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Creating 150 MPH Hurricanes in a Giant Aquarium in Florida

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SUSTAIN Cambridge Seven
A massive, indoor hurricane simulator could save your life

About two years ago, Brian Haus, the chair of the Division of Applied Marine Physics at the University of Miami, was studying storms in the western Pacific ocean, off the coast of Taiwan. He and his team are chasing hurricanes. Sometimes the hurricanes completely miss the sensor-packed buoys placed in their path to track power and speed. Sometimes they don't.

This time, the researchers got lucky. Not one, but two super typhoons hit their equipment at the same time. Even luckier, most of their gear managed to not break apart. He and his team waited for the storms to subside before they left port to retrieve their recording devices. But before they could recover the buoys, one storm, named Chaba, defied the forecasts. Instead of losing strength, it headed right for them at full power. Haus and his fellow researchers found themselves enduring nine days of "most uncomfortable" 30-foot swells.

Last month, the University of Miami broke ground on the 45-million-dollar Marine Technology & Life Sciences Seawater Complex, which will house a tool that will give Haus and other scientists studying storms more steady, predictable, and controllable access to an important resource in their work--the hurricanes themselves.

The hurricane simulation tool, which is named SUSTAIN (short for SUrge-STructure-Atmosphere Interaction) is a tempest in a teapot the size of a small house. When it's completed, it'll be unique in its ability to create category-5 level hurricanes inside of a lab, across a 3-D field of waves made of real sea water pumped into the building at 1,000 gallons per minute.

With it, scientists will be able to better understand the process by which hurricanes are fueled by warm water.

* * *

We know that hurricanes grow in power when they pass over deep warm water, and mellow out when they pass over colder areas. But we don't know much about the actual process of this energy transfer on the molecular level. By using salt water, the simulator more accurately creates sea spray and foam, which are believed to affect its evaporation into the atmosphere. And for the moment, how much heat is transferred directly and how much is transferred by evaporation is completely unknown. By simulating different kinds of waves and wind conditions, some with more and less spray, the scientists can measure the air and water temperature shifts using thermisters to model the delta in heat transfers when there's varying amounts of spray.

Knowing how this process fuels hurricanes will allow scientists and meteorologists to build smarter models of them, so we can forecast them with more accuracy. And its not possible, or easy, or safe to make these observations in the field. He says, "At sea, you have to deal with the real beast, but in the lab, we have the opportunity to create the hurricane when and how we want it."

The hurricane simulator and SUSTAIN is being designed by Cambridge Seven, the cross-functional architecture and engineering firm which got its start by winning the bid to create the New England Aquarium 50 years ago by being the only firm to mention fish in their pitch. Peter Sollogub, Associate Principal at Cambridge Seven, says the hurricane simulator is comprised of three major components:

The first is a 1400-horsepower fan originally suited for things like ventilating mine shafts. To create its 150mph winds, it will draw energy from the campus's emergency generator system, which is typically used during power outages caused by storms. The fan, sitting next to sensitive instrumentation, must have its vibrations isolated. "It's like your right hand is in a hurricane and your left hand is conducting retinal surgery," Sollogub says. The wind speeds are sensed through laser and sonic wind meters (otherwise known as anemometers).

The second part is a wave generator which pushes salt water using 12 different paddles. Those paddles, timed to move at different paces and rates, can create waves at various sizes, angles and frequency, creating anything from a calm, organized swell to sloppy chaotic seas. To reduce wave refraction, the end of the pool has a perforated, parabola-shaped beach to dissipate wave energy.

The third aspect of the tank is the tank itself, which is six meters in width by 20 meters in length by two meters high. It's made of three-inch thick clear acrylic so that the conditions inside can be observed from all sides. They've got to create ductwork for the air that creates "well behaved high velocity flow" so testing is accurate.

Bob Atlas, Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, has hopes for SUSTAIN, believing it will have an impact on our ability to predict the power of storms. Atlas says that when Katrina made landfall, NOAA--and the nation--realized that "we had made tremendous progress in track forecasting, but we hadn't yet really made a dent in being able to forecast intensity of hurricanes."

Bob Atlas has spent his career forecasting harsh weather, beginning in the U.S. Air Force where he maintained a rate of accuracy greater than 95%. His career then turned to research and modeling, first at NASA and now with NOAA, where the agency's Hurricane Forecasting Improvement Project has improved 26% in track prediction and 14% in intensity forecasting from 2005-2011. Atlas credits better models that also incorporate Doppler radar from hurricane spotting planes--both things that the hurricane simulator at U Miami will also help improve. SUSTAIN has been designed with a large overhead space where remote sensing experts plan to aim cameras positioned downward, mimicking the perspective of weather satellites. The remote measurements of the cameras will be compared against the actual measurements taken by lasers in the tank to fine-tune our ability to measure storms and waves from afar.

