Azura

Northwest Energy Innovations

Azura, a machine that turns the mothion of waves into electricity, off the coast of Hawaii

The waves of Hawaii are a big draw for tourists and surfers, but now they're also a source of electricity. For the first time in the United States, energy collected from waves is being turned into electricity that is heading onto the grid, and powering homes in Hawaii.

The project involves the Azura prototype, built by Northwest Energy Innovations. Azura is a 45 ton machine that moves with the swells of the waves capturing their complex motion in 360 degrees, making it more efficient than other wave generators that only capture a particular movement in the waves (like up and down, or side to side).

Azura was deployed last month, and will run for a full year, monitored by many different research groups, including the University of Hawaii, who independently verified that the generators were working and supplying power to the grid. If all goes well, an even larger version of the device will go into the ocean in 2017.

Though this is the first, there are a lot more wave energy projects in the works. The Department of Energy (DOE) notes that over 50 percent of the population in the United States lives within 50 miles of the coast, making waves (and their energy) an easily accessible renewable energy option.

The DOE is currently sponsoring the Wave Energy Prize, a competition open to the public where teams attempt to build the best wave energy device. Registration for the competition just closed this week, and 92 teams have submitted proposals, hoping to reach the grand prize of $1.5 million. Twenty finalists will be announced in August, and will then start building their designs.

From the moment NASA introduced its seven Mercury astronauts to the nation at a press conference on April 9, 1959, the manned program dominated more than a decade of the space agency’s activities. The astronauts graced magazine covers and became national heroes as the enraptured (and sometimes cynical) public waited to see if Apollo would successfully land on the Moon by the end of the decade. But behind this highly publicized space race was a program to begin visiting our planetary neighbours, Venus and Mars, which gave rise to the Mariner Mars exploration program.

The Mariner program began in 1960 with a simple goal: develop a small spacecraft, then send different incarnations at frequent intervals to Venus and Mars on the soon-to-be-available Atlas rockets to gather a wealth of data on these two worlds. It was, in some ways, a simpler goal than Ranger or Surveyor, two coincident lunar reconnaissance programs designed to take a close up image of the Moon before impacting its surface and make a soft landing respectively.

The Mariner 6 spacecraft

NASA/JPL

As a safety measure, the Mariner probes were designed to launch in pairs; for each mission, two spacecraft were readied and launched towards the same target on separate rockets. It was a way to increase the odds of success in an era where rockets were wont to explode shortly after liftoff. This dual launch arrangement proved to be a smart move. Mariner 1 launched on the first mission to Venus on July 22, 1962 on an Atlas rocket that started veering off course forcing the range safety officer to destroy it after just 293 seconds of flight. Its twin, Mariner 2, followed a little more than a month later on August 27 and fulfilled a fantastic mission, becoming the first spacecraft to fly by and gather data from Venus.

The next spacecraft pair was aimed at Mars. Mariner 3 launched on November 5, 1964, but was lost when the shroud housing the spacecraft atop the rocket failed to separate. Three weeks later on November 28, Mariner 4 successfully left the Earth. After an eight month cruise, it reached the red planet and made its closest flyby on July 15, 1965. As it sped past the planet on its way into heliocentric orbit, the spacecraft took the first close-up images of the planets’ surface, showing the horizon against the blackness of space and revealing a face marked by Moon-like craters. It was the first indication that Mars was a varied world worth studying.

From this point, the emphasis of the Mariner program shifted to favor Mars over Venus.

Mariner 9's launch

NASA

Mariner 5 was repurposed from a backup for Mariner 4 into a standalone Venus mission launched without a mate in June of 1967. The next Mariner pair launched to Mars in early 1969, and, flying just months before Apollo 11, these two probes benefitted from the technological advances primed to facilitate the lunar landings. Most notably, advances in telecommunications systems. In five years, data transfer rates improved sixty-fold for far superior images.

