Quantum LED

This schematic shows the five layers of the 3-D printed LED light.

McAlpine et al./Nano Letters

“In the world of 3-D printing, the big push is to try to print with multiple materials at once,” says mechanical engineer Michael McAlpine. “What they really mean, usually, is printing in two different-colored plastics.”

McAlpine and his colleagues at Princeton University, however, have gone far beyond two-toned action figures. They mixed and matched five different materials into the first fully 3-D printed LED lights. Although other teams previously claimed the honor, McAlpine says those weren’t the real thing. “They print a breadboard of electronics, then plug regular LEDs into it.”

More specifically, the LEDs (or light-emitting diodes) that the Princeton team created are called quantum dot LEDs. They’re a lot like the LEDs that are built into television and cellphone screens, but there’s some hope that QD LEDs could be more energy efficient.

3-D Printed LED

It works!

McAlpine et al./Nano Letters

The printed LEDs have five layers. On the bottom, a metal ring made of silver nanoparticles acts as a metal contact to an electrical circuit. On top of that are two polymer layers (both with really long chemical names) which together supply and shuttle electrical current to the next layer. That contains the quantum dots. The quantum dots are made of cadmium selenide nanoparticles wrapped in a zinc sulfide shell. As the electrons bump into these quantum dots, they emit orange or green light. The light is topped of with a cathode layer made of eutectic gallium indium, through which the electrons flow out of the LED.   

In addition to combining metals and polymers, some of the materials were hydrophilic (water-loving) while others were hydrophobic (water-repelling); some were liquids while others were solids. McAlpine says it’s the largest number of distinct material classes that have been 3-D printed into one object.

The printed LEDs performed on par with the kinds of LEDs that are used in iPhone screens, though they didn’t come close to beating the really fancy LEDs that are out there. But by controlling thickness and uniformity of the quantum dots, and by experimenting with different ink formulations, the performance of the printed LEDs could get better. Perhaps one day, if 3-D printers get cheaper, people could incorporate something like this into homemade TVs and iPhones.

But McAlpine imagines more exciting possibilities. “The conventional microelectronics industry is really good at making 2-D electronic gadgets,” he says. “With TVs and phones, the screen is flat. But what 3-D printing gives you is a third dimension, and that could be used for things that people haven’t imagined yet, like 3-D structures that could be used in the body.”

Up next, McAlpine’s team (who made a 3-D printed bionic ear last year, by the way), wants to try printing transistors, so that their 3-D printed gadgets could have the kind of functionality you might find in a computer chip. 

Interstellar

Paramount Pictures

A few years ago, I caught a glimpse of one of the biggest obstacles to space exploration. In a movie theater line, I overheard two people discussing the concept of building a human base on our Moon. Since I find that endeavor fascinating, I secretly tuned into their conversation — only to be hit in my space-loving gut with their outlook. They weren’t talking about the real possibilities of such a mission. Instead, they openly mocked the idea, saying such a thing was never going to happen, and that more important matters than space travel warranted our attention.

Their viewpoints struck a nerve with me, especially since they're not alone. Many people feel that way— or they don’t even care at all. This apathy, and even aversion, to space travel echoes throughout our current ventures into human space exploration, which have been next to nonexistent for the past three to four years. Without the Space Shuttle, NASA astronauts have had to hitch rides from the Russians to get to the International Space Station, and traveling to lower Earth orbit is about all they'll be doing for the next decade. Putting humans in space is just not the priority it used to be, and the film Interstellar has picked up on this indifference, too. 

The very first shot of this epic space odyssey sums it all up: a toy Space Shuttle sitting on a bookcase covered in dust. It’s an unsubtle metaphor for the fictional future Interstellar envisions. At some point, the human race ran out of food, and prioritized farming over more technical pursuits. The lofty goals of exploration and discovery have been shelved, and Matthew McConaughey’s character, Cooper, a product of this tradeoff, dreams of his former days as a NASA pilot but is forced to work in agriculture to keep his family alive in a world that is rotting away.

It soon becomes clear that Cooper and his daughter Murphy are the outliers in this world. Murphy's school teaches that the Apollo Moon landings were faked.  "I believe it was a brilliant piece of propaganda," says one teacher about the "faked" landings, "that the Soviets bankrupted themselves by pouring resources into rockets and other useless machines." Cooper wants his son to go to college, but the teachers advise otherwise. He needs to become a farmer. Why dream of anything else when we need to eat?

In an utterly bizarre twist, however, Cooper stumbles upon a secret underground community with the dream of leaving this decaying Earth behind. Yep, he’s found NASA, driven into hiding. Michael Caine’s Dr. Brand, the brilliant scientist heading up NASA’s interstellar mission, explains to Cooper that public opinion couldn’t justify allocating funding for the space agency, so they had to conduct their affairs in secret. But now, as the world’s atmosphere becomes saturated with nitrogen, NASA is humanity’s only hope to find a new world where the species can start over again.

Although Interstellar is set in the distant future, the movie rings true for many of the challenges our space agency faces today. It’s been three years since the cancellation of the Shuttle program, and since then, NASA has been feeling its absence. Hard. The administration has shifted its primary focus twice — from the Constellation program to the Space Launch System— both of which have received their fair share of criticism for their pricing and utility. Both have also had a hard time getting off the ground. And while we’re supposedly on target for a Mars mission in the 2030s, budget cuts and inadequate funding make that goal seem unattainable. 

The U.S. national budget plans to allocate just over $17 billion to NASA for 2015. As Phil Plait at Slate points out, that is less than half of a percent of the $3.9 trillion proposed national budget for next year. Buried within that statistic are the sentiments of those negative theatergoers: We have better things to do.

That’s why the film Interstellar comes as such a relief. As a movie, it certainly has technical flaws, some of which we pointed out in our Science of Interstellar package, and it drips with sappiness. But a worthy theme prevails: optimism. Optimism about space travel, about our Universe, and about the future of the human race. 

On their high-stakes mission spanning galaxies, Cooper and his fellow astronauts encounter wormholes, hostile exoplanets, and one gigantic time-bending black hole--things we’ve only ever dreamed of encountering--and they conquer these enigmas of the Universe. Much of the science in the film is more grounded in fantasy than fact. But I don't care. It’s a love letter to our species. We are going to prevail, and we’re going to see what space has to offer.

Space travel has been marking time for the past few years, and the industry took a big hit last week, with the explosion of Orbital Science’s Antares rocket and the crash of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo. Hopefully Interstellar will help to combat popular reservations about continuing our exploration of space. Space is hard, but that’s what makes it worthwhile.

I'm not sure if the movie will inspire every audience member, but it can certainly shift the mindset of some. By showing viewers the insane and incredible places space travel can take us, maybe everyday discussions of going to the Moon or Mars won't immediately be met with mockery. Instead of overhearing people laughing at the notion of a lunar base, I'll overhear more people intrigued by the concept. Such a change in attitude could be huge. Apathy is deadly to innovation, but excitement is infectious -- and that can be the spark we need to launch a new era of space flight.

As Cooper laments early on the film, “it’s like we’ve forgotten who we are — explorers, pioneers, not caretakers.” Maybe Interstellar will help us to remember.

Philae Anchors In.

An artist's impression of what the lander will look like after it reaches Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko.

ESA/ATG medialab

On November 12, the Rosetta mission will make history by becoming the first spacecraft to touch down on a comet. Until today, the European Space Agency has been referring to the craft's epic landing area as “Site J”. But in mid-October the ESA announced a competition to give the site a better name, and the results are in: Site J’s new moniker will be Agilkia.

