Today in great reads: The Verge's Ben Popper has a killer story up about the world of underground body hackers--those souls brave and crazy enough to perform surgery on themselves to give themselves new powers and strengths. It goes beyond regular cyborg ideas, partly because the guys are doing it themselves, with no safety net. Example: some embed a rare earth magnet under one's skin, which allows the hacked person to detect electromagnetic fields. There's a video of the surgery/hack, and it's a bit graphic but pretty awesome. Check out the story here.

PASADENA, Calif. -- We've seen a brief sample of the full-color environment at Gale Crater on Mars, but before the Mars rover Curiosity can beam back full-size versions, its cameras need a checkup. Scientists want to be sure they're seeing Mars as it really looks, in real ochre -- so the cameras have to be calibrated. To do it, Curiosity will call upon one of the most ancient tools of astronomy: A sundial.

Mars images are stunning to see, but they offer real science value, too, because Curiosity's science team will use them as their eyes on Mars. Curiosity's view of the rim of Gale Crater and Mt. Sharp at its center will help the team determine where the rover should drive first, and after that, which rocks will be most interesting to zap with its ChemCam laser or drill with its robotic arm. Determining a rock's interestingness is largely accomplished by just looking at it, so the view must be accurate, explains Tyler Nordgren, associate professor of physics at the University of Redlands in California.

"[Images] allow you to figure out what the landscape is made of, and what the rock is made of. Part of how you figure out what rocks are made of is by figuring out what color they are," he says. "It allows you to figure out the history of Mars."

Curiosity will continue to calibrate its high-resolution, 3-D color cameras later today (or to-sol?) on Mars, NASA managers said at a news conference Tuesday morning.

Mars' atmosphere is very different from Earth's -- it's much thinner and it's full of carbon dioxide, and it lacks the type of tiny aerosols that contribute to the Rayleigh scattering effect on Earth that turns our sky blue. The sun is also far fainter at an extra 50 million miles away. Dust kicked up by Mars' howling winds fills the skies, much more so on windy days, and as a result Mars' atmosphere looks slightly pink. This can cast a rosy hue on anything in Curiosity's surroundings.

Every camera needs a color cue to be sure the images represent reality. If trees on Earth look blue in your image, you can easily tell the color balance is off. But Curiosity doesn't have any natural color cues on Mars. Everything is pretty much red -- "it's all variations on a theme," Nordgren says. "You need to determine, when you look at a rock wall or cliff face and it looks red, how much of that is due to the rock, and how much of that is due to the lighting."

To do this, Curiosity is carrying a 4-inch square plaque mounted near its backside, which will be the first subject for the MastCam cameras. It has four slices of color, representing known shades of blue, red, green and yellow. A little post and ball at the middle act as a sundial that casts a shadow. This way, the rover can tell the right color in full light and in shadow.

Curiosity's cameras will shoot the sundial with its set of filters. Then it will take science images, ones the team will use to determine likely targets for exploration. Afterward, the cameras might shoot the dial again just to be sure.

"That tells you, under the current lighting conditions that are going on, here's how we tweak the different images as we put them together, to get the color balance just right," Nordgren says.

Scientists can then make false-color images, heightening contrast or hue to highlight certain topographical or morphological features of the rocks. They could even take out the sky's reddish glow, Nordgren says. "Imagine you could transport that section of Mars here to Earth, and have a nice yellow-white light shining on it, as if you were in the lab. Then you could see, 'Ah, this rock is still red, but it's not quite salmon-colored, it's more of a brick color.'"

The image below shows the same calibration target on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit.

Curiosity's plaque is the same, except that Nordgren and mission scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory added updated plaques. Curiosity's sundial is actually a leftover from the MER missions.

"That's really all you need to be scientific," Nordgren says. "But we thought, why not use this very dry boring technical piece of equipment, and turn it into something beautiful and evocative?"

On the target's face, the name MARS appears in 16 different languages. In the center, the sundial itself represents the sun, and concentric circles surrounding it represent the orbits of Earth and Mars, which are themselves represented by a pale blue dot and a red dot. Each home-plate color slice has a phrase describing what the mission means for human exploration. It reads:

Every sundial also has to have a date -- it's sundial tradition, Nordgren explains -- and a motto. Curiosity's is stamped "Mars 2012" and "To Mars to explore."

"It embodies the scientific process. Who knows what we'll discover with this new spacecraft?" Nordgren says.

Nordgren started building the MER Mars sundials when he was a graduate student at Cornell, studying with Steve Squyres, the principal investigator on Spirit and Opportunity. He builds and collects sundials and is fascinated by them, he says.

"They're beautiful, they're precise, they're amazing works of engineering and art that tie together astronomy and timekeeping," he said. "People have been using sundials, in one form or another, for thousands of years. I think they're lovely. It's a wonderful intersection of 21st century technology and ancient technology, on the surface of Mars."

More than just a scientific mission, Mars rover Curiosity's final, frightening descent stirred up plenty of emotions, from both the engineers who piloted it and from spectators around the world. We all held our breath as the rover went through the "seven minutes of terror" that was the landing--and then celebrated when news came of a successful finale. It was beautiful, and we've collected some of the best reactions to its descent, as well as some of the early pictures Curiosity sent back to Earth.