Mariner 6 flew by the Martian equator on July 30, 1969, and Mariner 7 passed the southern hemisphere on August 4. Both flew far closer to the planet than Mariner 4 and returned a total of 201 images between them including the first full globes of Mars along with new detailed images of the surface. These far superior images of Mars raised new questions about the planet and also increased scientists’ desire to pursue a landing mission. To this end, the Mariner 8 and 9 probes were launched with the goal of picking potential sites for the twin Viking landers as part of the Mars 71 project.

Mariner 8 failed at launch, but Mariner 9 did make it to Mars. This spacecraft carried a similar instrument payload to Mariners 6 and 7, but it had a markedly more powerful propulsion system. When it reached Mars on November 14, 1971, it used that system to slow its velocity, becoming the first spacecraft to go into orbit around the planet. After 349 days, Mariner 9 had sent back 7,329 images covering more than 80% of Mars' surface. The mission revealed river beds, craters, extinct volcanoes, and canyons, including the massive Valles Marineris that dwarfs the Grand Canyon, and showed clear evidence that wind, water erosion, and weather had physically shaped Mars in its past. These results from Mariner 9 ultimately narrowed down the landing site for Vikings 1 and 2, the first two probes that reached the surface in 1976.

As a bookend to Mariner 4 standing as the first wave of exploration, New Horizons will take the first ever close up images of Pluto on July 15, 2015, 50 years and one day after Mariner 4's first images of Mars. Imaging systems have come a long way in the last half-century, so the first images of Pluto will certainly be clearer than those first images of Mars! I'm helping the New Horizons team, bringing the excitement to the mission to the public, so be sure to follow me on Twitter -- @astVintageSpace -- for live updates during Pluto's flyby (but all the news will come from NASA. I can't tell you anything before the agency does!).

Sources: Mariner JPL Factsheet; NASA; JPL.

Liberator Gun On Display

Cody Wilson/Defence Distributed 2013, via Victoria & Albert Museum

Designed by Defense Distributed, the 3D printed Liberator pistol is both a revolutionary concept and a profoundly mediocre gun. The Liberator is the world's first successful 3D printed gun, capable of firing a single bullet, with only a modest risk of exploding in the hand of the shooter. Shortly after it’s creation, the State Department moved to block the group sharing the file online. Now, a proposed rule change to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations could keep all files for 3D printed guns offline.

The change in question is to the definition of “technical data,” and it is, unsurprisingly, quite a technical paragraph. From the proposed rules:

Paragraph (a)(1) also sets forth a broader range of examples of formats that ‘‘technical data’’ may take, such as diagrams, models, formulae, tables, engineering designs and specifications, computer-aided design files, manuals or documentation, or electronic media, that may constitute ‘‘technical data.’’ Additionally, the revised definition includes certain conforming changes intended to reflect the revised and newly added defined terms

Essentially, this means that the definition of technical data related to weapons now includes electronic files like schematics for 3D printed weapons. And, thanks to a change in the definition of “required,” exporting the technical data for printing a gun is treated identically to exporting a 3D printed gun itself.

If enacted, the rules could effectively keep 3D printed gun designs off the internet, or at least keep them from being hosted inside the United States. There’s a 60-day period for public comment on the rule change, and lasts until August 3rd.

Bullet time videos generated by CamSwarm

Wang et al, 2015 via arXiv

Back in 1999, the Matrix was a groundbreaking film in many ways—including its special effects, for which it won an Academy Award the following year. The most memorable scene was when the main character played by Keanu Reeves dodges bullets—the camera circles around him as he seems to move in slow motion:

Since then, this special effect called “bullet time” has become pretty common in action movies. To produce the bullet time effect, cinematographers set up an array of cameras that take photos sequentially or at the same time, depending on what the shot entails. Then afterwards the images are compiled to make one continuous shot.

This array setup has been around for a while, dating back to the early photography experiments by Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1800s. And while setting up dozens—or even hundreds—of cameras and firing them all at once isn’t hard if you’re a director with a multi-million dollar budget or even a hobbyist with a big budget for new cameras, so far this technology has not become easily accessible to the average person who wants to take a #NeoSelfie.