The new name comes out of Egypt. When the Aswan Dam was completed on the Nile River in the early 1900s, flooding nearly destroyed the temples on the island of Philae. Starting in 1972, the temple complex (which had been built around 370 B.C. as a place of worship for the goddess Isis) was pulled from the water and re-erected on the nearby island of Agilkia.

Since Rosetta’s lander is named Philae, it kinda makes sense to name the landing site Agilkia.  Apparently, out of the 8,000 suggestions that the ESA competition drew in, 150 people suggested Agilkia.  

Here's what the landing site actually looks like:

Hello, Agilkia

ESA/Rosetta/NAVCAM – CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

Staphylococcus aureus bacteria

NIAID via Flickr

Ever since the first antibiotic, penicillin, was used as a wonder drug in the 1940s, researchers have worried about antibiotic resistance. And with good reason. The CDC estimates that 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of infection by antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. The World Health Organization views antimicrobial resistance as a global treat, saying on their website: "Without urgent, coordinated action, the world is heading towards a post-antibiotic era, in which common infections and minor injuries, which have been treatable for decades, can once again kill."

A post-antibiotic era would be terrifying. Luckily, researchers are working on ways to avoid such a dire fate, looking into treatment options that go beyond antibiotics. One of these new research pathways was described this week in a paper published in the journal Nature Biotechnology. The research involves introducing liposomes, small structures that are designed to mimic a cell membrane, into the body. These particular liposomes are designed to act as decoys, drawing bacterial defenses (usually toxins secreted by bacteria) to themselves instead of letting them attack cells within the body. Once the toxins reach the liposomes, they are trapped and can't damage the cells of the infected organism.      

"We have made an irresistible bait for bacterial toxins. The toxins are fatally attracted to the liposomes, and once they are attached, they can be eliminated easily without danger for the host cells", Eduard Babiychuk, who directed the study, said in a press release. 

The hope is that these liposome reinforcements will be able to deflect damage from the body, bolstering the immune system's ability to respond to a bacterial infection. But the immune system won't have to go it alone. The researchers hope that by using liposomes, they can make antibiotics more effective at their jobs too, writing in the paper that the liposomes could be used "therapeutically either alone or in conjunction with antibiotics to combat bacterial infections and to minimize toxin-induced tissue damage that occurs during bacterial clearance."

It all sounds very promising, but there are still skeptics. Frank Martin Brunkhorst, head of clinical trials at the University Hospital of Jena in Germany, told Deutsche Welle, "I'm not sure this could definitely work," citing previous studies that used liposomes that failed. The researchers of the Nature Biotechnology paper have a ways to go before liposomes are used as treatment in medical facilities; so far they've had sucess using their engineered liposomes in mice, but human testing is still a distant goal.  

12 Weeks, In Ultrasound

Wolfgang Moroder on Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

Biotech entrepreneur Jonathan Rothberg is working on a handheld ultrasound device that can replace the big machines hospitals use today to check on growing fetuses, evaluate tumors, and more. Plug the device into a smartphone, hold it up to a person's body, and you'll get a window-like view of what's inside, the device's patent promises. Popular Science previously covered Rothberg's work on a $1,000 genome sequencer, which we gave a Best of What's New Award in 2012.

Whether his ultrasound idea will work depends on whether he's able to commercialize a novel ultrasound technology, MIT Technology Review reports. The technology is the capacitive micro-machined ultrasound transducer. It's a silicon-based alternative to the crystals that traditional ultrasound machines use for their most fundamental task, producing and detecting sound waves. MIT Technology Review explains:

Japanese electronics manufacturer Hitachi does already seem to make and sell a CMUT-based ultrasound machine, but it's not immediately clear how big the machine is or how much it costs. Rothberg wants to make a CMUT-based device that works as well as piezoelectric-based hospital machines for a few hundred dollars, MIT Technology Review reports. Hospital ultrasound equipment costs $100,000 or more, Radiology Today reported in 2013.

His success may depend on medical practice and culture as much as science and research, one review of CMUT technology, published in 2011, suggests: "The complete commercial success of CMUT technology depends more on finding applications with high volume markets, rather than overcoming technological hurdles."

[MIT Technology Review]

Lining Up To Vote In Brooklyn, NY

April Sikorski, CC BY-SA 2.0

This election, in an effort to avoid voter fraud, the state of Texas is adopting a stricter voter identification law — one which Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg says "risks denying the right to vote to hundreds of thousands of eligible voters". Meanwhile, in the county that houses state capital Austin, election officials are preparing for a high-tech future of fairer and more easily verifiable elections.

A research team based at Rice University is designing a system which might bring newfound stability to elections, and Travis County wants to be an early adopter. Computer scientist Dan Wallach says their "Secure, Transparent, Auditable, And Reliable" technology (STAR) will solve most of the major problems facing American elections, including making sure your vote gets counted, and showing losers that they really lost. It's not without obstacles, though.

American law demands perfect secrecy and perfect accuracy for its voters. Modern methods can fail on those counts, either because aging e-machines produce no meaningful paper trail for verifying elections, or because paper voting systems confuse voters who misuse the ballots. (This was the key issue in the 2000 Bush-Gore dispute in Florida.)

Philip Stark, a vote-auditing expert who worked on the STAR system, says the team calls it a "belt and suspenders approach" to election monitoring. That is, the system uses redundant safeguards to render fraud extremely difficult.

A STAR voter would enter a booth and select her candidate on a tablet screen. The computer then encrypts her vote and stores it electronically, keeping a tally. But the system takes several additional steps to ensure security for the voter and her candidate.

Voting Irregularities

A man examines one of the irregular Florida ballots that lay at the center of the Bush-Gore controversy in 2000.

Mark T. Foley/State Library and Archives of Florida via Wikimedia Commons

First, the machine prints a paper ballot stamped with the voter's selection in plain English (or one of 19 other languages) which the voter can review before leaving the booth and dropping it in a ballot box. If the voter trusts the machine, she can do so immediately. If, on the other hand, something doesn't look right, she can enter a code from the ballot to force the machine to decrypt her electronic vote. The first e-vote and the ballot are then discarded and she can begin the voting process over again (or, if she caught the machine cheating, report it). After the election, auditors can check those anonymous paper ballots against the anonymous electronic records in the machine to confirm everything went above board.

Once a vote is locked in and a ballot deposited, a second slip emerges from the machine, with a unique number, likely represented by a QR code. After the election, all the STAR systems compile and post online a public list of encrypted identification numbers keyed to each vote cast. A particularly cautious voter can then check (using some straightforward math or, more likely, a smartphone app from her favorite provider) whether her vote was counted in the total. If many voters report not finding their encrypted vote records online, auditors could trigger a recount.

All the underlying science and technology of STAR exists now, the team says, and it could be implemented using hardware purchased off the shelf from retailers at bulk rates. There's an entire portion of the team devoted to making them accessible across barriers of language, disability, and ease with technology. Current e-voting systems, mostly purchased after the Bush-Gore debacle, are aging, proprietary machines that are expensive to repair. But there's a challenge to swapping them out.

"Laws will have to change," Stark says. Regulations designed for outmoded systems won't allow STAR at today's polls. But Stark says he hopes the Travis County officials who urged scientists to build the system in the first place will eventually get the legal work done.