Click here to enter the gallery

What you might not expect when you're expecting: a company that wants to 3-D print a statuette of your unborn child. Japanese engineering outfit Fasotec will gladly take an MRI scan of an expecting mother's fetus and using its BioTexture modeling software to capture 3-D data related to human tissues convert that scan into a CAD file, then print it up in resin. It's called the "Shape of Angel" service (what else?), and it will only set you back roughly $1,250.

That makes it the most expensive way to completely creep out everyone you know. The MRI captures the entire pelvic region, so the mother's body is printed in a clear resin and the baby in white. The tiny keepsake (it only stands a few inches tall) is then ready for display on your mantel, or perhaps as a centerpiece at your next dinner party.

A gift box is included, because what you want to do after you 3-D print an unborn fetus is give it to someone.

[DigInfo News]

It's widely assumed that training on top of a mountain will give an athlete a major leg-up when competing closer to sea level. But it turns out it's not quite that simple, and in fact, athletes are discouraged from conducting training exclusively at high altitudes. How much altitude training helps, and how to tweak the finer points of a high-altitude training regimen are questions still under consideration. It's not nearly as simple as running on a mountain, coming down, and feeling prepped for your marathon. Today's altitude training cycle comes from decades of trial and error--and it doesn't work the way you'd think.

Altitude training started becoming trendy with athletes after the 1968 Olympics. In the 7,000-plus foot domain of Mexico City, some athletes thought training there improved their performance, or that Olympians who lived at that elevation did especially well. Athletes tried training at high altitudes and then competing back near Earth, but no significant advantage seemed to be gained from it. In the early 1990s, researchers Ben Levine and Jim Stray-Gundersen came up with a widely discussed, still slightly controversial theory: "live high, train low." It's just what it sounds like: live at high altitude, but when training, get (relatively) low.

The logic of the method goes like this. An athlete who lives somewhere near sea level moves to a higher altitude. In order to compensate for the thinner air, their body produces more erythropoietin, a hormone that tells the system to create red blood cells, which are in charge of carrying oxygen to working muscles. Those extra blood cells running through the athlete's muscles could help increase endurance enough to change the outcome of a race. When training at the lower altitude, they can also train harder with help from the red blood cells, increasing strength and endurance.

But there's a problem: At that altitude, the athlete used to sea-level conditions will have to train slower and use less oxygen. In turn, they'll be working at a lower level than usual and lose strength. The red blood cell count will help acclimate them to the higher altitude, but the lighter training will balance the equation, so the loss of muscle strength is enough to negate any help gained from a higher red blood cell count. In 1998, Levine explained to the New York Times that humans can never totally compensate for the altitude, and so they won't be training at their potential. That's what makes live high, train low a vast improvement by comparison: the person living at high altitude but training low can train as hard as they always do, and not have to first take a step backward in their training so they can increase their red blood cell count.

That's still the basic premise of altitude training, used today by endurance athletes around the globe. But the finer points of the system are still in question, as is just how much the system can help. Robert Chapman, a professor in the kinesiology department at Indiana University, has done work for the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Track & Field on the live high, train low method, and his controlled groups have shown between a 1 and 1.5 percent improvement over athletes training below 4,000 feet in distances above 5,000 meters. "In the world of elite level athletics," he says via email, "1 percent is massive."

Chapman says his research has also reveled how different athletes react to this training method. One might start pumping out the erythropoietin while another doesn't. Some might use a lot less oxygen at higher altitudes, others might not. The 1 to 1.5 percent is a mean, but for individuals that might be as high as 5 percent, while the process could make others worse off. The research has also given some idea on what the specifics of the training should look like, albeit with some gray areas he's still investigating with his lab. For athletes, he recommends living at a minimum of 7,000 feet above sea level for at least 28 days, then getting down to 4,000 feet for the harder workouts. But the data is mixed on when to compete after coming down: the first 48 hours seems good, but so does about 21 days later.

It can be satisfying to build something yourself, making careful measurements and ensuring your carefully routed wood slats fit together perfectly. Except when your measurements are off by a few microns and nothing fits. Some MIT students decided that a smart machine could help matters, and designed a re-routing router that automatically cuts the right shape.

Alec Rivers, a PhD student in MIT's electrical engineering and computer science department, inherited some woodworking tools from his grandfather, according to MIT News. He tried to build a picture frame, but no matter how carefully he measured, the pieces wouldn't fit quite right. "I was getting incredibly frustrated," he said. So Rivers, Frédo Durand, an EECS associate professor and member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and a mechanical engineering grad student named Ilan Moyer came up with a new handheld router.

You load the system with pre-drawn plans, and then you only have to be accurate within a quarter inch when you set it up. The router will redirect itself to rout wood along the appropriate route.

Its precision stems from a two-dimensional map the tool creates for itself. To do this, you have to move the device over the raw material first, so a camera on board can record the entire surface. To help it locate itself on the map, the user puts some black-and-white stickers on the surface to be cut. Then you load your design into a computer and this is overlaid onto the 2-D map. Place the router on the material you want to cut, and the system will automatically track its progress by taking further images, which it compares to its internal map. Motors on the router automatically adjust its path to ensure it follows the design.

It is cheaper and better than existing automatic cutters, CNC routers, because those devices can only cut things that are smaller than themselves, as MIT News explains it. This thing could conceivably cut anything. The team is actually considering adapting it to a forklift and attaching it to a flame cutter, so it could be used to carve enormous pieces of steel.