A camera array for a car commercial.

Breeze Systems via Wang et al 2015, arXiv

Now a team of researchers from Columbia University and Adobe Systems (the makers of Photoshop) has developed an app called CamSwarm that can bring bullet time to smartphones. A study outlining the technology was recently published in arXiv.

Let’s say you want to take a picture of your friend jumping. You could pull up the app on your phone, which would have a QR code on it. Your two other buddies would connect their phones to the same Wi-Fi network and, once they have the app open as well, could scan the QR code from the leader’s phone to link all three, making a camera array. The app provides real-time guidance as the photographers position themselves around the subject at the right angles to get the best possible shot. When the action begins, the app ensures that the cameras’ shutterspeeds are synchronized to achieve the desired effect. And afterwards the shots are compiled on the leader’s phone to produce the final footage. Boom, your friend’s jump has suddenly become epic.

A schematic for how CamSwarm works.

Wang et al, 2015 via arXiv

The researchers evaluated their app with 20 users who filled out a questionnaire after use. They found that the ideal group size was four people, allowing setup in about a minute. In their future work, the researchers hope to continue to make photography a more collaborative activity, which could turn our selfie culture on its head. However, the researchers did not mention when (or if) CamSwarm would be available.

Artist's vision of Wendiceratops

Danielle Dufault

What was 20 feet long, weighed one ton and lived 79 million years ago? A more spectacular cousin of the Triceratops.

In the wake of all the coverage and memes generated by Jurassic World, it's a great time to remember that paleontologists are still doing incredible work, looking into new dinosaurs through fossils, not genetic engineering (though some are doing that too).

Today, researchers announced that they have identified a new dinosaur in a paper published in PLOS One. The new dinosaur is named Wendiceratops pinhornens after Wendy Sloboda, a fossil hunter who has been discovering dinosaur bones and eggs in Canada since she was a teenager. Sloboda discovered the bonebed where the Wendiceratops fossils were found in 2010.

“Wendy Sloboda has a sixth sense for discovering important fossils. She is easily one of the very best dinosaur hunters in the world," David Evans, a co-author of the study said in a statement.

As you might imagine from the name, Wendiceratops is part of the same family of dinosaurs as Triceratops.

“Wendiceratops helps us understand the early evolution of skull ornamentation in an iconic group of dinosaurs characterized by their horned faces,” Evans said. "The wide frill of Wendiceratops is ringed by numerous curled horns, the nose had a large, upright horn, and it’s likely there were horns over the eyes too. The number of gnarly frill projections and horns makes it one of the most striking horned dinosaurs ever found."

Cruise RP-1 Sensor Pod

Cruise Automation

Rather than using the sensors that may be built into your car, the Cruise RP-1 is a pod of cameras, radar, and actuators that is mounted on the roof just above the windshield. It’s connected to a computer in the trunk and a button installed on the dashboard. When you’re ready for the RP-1 to take over on the highway, just push that button. It will engage adaptive cruise control, automatic braking, and lane keeping systems.

Like the built-in driver assist technologies available in new cars on the market, the RP-1 is not fully autonomous. You can’t text or take a nap while it’s engaged. It can ease the burden of a long road trip, but you still need to pay attention while the sensors do most of the work. If the system detects an oddity – someone cuts you off or there’s snow covering the lane markers – the RP-1 will alert you to take over.

Interestingly, there’s also an app for the RP-1 to show you speed, direction, and lane markers. One would think you could monitor these things the old-fashioned way, with your eyes and the windows of your car.

The first 50 RP-1 systems have already been spoken for at $10,000 each, though there is a waiting list for anyone interested in being a slightly-less-early adopter.

Surfer

niall62/FlickrCC by SA 2.0

Soon surfers could help monitor the ocean's health.