In other words, the future of fair and accountable voting could lie in the hands of Texas lawmakers.

National Transportation Safety Board Inspects SpaceShipTwo Wreckage

National Transportation Safety Board

Last night, Virgin Galactic held a press conference intended as its last connected directly to SpaceShipTwo’s crash on Friday. The conference had three major themes: the crash investigation is ongoing, the cutting edge of transportation technology always carries risk, and despite setbacks Virgin Galactic has no intention to abandon space tourism.

At the core of the statement is a vision that Virgin Galactic’s planned short hops into space, currently priced only for a wealthy elite, are part of the progression of all humankind:

It’s an ambitious statement, especially bold in light of the recent crash. Stuart Witt, chief executive of the Mojave Spaceport that launched SpaceShipTwo on Friday, is fond of comparing the craft to the voyages of 16th century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan is best known for launching the first naval expedition to circumnavigate the globe, though Magellan himself and the vast majority of his crew died along the way.

The 21st century is not the 16th century, and the death of co-pilot Michael Alsbury in the crash might shutter the whole enterprise. Writing for Popular Science, Eric Adams noted a key twinge of doubt in Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson’s remarks immediately following the crash:

Virgin Galactic’s statement last night had less doubt than the ones made immediately following the spaceship’s crash. But the possibility remains that the SpaceShipTwo might not be humanity’s bridge to the stars the way its creators hoped.

Meanwhile the National Transportation Safety Board is leading the investigation into the cause of the crash, and we can expect that they'll be very thorough doing so. Everything about the flight, from the vehicle's construction to surviving pilot Peter Siebold's recollection to fuel mixtures and failsafes will be pored over, all trying to establish exactly what went wrong so that it can never happen again. In part, the answer to SpaceShipTwo's crash will be found among the wreckage in the Mojave:

The Scene Outside 2000 Election Recounts In Florida

Dtobias, CC BY-SA 3.0

This election day, American voters will decide the futures of all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, as well as 36 in the Senate. Thirty-six states will choose their governors, and 87 of 99 state legislative bodies will hold votes on their hundreds of members. That's a lot of voting, a lot of happy winners, and a lot of unfortunate losers. 

It's easy to imagine that at least some of those losers will suspect funny business at the voting booths. Identification rules at play in 2014 address the specter of fraudulent voters, but history shows that candidates have much more to fear from faulty or rigged ballots (just ask Al Gore).

When a U.S. election is challenged, the response is often a full recount of all votes cast. But recounts fail too — and losers don't really care about exact numbers, Phillip Stark, an expert in statistical vote monitoring, tells Popular Science.

Imagine in an election of 1,000 voters, you just lost your deputy dog catcher race 299-701. But scandal strikes: a video reveals the town ballot-counter rushing on the day of the first count. A recount reveals a disparity: you didn't lose 299-701, you lost 300-700!

But sitting back in your chair at the campaign headquarters, staring up at the shrunken, sagging victory balloons you never dropped from the ceiling, you think: What's the point? The counter went through all that extra trouble and you still miss out on the fat paycheck and the glory of netting wayward hounds.

If, instead of secretly recording the ballot-counter and forcing a full recount (which can take weeks in larger elections), local officials had just checked up on the election to probe for errors, you might be satisfied, and voters could be more confident in the whole system.

Statistically speaking, the town council could have ordered just 100 ballots randomly recounted out of the 1,000. If the election was honest, then about 70 of those ballots should go to your opponent, and 30 to you. Even a sample of 20 that produced 6 for you might be reassuring, and would provide a huge benefit of election security with minimal effort. You just have to ask yourself how sure you want to be you before you'll accept that you lost, even if you do encounter problems.

When votes cast are checked against votes counted, Stark says, "You pretty much inevitably find at least one error", in even small samples. A method he developed along with other experts anticipates those errors while still producing strong reassurances for candidates and voters.

This process is called a Risk Limiting Audit. The best audits, in place in some states, use truly random population samples and only count vanishingly small portions of the total vote count. The larger the difference in reported results, the smaller the size of the audit necessary. Legislators need only to decide, as a percentage, how confident they want the auditors to be when they report their results. The auditors then count ballots until they reach that mathematical certainty. Stark says in a national presidential election, auditors should only have to count about 250 ballots per state to be 90 percent sure the results are reported properly. (If you like high-level math, you can find a more rigorous explanation of the statistics here.)

Of course, the world and its bureaucrats have a habit of complicating matters for auditors. Stark says most states do terrible jobs of storing and accounting for ballots after elections, introducing statistical noise to the audit. In other states, legislators handpick a county for an audit, disrupting the necessary randomness. Still, election monitoring moves forward. In the future, better voting machines that incorporate audits right into their systems could help in the fight against fraud. One such machine could appear in Austin, Texas, in coming elections.

Sniff Test

This is a nose model the Oregon Healthy Authority uses for educational presentations.

Oregon Health Authority

A pair of scientists say they've figured out how to make the smell equivalent of "white noise." They've written the equations. Now what's left is to make a device that's able to cancel out everything from onions to locker-room musk, although it's unclear whether such a machine will ever be made.

"Olfactory white" works differently from baking soda or water filters. Those use sodium bicarbonate and carbon to absorb odors. Olfactory white also works differently from Febreeze. At least according to About.com's description, the popular household spray eliminates odors by reacting with smelly molecules and turning them into inert compounds. No, the idea behind olfactory white is that you release additional molecules into the air so that when people sniff all those molecules at once—the original smell, plus the olfactory-white-creating-smell—their brains perceive it as no smell. (Or at least something not unpleasant.)

Olfactory white is supposed to be analogous to white noise, which sends out sound waves to cancel noises, and white light, in which colored lights combine to make white. The scientists who worked on this latest iteration of olfactory white aren't the first to come up with the idea. Neurologist Noam Sobel of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel pioneered it, but hasn't yet come up with a working machine, New Scientist reports.

Theoretically, canceling smells with smells should work because human perception of smell is synthetic, not analytic. That means that when human brains encounter multiple odors, they don't perceive them as a weighted mix. So it's not like, "Oh hey, this is 50 percent dairy compounds, plus 48 percent mild squash, plus two percent tree bark." Instead, human brains mush everything together: Smells like pumpkin pie!

Other scientists have performed a few studies asking people to describe the smells of pure molecules, such as tolualdehyde ("fragrant,""almond,""sweet") and valeric acid ("rancid,""sweaty,""putrid"). To create their equations, mathematician Kush Varshney and engineering professor Lav Varshney, who are brothers, made a map linking those descriptions and the molecules' chemical structures. Then they fed their map into a computer program that learns from examples. That computer program theoretically should be able to come up with descriptors for novel smells that weren't part of its training data.

From there, the Varshneys wrote an equation that comes up with a mix of molecules that, when added to a smell, should minimize the bad descriptors people would apply to that smell. For example, the brothers identified a few compounds that would help cancel the unpleasant odors of durian, dried bonito flakes, onion, and sauerkraut. (For the record, I find three of those four foods delicious.) Among the cancelling molecules are (+)-cyclosativene, which gives lettuce and cabbage their green smell, and (E,E,Z)-1,3,5,8-undecatetraene, which smells like pineapple.

A machine engineered to recognize and cancel out odors could bring peace to workplace lunchrooms, the researchers wrote in the paper they posted to the arXiv database. The researchers also imagined using their equations to come up with additives that take away disliked flavors in healthy foods.

