NASA's next interplanetary mission won't be a space boat or a comet-hopper, but another mission to Mars, this time with a stationary probe to drill into the planet. The InSight lander could rival the Mars rover Curiosity's amazing laser in terms of Martian instrument-penetration, drilling 30 feet into the planet's crust.

The InSight mission -- an acronym for Interior exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport -- made the cut for the space agency's Discovery program, NASA said today. It will be designed and built at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, just like Curiosity. It won't need an absurd, heart-stopping sky crane, however -- it'll land on its own feet after it launches in 2016.

The bargain $425 million mission will seek to answer how Mars formed. With Curiosity, Spirit and Opportunity, Phoenix and others, scientists now know a lot about the Martian surface, but not much is known about the planet's insides. Still no one is sure whether the planet has a molten core, for instance. Opportunity made some measurements this spring that will help, but InSight will get lots more answers. It's practically a carbon copy of the Phoenix lander, which successfully photographed the Martian snow. Like almost every other Mars lander, InSight is solar-powered. Learn more about it in the video at the bottom.

Earth is the only rocky planet that scientists really know well. Mars' insides must be different, because it lacks the dynamo that creates a magnetic field, like the one we have here. But the planets are very similar. Mars is a "Goldilocks planet," according to NASA -- it's big enough to have formed just like Earth, Venus, Mercury and the moon, but small enough that the fingerprint of these internal heating and convection processes still exists. It may have the most in-depth record of this planetary formation process in the entire solar system.

InSight is part of NASA's Discovery program, which funds (relatively) lower-cost and high-payback missions like Dawn, GRAIL, Messenger and Kepler.

By choosing this new lander, NASA spiked a comet-hopping probe and one of our favorite space exploration concepts, the Titan Mare Explorer. The space boat would have landed on the Saturnian moon and floated around in its methane lakes. Such a mission is far riskier than landing something on Mars, however. NASA, and JPL in particular, are really good (lately) at landing stuff on Mars.

It's true that Mars is great, we love Mars -- but a Titan boat would have been so awesome! Maybe some wealthy asteroid mining entrepreneurs will decide to go ahead and do it.

The ice cream cone-shaped fluorescent light bulb was supposed to be the lamp of the future, producing just as much light as the century-old Edison incandescent at a fraction of the energy. But CFLs look terrible, enveloping rooms in an unfriendly bluish hue. LED lamps are the next future of lighting, but they have their own obstacles to overcome, including sensitive electronics that can burn out when they get warm. SWITCH, the first liquid-cooled light bulb, aims to solve that issue and light up your house with the comfortable yellow glow of the incandescent.

WHAT'S NEW

Right out of the box, the SWITCH60 feels impressive, like a Cadillac version of a regular bulb. It has the globed shape of the 60-watts I used to buy before switching to CFLs, but it's way, way heavier -- the weight is the first indication that it's a piece of technology, not just a thin piece of glass you screw into a lamp and forget. On my kitchen scale, it weighed in at 9.8 ounces, about as much as a typical volleyball.

The weight is behind this bulb's secret -- it's full of liquid silicone, which dissipates heat from the 10 LEDs (12 LEDs for the 100-watt version). Warmer silicone moves toward the glass exterior, where heat dissipates into the air; as it cools, the silicone drops back toward the bulb's heart. Think of a lava lamp; this works basically the same way, said Dave Horn, chief technology officer at SWITCH. You just can't see the gloopy circulation.

The bulb also contains a volume-compensation device that works somewhat like a piston to keep the bulb at atmospheric pressure. If the bulb breaks, it won't explode. Plus, liquid silicone is food-safe and clear, so if you drop one and it breaks, your carpet won't stain and your dog won't get sick. This is a benefit over the mercury vapor-filled CFL, which can emit harmful mercury if it shatters.