But, Atlas added, there's a more practical aspect of the SUSTAIN facility that will tell us about more than just storms--it'll also tell us about how the world we live in will react to violent weather. All of SUSTAIN's fury can be aimed at models of manmade and natural structures--buildings, beachheads, sea walls--so that architects and engineers can test how storm surge and spray will affect cities and coasts. (Yes, they plan on clobbering mini models of skyscrapers.)

Atlas says, "NOAA has to be able to predict the storm. But ultimately, what the public needs to know is if their streets and homes will be flooded, and if their homes will survive when the hurricane is making land fall. And for that, I believe this facility can help."




How Tablets Will Remake Television

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Double Vision Alison Seiffer

The days of leaning back to watch TV have ended. Eighty-eight percent of tablet owners say they use the device in front of the tube; they find tweets, news, video and other information related to the program they're watching. Afraid of losing eyeballs, networks have released dozens of one-off apps with additional programming content. But that means that viewers must hop from app to app, distracting themselves even further from the TV-viewing experience. Now app developers are starting to take a new approach, one that allows tablets to communicate directly with Wi-Fi-enabled TVs and set-top boxes. The result could fundamentally change how viewers experience TV.

Second-screen apps are a relatively new phenomenon. The first generation, which came out last year, focused on making viewing more social. ZeeBox, an iOS and Android app that launched last November, pulls TV listings from the cloud, and users "check in" to whatever program they're watching. Each show page displays related tweets and Facebook status updates. Yet it's up to the user to check in to a new show when he changes the channel.

Newer apps do away with manual input and instead use a TV's audio to identify shows. Similar to music-identifying apps such as Shazam, the services sample audio from the TV about every 50 milliseconds and cross-reference that sound with an existing audio library. The apps can recognize what a person is watching in four seconds and then aggregate related content, including Twitter feeds, news stories, screenshots, clips and soundtracks. IntoNow, a start-up that Yahoo! purchased last spring, and California-based ConnecTV have had the most success. IntoNow is so accurate, in fact, that it can tell a baseball game at Yankee Stadium from one across town at Citi Field. But audio syncing is only a stopgap; even the most precise tablet algorithm is no match for a noisy room.

The environment doesn't affect a wireless signal, which provides set-top-box distributors, including cable and videogame companies, with a seamless conduit for second-screen content. When a TV or set-top box and tablet are on the same Wi-Fi network, they can recognize each other's activities. Last year, DirecTV became the first cable company to stream extra programming information from the cloud over Wi-Fi. When open, the iOS app recognizes which channel the set-top box is tuned to and calls up video, stills and in-depth bios on the cast and crew.

Soon producers will be able to customize the information that flows to the tablet screen. DirecTV plans to give networks the code for its app. Developers could use it, for example, to add a second camera angle to a scene or provide updates on other in-progress games during an NFL broadcast-all delivered from the cloud over Wi-Fi.

The experience won't be limited to broadcast. Later this year, Microsoft will release the Xbox SmartGlass app. The company will allow developers from video-on-demand services like HBOGo and videogame makers like Electronic Arts to create custom dual-screen experiences delivered through SmartGlass. One source will drive both screens, and viewers will once again be able to sit back and relax-even with their tablets.



Karate Experts' Superhuman Punch Comes From a Unique Brain Structure

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Karate WC Tampere 2006 Wikimedia Commons

If you've seen the board-breaking power of a professional martial artist and thought it looked superhuman, don't worry: for a while now science couldn't fully explain it, either. The punches delivered by a top-notch fighter are so tough that muscle strength alone can't account for them. But researchers from Imperial College London and University College London have discovered that a unique brain structure could be what gives experts fists of fury.

In a new study just published in the journal Cerebral Cortex, the researchers explain their process. They took 12 black belts with an average of 13.8 years' worth of karate experience, and also 12 control subjects who exercised regularly but who weren't trained in any martial art. After that, they hooked their arms and torsos up to infrared markers so their punching speed could be measured. The karate experts punched harder (obviously), but it was the timing of the punch, not just the brute strength, that mattered. Their wrists and shoulders were synchronized to give the most force.

Brain scans revealed what gave the experts that edge. Their brains' white matter--the bundles of fibres that send signals to other parts of the brain--was structurally different in the cerebellum and primary motor cortex, two parts responsible for movement. The difference also correlated with the age they started training and how long they'd studied karate, suggesting their unique brain structure and powerful punch are related.