It's debatable whether such inventions would be worth developing, but we're totally fascinated with the idea. Do your kids resent it when you add cauliflower to their macaroni and cheese? An olfactory-white additive may cancel out the flavor of the veggie, while keeping in the delectable cheddar and mac. Or how about a spinach salad that tastes only of the bacon bits?

[arXiv, via New Scientist]

Galactic Hero

David Montgomery/Getty Images

Hawking's Greatest Achievements

Defining and Redefining Black Holes

In 1974, Hawking presented a radical theory: Black holes actually emit energy, bleeding what would later be called "Hawking radiation." This seemingly minor point reconciled key aspects of classical and quantum physics and changed the way in which scientists see the universe.

Analyzing The Beginning of Time and Space

In collaboration with James Hartle, Hawking proposed in 1983 that the universe has no physical boundaries. Traveling its length would be a wraparound trip, similar to circumnavigating the globe. This mathematical model of the early universe also suggested that time, too, could exhibit a wraparound effect despite its finite beginning.

Popularizing Science

With the 1988 release of his cosmology primer, A Brief History of Time, Hawking became a global publishing phenom, eventually selling 10 million copies in 40 languages. The book introduced readers to the physics of black holes and the Big Bang, as well as Hawking's major theories.

James Marsh

Jeff Vespa/Wireimage/Getty Images

Director James Marsh On...

Meeting Hawking

"It's like meeting the Queen, or meeting God," says Marsh. "You don't quite know what you should be saying, or how you should be saying it, or what kind of answer you need to wait for."

Accuracy

The movie's biggest eureka moment features Hawking stuck while putting on a sweater--a predicament that inspired Hawking radiation theory. "We modeled the scene exactly on that breakthrough, which [his ex-wife] acted out for me in the room where it happened," Marsh says.

Hawking's Voice

After seeing a rough cut of the movie, Hawking volunteered his unique voice software. "It made a big difference," Marsh says. "The film was just better with the real voice. It has a music to it. It has more emotion, oddly enough, than the voice that we managed to create for ourselves."

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Space, Time, And The Great Cosmologist".

The Plasma Wakefield Accelerator

The plasma is contained in that metal box in the center.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

The SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory's linear accelerator cuts through the grass and trees just west of Stanford University in California, running for two miles, its path clearly visible from the air. Now, in a lab on the same campus, a 36-centimeter-long device is supposed to do the same thing.

The device is a plasma wakefield accelerator, a piece of technology that engineers have been working on for decades. The idea is to collide electrons at nearly the speed of light. The "wakefield" in the accelerator's name refers to an actual wake in a wave of hot plasma, in which electrons are supposed to gain speed and energy. Like other particle colliders, a plasma wakefield accelerator should make possible experiments looking into the universe's tiniest particles and most fundamental physics rules.

A practical plasma wakefield accelerator should be able to do all that using less electricity and at least 100 times less space than existing electron smashers, thus saving costs for future taxpayers and physicists. "We're looking for that next new technology that's going to allow us to push physics forward, but do it in a way that's realistic and affordable to society," Mark Hogan, a plasma acceleration researcher at SLAC, tells Popular Science.

The way plasma wakefield accelerators boost electrons is unique. It's often compared to surfing, that super-California sport. Physicists first send a bunch of electrons plowing through a small chamber of hot lithium plasma. That creates a huge wave in the plasma. Then physicists send a second bunch of electrons into the wave. As those electrons ride the wave, they experience a large electric field, helping them gain lots of energy in a short space.

Linear Accelerator at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Image courtesy of SLAC

The technology still has a ways to go before it can take over duties from its larger siblings. It's also early-stage enough that it's still an open question whether other technologies might win out in the next 10 or 20 years. Today, however, Hogan and his colleagues are announcing they've met a milestone in plasma wakefield acceleration. The team—including scientists from universities in Norway, China, Germany, and elsewhere in California—has injected about 1.6 billion electronvolts of energy into every electron in a bunch. The resulting beam of electrons, Hogan says, "looks like beams you'd put into a collider."

 In the results Hogan and his team are reporting today, their electrons were able to extract, on average, 18 percent of the energy from the wave around them. The team's previous attempts at this experiment didn't extract a substantial amount of energy from the wave.

Physicists first theorized about plasma wakefield accelerators in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was only in the 2000s and later that the technology existed to begin showing they might work.

Now that Hogan and his team have demonstrated they're able to boost electrons' energy, they have a number of tasks to tackle next. They'll want to figure out how to boost a higher-quality, denser beam of electrons. The denser, the better, for collisions. They'll also want to string together several of the devices like the one they've made. Scientists have always known that one will not be enough to replace large linear accelerators. They'll need many, working in sync. (The overall size is still expected to be feet long, not miles.) Finally, they'll want to try to get plasma wakefields to meaningfully accelerate positrons, too, not just electrons.

Hogan and his colleagues published their work today in the journal Nature.

Boston Skyline

Stefano Montagner

With the specter of rising sea levels threatening many metropolises worldwide, cities are starting to rethink what their future might look like. And in Boston, that future might look a little bit like Venice, canals and all.

A nonprofit research group, the Urban Land Institute (ULI), recently released a report which outlines Boston's options for dealing with rising waters. The sea level in Boston is currently rising at a rate of 0.11 inches per year. That may not seem like much, but eventually it could cause major, costly problems for the coastal city -- especially in the event of large storms like Hurricane Sandy. ULI offers numerous suggestions, including constructing artificial reefs, marinas, and algae farms; reconfiguring utility and drainage systems in low lying areas to accommodate floodwaters; and building seawalls and dunes. The fifty-two page report lays out potential plans of action in four different areas of the Boston area: the Alewife Quadrangle, The Innovation District in South Boston, Back Bay, and Revere Beach. 

One of the suggestions that's attracting the most attention relates to a proposal to install canals in Boston's Back Bay, embracing the rising sea levels as a new method of transportation. The plan would be to allow alternating streets in the neighborhood to flood, while keeping some of the streets intact. According to the report, "The canals will provide new waterway connections to the Charles River through a system of locks and to Fort Point Channel by way of the naturally forming Mass Pike Canal." 

Adding waterways to Back Bay is actually kind of a throwback for the neighborhood. Back Bay used to be a bay that was filled in with dirt during the 19th century. So if the city does decide to add canals to Back Bay in order to preserve it's future, in some ways it will be paying homage to its past.

[Urban Land Institute via io9]

Antares Explodes After Lift Off

The Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket, with the Cygnus spacecraft onboard, suffers a catastrophic anomaly moments after launch on Oct. 28, 2014.

NASA/Joel Kowsky

In the wake of the explosion of Orbital Science’s Antares launch vehicle last week, many were quick to point fingers at the rocket’s main engine hardware. The Antares’ first-stage rocket engine is the Aerojet Rocketdyne AJ-26, which is basically just a refurbished NK-33 – an engine made by the Soviets in the 1960s and 70s. Experts theorized that the five-decade-old engine design was most likely to blame for the destruction of the Antares, which exploded shortly after lifting off at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on October 28.

Well, it turns out those suspicions were spot-on. An investigation into the source of the disaster highlighted a potential "turbopump-related failure" in one of the two AJ-26 engines, Orbital Sciences confirmed Wednesday. Given this discovery, the company said it will most likely discontinue use of these engine types for future versions of the Antares.

