in Monrovia, Liberia, on September 22, 2014.

Morgana Wingard/USAID

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have confirmed that a second healthcare worker has contracted Ebola after treating a patient in the United States. News of a second worker's illness is not necessarily surprising after one Dallas nurse was confirmed to have Ebola on October 12. Both workers cared for Thomas Eric Duncan, a Liberian citizen who developed Ebola symptoms while visiting the U.S. Duncan sadly died at the hospital last week.

The first nurse, who drove herself to the hospital after noticing she had a low fever, is now in "good condition," the New York Times reports. Both workers are in isolation rooms at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital.

How can U.S. healthcare workers get sick with Ebola? Experts have often emphasized that the reason Ebola has killed thousands in West Africa is because some clinics there don't have even basic equipment, such as gloves, for preventing the spread of the disease. For a look at what some cities are dealing with, just see this disturbing collection of photos.

The situation is quite different in the U.S., and an Ebola epidemic in America is still extremely unlikely. Yet it's also becoming clear that it can be tricky for healthcare workers to do everything they must do to protect themselves from a severely ill Ebola patient's bodily fluids. Check out Vox's screenshots of the dozens of steps doctors and nurses must follow to remove their masks and "bunny suits" safely. Healthcare workers are especially vulnerable when they're taking off that gear, because it may have come in contact with bodily fluids, perhaps even with droplets that are too small to see. In addition, the workers may not have practiced this level of biosafety in a long time. All that can add up to small mistakes with grave consequences. 

More seriously, the U.S.'s largest nursing union put out a statement claiming the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital made a series of mistakes when admitting Duncan, including not putting him in isolation right away, not immediately giving nurses proper protective gear, and sending samples taken from Duncan through the hospital's tube system. The statement also says the hospital didn't train nurses properly. (The sick Texas healthcare workers are not members of the union, but contacted the union with their claims.)

CDC director Thomas Frieden has since said the agency should have sent a trained team to help at the hospital as soon as news broke of the first case, the New York Times reports. Dealing with Ebola does seem to require a whole set of skills most U.S. hospitals may not regularly practice. The New Republic notes that Doctors Without Borders, a nonprofit that has responded to several Ebola outbreaks, has special checklists, a buddy system, and trained people to help doctors and nurses take off their masks, bunny suits, booties, and other protective coverings. Only one Doctors Without Borders worker has gotten Ebola, even though the organization has treated the majority of Ebola patients in this outbreak, Science magazine reported October 3.

Yesterday, the CDC released a statement saying the centers are making improvements at the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, including getting a person to oversee doctors and nurses when they put on and take off their protective gear. The centers have also put together a response team that will go to any U.S. hospital "within a few hours" of it receiving an Ebola patient.

Minecraft iPhone

Of course, calling it a “working” iPhone is overselling it, but the device that’s been built here does have a surprising amount of functionality. You won’t be using it to make phone calls any time soon, but it does have several apps, including a calendar, photos, a camera, and even YouTube. (And if your brain isn’t tied into knots at the idea of watching a YouTube video on your phone about a game in which someone built a phone with a YouTube app, then you are a better person than I.) There’s even an interactive painting app and a few games, including a slot machine and blackjack—the payouts, however, are on the meager side.

Minecraft iPhone Slot Machine

Like the Minecraft hard drive, which stored only a paltry 4 kilobytes, an iPhone constructed out of pixelated blocks isn’t exactly the most useful of contraptions. Most of the apps are largely static constructions with the occasional “button” that can react by changing color when jumped upon. Of course, when you think about it, how is that much different from much of the software we all use on a daily basis? It’s largely a matter of scale.

The preponderance of experiments of this sort certainly raises questions about just how far a few dedicated people can go. What if, for example, you could build a hard drive in Minecraft that’s large enough to contain a copy of Minecraft in which you could build another working hard drive that could contain a copy of…you get the picture.