[University College London]



Strong Hands and Voice Pitch Really Are Signs of Fertility

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Strong, Fertile Hands Flickr/Nationaal Archief/a>
New research strengthens the link between physical attributes and baby-making potential

Recent research tells us that the sound of our voices betrays clues about our age, whether we're menstruating (if we're female), our sexual behavior and our physical strength. All of these factors, evolutionary psychologists say, are indicators of her reproductive potential. Voice pitch, in particular, has been associated with indirect measures of reproductive fitness in both men and women-men with "masculine" low-pitched voices and women with "feminine" high-pitched voices tend to be rated more attractive and have more sexual partners, for example, and they have higher levels of sex hormones (testosterone in men and estrogen in women).

But there's been very little research so far on whether the way we speak actually relates to higher fertility, in part because most of this work is done on college students who haven't started having children yet. In 2007, researchers finally left campus and travelled to Tanzania to study how voice pitch relates to fertility. The Harvard-lead team found that among the indigenous Hadza people, men with low-pitched voices reported having more offspring. This study was a step in the right direction, but it was limited by the fact that without a paternity test, men can't be sure that the children they're raising are their biological offspring. In fact, depending on where in the world you look, between 2 and 30 percent of men are-unbeknownst to them-raising children that they didn't sire.

Outside of the rare maternity-ward mix-up, this isn't a problem for women, so an international team of researchers decided to shore up the Hadza study findings by looking at voice pitch and female fertility rates in another indigenous African population, the Himba of northwest Namibia. This group has very little contact with western society, which means they don't use contraception and they still live off the land (more later on why this indigenous lifestyle was particularly important in this study).

Piotr Sorokowski, a psychologist at the University of Wroclaw in Poland, recorded 54 Himba women counting from one to 10 in Herero, their native language. Each woman's average voice pitch was measured across her vocal recording. Cross-referencing voice data with number of progeny confirmed the 2007 study linking pitch with fertility: Women with higher voices had more children and grandchildren. "The model predicts that by increasing voice pitch by 40 hertz (say from 180 to 220, a noticeable change in voice pitch for women), reproductive success goes up by 1, which is equivalent to having one child or two grandchildren," explains co-lead author Nathan Pipitone, a psychologist at Adams State University in Colorado.

The common factor between female vocal pitch and fertility is estrogen, says Pipitone, who has previously studied voices as fertility cues. In addition to having higher-pitched voices, women with high estrogen levels have been shown to experience more regular periods, better rates of ovulation (since ovulating women don't necessarily release an egg every month), healthier weights and body mass indexes, lower body-fat percentages and more favorable uterine and cervical environments for pregnancy. "We think that this association goes hand-in-hand: Traits that are linked to reproductive potential are also seen as attractive. High voice pitch is a consequence of higher estrogen levels-and men find this attractive," Pipitone explains.

The male attraction to high estrogen levels is subconscious, he says-"at the level of our nervous system"-and passed down through countless generations of successful reproduction. "Throughout human evolutionary history, males who found higher-pitched voices more attractive probably left more descendants, since high-pitched women had higher levels of estrogen and had more offspring." Over eons, subconsciously favoring high-pitched voices became the norm for men. (That preference has been scientifically documented; the affinity for the low, sultry female voice portrayed in the media is something we need to learn more about, Pipitone says.)

The team also looked at another proxy of reproductive success in the Himba, handgrip strength (HGS), which is considered a sign of phenotypic quality (i.e. health) in both modern and indigenous populations. On average, individuals with good HGS have healthier weights at birth, and they live longer and have lower risk of cognitive diseases in old age. In men, good HGS has been associated with higher testosterone levels, lean muscle mass and facial attractiveness. "If an individual's phenotype (traits expressed in the body from genes) is robust, that person has a healthy immune system to fight infection and can do strenuous work under harsh environments, all the while producing healthy offspring," Pipitone says.

Because HGS is associated with health, the researchers hypothesized that higher strength would predict better reproductive success. The so-called Grandmother Hypothesis, they believed, could explain the association. This idea suggests that living past their childbearing years is an adaptive trait that allows women to help provide for their grandchildren; strong grandmothers will be able to help more, and should therefore have more grandchildren.

Team member Jeremy Atkinson, a psychologist at SUNY-Albany, found that women with higher HGS had more children and "genetic vectors," the combination of children and grandchildren. When looking at grandchildren alone, they didn't find the association, which Pipitone believes could be explained by the small sample size. The findings therefore only indirectly support the so-called Grandmother Hypothesis.