Meanwhile, Orbital Sciences is moving forward on fulfilling its obligations to NASA. The company has a contract with the space agency under the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) program, which requires Orbital Sciences to provide NASA with a minimum of eight cargo transport missions to the International Space Station. Last week's failed launch was meant to be Orbital Sciences’ third resupply mission, so the company has to figure out how get at least five more rockets up into space.

To do this, Orbital plans to buy new rockets from an unknown supplier, Reuters reports. These vehicles will deliver the company’s Cygnus cargo spacecraft to the ISS for one or two missions in 2015. Then in 2016, Orbital hopes to introduce a new-and-improved version of the Antares, which will include an upgrade to the rocket’s propulsion systems (and a lack of AJ-26 engines). The company claims these changes will somehow consolidate their remaining five launches into four, and they will come at no increased cost to NASA, since an update to the Antares engines had already been planned for 2017. The plan will also puts Orbital on track to complete its CRS contract by 2016.

“We intend to move forward safely but also expeditiously to put our CRS cargo program back on track and to accelerate the introduction of our upgraded Antares rocket,” said Orbital CEO David W. Thompson. 

While Thompson didn’t specify which company Orbital will be buying its temporary rockets from, he said the potential candidates include two U.S. launch providers and one European company. Viable companies include SpaceX, which would be ironic, since SpaceX has its own CRS contract with NASA to provide 12 cargo resupply missions to the ISS.

[Reuters, Orbital Sciences]

Crumling's Printed Gun

Note the open-top design.

Michael Crumling

As police from Germany and Australia will tell you, 3-D printed guns are likely to be as fatal to the person firing as they are to anyone else. This is true primarily for poorly made 3-D printed guns using weaker plastics that can't absorb the explosive shock from the gun blast. Without specially designed ammunition, the stress of firing rounds risks exploding the gun -- and injuring the person holding it.

To fix this issue, Pennsylvanian machinist Michael Crumling made a special type of ammunition that doesn’t break a 3-D gun when fired. His special Atlas rounds are .314 caliber, a size sometimes used in rifles. However, these rounds look a bit different from normal rounds of ammunition. Typically, there are two mains parts of a round that are usually visible: the bullet, the little pointy part sticking out from one end, and the shell, the casing that surrounds the bullet. In the Atlas rounds, the bullet part doesn't stick out but is instead recessed an inch deep inside the outer metal casing, like a turtle in its shell. Here, the round's thick shell functions as both a barrel and a shell, absorbing the explosive force of the gunpowder and channeling it forward.

Atlas Bullets

Michael Crumling

To shoot these special bullets, Crumling also specially designed and printed his own gun, which resembles Defense Distributed’s “Liberator,” the first 3-D printed gun. There are some key differences, and chief among them is the lack of a closed barrel on top. Instead, the thick shells of the Atlas .314 rounds keep the bullet pointed the right way, and then eject when the bullet leaves. It’s a clever solution to the challenge of weak materials that’s limited the potential of printed guns.

The Gun's Special Open Top

Michael Crumling

It’s also a gun that’s harder to replicate. Crumling didn’t print his Atlas rounds, he machined them, using skills and tools that aren’t necessarily available to everyone with a 3-D printer. Given the time and skill demands of making ammunition like this, it’s less likely to have an impact in the United States, where conventional guns and ammo are readily available. However, it may make a bigger splash abroad, in places like Germany and Australia, where gun controls are tighter. Or in Japan, which just sentenced a man to two years in prison for printing a gun.

Jawbone UP3

Jawbone

Time to clear off some room on your wrist, because there's yet another fitness band on the way. While the $180 Jawbone UP3 might seem to occupy the same niche as the Fitbit or Microsoft's newly announced Band, the UP3's goal is focused less on providing the same raw data that many fitness trackers already offer and more on turning that data into qualitative ways to improve your life.

A 2013 study by the Pew Research Center found that 69 percent of Americans track at least one health-related statistic about themselves, with 21 percent of those relying on technology such as an app or fitness device to do so. The preponderance of fitness devices—with more high profile ones, such as the Apple Watch, still to be released—means that number is sure to rise. But even given the large number of people tracking health information, few of us are generally equipped with the tools or expertise to intelligently synthesize and make conclusions about that data.

At the heart of the UP3 is software that can intelligently figure out exactly what kind of activities you participate in. Jawbone says its algorithms can analyze your activity patterns and determine whether you're just out for a run or playing a sport like tennis or basketball. By tracking that information alongside other metrics, such as hydration and caloric intake, the UP3 can advise you to drink more water on days that you work out, or go to sleep earlier.

That analysis is an important factor for fitness trackers, since too much raw data about health can sometimes backfire. Articles in The Guardian and The New Republic have suggested that tracking caloric intake, for example, can reinforce problems like eating disorders.

And as fitness devices track more and more health factors, the data overload continues. In a blog post about the UP3, Jawbone product manager Jayanth Chakravarthy points out that heart rate can be very easy to misinterpret without the context of when it was measured. For example, having a heart rate of 91 beats per minute is to be expected after you've had your morning coffee; it means something very different if that same heart rate were to be recorded minutes after you wake up.

Should the UP3's intelligent analysis prove successful, makers of other fitness bands will likely have to take similar approaches. And that's good for those of us who want to improve our health, as few of us can really afford the personalized attentions of a trainer or nutritionist.

House Snake Embryo, Six Days Old

Patrick Tschopp, PhD; Harvard Medical School, Department of Genetics

Whence your phallus? You probably have one—the term includes clitorises as well as penises—and, until now, scientists had never examined which cells in an embryo make it.

In biology, that's unusual. Tracking which embryonic cells become what body part is an important part of figuring out the basic rules for making life. For example, scientists know, in detail, what cells turn into limbs and eyes. Today, two teams of biologists are publishing the first reports of cell-fate-tracking for phalluses in snake, chick, and mouse embryos. Yay! Considering the similarities between mouse and human embryo development, the mouse results likely apply to you, too, says Patrick Tschopp, a geneticist at Harvard University who worked on one of the teams. "We can be fairly confident that in humans, it's pretty similar," he tells Popular Science.

Here's what happens in mice, according to Tschopp and his team. A structure in the embryo called the cloaca sends chemical signals to another structure, called the tail bud. Some of those tail-bud cells form the genital tubercle, which eventually becomes a penis or clitoris. Scientists knew about the genital tubercle before, but never knew where it came from. Meanwhile, the rest of the tail bud cells become tails, in mice at least. Human embryos' tail buds eventually disappear.

Interestingly, the situation is a bit different in snakes and chicks. Snakes' phalluses originate from limb buds—which, in snakes, are evolutionary leftovers, like human tail buds. Chicks' phalluses draw from both limb buds and tail buds, Tschopp's team found. All three species' phallic development depends on signals from the cloaca, which eventually forms the urethra and anus in mammals.

Knowing the origin of phalluses further back in an embryo's history helps scientists figure out what genes drive phallus development. Scientists can look in those progenitor cells to see what genes are turned on. That, in turn, may pinpoint which genes go awry in human babies with genital birth defects, says Martin Cohn, a biologist at the University of Florida who worked on the second team publishing on phallus development today. Genital birth defects can be fairly common, but their causes are usually mysterious.

In addition, knowing how phalluses grow in different species offers a clue into how phalluses evolved in general. Phalluses are among nature's fastest-evolving body parts, as Cohn has found in previous research. Consider the differences between lizard and snake penises and mammalian ones. Male lizards and snakes each have a pair of sex organs called hemipenes, which are not enclosed. Instead, they act like slides for sperm. Turtles, birds, and crocodile-like animals also have slides instead of tubes. It's crazy out there.