WHAT'S GOOD

I replaced a CFL with the SWITCH60 in an upright light fixture in a room with white walls and a white ceiling, and the room filled with a comforting yellowish glow, which I thought was distinctly different from the cool blue hue of the one it replaced. Another major benefit: It was 100 percent bright immediately. No waiting for the vapors to fully warm up and fluoresce, which is one of the more annoying aspects of a CFL.

Other LED lamps emit light around 3,000 degrees Kelvin, a measure of color temperature, which is more toward the bluish end of the spectrum. It turns out that more energy is required to get to 2,700 K, around the color temperature of an incandescent bulb. SWITCH bulbs can take the heat this extra electricity generates, Horn said.

This is because of the phosphor blend used to produce that color, he said. "To get that redder look, the phosphor peak is very wide. Some of that red pulls into the infrared, and that's why the efficiency drops." The bulbs use a bit more power than others on the market, but the team decided it was worth it to achieve the proper glow. The 60-watt equivalent uses 12 watts, while the 100-watt equivalent uses 21 watts.

WHAT'S BAD

The price tag. The 60-watt version will set you back $40, and the brighter ones go for $60. The weight may also be troubling to some. It would feel weird in a cheaper lamp with a clamp-on shade, like you'd be injuring it. Horn said the weight is a common question and is "duly noted." "In the next generation lamps, we're looking at reducing that weight tremendously," he said. The bulbs aren't on sale yet, but they were shipped earlier this month to hotels and other hospitality establishments, so you may start seeing them soon.

THE VERDICT

If you miss the sun-like glow of the old Edison bulbs and care about energy savings -- and price is not an issue -- then this bulb is for you. It works well, looks great and does exactly as advertised. Compared to other LED options, the SWITCH bulb may be a better investment, because the liquid coolant will help direct heat away from the drivers, prolonging their life. It'll pay for itself, eventually; SWITCH says with 80 percent energy savings, that'll happen at around six months. But at the end of the day, it's worth more than many of the light fixtures into which it will be screwed--and whether it's worth it will vary by person.

Almost as soon as RFK Stadium opened in 1961, it became clear that the stadium was a dud. Football fans complained that the low seating made it difficult to see the entire field. Baseball fans complained that they had to twist in their seats to see the action at home plate. By trying to accommodate two sports, the stadium failed at both. All dozen of the combination football-baseball stadiums built in the U.S. since then have garnered similar complaints. The only one still in use as a dual-sport venue, the Oakland Coliseum, consistently ranks among fans as one of the worst sports arenas on the continent. Yet despite this dismal record, some architects are considering multi-sport venues again. PopSci asked Greg Sherlock, an architect at Kansas City-based Populous, the world's leading stadium-design firm, to give us a look at the future. His concept: a truly transformable stadium, whose modular parts snap together like Legos in custom configurations.

TRAVELING VENUES

Building new stadiums for one-time sporting events like the Olympics is almost always a waste of resources. The event spaces China built when it hosted the Summer Games in 2008, for example, now mostly sit empty. Sherlock's floating stadium could be towed to any city with a waterfront, installed for the event and shipped away afterward.

SWAPPABLE SECTIONS

Stadium managers could use modular seating sections of different shapes to provide the best seating configuration for any event. The seats for football and soccer games would line up along the sidelines and ends of the field, and seats for baseball games would be angled to face the pitcher's mound.

SEE-THROUGH ROOF

To preserve the outdoor ambience while still protecting fans from inclement weather, a translucent roof made from a type of plastic called ETFE would open in sections. Individual panels would block wind and rain, while louvers would twist to diffuse a blinding sunset or to create better acoustics for a concert.

SUSTAINABLE POWER

Many of today's stadiums, including the Washington Redskins' FedEx Field, run partially on electricity generated by photovoltaics, wind or biodiesel (or plan to). But a floating stadium has an additional source of clean energy: underwater turbines or buoys, which would transform the kinetic energy of the tides, river current or waves into electricity.

