In the wake of Curiosity's landing on Mars, a return to regular science missions in Earth orbit may seem a bit pedestrian. But tomorrow morning just after 4 a.m. EDT, an Atlas V rocket is launching from Cape Canaveral carrying a unique mission aimed at doing some pretty critical science much closer to home. The twin Radiation Belt Storm Probes are bound straight for the Van Allen radiation belts that ring Earth, mysterious and hazardous regions of nearby space that we've known about for decades without truly understanding them.

The Van Allen belts--named for their discoverer, U. of Iowa professor James A. Van Allen, who identified them in the late 1950s--are two donut like rings of intense radiation circling our planet. We know these regions of intense radiation occur around other bodies elsewhere in the solar system and the universe. And we know they are influenced by the sun, whose behavior can influence these radiation ring, bending them inward toward Earth and accelerating them, causing damage to power grids, disrupting satellites, and dosing airline passengers with higher-than-normal degrees of radiation.

In other words, the RBSP mission seeks answers to both fundamental physics questions as well as solutions to practical space weather problems. The inner belt stretches from the top of the atmosphere to about 4,000 miles up, while the outer belt begins at about 8,000 miles altitude and extends out to about 26,000 miles. These are huge swaths of space where high-energy particles can damage spacecraft bound for deeper space, yet we possess very little understanding of how these belts form, how they are influenced, and how they behave.

The twin RBSP spacecraft will travel straight into both belts over the course of their two-year mission, entering these regions of space where other spacecraft would be quickly rendered useless to collect the first real data set on the Van Allen regions. Flying in nearly identical orbits at slightly different speeds (both will have roughly nine-hour orbits), one spacecraft will lap the other every 75 days or so. This dual-spacecraft arrangement means that researchers will be able to take measurements from the same place in space at different times and compare the two.

Doing so will shed light on the structure of the belts and whether/how their intensities fluctuate over time. Researchers will learn how events like coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from the sun affect the belts, informing future spacecraft and mission design. And in terms of fundamental physics, the twin RBSP spacecraft will provide the first real data set on how these bands of radiation--observed elsewhere in the universe--get there in the first place.

Not bad for $686 million. If you're near Cape Canaveral and want to see this Atlas V ripping skyward, the launch window opens at 4:08 a.m. and closes at 4:28 a.m.

Future tech doesn't always look the way the '70s might've predicted, but sometimes it does. Case in point: this beautiful, fully functional hoverbike that could've been torn out of our archives. It's going to be a while before you see one zipping down the street, but if the public does get a chance to ride one, the bike is rideable right out of the box--no training required.

Brought to you by aerospace firm Aerofex, the bike runs on a pair of powerful fans. It picks up on instinctive movements people make while riding a bicycle or motorbike, then moves in the same way (except, you know, flying), meaning anyone can have a go at it. For safety reasons, they've tested it at 30 mph and 15 feet high, although earlier versions of it went as fast as a helicopter.

Like all fun toys, the military will probably get this one first. The founders aren't planning to make a manned version immediately, they told Innovation News Daily; instead they're opting to use it as a test platform for creating hover drones.

But until we see it somewhere else, fight back your Star Wars speederbike dreams with this test run video, shot in the Mojave Desert.

[Aerofex via Innovation News Daily]

We've already seen that it's possible to print parts of a gun--and have it work--using a 3-D printer. The project was highly controversial, but now a group wants to make sure that anyone can print a working gun at home.

The "Wiki Weapon Project," by a group called "Defense Distributed," is trying to raise $20,000 to get a plastic, 3-D printed handgun on the market. The chosen printer is the RepRap, which can be bought by anyone for less than $1,000. If the design works, an owner could upload the CAD blueprint and have the gun instantly.

A member of the group, Cody Wilson, told Forbes that the group is gathering the money to buy or rent a $10,000 Stratasys 3-D printer for prototyping the design, then offer a $1,000 or $2,000 prize to whoever gives them the best model for a 3-D printed gun. (They claim they've already received entries.) Once they build one, the design will be made open-source and RepRap-compatible.

The group's Indiegogo campaign was shut down for "unusual account activity" Tuesday after raising $2,000, but they're still collecting funds from their site and via Bitcoin. Here's the Indiegogo video:

[Forbes]

Of all the ideas for dealing with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, this one may be closest to home - turn it into furniture. Until sea drones can be built to hoover it all up, this is as good a solution as any.