As yet, it's unclear why the animals of the world have evolved such a diversity of phalluses. I can't wait for science to figure it out.

Cohn, Tschopp, and their colleagues published their work in the journals Nature and Scientific Reports.

A Rugged-Looking Former Governor

Illustration

Pale-faced men beware: People think you make terrible leaders.

Researchers have long known that attractive folks benefit from a "halo" of boosts to other percieved traits, and they have a much easier time getting chosen as leaders in groups. A new study designed to break that halo down into its component parts found that while people prefer smart-looking men in certain situations, they always want a guy with a healthy complexion when given the choice. (The research did not look at voter preference in women.)

A Figure Displaying A Face Used In The Study

Click to enlarge.

Brian Spisak, Nancy Blaker, Carmen Lefevre, Fhionna Moore, and Kleis Krebbers

Brian Spisak, a behavior expert who worked on the study, tells Popular Science this research has important lessons about followers' biases. In democratic elections, the candidates' appearances sway voters before they utter a single word. John F. Kennedy's robust, youthful looks were widely credited with giving him the edge in his 1960 television debate with Richard Nixon. Of course, he won that election.

In order to find their results, the researchers manipulated images of a man's face and showed them to 148 online subjects. They asked the subjects to choose who they would hire as CEOs tasked with leading aggressive or more stable companies. Healthy faces won out 69 percent of the time, while subects mostly chose smarter faces for stable scenarios.

The "healthy" faces had richer, warmer skin tones than the paler, bluer "sickly" ones. Study subjects evaluated different face shapes as more or less intellegent than one another. Spisak says the smarter faces also appear more feminine. He says people may value testosterone-laden toughness for times of threat, but seek out intelligence in peacetime.

Spisak says the strength of the health effect surprised the team. Given that people only prefer intellegence at certain times, it would make sense that the health's value might be context-dependent as well. But health turns out to be a "first-order" effect — meaning it's important in pretty much every situation. In their paper, the researchers suggest health-preference might be an evolutionary adaptation. Humans learn a great deal from each others' faces, and it would have been important for clans to follow leaders unlikely to keel over on the job. (This perhaps remains true today.)

In the long run, Spisak wants to look at how the health and intelligence effects apply to women and build a more comprehensive picture of human biases in choosing leaders. In the meantime, his advice for budding politicians? "Eat your fruit and vegetables."

Bas Lansdorp, CEO of Mars One

Brenda de Vries

Early on a Saturday morning, about 60 planetary malcontents gathered in a narrow auditorium on the campus of George Washington University. They’d come to hear about a plan to build a self-sustaining colony in space, and they hoped to be among its first settlers, leaving the rest of us to live and die on Earth. 

“How many of you would like to take a one-way mission to Mars?” asked the balding engineer on stage. His face was a peachy monochrome, with sharp, craggy features set like a mini moonscape, and he had slightly pointed ears. On his lapel, a sticker read: “GREETINGS! MY NAME IS: Bas.”

When nearly everybody raised their hands, Bas Lansdorp’s lips curled into a grin. These were his constituents, the folks who had pledged to serve as guinea pigs for a bold and strange experiment. Just the day before, he had been on CBS This Morning, patiently explaining his idea. “I just want to make sure I understand that correctly,” the dumbfounded host had said. “If you go on this mission, you are going and not coming back.” But here at the first-ever Million Martian Meeting, in August 2013, Lansdorp saw only believers. “Wow, this is a really easy crowd!” he beamed.

Most of the armchair aliens shared a demographic, the young-man Marsophile: guys with tattoos across their necks and arms, goatees and mustaches, variations on the Weird Al look. But there were also older women in the room, and kids too young to drive. What brought them together was an abiding belief in Lansdorp’s central message, that humans should be expanding onto other planets, and they should do so now. A few years ago, President Obama announced that the U.S. would put astronauts in orbit around Mars by the mid-2030s, but budget cuts and sequestration have slowed the project down, if not killed it outright. Even if NASA gets the mission back on track, the agency has said it will only send humans to Mars if it can also bring them back—a maddening bit of bureaucratic circumspection for the crowd assembled in Washington, D.C. “The technology to get you back from Mars simply doesn’t exist,” Lansdorp said, stirring up his audience, and it may not exist even 20 years from now. “We need to do this with the stuff that we have today, and the only way we can do that is by going there to stay.”

Until three years ago, Lansdorp had little to do with Mars. Trained as a mechanical engineer, he co-owned a wind-energy startup that aims to generate power using tethered gliders. But in 2011, the Dutch entrepreneur sold some of his stake in the business and started working on a grand idea: If governments are too stingy for a trip to Mars, or too risk-averse, then private business should take over. “I realized that if it’s going to happen, I’d have to do it myself,” he said to the crowd. Along with his Mars One co-founder, Arno Wielders, Lansdorp devised a plan to fund the trip primarily by selling it as entertainment. In studying the Olympics, Lansdorp found that the broadcast rights yield upward of a billion dollars. A reality television show about the first extraplanetary town in history, he figures, could be worth much more—at least the $6 or 7 billion necessary to build and launch the payloads.

The show would need a cast, of course, and that’s where the meeting’s would-be Martians sought to do their part. Since April 2013, Lansdorp’s team has been screening résumés sent in from around the world by anyone who cares to pay a modest application fee (the amount varied by country). The first phase of this stunt ended last December, when they narrowed down the pool to 1,058. These hopefuls will be interviewed and the group further whittled down this year. In the end, just four will be selected for the first mission—two men and two women, each from a different continent on Earth. Their trip to Mars is scheduled to land in 2025.

The people in the auditorium knew they faced long odds of being chosen, and that even if they were selected, the project might not make it off the ground. Still, Mars One has given hope to hordes of folks who have so far harbored their peculiar dreams in private. During the casting process, some 200,000 people checked in at the Mars One website, and a related interest group on Facebook accumulated 10,000 members. One tattooed young man in D.C. wore a T-shirt with a message that summed up the spirit of those assembled: “Bas is sending me to Mars,” it said across the front; on the back it read, “Thanks, Bas, you’re a good dude.”

For someone who doesn’t share the dream—an Earth-bound journalist, perhaps—that spirit seems quixotic at best and suicidal at worst. If Lansdorp sends four people to their living ends on a harsh and empty world, what will have been the point? Is Bas a good dude, or a dangerous megalomaniac? Lansdorp has a ready answer for any doubters: “People can’t imagine that there are people who would like to do this,” he said, as he wrapped up his presentation. “They say we’re going to Mars to die. But of course we’re not going to Mars to die. We’re going to Mars to live.”

Meet The Mars One Candidates.

(From left to right) Bea Henington, Leila Zucker, Karen Cumming, Max Fagin, and Anastasiya Stepanova are 1,058 applicants who made the first cut to win a one-way trip to Mars. Here's why they're willing to leave Earth behind forever.

It’s been 10 years since Spirit and Opportunity, the twin rovers, landed on the Red Planet. In that time they’ve rolled around for almost 30 miles, taking stock of a terrain that reaches out in all directions as a pock-marked plain of dusty, murky brown. They’ve weathered temperatures that range from 70° in the summertime to -225° in Martian winter, frequent and ferocious dust storms, an unbreathable atmosphere consisting mainly of carbon dioxide, and enough radiation from cosmic rays and solar flares to riddle a person’s DNA with cancerous mutations. Who would choose to spend a life in such a nasty, brutish place?