SELF-CONTAINED TOILETS

Rather than running pipes between barge sections-the pipe interconnects could leak-separate, self-contained barges carrying toilets and other facilities would dock at several locations around the stadium.

MODULAR PLAYING SURFACES

The playing surfaces-a six-inch layer of soil topped with turf for sports such as football and soccer or with a baseball infield, tennis court or other playing field-sit on barges. Movable turf plates aren't unheard of: The entire football field at the University of Phoenix stadium in Glendale, Arizona, rolls in and out of the arena in one piece.

SEAMLESS JOINTS

Magnetic interlocks could hold the floating panels together within two or three millimeters of each other. To prevent players from tripping on the seam between sections of the field, each plate would be framed with a pressurized silicone gasket that would press up against the neighboring sections and fill the void. Extra soil could then be piled on top for a gapless playing surface.

ELEVATED STANDS

The driving principle behind stadium-seating design is to get spectators as close to the ball as possible. For a big crowd at a football game, a shallow bowl works well, but for a small tennis match, the nosebleed seats should be pulled in closer. Each row of seats rests on standard, lightweight hydraulic lifts that can make entire sections steeper or shallower with the push of a button.

3-D printing has yielded items both fascinating and potentially troubling. Now we can add one more to the list of printed achievements: The U.S. Army has had a rapid prototyping wing for some time, and now they've deployed full teams--complete with scientists and 3-D printers--to Afghanistan.

The Rapid Equipping Force, as the wing is known, will be there to print one-off tools from a 20-foot shipping container stuffed to the gills with tech. The "Expeditionary Lab--Mobile," as it's awkwardly named, could significantly cut the amount of time needed to produce equipment, which might otherwise have to go through an approval process before the gear gets sent. The printer can make plastic parts while a CNC system, in this case a Haas OM-2, can create parts out of steel and aluminum.

That kind of speed isn't cheap: each lab costs about $2.8 million. That includes the 3-D printing devices, as well as a full stock of relatively traditional tools like saws and welders. Two engineers stay in each lab, are replaced every four months, and stay linked up electronically with other engineers.

Past their use in Afghanistan, officials told Military.com, the containers could find use in domestic operations, such as natural disasters.

[Military.com]

Since the moment the Mars rover Curiosity landed in Gale Crater two weeks ago, NASA engineers have been living on Mars time, rolling their clocks forward 40 minutes every day to keep time with the rover. One engineer brought his entire family along for the ride.

Flight director David Oh, his wife, Bryn, and their three kids - 13-year-old Braden, 10-year-old Ashlyn and 8-year-old Devyn - are waking and sleeping in accordance with the Martian clock.

A Mars day, called a sol, is 39 minutes and 35 seconds longer than an Earth day - not a huge difference, but one that adds up quickly. It drives most engineers crazy. The Oh family is making somewhat of a staycation out of it, at least before the kids start school. AP spent some time at their Pasadena-area home - click through to the Huffington Post to hear about their adventure.

As you've probably heard by now, in an interview Sunday, Missouri Representative and Republican Senate nominee Todd Akin said he believed that rape-related pregnancy was "really rare." He continued by saying that, "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

So, now for the facts. Pregnancy resulting from rape is not rare. In fact, a woman is more than twice as likely to get pregnant during a rape than during consensual sex. That said, there may actually be something to the idea that the human female body has evolved an ability to resist rape-related pregnancies, although the potential mechanism is pregnancy termination, not prevention, so it's almost certainly not what Akin was talking about.

Akin now admits he "misspoke" in the interview, although it's not entirely clear which part he's referring to.

Akin's intentions aside, he's just plain wrong when he says rape-related pregnancies are rare (a fact that's even more frightening considering that he is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology). Melisa Holmes, an ob-gyn in South Carolina, led a study on pregnancies from rape through the National Crime Victims Center. Holmes's study, which was published in 1996, found that 5 percent of rapes in females of reproductive age resulted in pregnancy, amounting to an estimated 32,101 rape-related pregnancies per year in the U.S. Even that astounding number was a "significant underestimation," she says, because so many rapes go unreported.