Companies could use this technology to complete tasks that now require heavy equipment, and hobby woodworkers could use it to improve accuracy on complex shapes. Rivers said it's so precise, it cut out a map of the United States.

Rivers and colleagues will present their work at the Siggraph conference this week. Here's a video describing their project:

[MIT]

Bad weather is bad business. That's especially true if you're an airline or commercial pilot, though it impacts everyone. Weather-related delays and cancellation tax the economy for billion of dollars in lost productivity each year, much of which is borne by the airlines themselves. And of course there's the occasional human cost of weather as well. Every so often, a rapidly forming weather event or a bad decision by a pilot costs lives. People die flying through severe weather (you mostly hear about this when it's a larger passenger jet, but smaller planes crash more often than you probably realize). That's why technology giant Honeywell sends engineers out flying in a 60-year-old twin-propellor aircraft looking for storms. And that's why today I'm going with them.

Honeywell is a technology solutions company that you know but may not realize you know (they build everything from the fire safety system in your office building to better body armor materials for police officers to longer-lasting brake pads for our cars), and today it is showing off a solution to a shared problem that we perhaps don't realize we have: When we board a flight bound for anywhere, the pilot or pilots in the front seat have a really poor view of the weather ahead. In a sense, they are flying (nearly) blind into an atmosphere that can quickly turn hostile.

Honeywell's newest weather radar system for aircraft removes that uncertainty by painting a detailed picture of the weather ahead in three dimensions, and even predicts--with 90 percent accuracy--where within a storm system the most inclement weather is hiding. That accuracy allows pilots to deviate from their flight paths only when necessary, and when they do they can plot an optimal course through or around foul weather--saving fuel, time, and money in both instances. Better information in the cockpit should lead to fewer delays, more direct journeys, and huge cost and fuel savings (not to mention a smoother travel experience). And in that rare but terrifying case, such a system could save lives.

THE OLD WAY

Our airliners are largely legacy machines--old aircraft with old systems onboard. Weather radar is no exception. Mounted in the nose of the plane, conventional radar antennas send a flat, horizontal beam out into the space in front of an aircraft and sense whatever signal bounces back off of objects--like clouds--in the sky. On their displays, pilots see just a thin horizontal slice of the sky in front of them, represented as the bird's-eye view of cloud coverage like the one we see on the morning meteorology broadcast. Pilots can tilt the radar beam up or down to sample a different slice of the sky, but at any given moment they can only see what the radar is pointed at.

Given that storm systems are complex and three-dimensional, 2-D horizontal radar provides a weak profile of a storm ahead. A pilot wishing to locate the top of an incoming thunderhead, for instance, must tilt the radar up and down looking for the elevation where the storm no longer appears on the display, then calculate its distance from the plane against the angle of the radar tilt while accounting for the fact that the plane is speeding through the air. If the math is correct--and there's plenty of room for human error here; the pilot is doing this while also operating the aircraft--cockpit personnel get a decent estimate of how high they must climb to miss the storm.

That's if the radar sees the storm at all. Radar systems--particularly those working at shorter wavelengths--are susceptible to what's known as attenuation. Simply put, this is when a radar beam is scattered or absorbed by the storm and a very weak echo is returned. It tends to happen at longer ranges and when the beams have to pass through many hydrometeors (water droplets or ice crystals in the atmosphere). So the bigger and more moisture laden a storm is, the more likely it is to attenuate a radar beam. And an attenuated radar beam, on a radar screen, looks like nothing. It's black, like empty space. The biggest storms can look like no storm at all.

Really nasty weather is tracked by more sophisticated ground radar and satellite as well, and air traffic controllers do offer better information to pilots when they have the time. But the job of keeping tabs on the weather and using that information to adjust flight paths optimally falls to the pilots alone. And you might be surprised to learn how scarce that information can be. The pilot doesn't know a whole lot, and what he or she does know is subject to both technological and human error.

SEEING 320 MILES INTO THE FUTURE

"You can't see this on conventional radar," Dr. Ratan Khatwa says, both his face and the radar screen mounted in the plane's passenger cabin lighting up almost simultaneously. Khatwa is a senior chief engineer at Honeywell Aerospace and today's emcee as we lift off from Dulles International Airport and cruise across Virginia at roughly 20,000 feet in Honeywell's Convair 580 test aircraft, a twin-engine turboprop that turned 60 years old this year (it used to fly passenger routes for United Airlines). What he means is you couldn't see what we're seeing on the radar screen in front of us with a standard 2-D radar unless you were both a trained pilot and a trained meteorologist and also very lucky. Even then, you couldn't see it like this. You'd have to infer it from the data and imagine what it really looks like.

Honeywell calls its technology IntuVue, and it's clear why: lacking any real background in aviation or meteorology, I can read this screen intuitively. That's by design. Khatwa tells us the training manual is only ten pages, and pilots who aren't enthusiastic about even a ten-page read can take a quick online training course. That's because by adding a layer of automated computing to a new kind of radar antenna, IntuVue ensures that the pilot has to do a minimal amount of work to receive excellent radar interpretation. It's taken the beam tilting, the arithmetic, and the guesswork out of the enterprise and given pilots a rather complete view of the sky ahead.