The U.K.-based artists at Studio Swine eventually want to capture bits of plastic where they float in the ocean, recycling them on-site into furniture or bringing them to shore for recycling and further use. Until then, they've come up with a system to use plastic that has washed up on shore.

The garbage in the ocean is not so much a patch, but a soup of tiny pieces floating in a collective. Studio Swine imagines collecting them and pressing them together like particle board and making new products. They built a sluice contraption to help sort these particles, much like miners would pan for gold.

The team tested it at a place called Porthtowan beach in southwest England, where they found many small plastic pellets known as "nurdles," around 4 millimeters in diameter. Nurdles are pre-production pieces of plastic that wind up on beaches after spilling in ocean transit, or otherwise being lost or dropped. They have not been injection-molded yet, which would make them easy to work with.

The plastic-panning contraption is called the Nurdler, and it uses a hand-powered water pump to sort plastic bits by size. After sorting, the machine contains about one-fourth organic material, like seaweed and driftwood. This material can be compressed into small briquettes that can be burned to melt the plastic. The team used this system to build its first prototype item, the Sea Chair above, which was displayed at the Furniture Fair in Milan this year. The tag shows the geographical coordinates of the plastic, and a chair production number.

No word yet on whether more of these will start cropping up at furniture stores anytime soon -- but here's hoping so, for a pretty elegant new purpose for plastic garbage.

[via Slashdot]

As promised, NASA has stitched together high-resolution imagery of the descent and landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, captured from the rover's own bellycam. The full-color four-frame-per-second video is below, with synchronized narration from Allen Chen and the other scientists in the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

At first, all is dark for the Mars Descent Imager, aka MARDI, as Curiosity is still nestled in its backshell. Then the heat shield falls away, and Curiosity starts filming the surface of Mars. The dust billowing up near the end is from the sky crane hovercraft lowering the rover to the surface.

As this was happening a couple weeks ago, NASA lost direct contact with the rover (as expected), so Chen and the others were viewing the spacecraft's progress via the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Not to mention the 14-minute light time delay between Mars and Earth. But everything was picture-perfect from Curiosity's own vantage point:

We've said it before, but our favorite application for 3-D--really, the only venue in which we don't hate it--is gaming. Nintendo just released the 3DS XL, basically a bigger version of the glasses-free 3DS we reviewed here, and it's great. Here's why.

What is it?
It's a dual-screen portable gaming system, the latest of many iterations of the Nintendo DS (others: the DS Lite, DSi, DSi XL, 3DS). This one takes the 3DS, with its glasses-free 3-D top screen and touchscreen bottom screen, and enlarges it--the top screen went from 3.53 inches (small!) to 4.88 inches (pretty big!). It also has two cameras on the rear for taking 3-D pictures or playing augmented-reality 3-D games, plus one in the front for video chat. It has Wi-Fi to download games and do a little social networking and other web stuff.

Does it work well?
Yeah! The 3-D, when you've got it aligned right (about a foot to 18 inches away, looking head on--here's more on that), works surprisingly well. You get the "stuff flying at you" effect and the "this stuff is further away than that stuff" effect, and the increased screen size is really welcome. 3-D gaming is theoretically all about immersion, which is hard to achieve with a tiny screen. The 3DS XL? You can actually get lost in it. It rules. The physical size is actually much more comfortable for normal-adult-sized hands than the original 3DS, and I think the design is much better--cleaner, rounder. The Select, Home, and Start buttons have also been improved.

Downsides?
It's not really pocketable, at least not for me. But neither is the PlayStation Vita, and neither is a Kindle, for that matter. The bigger screen is definitely an improvement, but it also retains the same resolution, which can make things look more pixelated. The 3-D effect is fairly easy to lose--if you change the focus of your eyes by looking elsewhere, or the angle by moving your head, you kind of have to concentrate to get the effect to come back. The speaker is, curiously, not as good and not nearly as loud as the 3DS. And the games library is still a bit thin. But if you're going to make the jump into portable glasses-free 3-D gaming, the XL is definitely the way to go.

Animals use electricity to move, and so electricity can be used to make them move, as the scientists at Backyard Brains show in a neat DIY experiment that can be done with a cockroach's leg. For a larger scale version, they connected the device to a squid, which produce pigmented cells called chromatophores to reflect light. By using an iPod blasting Cypress Hill's "Insane in the Membrane" as the stimulant, they discovered a lovely, abstract look at the process.