More recently, in 2003, husband-and-wife team Jonathan and Tiffani Gottschall, then at St. Lawrence University, identified even higher rape-related pregnancy rates. Analyzing survey results from 8,000 women around the country, they determined that 6.4 percent of rapes in women of childbearing age resulted in pregnancy. In cases where no birth control was used, the rate increased to 8 percent.

Meanwhile, a CDC report released last November concluded that 1 in 5 women have been raped, with 1.3 million women age 18 and up raped in 2010 alone. Doing the math, allowing for the use of birth control, and only including adults, the most recent data suggests that more than 83,000 women became pregnant by a man who raped them in 2010.

Jonathan Gottschall recognizes that there's some "squishiness" in all of these numbers because they're based on self-reported data. Still, he says, "the available data give us no reason to think that conception from rape is rare, or even that it is less rare than conception from consensual intercourse. If anything, the data suggest that things go the other way around." Indeed, a 2001 study out of Princeton and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences found the rate of pregnancy from consensual, unprotected sex to be just 3.1 percent.

Rapists subsconsciously target victims based on their likelihood of conception.No one is sure why forced sex is statistically a more successful reproductive strategy than consensual sex. "We think it might be because rapists tend to target young women at peak fertility," Gottschall says. Holmes confirms that most rapes occur in women under 25, and pre-pubescent girls, post-menopausal women and visibly pregnant women are statistically underrepresented among female rape victims, according to Gordon Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist at SUNY-Albany who wrote about rape-related pregnancy in The Oxford Handbook of Sexual Conflict in Humans.

"Rapists don't pick victims at random," Gallup says. "Unbeknownst to them, rapists clearly target victims based on their likelihood of conception. They tend to preferentially target young, post-pubescent females that are in their reproductive prime."

Age alone doesn't it explain it, though, because per-incident rape-pregnancy rates are higher than consensual pregnancy rates even among young women. Seeking out youth and attractiveness -- a fertility cue, according to a growing body of evidence -- gives rapists the reproductive edge, the Gottschalls proposed in their paper. They cited evidence from the 2000 book A Natural History of Rape by University of New Mexico biologist Randy Thornhill and University of Missouri anthropologist Craig Palmer, indicating that rapists seek out young, attractive women.

The Gottschalls wrote: "We propose...that all men -- rapists and non-rapists -- have the capacity to 'read' fecundity cues and pursue the most attractive/fecund women that they can. However, since rapists circumvent the problem of female choice, while non-rapists must confront it, it is plausible that the average instance of rape occurs with a more attractive/fecund woman than the average instance of consensual intercourse. Thus we propose that rapists target victims not only on the basis of age but based on a whole complement of physical and behavioral signals indicating the victim's capacity to become pregnant and successfully carry a child to term."

I called Gordon Gallup for his perspective on rape-related pregnancy. Last year, during a conversation about the antidepressant effects of semen, he mentioned a theory that the nature of a rapist's ejaculate has something to do with his reproductive success. When I asked him to elaborate on that, he told me that semen contains follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) and luteinizing hormone (LH), which trigger ovulation during the female menstrual cycle. FSH is needed for sperm production, but the presence of LH in high levels is more mysterious because it's not important for male fertility. It's possible, Gallup says, that seminal fluid released during forced sex contains higher-than-normal levels of these hormones -- LH in particular -- which may trigger ovulation in the victim.

There's no direct evidence yet of sex-induced ovulation in humans, although there's some very new research hinting at the possibility. The LH in semen has been shown to trigger ovulation in camels, alpacas and llamas. Semen also makes female koalas ovulate, although LH hasn't been identified as the active ingredient in that species' semen yet. A 1973 study found that 70 percent of conceptions from rape occurred outside a woman's most fertile time. And a 1949 study cited seven women who reported becoming pregnant due to rape, despite having not had a period for up to two years leading up to the assault.