IntuVue's big innovation is that it takes something analogous to a 3-D snapshot of the sky for the entire 180 degrees forward of the aircraft. It doesn't simply pulse a horizontal radar beam out to capture a single flat slice of atmosphere, but rapidly pans and tilts to capture radar data from the ground up to 60,000 feet (it uses topographic map data to remove signal noise generated by radar bouncing off the ground), then quickly computes that data into a single picture of that entire space in front of the aircraft out to 320 nautical miles (it refreshes this image every couple of seconds). It captures the density of the clouds and the movement of reflectors (moisture) within them, extrapolating the intensity of the weather within in the standard green-to-red scale familiar to the local news station's Doppler map. Churning clouds indicative of turbulence appear as bright magenta blobs. IntuVue even has a sense for when it's being tricked by an attenuated signal, designating with cross-hatched purple lines the areas where it is not registering anything but it thinks storm activity may be hiding.

In automatic mode, the system visually shows the pilot only the weather relevant to his or her flight path--that is, the weather within 4,000 feet above or below the aircraft. But because the entire navigable sky has been imaged, a pilot considering an altitude or course change can easily explore the weather at other altitudes or along other headings. Pilots can even get something 2-D radar simply can't provide in any kind of timely manner: a vertical profile display, showing what a storm cell looks like from top to bottom as viewed from the side (rather than the usual bird's-eye view) so they can determine if the storm is more intense at higher or lower altitudes.

But the aspect of IntuVue that really pulls weather radar into the 21st century--the technology that is still largely stuck in the 1960s and 1970s, at least in commercial aviation--is its power of prediction. Khatwa's radar screen hasn't just lit up with varying green, yellow, and red blobs of atmospheric activity as we make our way toward a line of storms we're targeting in the western Carolinas. It's also lighting up with symbols within those storm clusters indicating where the system thinks the is lightning and hail.

It's here the technology goes beyond both radar as we know it and pilot intuition into something even the best human mind working a 2-D radar could only make a semi-educated guess at. The radar data is all raw, gathered by the antenna in the nose of the airplane, Khatwa says. But augmented with some computing power, the system can also draw inferences beyond what the raw data can see. By rapidly running the radar data through some probabilistic algorithms, it can infer where exactly within a storm cell there is likely to be the kind of activity that is dangerous to aircraft (for now that's limited to lightning and hail, though in the future the algorithms are bound to get better and broader). Honeywell has checked IntuVue's predictions against other meteorological data from the ground and claims that nine times out of ten its lighting and hail predictions are correct.

From where we sit in the cabin of the aircraft, we can see not only what weather is on the way but where and what kind of weather it's going to be, even hundreds of miles away. Right now, our screen is showing a massive storm cell about 80 nautical miles out dotted with jagged yellow lines, the universal symbol for electricity. It's the thunderstorm we've been looking for and we're heading straight for it.

STORM CHASING

Out in front of our storm there is the usual sprawl of overcast clouds, and IntuVue is showing patches of turbulence throughout. The pilot advises us to buckle back into our seats, and things do begin getting choppy, shaking the Convair and putting us through a series of those little lurches you experience every so often on a passenger jet, the kind that put butterflies in your stomach and that are more pronounced in our smaller twin-prop. Outside the aircraft, we are enveloped by clouds. "It's like a blizzard out there," a disembodied voice says over the headset, though I can't tell who said it. As we lurch again the pilot comes on: "We probably shouldn't go closer than ten or 20 miles." No one argues.

What does bad weather look like? On the screen, it looks big--green around the fringes then yellow as you move inward, with patches of red indicating the strongest parts of the storm--and is dotted with lightning bolt symbols as well as a few lollipop-looking symbols that indicate a likelihood of hail. It is also layered with magenta--lots and lots of magenta--indicating turbulence, and along with lighting and hail that's what pilots want to stay away from.

Our storm actually shows fairly light lightning and hail presence, but lots of strong turbulence. And it looks massive. As we get closer to the edge of the major cell things actually smooth out and we climb out of the layer of clouds surrounding it and into the sunshine. Grabbing my camera I move up to the cockpit hoping to snap some images of the monstrous thunderhead in front of us, but I've only clicked the shutter a few times before the pilot tells me we have to make our turn. The thunderhead we've been searching for is looming dead ahead and we're closing the distance. "Do you have what you need?" the pilot asks? I don't (the shooting light is horrible in an aircraft cockpit) but we have to turn anyhow. The point is, we know we have to turn around, and fast. Our trained test pilots have the right information in front of them to know that even they don't want to tangle with this storm.

But sometimes as a pilot you don't have a choice. In high-traffic corridors, air traffic controllers are juggling so many aircraft that pilots must stay on a very confined path, with very little room to deviate. Our pilots had elected not to fly any closer to the turbulence-laden thunderhead we'd set out to see, but on the return trip to Dulles we received our real, if unplanned, demo of IntuVue. During our approach through the traffic-heavy East Coast corridor around Washington D.C. we ran headlong into another storm, and this time there was no way around and no turning back.

On our radar display in the cabin, we could see both the storm and what our pilots were doing about it. The storm cell itself was long and narrow in shape but broadside to us, showing patches of severe activity at either end--lighting to our left, hail to our right. The cabin went dark again as we punctured the clouds. Moisture began streaming along the window panes toward the rear of the aircraft, and a single wave of hail slapped against the right side of the fuselage, startling those of us against the windows. And then we were through it--we watched on the radar screen as the pilots had carefully threaded us right between the two most severe parts of the storm, which now moved off the radar screen behind us. We landed in sunshine.