The music causes a current to flow in wires hooked up to a squid, exciting its tissue. The video here shows an 8x microscope zoomed on the the dorsal side of the caudal fin of the Longfin Inshore Squid, which produces three colors in its process: brown, red, and yellow. The result is tough to describe--sort of like the start of a Roald Dahl painting (although he probably would've picked different tunes). Check it out below.

[Backyard Brains]

Despite the ethical and political differences they incite, stem cells are still a miraculous medicine, potentially able to change into whatever a sick body needs them to be. The only way to get them, though, is from actual embryos. If we could get around that, theoretically, the problems would be gone. Johns Hopkins scientists are making progress there, creating them from a non-controversial supply of something we have in bulk: adult red blood cells.

It's not impossible for us to turn red blood cells into stem cells already: Viruses can be harnessed to set the clock back on the cells by delivering genes to them, but that can come with complications, like mutated genes or cancer. Instead, this technique (just published in PLoS One uses plasmids, DNA rings that replicate inside cells, then degrade. By jolting the cells with an electrical pulse, researchers created tiny holes holes in the cells that the plasmids could slip through. The plasmids then inserted genes that cause the red blood cells to change to induced-pluripotent stem cells, or iPS--embryonic-like cells that act as if they were part of a 6-day-old embryo. Unlike other processes, the cells were also introduced into a simulated version of the bone marrow environment they're usually in.

Early reports from the researchers say it's been successful. Usually, scientists might be able to eke out a handful of usable stem cells out of hundreds. The Johns Hopkins team has reported that their process can make up to 50 or 60 percent of them usable, without introducing viruses.

But the next step for the researchers is the important test: checking the sturdiness of the cells by seeing what they can develop into after the stem cell phase.

[PLoS One via Medical Xpress]

We've heard of odd rules put in place (marijuana use comes to mind) to keep Olympians and Paralympians from gaining an unfair advantage, but this is odd and more than a little scary: Against regulations, some Paralympians may physically hurt themselves--maybe to the point of breaking a bone--in order to get an edge in competition.

The BBC interviews an athlete who shocked himself as a way of "boosting," as it's called; injuring yourself, the theory goes, can increase blood pressure or heart rate, and thus enhance performance. Unlike their Olympic counterparts, those with spinal injuries don't automatically increase their blood pressure while competing. Instead, some try to induce it artificially. One says a common way is "clipping off a catheter to let the bladder fill."

This isn't something new; it's been banned by the International Paralympics Committee since 1994. But that, of course, doesn't mean everyone stopped doing it. Twenty athletes were tested before the Beijing Paralympics and athletes are being monitored before the London Paralympic events. As dangerous as it is, though, it's not something easy to test for, and if blood pressure is discovered to be heightened in an athlete before a competition, they only get the boot for that event, not long-term.

[BBC]

Stitches deserve a makeover. We've been using them in some form for thousands of years. So while they've stood the test of time, a researcher from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is wrestling surgical sutures into the future by creating "smart" electronic versions. They can monitor sutured sites for infection, and even help in the healing process.

First reported in the journal Small, the sutures, invented by professor John Rogers, use ultrathin silicon sensors attached to polymer or silk strips. Those sensors, once the sutures have been threaded through the skin, can detect if the would site is above room temperature, an indication of infection. Even better, they can help with that infection by heating the site, which (maybe counterintuitively) has been shown to help heal infections. A silicon diode and platinum nanomembrane resistor are used as the heat sensors; simple gold filaments with a current run through them are the heaters.

To make the tiny sensors, researchers use chemicals to slice a tiny piece of silicon from a silicon wafer, then use a rubber stamp to transfer the nanomembranes to polymer or silk strips. Metal electrodes and wires are added to the top, and the device is covered in epoxy coating.

It's an impressive step forward for an old technology, sure, but it could go even further one day by releasing drugs into a site on command.

[Small via Technology Review]

There's some history in this week's roundup of stunning images. For one, we have a photo of the Nevada atomic bomb tests from the '50s, taken from the Las Vegas strip. Alongside that we have what you see above: a nuclear power station still in use today. We're also featuring a Syrian rebel with a machine gun and cellphone, a psychedelic art project with water balloons and bald men, DIY lava, and more. Check out the gallery to see them all.