The idea that semen produced during rape is especially primed to promote pregnancy seems less far-fetched considering the well-established evidence that what a man is doing when he ejaculates affects the chemical makeup of his semen. Studies on artificial insemination show that semen collected from a man who used his imagination to become aroused and ejaculate is much less likely to result in conception than a sample collected from a man watching porn, Gallup says. Even more potent is semen collected after coitus interupptus, i.e. pulling out during actual sex. The conditions under which a man becomes aroused and ejaculates has been shown to affect factors like sperm count, shape and mobility.

If semen changes based on context, it's plausible, Gallup asserts, that participating in a rape can affect its chemical makeup. Ovulation-inducing semen would be especially useful during rape, which is usually a one-time encounter. As sinister as it is, the ability to unconsciously adjust semen to make it more potent during rape could be one reproductive strategy that evolved in men to increase their reproductive success.

In addition to the devastating physical and emotional consequences of rape for the victim, things are also grim from the evolutionary perspective. "The problem with rape if conception occurs, is that it precludes making an informed mate choice, which is the principal means by which females maximize their fitness," Gallup says. "And it means that the female is not going to be subject to protection and provisioning by the child's father. Women are left holding the bag, so to speak."

Women appear to have evolved mechanisms to counteract these tactics and control their fertility. I've written about these kinds of dueling reproductive forces, known as antagonist coevolution, before. Some quick examples in human females: Research shows that women engage in less sexually risky behavior around ovulation, when they're likely to get pregnant, and their hand-grip strength, a measure of physical resistance, is enhanced during ovulation if they read a sexual-assault scenario, a mechanism that may have evolved to enable the female to more effectively resist rape when they're fertile.

In saying that women "shut down" pregnancy after rape, Rep. Akin unwittingly stumbled upon the concept that women's bodies reject unfamiliar sperm. In 2006, Gallup and his co-author Jennifer Davis published their theory that preeclampsia, a common pregnancy complication that can result in spontaneous abortion, evolved as an adaptive response to unfamiliar semen. (I say unwittingly because Akin was more likely referring to a theory that the fear and trauma of rape causes a woman's fallopian tubes to tighten, thus preventing pregnancy. This idea, proposed by John C. Willke, a physician and a former president of the National Right to Life Committee, has been lambasted by other doctors.)

Psychologist and writer Jesse Bering explained the preeclampsia idea in his excellent post, which I highly recommend you read in its entirety: "By the early 1980s, scientists had started to notice that preeclampsia was more likely to occur in pregnancies resulting from 'one-night stands,' artificial insemination and rape than in pregnancies that were the product of long-term sexual cohabitation. That it was the woman's prior exposure to the male's semen that was responsible for this pattern was evident by the fact that couples who'd been using barrier contraceptives (such as condoms), or who practiced coitus interruptus (in which the man withdraws prior to ejaculation) before they began trying to conceive also had higher rates of preeclampsia than those who'd been engaging in unprotected sex for some time."

Bering continued, "It may be useful to think about preeclampsia not simply as a medical anomaly," reason the authors, "but as an adaptation that may have evolved to terminate pregnancies where future paternal investment was questionable or unlikely."

Now, none of this means that rape-related pregnancies are rare, or that biology should be trusted to ward off these pregnancies. The sheer numbers of pregnancies from rape tell us that it's happening -- a lot. And, obviously, preeclampsia is not the solution. Having the right to choose what to do about it is.

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

Here's the second video in our series of maker profiles as part of the Red Bull Creation competition. In this installment, you'll meet Greg Needel, mechanical engineer, combat roboticist and toymaker. For last year's program he built a beer tap that senses the size of a glass and pours the perfect brew, and then went on to create a swingset-powered vehicle. This year, he continued the party theme with a robotic cooler. Bravo, Greg. Enjoy.