Surfers are particularly attuned to the sea, keeping an eye out for the best waves. But soon, they could help gather scientific data by simply participating in their favorite activity.

Scientists in the United Kingdom have announced a system that would allow surfers to measure sea surface temperatures every time they go into the ocean. The temperature of the sea surface is incredibly important to scientists, because it affects how plants and animals act and survive in the water, and even changes how much oxygen the ocean can absorb. By keeping an eye on the temperature, scientists can anticipate dangerous events like algal blooms.

They equipped a surfboard with an instrument that takes measurements of the ocean's temperature, and simultaneously records the location of the surfboard using a global positioning system (GPS). The temperature is measured with a small tag attached to the leash that connects a surfer to her board. The GPS instrument is worn in a pack around the waist. One surfer braved the waters off the coast of the United Kingdom 85 times in one year, collecting information. Those readings were then compared to measurements taken by a scientific station in the same area. Both the surfer's instruments and the regular instruments had the same information.

Since the measurements from the surfboard were reliable, the team hopes to expand the program. They estimate that surfers equipped with the instrument could help gather nearly 40 million pieces of data per year just in the United Kingdom. Surfers around the world could gather far more, and the researchers speculate that future iterations of the instrument might be able to measure salinity or even contaminants in the water.

And the surfers who choose to participate would get something out of the deal too. By tracking their locations with GPS, the surfers can get an accurate count of how many waves they rode, how long they rode them for, and even their top speed on the waves. It's a win-win.

The only problem with the system is that surfers tend to go out in certain sea conditions and in certain places, skewing the results. The authors of the paper say that they can get around this by eventually expanding the program beyond surfers to include other groups, like swimmers, kayakers, fishermen, and boaters, who could gather different information.

Artist's interpretation of a binary star system

ESO

A team of researchers has identified a unique system of stars made of two binary stars and a tag-along lone companion, according to work presented at the UK National Astronomy Meeting held this week in Llandudno, Wales.

The researchers made the discovery by using the SuperWASP (Wide Angle Search for Planets), a set of relatively low-cost cameras in the Canary Islands and South Africa that chart the brightness in different parts of the sky over a period of years. Stars that pass in front of one another create distinct double-dips in brightness, which enabled the researchers to make the discovery.

The five-star system is located 250 light-years away from Earth in the Ursa Major constellation. The stars all orbit on the same plane, indicating that they likely formed from the same proto-stellar disk of dust and gas. One pair of stars orbits so close together that it is called a contact binary, the BBC reports, and they may even share an atmosphere. The stars in the other binary are separated by almost 2 billion miles. Thirteen billion miles separate the two pairs of stars—a distance of more than four times the diameter of Neptune’s orbit. After discovering the two binaries, the researchers detected some additional wavelengths of light that they couldn’t account for, which led them to discover the fifth, lone star in this complex system.

How the 1SWASP J093010.78+533859.5 system works

via BBC

"There could sometimes be no fewer than five Suns of different brightnesses lighting up the landscape,” Markus Lohr, one of the researchers behind the work, told the BBC. "This is a truly exotic star system. In principle there's no reason why it couldn't have planets in orbit around each of the pairs of stars. Any inhabitants would have a sky that would put the makers of Star Wars to shame.”

Though this five-star system is unique, it’s not the first one to ever be discovered—Lohr adds that NASA’s Kepler telescope has previously discovered another five-star system.

CubeSensors

Photograph by Sam Kaplan

These little air quality sensors come in packs of two, four, and six ($300 to $600).

How much do you know about the climate inside your home? Humidity, volatile organic compounds (VOC), and barometric pressure? We thought so. That’s where CubeSensors come into play. Palm-size and wireless, these wee boxes sniff out the tiniest changes in atmosphere, helping you assess the condition of any Wi-Fi–connected room.