For all our attempts to find it on other worlds, water may not be the most essential molecule for life, a new study suggests. A protein that brings oxygen to muscle can function without it, using a synthetic polymer in its place.

A study in the Journal of the American Chemical Society addresses whether proteins can behave normally in the absence of a water coating, which gives them their viscosity. Adam Perriman at the University of Bristol in the UK stripped myoglobin protein, a blood protein that transports oxygen, of its water molecules and replaced it with a synthetic material. This polymer material acts as a surfactant, wetting the proteins and turning them into a liquid agglomeration. There's no solvent, no extra liquid, to carry them around and help them move.

"The proteins are themselves the liquid," Perriman puts it to New Scientist.

He and his colleagues observed the modified proteins' movement, which indicates how well they're functioning, and found they moved as well as proteins in water. They could even still bind oxygen, a key function of myoglobin.

This modified protein could be used for wound dressings, carrying oxygen toward the skin, as NewSci reports. This doesn't mean life could survive without any water at all, because the protein would never be found this way in nature. But could we produce waterless blood protein for easy transport? Artificial blood already exists; maybe future versions will not need water to work. One of the main obstacles facing extraterrestrial colonists is water - the lack thereof anywhere else we can find, and the huge costs involved in transporting our own supply. But maybe future humans pumped full of polymerized blood could survive without it.

[New Scientist]

3-D printers can make airplanes and their parts, food and more - why not entire buildings? A professor at the University of Southern California aims to print out whole houses, using layers of concrete and adding plumbing, electrical wiring and other guts as it moves upward.

Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis at USC created a layered fabrication method he calls Contour Crafting, which he says can be used to build a single house or "a colony of houses." It could be used with concrete or adobe, he says. Khoshnevis has been developing the system for several years and hosted a presentation about it at a recent TEDx event.

It would use a movable gantry taller than the house you want to build. Concrete pours out and is set down layer by layer, like a typical 3-D printer would sinter plastic together. It could be ideal for emergency housing, commercial or low-income structures, but it could also be used to print out customized luxury homes, according to Khoshnevis. Or, he adds, it might be ideal for the moon or Mars. "Contour Crafting technology has the potential to build safe, reliable, and affordable lunar and Martian structures, habitats, laboratories, and other facilities before the arrival of human beings," his website reads.

Khoshnevis is hardly the only 3-D printing expert advocating this - Enrico Dini, the Italian inventor of the D-Shape 3-D printer, wants to 3-D print moon buildings out of lunar regolith.

On Earth, the automated system could prevent delays, injuries and other labor issues related to human workers. With this system, maybe a 3-D printer could beat the Chinese attempt to construct the world's tallest building in three months.

[via Dvice]

After a couple days of black-and-white imagery and blurry color thumbnails, the Mars rover Curiosity has downlinked its first full-color, 360-degree view of its new home in Gale Crater. Click past the jump to enlarge the whole thing--it's incredible.

The image was brightened during its processing, because it's not actually this sunny on Mars. The planet is another 50-ish million miles from the sun, and it only receives half the sunlight Earth does.

Still, it's bright enough for the rover to see its own shadow. The pebbly ground, which may be part of an ancient alluvial fan (water-flowing area), is also clear. Those grayish splotches are areas where Curiosity's sky crane descent stage blew away the dust with its rockets, and those will be interesting targets for scientists. Curiosity team members want to study the bedrock at Gale Crater to understand how the crater formed and what minerals are present there. They need to be careful the hydrazine rocket fuel doesn't interfere with measurements, however, which is one reason they don't plan to visit the descent stage itself, which isn't too far away.

You can also clearly see sand dunes at the top, which appeared as a dark strip in the black-and-white images the rover previously sent this week. In color, you can see more detail and make out brownish, reddish areas, which indicate different rock textures and materials.

Curiosity will be sending lots more postcards from Mars, along with its science findings - check with us for the latest updates.

For those who want something more active than a wagon but smaller than a SUV, there aren't a lot of choices. There's the Subaru Outback and the Volvo XC, and, well, that's pretty much it. While the Subaru is a great all-arounder and gives off an insouciant LL Bean Nor'eastern vibe, sometimes the consumer wants more luxury than a Subie. Which brings us to the Audi Allroad, Audi's all new for 2013 A4-derived sport wagon. The Allroad, which was last on sale in the States in the mid-2000s, combines, Audi says, "what premium buyers are looking for in a capacious and rugged crossover with the refinement of an executive sedan." Sure. Why not.

WHAT'S NEW

While this is an all-new for 2013 model, it's built on the latest A4 platform and powered by Audi's tried-and-true 2.0 TFSI turbocharged, direct-injected, four-cylinder engine that produces 211 hp and 258 lb-ft of torque, and is mated to an eight-speed automatic transmission. Audi has supersized the Allroad's proportions from the A4 Avant; the Allroad is half an inch wider and about an inch and a half higher, giving it 7.1 inches of ground clearance. That should be tall enough whatever is thrown at most suburban dwellers.

The Allroad has a taller profile as well, with a 58" height augmented by standard 18-inch wheels. While you can option 19-inch wheels and tires, these are all-season sports tires and you'll lose some of the Allroad's off-road raison d'etre. Audi added some attractive exterior cladding in the form of matte-finished lower bumpers and wheel arches, a new grille, stainless steel skid plates and side sills as well as contrasting body trim and aluminum raised roof rails, which all contribute to the Allroad's outdoorsiness.