Still, the finding that stronger women have more children confirms that HGS is valid proxy of reproductive success, and it refutes the common assumption that strength is more important for reproductive success in men than in women, especially in an indigenous population, in which the ability to survive depends on physical labor. Among the Himba, men herd livestock while women take care of the day-to-day business of living. "Looking at what these women do is incredible," Pipitone says. "Walking miles for water, having to dig up tubers in crappy soil, all with children strapped to them."

"Totally ‘dainty' females like we see today in modern society have feminine characteristics and most men find these traits attractive, but getting back to how humans have lived over evolutionary history probably tells a slightly different story," he continues. "A combination of strength and femininity was probably more valuable among early humans."

Jennifer Abbasi is a science and health writer and editor living in Portland, OR. Follow Jen on Twitter (@jenabbasi) and email her at popsi.thesexfiles@gmail.com.



Video: Fly Through A Billion Light Years of the Universe, Past Galaxy Clusters and Dark Matter

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A massive cosmic cataloguing effort released a new crop of star and galaxy data last week, noting the locations and brightnesses of hundreds of thousands of objects. Now you can fly through some of them in this new video -- click past the jump for a "flight through the universe."

There are close to 400,000 galaxies in this animation, whose precise locations come from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It seems a little overwhelming when you full-screen it, but this is just one tiny slice of the cosmos -- it only goes to about redshift 0.1, an astronomical term for distance that means these stars are 1.3 billion light years away. Or, more accurately, their light left them 1.3 billion years ago.

Flying through galaxy clusters, you start to get a sense for the larger-scale structures that organize these massive clumps of matter into wispy tendrils. This is thought to be the work of dark matter. Astronomers are using SDSS data to track the stuff, and visualizations like this can help.

The latest SDSS data dump includes the first information from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, or BOSS, which tracks something called baryon acoustic oscillation. What you need to know about that: It's like a cosmic yardstick, helping scientists measure the gravitational influence of dark matter and dark energy, which is thought to be driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. But sometimes, data is just pretty, isn't it?

This video is the work of Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University, along with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins.

Sloan Digital Sky Survey Equipment: BOSS is capturing accurate spectra for millions of astronomical objects by using 2,000 plug plates that are placed at the Sloan Foundation Telescope's focal plane. Each of the 1,000 holes drilled in a single plug plate captures the light from a specific galaxy, quasar, or other target, and conveys its light to a sensitive spectrograph through an optical fiber. The plates are marked to indicate which holes belong to which bundles of the thousand optical fibers that carry the object's light.  Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

[via APOD]



Diagnostic Eyedrops Could Make Patients' Eyes Light Up With Signs of Neurological Disease

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Diagnosing the Brain by Gazing into the Eyes SheLovesGhosts via Wikimedia

Neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, or Creutzfeld-Jacobs are tough to diagnose. Outward symptoms can obviously be an indicator, but symptoms for many neuro-disorders overlap while protein biomarkers for each illness, called amyloids, are difficult to distinguish between. But researchers at UCSD are developing a new diagnostic tool that could soon let doctors diagnose a patient's neuro-degenerative condition simply by gazing into his or her eyes.

Amyloids are fibrous protein aggregates with distinct structures--basically proteins that didn't fold quite the right way. This makes them distinctive as a group but difficult to distinguish between. Many neurological disorders like those mentioned above are associated with specific amyloids. Identify the amyloid, and you can identify the disorder. That's been difficult until now, but the UCSD team has developed a set of fluorescent markers that change colors depending on what amyloid they encounter.

Amyloids accumulate in the brain but also in the eyes--those windows to the soul that just so happen to be excellent windows into the cranium as well. Using an ointment or eyedrops loaded with these fluorescent markers, the hope here is that doctors could light up amyloids in the eye in different colors, with each color corresponding to distinctive physical properties of the amyloid and the disorder it is associated with. Rather than resorting to somewhat unreliable diagnostics for neurodegenerative disorders--diagnostics that rely on amyloid targeting radioactive molecules and PET scans--the clinician could see the color of the patient's condition right there in his or her eyes.

[Science Daily]



Billionaire Investor Peter Thiel Backs New Venture Aimed at Producing 3-D Printed Meat

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Peter Thiel's New 3-D Printing Challenge: Meat FotoosVanRobin via Wikimedia
Ctrl + P for protein

Billionaire Peter Thiel would like to introduce you to the other, other white meat. The investor's philanthropic Thiel Foundation's Breakout Labs is offering up a six-figure grant (between $250,00 and $350,000, though representatives wouldn't say exactly) to a Missouri-based startup called Modern Meadow that is flipping 3-D bio-printing technology originally aimed at the regenerative medicine market into a means to produce 3-D printed meat.