Astronomers have glimpsed the first evidence of a dying star devouring one of its planets, a fate that may await the inner planets -- including Earth -- in our own solar system. The star in the new study swallowed its planet as it mushroomed into a red giant.

The star, BD+48 740, is older than the sun and about 11 times bigger. It's located in the Perseus constellation. Astronomy professor Alex Wolszczan of Penn State was looking at it as part of a survey of old sun-like stars. The team is searching for exoplanets around red giants, partly because so few are known to exist -- this may be because they've been swallowed up already, Wolszczan and colleagues write.

The team, which included astronomers from Poland and Spain, performed a detailed spectral analysis of the star to see what it contained. They found lots of lithium, which is strange for such a huge, old star. Lithium mostly formed during the Big Bang, and it does not last very long inside stars, so the presence of the element indicated that the star must have swallowed a planet.

While observing the star, the team also found another planet, this one a lot larger than the putative planet the star already consumed. It's about 1.6 times the size of Jupiter, as evidenced by its influence on the star, and it is in a very strange elliptical orbit. The team says this surviving planet's orbit suggests the missing planet dived into the star and gave its sibling a boost of energy, kicking it out like a boomerang.

"The highly elongated orbit of the massive planet we discovered around this lithium-polluted red-giant star is exactly the kind of evidence that would point to the star's recent destruction of its now-missing planet," study co-author Eva Villaver of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain said in a statement.

The process is not something astronomers would normally see because it happens pretty quickly, at least relative to the star's distance from Earth. But chemical analysis contains all the evidence they need. The study appears in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

[Penn State]

The future of military robotics isn't all heavy metal and humanoid soldier-bots. If DARPA's newest warbot implement is any indication, the future is soft, lightweight, and inflatable. The Pentagon's blue-sky research wing is about to award $625,000 to iRobot to develop an inflatable robotic arm that can lift four times its own weight.

The Advanced Inflatable Robot, or AIR, is still very much a prototype and still very short of exactly what the DoD is looking for. But it's a step towards what DARPA clearly sees as the future of battlefield robotics--lightweight, man-portable, soldier-deployable systems that can execute a mission (surveillance and reconnaissance, explosives ordnance disposal, etc.) safely while working beside human operators. Things like this squishy chameleon ‘bot we wrote about just last week.

The AIR arm you seen in the vide below can only lift two or three pounds at present--not enough to make it militarily viable. But the arm itself only weighs a half-pound, giving it far greater strength-to-weight than the rigid, "gears-and-actuators" arms generally deployed on something like iRobot's Packbot platform (these usually lift some fraction of their own weight). The arm below has also had its strength reduced for these initial tests. On operational arm could lift many times its own weight, and its air pressure would scale so that if it ran into an obstacle or a person, it would buckle rather than bash. That makes it safer to operate in chaotic environments with humans in the mix.

[Danger Room]

Massive blood loss, known as MBL in the medical world, is a major cause of death during cardiac surgery--and an accepted one, because it's the best option we have. Blood transfusions help, but those aren't without complications, either. A new device could cut that step out of the process for some patients by collecting the blood from a surgery, concentrating the blood cells, and routing it intravenously right back to the person on the table.

The device, called HemoSep, has just been approved for use in Canada and Europe following clinical trials in more than 100 open-heart surgeries. When used, it reduced how often a transfusion was needed post-surgery. During the process, blood is sucked from the surgical site or from another machine used in the surgery. A blood bag in the HemoSep uses a chemical sponge and mechanical agitator to concentrate the spilled blood.

After that, the concentrated cells are sent back intravenously. That could significantly lower the amount of blood needed from a donor (if any would even be needed after that) and a bad reaction to the transfusion would be unlikely--it's the patient's own blood, after all. It's also simpler: a one step process that happens during surgery, rather than requiring trained professionals to draw blood from another person, process it through a centrifuge, and send it back to the patient.