THE DRIVE

If you've spent anytime behind the wheel of an A4 Avant, you know what you're getting into. The turbocharged four-banger is perfectly adequate for the Allroad and, mated to the eight-speed automatic, delivers great gas mileage--20 city, 27 highway--for a wagon with a 3,891-pound curb weight. The Allroad has a new electromechanical steering system that saves weight, improves fuel economy and gives the vehicle a firm and not-too-ponderous drive. There's an acceptable amount of feedback in the wheel, which is what you want in a comfy daily driver. Also, like an Audi should be, the driver can feel free to mash the gas--the Allroad pushes you along from 0-60 in 6.5 seconds, again not too shabby for a big vehicle. Inclement weather is where the Allroad shines, with full time Quattro all-wheel drive and the raised command position, the Allroad feels a lot more like a shorter Q5 than a taller A4.

WHAT'S GOOD

The Allroad is new for 2013, and the model it is based on, the A4, was just refreshed for the model year. We like the interior, an improvement for Audi, with a utilitarian yet luxe feel to it. Opt for the Audi Connect system, which turns the car into a Wi-Fi hot spot and has all kinds of Google search connectivity baked into the system. We especially like the new exterior of the Allroad, which is an experiment in body cladding gone right. For an experiment in body cladding gone wrong, see the 2001-2005 Pontiac Aztek.

WHAT'S BAD

Like a lot of German cars, we wish most of the options were standard. When spending close to $40,000 on a family car, we think it should come with a backup camera and power liftgate standard. Also, Audi, for those of us who enjoy a sportier drive, where's the DSG?

THE PRICE

The Allroad starts at $39,600 for the Premium, $42,900 for the Premium Plus and $48,800 for the Prestige. That said, with options, the Allroad starts to get mighty expensive. Nicely equipped and you're looking at 46K, which is a lot more than Audi's proper mini-SUV, the Q5, which starts at $35,600. Some other models to consider are the Volvo XC70 and XC90, the Acura TSX Sportwagon and, the granddaddy of them all, the Subaru Outback. All weirdly great cars in their own special ways.

THE VERDICT

The Allroad looks great, drives like a charm, and is in that sweet spot between a crossover and a wagon. While the price tag may be a bit daunting to some, especially compared to the other models in its class, the Allroad presents a compelling premium buy in a segment that is dwindling in size. With the Allroad, the choice doesn't come down luxury or utilitarianism--why not have both?

This article originally appeared in the May 1941 issue of Popular Science. You can explore more of our archives--stretching back 140 years--here.

No one can accuse our colleagues from PopSci's past of not trying. They devoted a large section to tips (with illustrations!) to staying healthy, with assistance from science. Some of those tips, like warnings about diet pills, could be printed today and no one would bat an eye--but others, like chores being enough exercise for "a housewife," maybe not so much. Check out the gallery for them all.

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Science is how people attempt to see the world as it truly is. That's why I'm drawing the title of this new column from the wisdom of the greatest of scientists. Since Isaac Newton first stated his Second Law of Motion, we have understood that "force" is really a product of mass and acceleration: F = ma. Move more things faster, and they will exert more force.

Newton's insight holds true not just in the physics lab but everywhere. We think of ourselves as becoming more virtual in this age of data and social networks, but we still live in a material world, and we prosper by making and moving material things. That's why a distributor of consumer goods (Wal-Mart) is the second largest company in the world-and why the other seven biggest companies on the planet by sales are in the energy business.

It takes energy to make and move material things: energy to build airplanes, energy to divert rivers, energy to light up cities and, increasingly, energy to operate the computers we use to develop new and better ways to do everything else. (A single Google search takes about as much power as turning on a 60-watt lightbulb for 17 seconds, and server farms now use at least 1.5 percent of the world's electricity.)

We should not be surprised, then, that the two most economically powerful nations on Earth are also the two greatest producers of energy. The U.S. led the world in tapping the combined energies of coal, hydroelectric dams, oil, natural gas, nuclear fission and wind until 2006, when China's energy output surpassed ours. And in 2009, China became the largest consumer of energy as well.

One might argue that Americans are worse off for falling behind, and that China has a brighter future. But here physics provides another insight: Power is easily transferred. The U.S. ranks just behind Russia and Saudi Arabia in domestic oil production, and yet we also continue to import oil from abroad. China, meanwhile, is so hungry for energy to fuel its economy that it has followed a similar pattern with coal; it is the world's largest coal producer yet remains a net coal importer. In fact, the U.S. is one of China's suppliers. And China uses all of that energy not only to grow its own economy but also to make more things that it ships to us.

Who benefits from the force generated by this accelerating mass? Economists would say all of us. "Economic growth," which is just another way to describe more material moving faster, has long been the basic metric by which we measure national health. Moving more things faster isn't always desirable, though. Cars crash, or burn fuel that changes the climate.

To see things as they truly are, we must take into account another equation: W = Fd. Work is what happens when someone applies force over distance. Not simply more mass moving more quickly, but the right mass moving in the right direction. In the months ahead, I'll be looking at the ways we direct the great forces that science has put at our disposal.

