If you’re headed to the pool to beat the summer heat, just try not to swallow the water: the number of incidents of the parasite Cryptosporidium has increased in recent…
Nasty Pool-Dwelling Parasite Is On The Rise
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Watch SpaceX's Epic Landing Attempt Right Here On Sunday
SpaceX will attempt to make history on Sunday. After launching supplies to the International Space Station, the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket will separate from the…
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Australia Lets A Military Drone Fly Free On The Coast
For the first time ever, an Australian military drone is getting permission to fly in normal skies. In May, Airservices Australia, an Australian government-owned company that…
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Fiber Optic Fix Will Make Connecting The World Easier And Cheaper
Wires are so old school. Nowadays, most of our information (whether on the Internet, TV, or phone) is communicated over fiber optic cables, long strands of material that can…
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From Our Archives: Sign Up Here For A Trip To Space
More than 60 years ago, an unassuming ad made big promises in the August 1952 issue of Popular Science.As part of a publicity campaign, the Hayden Planetarium offered…
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Superfast Lasers Create A Hologram You Can Touch
The halls of science fiction are well-decorated with dreams of holograms—Jules Verne introduced holography to literature in 1893 with The Castle of the Carpathians, and how…
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Q&A With SciBabe On GMOs, Swearing, And More
Earlier this month I was traveling in California for work, and during one stop I attended the 1st Annual Institute for Food and Agriculture Literacy Symposium at UC Davis.
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Police Will Throw This Camera Ball Into Rooms
“Camera in the hole!" police officers soon shout, as they toss the new Explorer camera orb into a dangerous room before entering. Made by MIT alumnus at Bounce Imaging, the…
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Next Week, Watch Venus And Jupiter High-Five In The Night Sky
The two brightest planets in the evening sky draw close together for a sunset show on June 30.
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The Race Is On To Surround The Earth With Satellites That See Almost Everything
Just last year, three startups threw down the gauntlet in the race to dethrone Google Earth as the king of satellite imaging. In recent weeks, another startup entered the…
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This Bricklaying Robot Can Build A House In Two Days
An engineer in Perth wants to mechanize one of humanity’s oldest jobs. His robot is named “Hadrian,” after the Roman Emperor who built a wall in Northern Britain, and it can…
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Space Aurora, Popeular Science, and Other Amazing Images of the Week
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These Students Built A Working Hyperloop (A Very Tiny One)
Elon Musk’s Hyperloop is an idea as ambitious as it is fantastical. A train that travels at 760 mph through a pressurized tube is a hard sell, even with it gracing the latest…
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This Insanely Hard, Self-Driving Robot Race Takes Place In A Parking Lot
The challenge of the Autonomous Vehicle Competition, hosted by hobbyist electronics vendor SparkFun at its Boulder, Colorado, headquarters, seems simple enough: Build a robot…
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U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon Competition
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Unmanned SpaceX Rocket Blows Up During Launch
[Update 6/28/2015 at 2:13 p.m.]During a press conference, SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said that the explosion may have originated from an overpressurization event in the…
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Artificial Neurons Could Replace Some Real Ones In Your Brain
The neurons in your brain are exquisitely designed to transmit signals—as many as 1 trillion bits per second, according to some estimates. The cells use chemical neurotransmitters to pass the signal from one to the next. To treat neurological disorders, scientists have only been able to hack this signal with electric stimulation or imprecise chemical changes from medications. Now a team of Swedish researchers has developed a synthetic neuron that is able to communicate chemically with organic neurons, which could change the neural pathways and better treat neurological disorders, according to a study published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.
Artificial neuron schematic
karolinskainstitutet via YouTube
The artificial neurons work just like the neurons in your brain right now: they detect chemical signals, transmit them electrically from one end of the “cell” to another, then release chemical neurotransmitters in response. But the artificial neurons are the size of a fingertip and made of organic bioelectronic polymers. To test their device, the researchers put one end of the artificial neuron in a petri dish with chemicals that the device could detect, then used a machine to monitor the electrical changes that it generated, then determine from there how much of a chemical signal to produce on the other end.
The researchers hope that artificial neurons like these could help repair issues of neuron signal transmission in brains impaired by disease or trauma. The researchers hope to make the device smaller in the future so that it can be implanted and tested in a real brain.