At the conference lunch, I put this question to a young man named Max Fagin. Forget your likely death on the mission, I said. Pretend that there will be no computer glitch or landing failure, and that your ship won’t end up inside a giant fireball. Imagine that you won’t get sick or break a limb and have no doctor to help you. Let’s say that technically it all goes right. What, then, about the stuff that you’ll have left behind forever? What about the feel of falling snow, the gentle breeze, or swimming on a scorching day?

“I would feel incredibly sad about missing all those things,” said Fagin, a master’s student in aerospace engineering at Purdue University. “But the whole point of going to Mars is that you’d have better substitutes. Any human being can visit the ocean. Anyone can visit the forest. These are beautiful things, but they are commonplace. I will get the chance to experience a sunrise on Mars. I will get the chance to stand at the foot of Olympus Mons, one of the tallest mountains in the solar system. I will get the chance to see two moons in the sky. I just can’t imagine being nostalgic for a life that 6 or 7 billion people are experiencing right now.”

There were a few more Martians at the table with us; we were eating sandwiches and sushi, foods an astronaut could only dream of. I asked Fagin, Won’t the novelty wear thin? What happens when you’ve seen that sun rise and set a hundred times, and when you’ve walked around Olympus Mons? What happens when you’re in your cramped habitat with nothing much to do except the grim work of staving off an early death? And what about the food? I jabbed my chopstick at a Whole Foods tuna maki. What happens when you’re forced to live on undressed mini lettuce from your agri-pod? 

Fagin waited for me to finish my speech, his face a quiet picture of condescension. “You’re seeing things from a narrow point of view,” he said. “It only seems weird to you because of when and where you live. I mean, would you ask an Inuit how he can stand the boredom of all the snow and rock?”

I stuttered for a second and fell silent. Why indeed should I take my pampered life on Earth as a baseline? Maybe life on Mars wouldn’t be so different from the lives that humans led for thousands of generations. Later on I’ll find rebuttals to his argument: The Arctic teems with wild animals and plants, hardly like the lifeless wasteland one would find on Mars. And, as it happens, the Inuit do suffer dire rates of suicide and depression. But I’m sure these facts wouldn’t matter much to Fagin. In 2010, he spent two weeks crammed into a tiny research station in the empty Utah desert, where students tried to simulate a stay on Mars and put on space suits every time they went out for a walk. “I didn’t have as much time there as I wanted,” he told me.

But what about your family? I sounded desperate now, as if I needed to make him see that Mars One would only lead to misery and death. Yet Max Fagin would not be swayed. The colonists will be more in touch with home than soldiers were in Vietnam, he said, and certainly more so than the migrants who came to America before the first transatlantic cable. The first settlers on Mars will trade video-mail with their families. “My parents have been comfortable with the notion for quite a while now,” Fagin said. “They know that they’re going to lose me eventually, because the planet is going to lose me.”

Meet The Mars One Candidates.

(From left to right) Kellie Gerardi, Ryan MacDonald, Dianne McGrath, and Andrew Rader are among the 1,058 applicants who made the first cut to win a one-way trip to Mars. Learn more about each of them, and why they're willing to leave Earth behind forever, here.

Late in the afternoon, once the presentations had wrapped up and the Martians were gathering for a postconference trip to the National Air and Space Museum, I found Lansdorp near the stage. He had just finished an interview and the camera crew was packing up. He seemed wearied by his publicity tour; his grins appeared forced when replying to questions that he had been asked again and again since the project was announced. “Saving humanity is not anywhere on my list of reasons to do this,” he told a small ring of reporters. “I started this because I wanted to go myself.”

Though he calls himself a lifelong Mars enthusiast, Lansdorp didn’t have the expertise to plan the mission alone. As a graduate student at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, he designed systems for a hypothetical space station, and that’s how he connected with Wielders, a payload study manager at the European Space Agency. “He knows about space, and I don’t,” Lansdorp said. Wielders told him that a one-way mission would be feasible, if they could raise a lot of money. That’s when the pair devised their plan to sell the broadcast rights and show the journey on TV.

Their concept has some flaws. Big-event programs make a lot of money, but they’re often brief and action-packed. (Lansdorp’s model, the Olympics, is a good example.) Mars One wants to run a show for decades, with most of the airtime in the next 10 years dedicated to the arduous process of crew training. What happens if networks aren’t interested in a multiyear commitment? What if no one likes the show? Or what if everything is going well, and then the colonists decide they want some privacy, and turn off the cameras?

To work out the details, Lansdorp recruited the help of one of the biggest names in European reality TV: Paul Römer, the co-creator of the Netherlands’ Big Brother. He emailed the producer blind, and heard back right away. (“What are the odds?” Lansdorp says. “You contact some media expert and he turns out to be a science-fiction fan!”) In June, Mars One signed a contract with Darlow Smithson Productions, a subsidiary to a company where Römer once served as chief creative officer. The show will document the candidate-selection process and could potentially air in early 2015.

As for the space technology, Mars One says nothing will be built in-house; Lansdorp wants to purchase all equipment off the shelf or develop it with private vendors. He expects to use an upgraded version of the Falcon 9 rocket produced by SpaceX, and a landing capsule from SpaceX or Lockheed Martin. He’ll need a pair of rovers, too, not built for science like the NASA bots, but for moving Martian soil and laying sheets of thin-film solar panels, in preparation for the settlers’ arrival. 

The Mars One timeline is ambitious—perhaps too ambitious. It’s not clear that Lansdorp’s contractors will be able to tweak their technologies (for rovers, life-support units, space suits, and so on) to fit the needs of the mission at the necessary pace. And given the expense of recent, much more modest missions to the Red Planet—Mars Science Laboratory, which involved landing only the Curiosity rover, cost $2.5 billion—Lansdorp’s projected price tag seems rather low. While Mars One won’t say how much money it has in the bank, the company does not appear to have raised more than a tiny fraction of what it needs. “At this moment, the weakest link is really the fund-raising,” Lansdorp said at the meeting. “If we had the $6 billion in the bank right now, I’m very convinced that we could pull this off. But to convince the people who have to give the money upfront to finance the hardware—that’s our biggest challenge.”  

Even the attendees in D.C. had some doubts about Mars One. “We know this could fail. We know it’s a long shot,” one told me. But that’s not really the point. Lansdorp has shown that their path to Mars need not be blocked by budget-cutting bureaucrats. They don’t need to wait for guys like Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, or Dennis Tito, the millionaire who plans to mount a Mars flyby in 2021. Earlier this year, more than 8,000 people pledged $300,000 to Mars One on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo. A few years ago, all these dreamers would have been alone in their frustration. Now they’re meeting up online and organizing conferences. The Martians have a movement, and it’s growing.

When I describe Mars One to friends, many seem to take it personally; they call the Martians lunatics or worse. They’re not unusual. On the Aspiring Martians Facebook group, knee-jerk hostility has been the subject of many long discussions. As one user wrote in January, “I’m sure I’m not the first one to have noticed that anywhere anything Mars One–related is posted, we’re told (in the comments) that we are crazy, wannabes, psychologically deviant, on a suicide mission, in for a rude awakening, the mission is a hoax, technology needed doesn’t exist, and, in some cases, that we deserve to die for participating.” 