The creators of the blood salvaging tech, from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, are looking to launch the device for commercial medical use in September.

Our friends at American Photo have a great feature up today about hyperspectral photography, a technique that takes advantage of the fact that photographs often capture light beyond the visible spectrum. Using the technique, you can peel back history--and see what lies underneath pages that have been blacked out, erased, or written over. It's already leading to new discoveries about Lincoln, Archimedes, Sophocles, and more--what'll be next? Read the full story at American Photo.

DARPA's Tactically Expandable Maritime Platform (TEMP) program is a wide-ranging effort to pack standard ISO shipping containers with technologies that can assist during humanitarian disasters or aid military in solving other unconventional, international problems (like piracy). Essentially DARPA wants a modular means to quickly turn any ship into a technology-laden base of operations that can quickly execute ship-to-ship or ship-to-shore operations. We've seen the ship-based portion of this before. We're now seeing the ship-to-shore piece.

Meet CAAT (for Captive Air Amphibious Transporter). The prototype vehicle is basically like a tank with treads made out of air-filled pontoons, enabling it to roll over water (and obstacles in the water) with Abrams-like efficiency and continue its forward march once it hits shore. Perhaps the coolest thing about the video below: this is a 1/5 scale demonstrator.

Preparing for a newborn baby is a lot of work, from buying the bassinet to arranging the diapers. And soldering apart the Wiimote, installing the crib lasers and turning on the camera.

A new Hungarian dad, concerned about monitoring his baby's breathing, did what any modder would do: He built a baby-breathing-tracker. His name is Gjoci and here are his plans.

Other baby trackers use capacitive sensors or microphones, but this one senses motion by triangulating points of light. A Wiimote camera reports the position of the light points, and a microcontroller computes the relative change in motion to indicate breathing. Initially Gjoci planned to use LEDs, but the lights weren't bright enough and he worried the baby might "gulp the components." He settled on lasers instead, using 1-MW laser diodes to project four points of light. Newborns don't move much, so there's not much danger of the tot moving into the lasers' path, but he is still searching for a safer alternative.

Meanwhile, the system works beautifully, according to Gjoci's tests, as you can see below. The camera from a Wiimote reads the location of the light spots, then waits a few milliseconds and measures them again. Gjoci modified some code from a Japanese hacker and his system searches for the difference between the two measurements. Here's how he explains it on his blog: "If the total difference is higher than the threshold, it effects good conditions. Otherwise no or low movement is detected." If there's no motion for 10 seconds, the system sounds an alarm. An LED display shows movement data for each light point.

In two weeks, Gjoci had only a couple false alarms, and the hardware is still working well. Head over to his site for the full schematics.

[via Hackaday]

Science spends a lot of time taking care of bananas - inventing refrigerated ships, crushing acres' worth of them to come up with enough seeds to breed, and so on. Now a group of Chinese researchers are proposing a secondary banana coat, spraying Andrew W.K.'s favorite fruits with a hydrogel made from discarded shrimp shells.

A hydrogel coating made of chitosan, derived from crustacean shells, can prevent a banana from becoming overripe for about two weeks, according to Xihong Li, lead author of a new banana study reported this week at the American Chemical Society's annual meeting.

Bananas continue to respire after they're picked, taking in oxygen through their skin. The more it respires, the faster it ripens, which is why an air-exposed banana turns brown so fast. Bananas reach a tipping point as they ripen -- the pulp releases a chemical that speeds this process further, and the fruits become mushy and cloyingly sweet. Then bacteria on a banana's skin causes it to rot.

To slow down this process, Li and colleagues sprayed green bananas with a hydrogel made of chitosan. Chitosan is prized as a fertilizer, blood clotting agent and a wine purifier, among many other uses. In the case of bananas, it helps keep them green longer, killing surface bacteria and slowing the fruit's respiration and therefore its ripening.