Click here to enter the gallery

Science is serious business, but sometimes new technology can look a bit silly before it's widely adopted (and especially if it's never adopted, like the PistoLaser or the Hoop Cycle.) In this archive gallery, we've rounded up nine men who, though incredibly solemn and impeccably dressed, just couldn't maintain dignity in the face of cutting-edge science.

See the gallery.

The Mars rover Curiosity's first roll was more than a cause for celebration - it will help pinpoint where the rover set down, and emblazon the name of its maker into the Martian soil. Curiosity's wheels have holes arranged in the Morse code pattern for "JPL."

Each of Curiosity's six 20-inch-diameter wheels has a zigzag tread and a dash-dot pattern (.--- .--. .-..), which translates into the short and long signals of Morse code for the letters JPL. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the rover was built, designed it this way in homage to the unmanned planetary systems center. It's also to serve as a sort of wheel-based odometer.

Matt Heverly, lead rover driver, said in a news conference that the tracks will help the team figure out the rover's position. "If we are in sand dunes where we don't have lots of rock features around us, we can use those patterns to do our visual odometry," he said.

Curiosity's first roll is the latest in a series of checkouts it must finish before driving to its first science target. The science team found out that some debris kicked up by the rover's sky crane rocket backpack landed on one of its wind sensors, scrambling its data-collection abilities. But all things considered - from the thundering launch to radiation-filled journey to Mars to the crazy sky crane delivery - Curiosity is a picture of health.

Eventually, the rover will traverse through Gale Crater to Mt. Sharp at its center.

The gibbon is clearly in trouble. Will he succumb to the lure of the bananas, or will he be saved by the distraction of the helium? That is the conundrum of this week in the future.

Want to win this irresistible Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of their friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the t-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

• Audio: Gibbons On Helium Sing Soprano
• Keep Your Bananas Ripe by Spraying Them With Recycled Shrimp Shells
• Giant Cave Spider Discovered in Oregon
• In Hong Kong, Starbucks Biorefinery Turns Stale Pastry and Coffee Grounds Into Plastic
  

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

• The Goods: August 2012's Hottest Gadgets
• Pop Review: The Nintendo 3DS XL Proves Bigger Is Sometimes Better
• A Blueprint to Let Anyone 3-D Print an Open-Source Gun At Home
• Video: Inside NASA's Spectacular Undersea Mission to Save Earth from a Deadly Collision
• FYI: Is There Any Way to Prevent Toe Cramps?
• Video: New Dad Builds a Baby Monitor Out of Lasers and a Wiimote
• The Army's Quick Fix for Soldier Suicides: Anti-Depressive Nasal Spray
• Distant Red Giant Caught Devouring One of Its Planets
• Rape Results In More Pregnancies Than Consensual Sex, Not Fewer
• Change of Venue
• SWITCH60 Review: The First Liquid-Cooled LED Bulb Will Light Up Your House Like Edison
• The Most Amazing Images Of The Week, August 20-24, 2012

So, for the past year, there has been this ongoing legal drama between the two biggest players in the mobile computing world, Apple and Samsung. Apple, which no sane person would deny pioneered the all-touchscreen, rectangular, app-based modern smartphone we all carry, sued Samsung, the world's biggest phone manufacturer, for ripping off its designs and violating its patents. And just now, the jury handed down a verdict: Samsung will have to pay over $1 billion in damages.

This will, of course, lead to all kinds of unusually-shaped and irregular polygon-inspired smartphones as every company makes sure its phones are not mistaken for Apple's. Personally I'm looking forward to the new Samsung Amoeba. Read more about the saga here.

Sony makes some of the best tiny interchangeable-lens cameras (ILCs) in the game, but ILCs have had issues in the past with autofocus on a technical level, due to the smaller sensors. The new NEX-5R, the follow-up to the excellent NEX-5N, has 99 phase-detection autofocus sensors, so it can autofocus like a champ. Plus it's got a 180-degree swiveling screen and Wi-Fi, plus the promise of lots of cool apps from Sony. Read more about it at Pop Photo.

Lots of tech writers hated the Samsung Galaxy Note, a massive 5.3-inch-screened Android smartphone. So, this is probably definitive proof that absolutely nobody cares what we think, because the Note sold (sold! Not just shipped!) over 10 million units, and the new version is even bigger at 5.5 inches. It has the usual processor and OS version upgrades, and some UI tricks like hovering the stylus over icons to show options. No word on 4G LTE inclusion, or whether it will accept regulation-sized skateboard trucks. [All Things D]