Lansdorp sees this too. There are some people who want to go to Mars, he said during the conference, and lots who don’t. “These people will never really understand each other.” But a simple lack of understanding does not explain the anger that emerges when the Martians share their dream in public. It’s not just that their trip seems difficult or crazy. It’s that they seem to be running from Earth. What’s wrong with our planet?, we want to ask. Life here isn’t good enough for you? Or perhaps it’s something personal: I’m not good enough for you? 

“It has nothing to do with anything rational,” Lansdorp told me, when explaining why anyone would want to go to Mars. “It’s almost the same as love. You want it for some reason you cannot really explain, and sometimes one love is more powerful than other loves that you have.” Lansdorp began his project because he wanted to go to Mars himself, but now that he and his girlfriend are expecting a child, he says he has given up the idea of going first. He doesn’t want to miss seeing his child grow up. “But I do understand there are people who would do that,” he said.

I wouldn’t leave my girlfriend, either. When I look into the sky, I feel only wonder—a movement of the mind, not of the heart. But as we spoke, I thought back to a Q&A I’d once attended with the astronaut Michael J. Massimino. Someone asked him what it’s like to take a spacewalk and see the Earth from far away. He said it was the most amazing sight he’d ever seen, but that it also made him deeply sad. Why? Because he knew that he’d never have the chance to share the vision with the people he loved the most.

In that light, a one-way trip to Mars made a peculiar sort of sense. An astronaut doesn’t abandon his family, and choose another, greater love to take its place. Instead he ventures into outer space on their behalf, on behalf of everyone he leaves behind, no matter the physical or emotional cost. The would-be Martians talk of sleeping under double-moon-lit skies, but they also know that they’ll be as alone as any human beings in the history of time. And that’s precisely why their journey matters, for us as well as them: They’ll live on Mars, so the rest of us don’t have to. 

Just before I left the conference, I met another Martian, Leila Zucker. She’s a physician in her 40s, happily married, yet inclined to set it all aside. “I can work to make things better on Earth while I’m here,” she told me, “but I could work to make things better on Earth while I’m on Mars. The idea that I’m running away or something . . . no, I’m not. People who think that are small-minded and scared. The whole idea is to expand the human race.”

Earlier she’d spoken on a panel, taking questions from the crowd. “None of us are planning to die, but all of us recognize that we could,” she said at one point. “You don’t get my life for nothing, but I will give it up because this is my dream.” Then, as the session drew to a close, she abruptly began to sing: “I wanted to go to the Red Planet Mars/but I didn’t get picked by Bas/I wanted to go to the Red Planet Mars/now I gaze longingly at the stars/But I don’t care I wasn’t picked for space/I’m cheering for the future of the human race/Someday we’ll all go to the Red Planet Mars/’Cause Mars One leads the way to the stars!”

When she sang the last two lines a second time, all the other Martians joined in.

This article was originally published in the November 2014 issue of Popular Science under the title "Bas Lansdorp Has A Posse."

HL Tau and its protoplanetary disk

ALMA (NRAO/ESO/NAOJ); C. Brogan, B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

At the very center of the image above is the sun-like star HL Tau, surrounded by rings of dust and gas. You may never have heard of HL Tau, but this picture will go down in the astronomic annals as the first high-resolution image of the birth of a planetary system. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), an international observatory in northern Chile, scientists were able to capture this image, showcasing the early stages of a planetary system forming around HL Tau—a celestial ultrasound of a distant solar system..

HL Tau, sometimes called HL Tauri, is located 450 light years away in the constellation Taurus. The star has been the subject of numerous studies, and researchers had already discovered at least one embryonic planet in orbit around the star, but they hadn't actually been able to observe its planetary formation first-hand. They knew that there was a disc of dust and other pre-planetary material surrounding the star, and they even were able to observe the magnetic field of the disc. But with the high-resolution capabilities of ALMA, they were able to get a beautiful image of the birth of planets. 

“When we first saw this image we were astounded at the spectacular level of detail. HL Tauri is no more than a million years old, yet already its disc appears to be full of forming planets. This one image alone will revolutionize theories of planet formation,” Catherine Vlahakis, ALMA Deputy Program Scientist and Lead Program Scientist for the ALMA Long Baseline Campaign said in a statement. 

In the image above, HL Tau is shining brightly in the very center of the ringed disc. The surrounding bright rings are just dust and gas in orbit around the star, but as they circle HL Tau, the particles of dust smash into each other, sticking together and forming larger and larger bodies. Eventually, these bodies build up into proto-planets, large enough to clear a path through the dust and gas; the trails of these early planets are visible in the image above as dark rings.    

“Most of what we know about planet formation today is based on theory. Images with this level of detail have up to now been relegated to computer simulations or artist’s impressions. This high resolution image of HL Tauri demonstrates what ALMA can achieve when it operates in its largest configuration and starts a new era in our exploration of the formation of stars and planets,” Tim de Zeeuw, Director General of the European Southern Observatory said in a statement. 

As you can see in the comparison below, HL Tau's planetary disc (left) stretches for a much greater distance than our own solar system (right). Scientists estimate that even though HL Tau is smaller than our sun, the distance from it to the edge of the pre-planetary disc of dust and gas is three times larger than the distance of our sun to Neptune (2,798,000,000 miles). 

Solar system comparison

ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

The image taken by ALMA is particularly exciting for researchers, because it demonstrates the capabilities of the array located in Chile. ALMA captures images in wavelengths that are much longer than the wavelengths of visible light, which in this case allowed them to see the structure of the cloud surrounding HL Tau. If they had tried to look at it using an instrument that collected visible light, the dust and gas would have gotten in the way, yielding an image that was not-so-clear (or as exciting). 

Bionic Bird

XTIM

If aeronautic engineer Edwin Van Ruymbeke gets his way, you may soon be able to use your smartphone to fly with the birds. Not personally, of course, but in the form of Van Ruymbeke's crowdfunded Bionic Bird project, which the inventor describes as the world's first "furtive civilian drone."

Because the Bionic Bird flies by flapping its wings instead of using the helicopter-style design favored by most drones, it can actually blend in among real birds. The Bionic Bird is shown attracting other birds, including predators (see video below), or being swatted at by every bird's worst enemy—cats. (The Bionic Bird team says the drone's foam body is "indestructible", which seems a bit hyperbolic, given what I've seen a cat's claws and teeth do to many a rug, but the carbon fiber wings can at least be replaced separately.)

The Bionic Bird can supposedly operate at a range of up to 100 meters, using Bluetooth 4.0 to communicate with smartphones—currently iOS, though an Android app is on the way. Its onboard battery lets it fly for about 6 to 8 minutes at a time. (The included egg-shaped charger can recharge it in 12 minutes, but that still means a lot of charging for less flight.)

You're probably not going to use the Bionic Bird for anything particularly practical; it's more of a clever toy than anything, though it may appeal to the ornithologically inclined. That said, if it works as well as the videos demonstrate, it can probably fly circles around your average quadricopter drone—or maybe even land on your homemade helicarrier.

Van Ruymbeke's project has already hit (and well exceeded) its $25,000 funding goal, and the first batch is supposed to ship before Christmas. General availability is targeted for March 2015, with orders opening up in early December. Depending on the eventual funding totals, the crew behind the drone have already earmarked a number of improvements to come in later versions, including an HD camera with live streaming capabilities, control with a wristband, and hovering like a hummingbird.