We've seen stuff kind of like this before. The larger idea here is to use cultured cell media to create a meat substitute that will satisfy the natural human desire for animal protein minus the environmental (and ethical) impacts of industrial scale farming. And by using 3-D printing technology, Modern Meadow might even be able to make it look like the real thing, though we're somewhat skeptical even the best-looking faux fillet is going to stand up to the real deal.

It's also going to be expensive, though Thiel and Modern Meadow hope that by developing a mature technology that can scale they will be able to bring costs somewhat in line with average meat prices. They've got a ways to go. Last time we visited the butcher meat was selling in bulk and by the ounce. CNET reports that Modern Meadow's short-term goal is to create a single small sliver of its meat substitute less than one inch long.

[CNET]



Archive Gallery: Man vs. Shark

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Fighting Sharks with a Homemade Harpoon/Shotgun
Long cast as the enemy, sharks are really losing this war, as men arm themselves with shark guns, shark repellent and fish the bejeezus out of these misunderstood monsters

The Olympics ended on Sunday, but if we know our readers, many of you were still glued to your televisions as the Discovery Channel's Shark Week began, with hours upon hours of programming dedicated to these fearsome, fascinating creatures. We at PopSci have to confess to being equally intrigued by sharks, an interest that has continued throughout history.

Though, the farther back you go in our archives, the more our shark coverage seems less like scientific curiosity and more like bloodlust. We were only too happy when shark skin started being turned into leather, for example.


Click here to launch the archive gallery.

In more recent history, though, the author of "Jaws" wrote a story for us that cast sharks not as the villain, but as a misunderstood monster that is just as afraid of us as we are of it. And lately, our weapon of choice for protecting ourselves against shark attacks is a harmless electronic repellent, not a combination harpoon/shotgun.

You can see all this and more in this week's archive gallery: a look back at our strained, but evolving, relationship with these toothy terrors of the sea.




Rough Sketch: "This Squishy Arm is Cheap--Good For Search and Rescue"

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Robotrunk Trevor Johnston

Our 14-inch-long robotic elephant trunk has five segments, each made of a silicone membrane with an embedded metal spring that acts like an exoskeleton. The segments are filled with dry coffee grounds and each is vacuum-controlled separately. When coffee grounds are loosely packed, they're in a liquid-like state. When they're vacuum-packed, they transition into a solid-like state.

Three fishing-line tension cables run down the length of the trunk. To move a segment while the coffee is loose, first we change the length of the cables; software tells motorized spools how much to pull each line to produce the curvature we want.

Then, to lock a segment in place, we suck the air out of it, jamming the coffee into solid form. Since we can move an individual segment by locking the other ones, we can make the robot twist and take on complicated geometries using only three motors total. Usually you'd need three motors at each joint to get the degrees of freedom we get.

We tested more than 20 different grains, but coarse-ground coffee jams particularly well. The grounds are jagged, so the grains don't slip past each other. Also, smaller grains can fill voids between larger grains, constraining motion even more.

The trunk can grab things and hold twice its weight. Because the parts are so cheap, the robot is more disposable than most, which could be good for search and rescue. Another application might be for humanoid or industrial robots that work around people. These machines can be dangerous because they are rigid and have hinges that can pinch people. That's not a problem with the trunk.

-Nadia Cheng is a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at MIT



Visualized: Worldwide Shark Attacks Since 2000

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Shark Attacks Around the World Source: International Shark Attack File

At the Florida Museum of Natural History, filling up two five-drawer file cabinets are 2700 detailed accounts of shark attacks that collectively make up what's called the International Shark Attack File. The name of the database might be somewhat misleading-two recent stories suggest that shark-human interactions should be referred to as "incidents" rather than "attacks." But whether we think of them as vicious, violent killers or big, curious fish navigating cloudy waters, one thing is clear from the Shark Attack File: Sharks bite more people in U.S. waters than anywhere else in the world.

According to the File, 39% of the incidents in 2011 involving shark teeth sinking into unwitting human flesh occurred in shallow waters off U.S. beaches. That's way more than Australia, who racked up 14% of shark attacks last year to come in second. And yet, the United States' share of incidents was the lowest in over a decade-between 2001 and 2011, an average of 59% of confirmed, unprovoked attacks took place in U.S. waters.