Minecraft isn’t the first environment to provide this kind of experimentation, though it does have the advantage of being a highly visual medium and existing in the age of YouTube, where those creations can be thoroughly disseminated. A couple decades ago, my friends and I were building simple machines like this in MUSHes, multiplayer online text-based games that contained their own engines for interpreting in-game code.

The Minecraft iPhone isn’t about to replace your existing phone, though it does have a screen large enough to give the iPhone 6 Plus a run for its money—and the Minecraft iPhone probably won’t suffer from bending, since you can’t really fit it in your pocket anyway.

[via Kotaku]

Rosetta Takes A Selfie

With a photobomb from comet 67P

ESA/Rosetta/Philae/CIVA

After more than 10 years of traveling through space, the Rosetta spacecraft -- the first space vehicle to travel to a comet -- is finally taking a load off. Well, part of it is, anyway.

This morning, the European Space Agency confirmed the landing site for Rosetta’s lander, Philae, on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Out of five potential areas for touchdown, a region known as Site J was picked for the historic landing, which is currently scheduled for November 12. Site J is located on the smaller of the comet’s “lobes” (or the “head” of the rubber ducky-shaped comet).

The landing will mark the first time a spacecraft has touched down on a comet. But the mission won’t exactly be a cakewalk. There’s still a lot more to be done before the landing can happen, and comet 67P’s weird shape means there’s a significant chance the 220-pound lander will more crash than land.

Philae

An artist's rendering of Philae touching down on 67P

ESA/ATG medialab

On November 11, the day before the expected touchdown, the flight dynamics team will have to make a series of “Go/No-Go” decisions in order to determine that Rosetta is where it needs to be to deliver Philae safely. Since Rosetta arrived at the comet on August 6, it has been moving closer to the comet body every day. Right now, it’s about 10 kilometers away from 67P, which is only 4 kilometers wide itself. But on landing day, the spacecraft will need to be 22.5 kilometers away from the comet’s center.

Two hours before Philae is released, Rosetta will perform a short maneuver to ensure the lander is on the right trajectory to land (and not crash).  As of now, Philae’s separation is scheduled for 8:35 am GMT, or 3:35 in the morning for those on the East coast. The landing will occur about seven hours after that, but because of the travel signal time between Rosetta and Earth, we won’t know if it made it down safely until 28 minutes later.

During its descent to 67P, Philae will take pictures and even perform a few experiments, testing the dust and plasma environment surrounding the comet. Once it makes it to its new home, Philae has about 64 hours of primary battery life to conduct its first sequence of science experiments.

After that, lengthier experiments kind of all depend on how much longer the batteries can last. Philae has solar panels for generating energy, but the team expects that dust will eventually settle on them, complicating the process. Man, if only 67P had an outlet...

Finally, in March 2015, the comet will have moved along its orbit, bringing it much closer to the sun. By that point, Philae will be so hot that it can’t continue with its work, and the whole operation will come to an end. But though we will have lost a lander, hopefully we will have gained a significant understanding about the evolution of comets -- and the origins of our Solar System.

Site J

Philae's primary landing spot

ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

Study Volunteers

Andrew Meas, Dustin Shillcox, Kent Stephenson and Rob Summers in the University of Louisville lab where they get specialized training to work with electrical stimulation to move parts of their bodies below their spinal cord injuries.

Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation

More than 30 people who have been paralyzed by spinal-cord injuries could soon get an experimental treatment that involves sending electric currents to their spines. The Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation is raising funds to add volunteers to an ongoing study of the treatment.

The treatment took a strong step forward recently, when the study's scientists published a paper showing that electrically stimulating the spinal cord, alongside intense physical therapy, helped four completely paralyzed young men to move again. Whenever the men visited the lab and had their electrode implants turned on, they were able to move their legs, knees, ankles, and toes on their own. The men also reported they had improved bladder and sexual function after starting the electrical stimulation therapy — important components to their quality of life.