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Release Your Inner Climatologist
Photo Credit: NOAA via Wikimedia Commons
Project: Cyclone Center
Climatology is a fiendishly difficult field of study. There are so many factors to consider, and in many cases, we don’t have a lot of historical data to help us refine and improve our models. Complicating matters further is the question of climate change. If we don’t have a solid grasp on how certain events used to happen, how can we have a clear understanding how of they will work in the future?
Zooniverse wants your help to change that. In a project called the Cyclone Center, researchers want you to help improve our understanding of tropical cyclones. A tropical cyclone is a storm system that produces thunderstorms, strong winds that can easily exceed 100 kph, and torrential rain. Asia seems to be particularly prone to cyclones, and they are deadly: Cyclone Nargis, for example, killed more than 140,000 people, and resulted in $10 billion in damage.
The Cyclone Center has some 300,000 satellite images of tropical cyclones taken since 1978. You’re being asked to view these images and classify them using a modified "Dvorak technique." This technique uses a simple questionnaire to analyze the pattern of the cyclone to estimate intensity, wind speed and direction.
To get started, use your existing Zooniverse login, or create a new one, and take the easy tutorial at the Cyclone Center. You can then help to classify the images and get a better understanding of these storm systems. Your work may also help to save tens of thousands of lives in the future.
This project brings together several organizations, including the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, NOAA'S National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), The Risk Prediction Initiative, and the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
Chandra Clarke is a Webby Honoree-winning blogger, a successful entrepreneur, and an author. Her book Be the Change: Saving the World with Citizen Science is available at Amazon. You can connect with her on Twitter @chandraclarke.
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Oslo Builds Bee Highway To Save Precious Pollinators
Today, we're talking bees.
Yep. Those bees. Sure, some people might have had a bad encounter or two with the wrong end of a bee's stinger, and might be on guard around the little insects.
For the most part though, bees get a bad rap. In addition to creating delicious honey, they also help pollinate crops, to the tune of $15 billion dollars every year in the United States. Without their help we wouldn't have food.
And that's why it's not great news that bees haven't been doing so well in recent years. Last year, the United States lost 40 percent of its honeybee population, a devastating loss. No one is exactly sure what's causing the collapse, but climate change, pesticide use, disease, and habitat loss are all suspect. And other countries around the world are having the same difficulties. In Norway, which also noticed declines in bee populations, people are creating a 'bee highway' that gives bees a safe haven in the middle of the country's capital city. See a map of the highway — made up of individual honeybee habitats — at pollinatorpassasjen.no.
Map of the 'bee highway' created by residents of Oslo, Norway
Pollinatorpassasjen.no
The program is a mix of government funded green roofs and private gardens, and is hailed as the first such highway in existence. Bees, like most animals on Earth, like to move around, but when their habitat is fractured into tiny areas of flowering plants broken up by concrete or grass, it can be difficult for them to move from one habitat to the next. By creating a network of flowering habitats (or a 'highway') the hope is that the bees will be able to move freely, without being unduly stressed.
Other countries are also allying themselves with the bees. Last year, President Obama announced the creation of a pollinator task force to help solve the bee crisis. This year, that task force came back with some recommendations for preventing pollinator deaths.
The three goals are:
- Reduce honey bee colony losses to economically sustainable levels;
- Increase monarch butterfly numbers to protect the annual migration; and
- Restore or enhance millions of acres of land for pollinators through combined public and private action.
Could the United States have a bee superhighway in our future? It certainly seems possible given the last of the goals. In the meantime, we're going to keep an eye on the development of robo-bees (still in the very early stages), which could help fill in the pollinator gap while the bee colonies recover.
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Watch This Strange Multicopter Carry A Guy
There are some strange relatives in the helicopter family. Small quadrotor drones are the most popular recent addition, but there have been human-carrying cousins for decades. These aborted hoverbikes took the unusual step of putting an exposed pilot safely above the craft’s spinning blades. Not content with those flying human blenders, some human-carrying multicopters aim to sit the pilot almost level with the rotors. Check out this project man-carrying multi-copter from Quadro UAS:
Despite the low flight in the video, this project is hardly haphazard experimentation. The vehicle makers document the math behind the decision. The vehicle uses 16 rotors, arranged in clusters of four, powered by electric engines. A lightweight passenger (no heavier than 134 lbs) sits in the center. Autonomous drone flight software steers the craft. Like other human-lifting multirotors, it’s a work in progress, promising short flights for light people willing to overcome their fear of nearby spinning blades.
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