Apparently, this trend doesn't have anything to do with the relative deliciousness of American thigh meat. According to an analysis by George Burgess, a shark researcher at the Florida Museum of Natural History and the current keeper of the International Attack File, "the number of shark-human interactions occurring in a given year directly correlates with the amount of time humans spent in the sea."

And that simple fact could explain why attacks in the U.S. have been on the decline. Americans have likely spent less time in the water since the recession, writes Burgess, limiting their exposure. That might not be the whole story, however; Burgess thinks that worldwide overfishing could also mean there are fewer animals out there mistaking a wetsuited human for a savory seal.



A New Robot Dismantles Pipe Bombs While Leaving Forensic Evidence Intact

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SAPBER A bomb-disposal robot (left) places a pipe bomb on top of SAPBER. RE2 Inc.

The first priority in a bomb-related emergency is, of course, to safely dismantle the bomb. If it's a pipe bomb--the basement-built explosive device--a robot could be sent in to do the job. But enlisting one could hurt officials' secondary objective: obtaining evidence to determine who built the bomb. SAPBER, a new robot, can safely disarm it and turn over the forensics needed to track down its maker.

Short for semi autonomous pipe bomb end-cap remover, the device comes from The Department of Homeland Security Science and Technology Directorate. A bomb-disposal robot first retrieves the pipe bomb, then SAPBER, piloted remotely, disassembles it using tools like cutting wheels and a twisting wrist so the inside material--whatever that may be; there are no hard and fast laws of pipe bomb-building--can be emptied out by authorities and examined. Other techniques could damage the evidence while disabling it. The bomb-disposal 'bot places the bomb on SAPBER's tray, and after it takes off a piece, collects it internally. While working, it also uses four video cameras to record the process for forensic use.

SAPBER's meant to easily fit into local departments' bomb preparation routine; it's small enough to fit on a bomb-squad truck, only weighs 140 pounds, and is made from mass-manufactured parts that can be re-ordered if one breaks. It doesn't look like much for its price tag of $12,000, but its already been run through live-test gauntlets, presumably being prepped for wider adoption.

[PhysOrg]



Video: Penny-Sized Thrusters Could Turn Tiny Satellites Into Orbiting Garbagemen

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The Components of Mini Ion Thrusters M. Scott Brauer

The big rockets of our day get all of the fanfare during a launch, but often they're accompanied by tiny stowaways known as CubeSats, which hitch a ride and drop into orbit. They're convenient and able to get us into space cheaply, roughly the size of a Rubik's Cube and weigh only three pounds. A potential problem with them, though, is there's no way to control them once they're gone, and when we keep sending them farther from terra firma, they could pile up in space. To nip that problem in the bud early, an MIT professor has developed penny-sized thrusters that could help us take them down ourselves.

Right now, the two dozen CubeSats in the atmosphere are fine; they retire, float for a while, then die burning up in the atmosphere. But if we want them to stay in a higher orbit (we do), they could stay there a lot longer, potentially cluttering up the orbit, or even causing collisions. To relieve any space congestion, Paulo Lozano, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT, has created miniature engines for the CubeSats that run on ion beams. They're small, flat squares lined with 500 microscopic tips. When the tips are hit with voltage, they emit a stream of ions, enough of which can move the CubeSat along.

If we have those, we could drive the CubeSats into satellite seppuku, driving them down into the atmosphere once they're done, or even better, use them to pick up the remans of other CubeSats, clearing the way for more satellites.

[MIT News]



The Most Useful Testing Equipment For DIY Projects

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Oscilloscope Kathryn Taylor

In my work I rely on many pieces of test and measurement equipment just as much as my hand tools. Although I can accomplish a surprising amount with just a hammer, I can't complete any of my mechanical or electronics projects without being able to reliably quantify things like length and voltage. Here are the gadgets I use in my shop the most.


Click here to enter the gallery



The Most Amazing Science Images Of The Week, August 13-17, 2012

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Planes At Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto / Howard Greenberg & Bryce Wolkowitz, New York

This week's images span quite a range. For one, we've got a distant galaxy drifting away from other heavenly bodies. But on the other end of that, we look at technology that can reconstruct a beard down to the hair. It also includes this amazing photo of an air force base, two retired space shuttles meeting face-to-face, and more. Click the gallery to see them all.


Click here to enter the gallery



The Goods: August 2012's Hottest Gadgets

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Logitech K760 Courtesy Logitech
A dozen great ideas in gear

In honor of this month's theme, the future of sports, try out some great running gear. Once you're done, kick back at a barbecue like a pro with a high-tech grill monitor.


Click to launch the gallery.