Researchers are now seeking to expand the study to 36 additional volunteers, whom they'll follow for five years. The scientists "need to test more patients that will be a little more diverse to get a better idea of who will be responsive," lead researcher Reggie Edgerton of UCLA wrote to Popular Science in an email. The current participants are active men in their early 30s or younger. Edgerton and his team want to test study participants who are older, as well as women. The team remains focused on people who have a complete paralysis diagnosis and have been paralyzed for a year or more.

The study has no trouble recruiting participants. "There are more volunteers than we can accommodate," Edgerton says.

What's happening now is that the Reeve Foundation is seeking donations for the research at its website, ReeveBigIdea.org. Matthew Reeve, actor Christopher Reeve's son, visited New York City Comic Con last week to talk about his famous father and about the foundation's work. Christopher Reeve became paralyzed after a horse riding accident in 1995 and died 10 years ago on October 10.

"My father used to say that nothing of consequence happens unless people get behind an idea and they share that idea with others and eventually it becomes a movement," Matthew Reeve told Popular Science in a phone call before Comic Con. "We want to rally everyone in the community and beyond."

Wrong Way

LincolnGroup11 via Wikimedia Commons

Science chases progress. Researchers live under pressure from grant agencies, their peers, and the public to produce exciting results. New finds make headlines; checking old work usually does not. But when a recent study of human behavior by Sarah Brown-Schmidt and Sid Horton failed to reproduce a result from the authors' earlier research, they published a paper in the online journal PLOS ONE saying so. The response has been almost unanimously positive.

The researchers got a celebratory write-up from the journal (that topped Reddit's r/science section Tuesday) for their trouble:

Verification and reproducibility are basic tenets of scientific research. Old results are rejected all the time but usually not by the scientists who found them in the first place. A survey of 53 outlandish claims in clinical cancer research published in Nature in 2012 only managed to replicate six studies' original results. (That shocking ratio is a product of the chosen studies and the unpredictability of cancer research. Other fields are far more consistent.)

In general, the scientific community is vigilant about weeding out bad research from its ranks. It makes sense then that researchers who take the extra step of shooting down their own work recieved this response.

Opening Screen from the Fish School Game

Can you tell the difference between robot fish and real ones? You can take this online test to find out. Here's the catch: For every question, both fish schools are rendered as green dots on the screen. It's just that one set of dots corresponds to the actual movements of Pacific Blue Eye fish researchers filmed. The other set of dots moves according to algorithms researchers wrote.

The algorithms are based on everything the researchers know about how Pacific Blue Eyes school. Testing whether people can tell the algorithmic fish apart from real fish movements is one way to evaluate how well the team understands schooling behavior, mathematician Maksym Romensky wrote in a blog post. Romensky and his colleagues at Uppsala University in Sweden study the movements of large animal groupings, such as bird flocks and cicada plagues.

If you take the online test, the site will log how well you fare, data that Romensky and his colleagues will presumably analyze later. That said, I would guess many suburban and city folk are too removed from nature for tests like this to be meaningful. Might they not also be fooled by a poor algorithm? People have been able to tell older animal-group simulations are not real, Romensky writes. His colleague, biologist James Herbert-Read, pointed me to this bird-flock simulation, from 2011:

Did that strike you as obviously wrong? It seemed a bit strange to me, but I still felt uncertain.

Romensky, Herbert-Read, and their colleagues also tested their algorithmic swimmers on researchers who study fish behavior. On average, the fish experts got 4.5 out of 6 questions right per game, which is slightly better than chance. They also got better over time. So there's still room for improvement for the algorithms, even if I can't see it. My score was 3/6, exactly chance.

October 1964 Cover

Popular Science

Looking through the Popular Science archive reminds a reader that everything we do now was once a new idea, and that sometimes, even our most advanced technology was imagined years before it was possible. On this Throwback Thursday, we go back 50 years to the Popular Science of October 1964. 

VHS In The Lab

The Videocorder And Its Designers

Popular Science

Those old videotapes of M*A*S*H episodes collecting dust in your basement may look pretty outdated, but the technology that brought them into your home was once cutting edge. In 1964 we covered a new entry in the "red-hot race" to bring video recording to home televisions. The inventors already had a strong sense of how consumers would one day use the technology:

Of course, cable and pay-per-view have had their day, but Netflix, HBO, and other providers are already showing that a digital descendant of that model is the future of television.