This could eventually be used in banana transport or even by people at home, spritzing their bananas with a shrimp shell spray. Li is now working on a new ingredient in the hydrogel that would allow it to be used commercially.

[American Chemical Society]

When a roadside bomb or other explosive device goes off, it hits everything nearby with an extreme blast of pressure. Almost simultaneously comes a heat--more than 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit--that's hot enough to cook skin. Presented today at a meeting of the American Chemical Society, a new invention will try to counteract that, and do it through a technology that's already been used for hundreds of years: camouflage paint.

The Army, which funded the project, expects certain criteria to be met for its face paint. It's mandated that the paint (even heat-protective paint) be water-proof, for example, and also contain DEET, a pesticide to ward off bugs, so this new paint has to meet those conditions in addition to its new role as heat shield.

Most types of makeup are produced with hydrocarbons--chemicals that burn when in contact with intense heat. Hydrocarbons being a nonstarter, the Army went with less flammable silicones. DEET is flammable, too, weirdly, and the guidelines required a full 35 percent of the paint to be made of the stuff. To sidestep that issue they placed a hydrogel around it, a chemical that's mostly water. The heat from a bomb lasts a mere two seconds, but researchers managed to get the paint to protect for a whopping 15 seconds, so early testing has definitely been successful.

The next step? Putting the design from the University of Southern Mississippi team to use, then creating a colorless version for use by firefighters. See a video of the paint in action below from New Scientist.

[American Chemical Society]

Short answer: Not really.

Long answer: All muscles are capable of cramping, but the ones farthest away from your spinal cord-in your feet and lower legs, for example-tend to be the most vulnerable to seizing up. The long, spindly nerve cells that run from the spinal cord to the toes are especially prone to damage. The prevalence of nerve damage increases with age, so the elderly are among the most common victims. Once these cells start to malfunction, they're more likely to erupt with abnormal, spontaneous electrical signals, leading to unwanted muscle contractions.

Toe cramps, like their more painful analogues in the calf, are associated with conditions other than aging as well. Yet despite their prevalence, few successful remedies have been found. "A lot of treatments have been used in the past," says Stanford University neurologist Yuen So. Among the oldest is quinine, the malaria-fighting drug that gives tonic water its bite. A tablet before bed can have a small effect on nighttime cramping-however, the FDA now discourages its use because of rare, but very serious, side effects, such as low blood platelet counts. Other options include vitamin B complex and magnesium, but nothing has been proven effective. "There isn't a gold standard out there," So says.

The most common prescription for cramps doesn't involve any drugs at all. Doctors often tell patients to try stretching, which can help to relax a muscle that has tightened up. Whether this has any prophylactic benefit (especially for toes) is another story: "Does stretching before you go to bed lower your risk of waking up in the middle of the night with cramps?" asks So. "I don't think that has been proven yet."

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.

Researchers have just discovered that gibbons not only compete with our top ranks of singers--they have the technique down pat with almost no effort. How did we find this out? By gassing them with helium and listening in on the results, of course.

A study just published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology covers the research from the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University, Japan. By filling an environment with helium, the team could bring out the subtleties of the gibbons' singing--the strange, high-tone subtleties. The apes' singing is plenty loud already--it can be heard through thick jungles from more than two miles away--but when helium gets introduced to the equation, the sound velocity and resonance frequencies are increased.

The resulting sounds (listen above while reading this for the full effect) revealed that gibbons use the same techniques as humans to create speech--it starts at the larynx, then gets sent through a filter; the shape of the filter is determined by the supralaryngeal vocal tract. It's known as the "source-filter" process.

We used to think those vocal acrobatics were an evolutionary blip only seen in humans, but instead, researchers say, it shows how we have a lot in common. Gibbons just picked up on the natural aptitude for soprano singing, while we picked up on the speech. As pretty as it sounds, maybe Home sapien didn't get a bad end of the deal.