Innocent Martian Rock Tweets As It's Zapped by Curiosity

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Mars Rock N165 NASA

The Martian rock recently named N165 found itself thrust into the limelight this week as it received a new neighbor from Earth--the Mars rover Curiosity. Some genius made a Twitter account from the perspective of N165 as it meets Curiosity, attempts to make friends--and is ruthlessly attacked.

The Sad Tale of Martian Rock N165

A peaceful rock on Mars gets zapped by Earth lasers

Storified by Popular Science · Mon, Aug 20 2012 07:36:55

The story begins, like any other "sol," or solar day, in Mars's Gale Crater--with the addition of an unexpected new neighbor.
It's a beautiful Sol here in Gale Crater!N165 aka Coronation
So much going on around here lately - the most excitement I've had in millions of years! But I'm glad it's back to normal now.N165 aka Coronation
The big metal creature was scary at first, with the rockets and noise, but I'm sure it's just curious. Maybe I should say hello!N165 aka Coronation
@MarsCuriosity Hi there! Welcome to the neighborhood! I see that you're new here -- would you like to be friends?N165 aka Coronation
@MarsCuriosity So, uh, is this your first time on Mars?N165 aka Coronation
The big metal creature is still just staring at me. I think maybe it's a little shy.N165 aka Coronation
This is where things start to go wrong.
Oo, it's making some kind of whirring sound now. Maybe it's trying to communicate with me! Hello!N165 aka Coronation
Okay, the big metal creature has stopped whirring now but the staring is getting a little uncomfortable...N165 aka Coronation
@NiskyMom2Four @MarsCuriosity Wait, laser? What laser?N165 aka Coronation
Come on, guys, I know you're just fooling. What are the chances? Out of all the rocks on Mars, a killer robot would pick me? Haha! :)N165 aka Coronation
My robot friend is still staring, and is making a strange clicking noise now. It's kind of making me nervous. :/N165 aka Coronation
Hey @MarsCuriosity... um... what are you up to?N165 aka Coronation
< looks around nervously >N165 aka Coronation
Um, @MarsCuriosity, what are you.... hey! ... HEY!N165 aka Coronation
OW OW OW! STOP IT!N165 aka Coronation
HELP!N165 aka Coronation
< puff of dust > < silence >N165 aka Coronation



In Hong Kong, Starbucks Biorefinery Turns Stale Pastry and Coffee Grounds Into Plastic

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Coffee & Pastries DeusXFlorida via Flickr

Instead of burning it, composting it or just dumping it in landfills, food waste from your area coffee shop could be upcycled into new plastic or laundry detergent. Starbucks Hong Kong is trying out a new biorefinery, breaking down stale bakery products and coffee grounds into a sugary mixture that can be used for manufacturing.

Scientists at the City University of Hong Kong worked with the coffee giant in that country to come up with a food biorefinery, according to a report from the American Chemical Society, which is hosting its national meeting and expo this week. Carol S. K. Lin of the City University works with an environmental nonprofit called The Climate Group, and members asked her to work with Starbucks, whose officials wanted to find a new use for its food waste. Lin has developed other biorefinery technology in past research, and she's converted food waste from the university cafeteria into useful material.

The material in question is a basic sugar compound called succinic acid, which can be used as a sweetener and also as a feedstock for products like bio-plastics. The biorefinery would work by blending pastries and other food waste with some fungi, which excrete enzymes to break down the carbohydrates in the food. The mixture then goes into a fermenting vat where bacteria decompose the mixture into succinic acid. This material can then be further refined into a variety of products, according to ACS.

Plenty of other food items, notably corn, are already refined into biodegradable plastics, fuel and other materials. But they're largely the result of crops grown and harvested for the purpose of not being eaten. This method would use food that was originally intended to be food, and turn it into cleaning products or something else.

Along with providing a steady stream of material, a coffeehouse biorefinery would divert tons of food waste from landfills or the compost heap, Lin said at the ACS meeting. Starbucks Hong Kong produces about 5,000 tons of uneaten bakery items and coffee grounds. The $11.7 billion chain has exponentially more stores in western countries - 12,848 in the U.S., according to a tally on Wikipedia - so there's exponentially more waste in those places that could conceivably be turned into new raw materials. The next step is to test the refinery process at a pilot plant in Germany, according to Lin. No word on whether it will come to Starbucks' home turf.

[American Chemical Society]



Video: Affordable Robot Hand Made with Cellphone Parts Can Replace Its Own Fingers

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The Sandia Hand Sandia Labs

The human hand is incredibly complex, and no matter how many attempts we see to replicate it (lots of attempts), none seem to get it perfectly right. So a DARPA-funded project is throwing the idea of completely mimicking it out the window and going with an impressive four-fingered plastic machine that can move objects, replace the batteries in a flashlight, and even help detect IEDs.