The First Selfie Drone

Photo Ball Clicks From Above

Popular Science

Nowadays, computerized flying drones are available for all your aerial selfie-taking and other photographic needs. But what was one to do in 1964 to get that shot from above? We discussed a genius device, not yet built, that could be tossed in the air or dangled, and used mercury to trigger a shot when the lens pointed down.

Big Spinner

The Dizzy Maker

Popular Science

Back in 1964, no one knew how long-term spaceflight impacted human beings. In advance of the Gemini missions, North American Aviation planned the construction of an enormous centrifuge with a living capsule ripped from a KC-97 cargo plane on the end. Four astronauts would have lived inside for up to 30 days, experiencing the spinning, dizzying sensations of spaceflight as they went about their business.

As far as we can tell, the swinging monstrosity was never built. (Perhaps the challenge of building plumbing systems in a giant centrifuge was a contributing factor.) NASA does use smaller, but still quite large, spinning machines to train astronauts for the immense stress of launch on the body.

Wrong-Way Warnings

Warning Signs

Popular Science

Signs warning drivers not to enter exit ramps may not seem like the most advanced technology, but in 1964 they were introduced to combat a serious problem. Eight percent of fatal freeway accidents at the time were head-on collisions resulting from a confused driver, often driving the wrong way on an exit ramp. With wrong-way signage now a ubiquitous feature of American roads, that number mostly hovers between two and three percent, according to the NTSB.

You can read the complete October 1964 issue here. 

Superlice

De Agostini/Getty Images

As if lice weren’t bad enough, a growing number are now resistant to over-the-counter (OTC) treatment. Scary, yes, but not surprising since doctors have relied on a single compound to kill the bugs for decades, says John Clark, a University of Massachusetts Amherst toxicologist.

What Used To Work

OTC treatments kill lice with neurotoxins called pyrethrins (or the synthetic permethrin). When repeatedly exposed to the drug, bugs evolve a genetic mutation that desensitizes their nervous systems to its effects. 

Why That’s A Problem

Populations of lice develop additional defenses until they become completely immune, as is now the case in Argentina and Israel. In March, Clark reported that 99.6 percent of head lice in the U.S. already have the genetic mutation and are en route to achieving superlice status. 

What To Do Now

A few single-treatment prescription medications exist. Removing lice with heat treatment or those annoyingly tiny combs also works. You just need the patience of a saint (or a school nurse). “I’d recommend a professional,” Clark says.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Superlice, Coming To A Scalp Near You."

Human stasis, as portrayed in the movie Prometheus.

NASA wants to know whether it's really possible to put astronauts into 'suspended animation' for long-distance space travel.

Prometheus/Twentieth Century Fox

It sounds practically perfect in every way, but there’s still a considerable amount of time and research that needs to happen before we send astronauts off to Mars via the shores of sleep. The technology that SpaceWorks is looking at is a form of therapeutic hypothermia that will drop the temperature of the astronauts’ bodies by just 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, reducing their metabolism and putting them in a kind of hibernation. “It doesn’t take much to get the body to start slowing down,” says John Bradford, President of SpaceWorks Enterprises. 

Though it involves chilly temperatures, therapeutic hypothermia is a hot topic in the medical world, with numerous published studies and trials in the works, all trying to buy trauma patients an increased chance of recovery on the surgeon’s table.  Bradford says that SpaceWorks has been paying close attention to the studies coming out of the medical world, and that they think therapeutic hypothermia could be used safely on interplanetary flight, once some of the medical concerns of such an endeavor are studied and addressed.   

One of the biggest issues facing human stasis using therapeutic hypothermia involve the simple fact that the method has only been tested in people who have been severely injured. “Nobody has done this on a healthy person,” Bradford says, making it hard to isolate what benefits or problems the method could pose for astronauts in peak condition. Not only that, but the longest medical trials of therapeutic hypothermia have only lasted for 14 days, and a mission to Mars will take at least 180 days for a one-way journey. 