Luke Mitchell (luke.mitchell@popsci.com) is the magazine's Ideas Editor

Mars rover Curiosity has landed. You know this because you have an Internet connection and because the hair-raising landing--though conducted in the middle of the night on a Sunday/Monday--was a huge media spectacle, and justifiably so. NASA just delivered the most sophisticated suite of science instruments ever packaged on a planetary rover onto the surface of Mars via an untested landing maneuver, instruments that should provide us with two uninterrupted years of unrivaled geological science on another planet. That in itself is a truly incredible story. But it's not the whole story.

Every interplanetary robotic mission has had its technological "firsts," and each has had its impact on the design of the missions that would follow. We've gone from small rovers to larger ones, from very human-dependent robots to ones that possess degrees of autonomy. It's impossible to at this early stage to even begin to understand what Curiosity's science legacy will be, but from a technological standpoint its legacy is already taking shape--to see it, you simply have to read between this week's headlines. There are a few things we can extrapolate from Curiosity's successful landing that will have huge impacts on robotic space exploration going forward.

WE CAN PUT VERY BIG THINGS IN PLACES WE COULDN'T BEFORE

"I think this is an example of how the ambitions of the robotic exploration community keep expanding," Dr. Robert Gold, Chief Technologist of the Space Department at Johns Hopkins Advanced Physics Lab, says of the MSL mission. "We started with the Sojourner rover [part of the Mars Pathfinder mission] that was about the size of my briefcase. Then we had Spirit and Opportunity, which were about the size of a desk. Now we've got Curiosity--about the size of a small car."

"There is this progression that is taking us to a level of exploration that people hadn't even thought about twenty years ago."
This uptick in size is no accident, and it wasn't easy to engineer. With each successive Mars rover and lander mission, spaceflight engineers kept coming up with new ways to get larger objects and more science instruments onto the Martian surface because the solution that worked for the previous mission generally wouldn't scale up for the newer, larger payload. With the sky crane that deposited Curiosity at the bottom of Gale Crater, the problem of scalability seems to have been at least temporarily solved.

"We wanted to build a capability to get a metric ton to the surface of mars," Michael Meyer, lead scientist for NASA's mars exploration program and program scientist for MSL, says. "So one of the big carry-forward technologies is the whole sky crane apparatus being able to get something that heavy to the surface. This whole system gets rid of the weight of a landing platform, it gets rid of a ramp that would be needed to get off the retro-rockets if it were to land on top of the rockets--we've stripped away all of the unnecessary things, and there's a huge payoff there. It allows us to put something pretty heavy on the surface of mars."

Can it scale to handle even larger payloads? It's impossible to say without doing some very careful math and modeling, but on its face it seems feasible that we could scale up the sky crane by a factor of two, Meyer says. By a factor of ten? Maybe. The important thing is that NASA put a metric ton on another planetary body. Something that can accurately place that much weight elsewhere in the solar system could deliver future robots, pieces of a future human habitat, an energy source to power a fleet of robots--the possibilities are suddenly wide open. Unlike much of NASA's previous landing technology, it's a capability with lots of room to grow. Says MSL Project Scientist John Grotzinger of the sky crane: "I think this is the way that all landed Mars missions will be carried out."

WE CAN DO MORE SCIENCE FASTER

Previous rovers like Spirit and Opportunity were scientific powerhouses for their time, but Curiosity leverages two key technological advantages that have really come into their own since the final technology plan was set in stone for the Mars Exploration Rover: autonomy and processing power. Computing power has marched upward along a fairly predictable tick via Moore's law since the MER mission launched in 2003. But alongside that substantial boost in raw processing power we've become way better at honing our algorithms to do what we want--including making "decisions." As a result, Curiosity is going to give us a lot of scientific bang for our $2.5 billion bucks.

Spirit and Opportunity were fitted with some degree of robotic autonomy, but it was mostly limited to navigation and deciding what targets to study next. Curiosity carries that forward, but its real exciting autonomy is in the scientific instruments themselves. Curiosity will process a lot of its own data onboard, making judgments about what's important and what is statistical noise or otherwise useless information. It will beam the important stuff back to scientists on Earth and discard the rest, reducing the overall amount of raw, unstructured data that must be beamed Earthward and saving time both on Mars and on the ground.

That means it will move faster between areas of interest and cover more scientific ground in less time. This kind of autonomy is critical to the future of robotic space exploration, especially if we ever want to send a robot scientist like Curiosity to the outer solar system where communication lags between robot and Earth stretch into the hours. Curiosity's systems are paving the way.

WE CAN DO BIG SCIENCE ON SMALLER BUDGETS

Mars Science Lab is an expensive mission, an estimated $2.5 billion all said. It was never really supposed to get this big or expensive, but as scientists packed more and more scientific instruments and capabilities on board, it grew from a medium-sized mission to a huge mission. Unfortunately, science budgets around the world being what they are, we're unlikely to see another huge science mission like MSL anytime soon, APL's Gold says. Missions will have to be smaller and less costly to get funding. It's not an ideal situation, but thanks to MSL's technology contributions (like those mentioned above) it's not an untenable one.

"Let's imagine that we can't do something as large as MSL anymore," Grotzinger says. "That does not mean we cannot continue with robotic exploration with rovers in a way that I like to call ‘boutique missions.' What you're basically doing is you're taking a smaller platform--and you're still landing it with sky crane, by the way--and you admit at the outset that you don't want a comprehensive payload because you can't afford it."