The Sandia Hand is meant to be a relatively affordable, still-dextrous alternative to the current crop of robotic hands. It costs $10,000, compared to up to $250,000 for a similar high-end hand; is made of plastic; and is mostly produced with parts found in cellphones. The digits attach to the palm through magnets, so they can be easily switched out, or can detach when the hand gets rocked too hard. (Something fun besides the standard fingers, like, say, screwdrivers, could also be attached.) It can even retrieve its digits and reattach them on its own.

That durability makes sense, since the hand might be enlisted overseas as an IED-disabling device. Right now, there's a simple way to disarm IEDs: run something into them. That works, but a hand like this could provide the finesse a bomb diffuser would need to stop a threat without the bang.

[Sandia Labs via Scientific American]



Synaptics Introduces Pressure-SensitiveTrackpad

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Synaptics ForcePad Synaptics
You clicked, but how hard did you click?

Trackpads have been a remarkably simple solution to what could've been a complicated problem: translating the mouse to a laptop. But pushing that technology any further requires some lateral thinking, and the next dimension laptops might venture into is detecting pressure from your fingers, which would open the door for a larger set of commands. It would change how we navigate, and we might be almost there.

You can watch the video below to get a better sense of exactly how this sort of thing works, but it breaks down like this. You don't click things; there is no way to click things. Instead, the trackpad on your laptop monitors all five of your fingers, as well as how hard they're pressing on the pad. A set of commands based on how you move your fingers lets you move through the operating system; those commands could give you more control over your experience. (Push on top of trackpad to nosedive in a plane, to use a potential, simple example in gaming)

As Gizmodo points out, this isn't the first example of the tech we've seen, but it might be the most visible. Cutting clicking from PCs might not just be more efficient, but also more logical. We've been moving toward that ever since the first mouseless devices, and eliminating everything except finger motion makes sense as a progression. Less movement via the trackpad means less steps to make something happen in Windows 8, which means increased efficiency (after you get used to the weirdness of it, probably).

ForcePad Animation from Synaptics, Inc. on Vimeo.

[Synaptics via Gizmodo]



Quantum Processor Calculates That 15 = 3x5 (With Almost 50% Accuracy!)

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Quantum Processor The device in this photomicrograph was used to run the first solid-state demonstration of Shor's algorithm. It is made up of four phase qubits and five superconducting resonators, for a total of nine engineered quantum elements. The quantum processor measures one-quarter inch square. UCSB

For the first time, a functional solid-state quantum computer has completed a fairly simple math problem, factoring a prime number into its constituent parts. The solution itself isn't that great an accomplishment - it was the number 15 - but it's a major leap for quantum computers, because it's a step toward factoring much larger numbers. Factoring very large numbers very quickly is crucial for cybersecurity.

Researchers led by PhD graduate Erik Lucero of the University of California-Santa Barbara built a quantum processor to map the number 15. The team built a quantum circuit made of four superconducting qubits, which are the logic gates of a quantum system, on top of a substrate made of sapphire. It also contained five microwave resonators. The fabrication itself was a breakthrough, because organizing nine separate quantum pieces required very precise, automated construction methods. The qubits were entangled and verified using quantum experiments. Then the team used this circuit to factor 15 using Peter Shor's factoring algorithm. That code says for any given integer N, the computer must find its prime factors. But it does this quantum-fast, finding the solution exponentially faster than the quickest known classical factoring algorithm.

Why is this important? Quantum computers could greatly improve cybersecurity by enabling much more complex encryption than is possible with classical systems. The most common form of encoding is called RSA encryption, and it's based on the fact that it is very hard to factor large prime numbers. The product of two large prime numbers serves as the key for encryption, and the prime factors themselves are secret. To solve the code, a classical computer system has to crunch a series of numbers. This can take a long time, especially as the prime numbers get very large.

With the fastest classical factoring algorithm, factoring the 600-digit, largest-ever RSA encryption number would take longer than the age of the universe. This system could theoretically do it in an hour.

Lucero and colleagues ran the experiment 150,000 times, and the processor got the right answer 48 percent of the time. Shor's algorithm holds that a quantum system will get the right answer exactly half the time, so this is actually pretty good. The next step is to improve quantum coherence and build more complex circuits, so the computer can solve much larger factoring problems.

The paper appears in this week's issue of Nature Physics.

[UCSB]



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