Some of the other medical questions that therapeutic hypothermia faces:

• Cognitive function—How will being unconscious for six months affect the human brain, and how long will recovery take? “Is it going to be a couple hours, a couple days?” Bradford says, adding: “We’d like to measure how well you can perform when you get there.” A recovery time on the scale of months would obviously be problematic. Bradford says that initial results from case studies showed that some patients who underwent therapeutic hypothermia actually preformed better cognitively after the procedure than before. Then again, before the procedure, those patients were severely injured, so it’s hard to say how astronauts would react. 
• Muscle atrophy and bone loss—Staying in shape is hard enough for astronauts and cosmonauts who are awake. But add being completely sedentary to a weightless environment and the threats of muscle atrophy and bone loss become much more severe. To counter the physiological effects, Bradford says that astronauts in stasis will be treated with drugs to counter the bone loss, and their muscles will be given an electrical workout, stimulated by small electrical impulses. “We can envision that you’re constantly being exercised in this manner,” Bradford says.
• Intracranial pressure—One of the more enigmatic challenges faced by long-term spaceflight projects is the effect of intracranial pressure on astronauts. Researchers have noticed that without gravity, fluids in the body tend to move towards the upper body, raising pressure in the skull, and affecting vision. Bradford says that some medical studies have found that induced hypothermia can reduce cranial pressure in situations here on earth, which gives him hope that it could have a beneficial impact on astronauts. 
• Radiation—Exposure to radiation is a huge challenge to long distance spaceflight, but Bradford hopes that stasis using hypothermia could reduce the risk. A summary of the proposed method from SpaceWorks says: “Testing in animals has shown that cancerous tumor growth and the effects of radiation are significantly reduced and slowed during the torpor-state (on par with metabolic rate reduction).” In addition, the savings on mass (no living quarters, less food, etc) mean that a transport vessel using stasis could theoretically be heavily armored against radiation in a way that a larger vessel could not.  

Bradford says that the next phases of research will involve longer term testing on animals, then humans, and eventually, humans in space-- likely on the ISS. He’s optimistic that with all the ongoing medical tests on therapeutic hypothermia, a viable solution for the Mars mission will be available well before any Mars projects get off the ground. “A space application is just part of it. Instead of developing some niche technology, we’re going to leverage something that’s existing,” Bradford says.  

And, just for the record, unlike many science fiction plots where something goes wrong and the capsule containing the astronauts is left to float in space for centuries, if something were to go wrong on a Mars mission using stasis, the hibernation system would automatically shut off, waking the crew and allowing them to make necessary repairs. 

IRIS View of the Sun, December 2013

NASA

Human eyes can't (or at least shouldn't) look directly at the sun, but NASA's IRIS can. The Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph mission is the latest to fly into space to observe the solar atmosphere. Now, a little more than a year after it launched, the satellite has sent back a complex picture of a special region of the sun, just below its corona.

IRIS observes the sun's ultraviolet radiation, which can't be seen by human eyes, and most of which is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere before it reaches our home planet. The satellite studies the interface region between the sun's visible surface, which is called the photosphere, and the corona, or the "crown" of light you can see during solar eclipses. Scientists think the interface region is key to a paradox about the sun: Its corona is thousands of times hotter than its photosphere, even though the corona is farther away from the heat-generating chemical reactions in the sun's core. It would be as if the air across the room from your radiator were warmer than the surface of the radiator itself.

IRIS is supposed to give scientists a more detailed look at what the interface region might be doing to shuttle energy out to the corona. Its telescope measures the temperature, velocity, and density of material in the interface region. It's able to see details as small as 150 miles across.