Rather, as instruments become more sophisticated, smaller, and higher fidelity (and as launch costs hopefully come down with the advent of private space launch options) mission planners would choose narrower scientific goals and one or two very specialized, very sensitive science instruments that conduct science at a much higher resolution than what we capable of today even with Curiosity.

We then give them the robotic autonomy to perform their science missions as efficiently as possible to derive as much value from each mission as we can get. Spirit and Opportunity far outlived their primary mission lives, but they didn't really grow any faster or smarter--with the exception of some software updates over time, they essentially were what they were. Curiosity is dabbling in a kind of computer science that can learn and become more efficient as the mission progresses. Future robotic missions--big or small--will take what Curiosity and its handlers on Earth learn and run with it. We know sky crane can land even huge robots with relative precision, and we know that with increased autonomy we can conduct more science in less time, boosting the scientific payoff per dollar spent. All that taken together spells big things for the future missions that follow Curiosity into space.

"I think that this mission is one really of a whole trend of mission like Cassini at Saturn, Messenger at Mercury, New Horizons on its way to Pluto--all of these missions take years to develop and by the time they launch their technology is already outdated," Gold says. "But there is this progression that is taking us to a level of exploration that people hadn't even thought about twenty years ago."

He's not alone in that sentiment.

"The level of exploration that we're doing is going to set the bar high for future exploration," Meyer says of Curiosity. "I think this will be viewed as a golden era of planetary exploration."

To help prepare for track meets, competitive 5K races and especially the Olympics, Boston-based runner Ruben Sanca runs 116 miles per week, takes vitamins and mostly watches his diet. But he would still feel fatigued after training runs. Then a blood analysis and a special software program revealed his internal chemistry needed some adjusting.

His iron was low, his B12 was high and his cholesterol wasn't great, the analysis said. Sanca changed his diet further - laying off the fried stuff completely - and altered his vitamin intake. Through successive blood tests, he watched his internal health get better and better.

"It gives me a good confidence boost," Sanca said. "If I'm going into a race, I feel more confident, because I feel like my chemistry of my body is in the right place."

Training for the highest levels of competition is increasingly about much more than the right moves - it's about internal health, too, and the holistic, system-wide "omics" that will characterize the future of medicine. An athlete's metabolome, proteome, microbiome and genome might be just as important than his or her physical training regimen. A new service called Inside Tracker aims to help athletes understand some of these internal characteristics, using a systems biology approach to evaluate the best combination of diet and chemicals.

Inside Tracker monitors 20 biomarkers in the blood, and a proprietary algorithm figures out each person's optimal range in each biomarker, such as a 25-year-old male's ideal iron content. Then the company checks blood samples for vitamin deficiencies or excesses, cholesterol and other indicators, comparing them to each user's idealized range.

Gil Blander, founder and president, compares it to a car's onboard computer.

"Every 5,000 miles, you take it in, plug into computer in the car, and the computer will tell the mechanic immediately, what are the issues with the car? Do we need to change the oil or air filter? Then you know what to do to replace it, and the car is good for another 5,000 miles," he said. "With Inside Tracker, we take a bit of our blood, look at 20 biomarkers we assume are important for athletic performance and overall well-being, and then we give you a recommendation."

Blander whittled down biomarkers laboratory companies already use in routine blood tests, eliminating markers for rare diseases or cancers and focusing on certain vitamin levels. He wouldn't disclose the company's list, but said it includes messenger molecules like creatine, which supplies energy to muscles, and minerals like magnesium, iron and vitamin D. Blander and his colleagues mined scientific literature to come up with baseline numbers for various populations, noting that not all humans have the same internal body chemistry. A bodybuilder would have normal creatine and creatinine (a creatine byproduct) levels that would indicate kidney failure in a 30-something woman, for instance.

"Each of us deserves to have our own range," Blander said.

An Inside Tracker user would input his or her basic personal info into the company's website and then go for a blood draw, which will be used to gauge baseline biomarker levels. Over continuing blood draws, users can track how their metabolites and vitamin content change. Sanca said he noticed a difference physically, too. "I started taking iron supplements, and now I feel better during my training," he said.

Sanca, 25, went to the Olympics representing Cape Verde, the small former Portugeuse colony where he was born. He didn't qualify for the men's 5,000 meter final this week, but he said before boarding a plane for London that he was thrilled to be part of the Games.

Sanca has taken blood tests in the past to track various performance measures, but then he's lost the printout from the doctor, or forgotten to bring it with him to a meet or a race. "The cool thing about this is you don't have to worry about any papers; it's all online. Whether I'm at home in base training, or somewhere else racing, I can log in and see all my blood work on a chart," he said.

Blander said a systems biology approach makes much more sense than a "miracle pill" single-solution, which researchers have been seeking for decades. He was inspired by research on resveratrol, an antioxidant found in red grapes that is thought to help limit calorie intake, lower blood sugar and fight the effects of aging. Despite its promise, it remains controversial and is not a one-size-fits-all answer, Blander said.

"You need to look at [health] from a lot of different angles. There's one paper, for instance, looking at creatinine in a soccer player, but it didn't look at vitamin D, or B12, or etc.," he said. "We combine a lot of different markers and we are looking at it in a scientific way, giving a range that is specific for you."