The journal Science published five papers today, all describing different kinds of activity happening in the interface region. In an essay for Science, solar physics researcher Louise Harra summarizes what the papers found:

For example, one paper found that the interface region fires off small, fast, fleeting jets of plasma. The jets have speeds of 50 to 155 miles per second and last just 20 to 80 seconds each. Yet they probably feed mass and energy into solar wind, the paper's authors wrote, which streams off the corona to buffet Earth and the other planets in the solar system.

IRIS will continue to observe the sun for at least another year, until the summer of 2015.

IRIS' First Image of the Sun, July 2013

NASA

Ebola

Ebola virus particles on an infected cell

NAID via Wikimedia Commons

While most of the recent coverage of the ongoing Ebola outbreak has focused on rising death tolls and a few infected U.S. citizens, other segments of the population have passed mostly unnoticed from the harsh glare of the media spotlight: Survivors, and those who are seemingly immune to Ebola. 

People who survive Ebola can lead normal lives post-recovery, though occasionally they can suffer inflammatory conditions of the joints afterwards, according to CBS. Recovery times can vary, and so can the amount of time it takes for the virus to clear out of the system. The World Health Organization found that the virus can reside in semen for up to seven weeks after recovery. Survivors are generally assumed to be immune to the particular strain they are infected by, and are able to help tend to others infected with the same strain. What isn't clear is whether or not a person is immune to other strains of Ebola, or if their immunity will last.  

As with most viral infections, patients who recover from Ebola end up with Ebola-fighting antibodies in their blood, making their blood a valuable (if controversial) treatment option for others who catch the infection. Kent Brantly, one of the most recognizable Ebola survivors, has donated more than a gallon of his blood to other patients. The plasma of his blood, which contains the antibodies, is separated out from the red blood cells, creating what’s known as a convalescent serum, which can then be given to a patient as a transfusion. The hope is that the antibodies in the serum will boost the patient’s immune response, attacking the virus, and allowing the body to recover. 

But this treatment method, like all Ebola treatment methods, is far from ideal. To start with, scientists aren't even sure if it works. In addition, the serum can only be donated to people with a compatible blood type to the donor, and it’s unclear how long the immunity would last. Adding to the confusion, there are several different strains of Ebola, and there’s no guarantee that once someone has recovered from one strain of Ebola they are immune to others. 

When Nancy Writebol, one of the survivors of Ebola who was whisked back to Atlanta soon after contracting the virus, was asked by Science Magazine if she would consider going back, she said: 

“I’ve done some reading on that and talked to doctors at Emory about that. My doctors at Emory are not sure how long immunity would last. It’s not been studied. I’ve read that even if a survivor was willing and able to help with the care for Ebola patients, because there are so many strains of Ebola, it would still be very wise and necessary to operate in PPEs and not just assume you’re immune.”

People who survived the disease are of particular interest to researchers, such as those working on the ZMapp drug, who hope that they can synthesize antibodies in the hopes of creating a cure.

But even less understood than the survivors are the people who were infected with Ebola but never developed any symptoms. After outbreaks in Uganda in the late 1990’s, scientists tested the blood of several people who were in close contact with Ebola patients, and found a number of them had markers in their blood indicating they carried the disease, but they were totally asymptomatic—they managed to completely avoid the horrifying symptoms of the disease. 

In a letter in the Lancet this week, researchers look into the existence of these asymptomatic patients, and hope that identifying people who are naturally immune could help contain the outbreak as scientists work on developing a treatment. A 2010 study published by the French research organization IRD found that as much as 15.3 percent of Gabon's population could be immune to Ebola.

“Ultimately, knowing whether a large segment of the population in the afflicted regions are immune to Ebola could save lives,” Steve Bellan, an author of the Lancet letter, said in a press release. “If we can reliably identify who they are, they could become people who help with disease-control tasks, and that would prevent exposing others who aren't immune. We might not have to wait until we have a vaccine to use immune individuals to reduce the spread of disease."

Being able to reliably identify naturally immune patients is still a ways off, but Bellan and his fellow researchers hope that by studying the current outbreak and looking for asymptomatic individuals, they might be able to save lives in the future.