Each set includes a base station that connects to a mobile app via a router or modem. To get a reading, shake the cubes. A blue glow means everything is fine. Red means you have a problem and need to check the app for details. Ultimately, you can combat allergies and (literally) breathe easier when you know what’s in your air. The cubes can also be paired with a Fitbit or Jawbone Up, allowing you to link sleep disruptions to environmental causes. If you snore, dry air could be the culprit. The app’s recommendation: Turn on the humidifier.

This article was originally published in the June 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Decode Your Air Quality.”

Screenshot of James Yoder's 'Stuff In Space' website

James Yoder/Stuff In Space

From down here on the ground, space looks like a pristine void. But Earth's orbit is actually crowded with a ton of stuff, from human-made satellites to many smaller pieces of debris whirling around at dangerously high speeds, as the film Gravity so memorably dramatized. In fact, there are an estimated 500,000 or so smaller orbital debris (between one and 10 centimeters in diameter) and about 21,000 larger bits (larger than 10 centimeters) spinning around Earth right now, according to NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office.

And now you can see all but the smallest bits moving around us right now thanks to "Stuff In Space," a mesmerizing new website designed by young programmer James Yoder, which tracks the paths of hundreds of thousands of orbital objects in realtime. "The website displays anything currently trackable -- low-earth orbit, geosynchronous, and anything else there is," Yoder tells Popular Science in an email, referring to satellites that are far enough away to orbit the Earth once every day (geosynchronous) or closer and orbit more rapidly (low-earth orbit).

Screenshot of GPS orbits from 'Stuff In Space'

James Yoder/Stuff In Space

Load up the Stuff In Space site (Safari and Firefox browsers work best, Chrome often leaves some debris out on Macs) and you're immediately presented with a slowly spinning globe (which accurately displays day and night) surrounded by various color-coded dots representing satellites (red), debris (gray), and discarded rocket bodies (blue).

As you glide your mouse across the screen, the orbits of satellites and large debris are highlighted as blue lines and their names or designations displayed in text. You can also hover over the "Groups" section to see views of some of the largest collections of related objects, such as America's network of GPS satellites, Russia's rival positioning system GLONASS, and the debris of the accidental 2009 collision between a Russian military satellite and American communications satellite (Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251). There's even a search function, if you happen to have a particular satellite name in mind (Polar Bear, anyone?)

Orbit of the Polar Bear satellite from 'Stuff In Space'

James Yoder/Stuff In Space

The data for the actual orbits comes from SpaceTrack, a publicly accessible website operated by the US Defense Department, but which so-far hasn't been used to visualize object orbits in 3D much, nor quite so clearly and beautifully (a 2008 Google Earth plugin exists, but it focuses on satellites and the design isn't as thoughtful). As Yoder tells Popular Science in an email: "Websites that track satellites existed, but usually only one satellite at a time, and usually they just plot the satellite on a 2D map of the ground."

Yoder --a soon-to-be freshman engineering student at the University of Texas-Austin, and former participant in the FIRST Robotics Challenge-- says he created Stuff In Space over the course of "about a month, working in my free time." He cites Kerbal Space Program, a popular space simulator PC game, as inspiration for the project. Although he has school coming up in the fall, Yoder plans to add even more to the website, specifically "more information about different satellites and more satellite groups." He also posted his source code on Github for others to emulate and expand upon his work.

As for why go to all the trouble, other than just the pure fun of making something, Yoder says: "I hope people get out of it a better understanding about the huge variety of stuff orbiting over their heads, and maybe learn a bit about how orbits work. I personally never realized just how many things are up there until I saw the plotted satellites for the first time.

Smog

BriYYZ/Flickr

Air pollution in Shanghai in 2008.

Two years ago, severe floods in central China triggered landslides, washed out roads and houses, and killed 200 people. And according to a recent study, air pollution may be partly to blame.

Particles in the air don't cause strong storms, but they can redirect them. In the case of the Chinese floods, soot particles in the air prevented rain clouds from forming during the day. The dark particles of soot absorbed sunlight, which warmed up the air and kept the moisture in the air from condensing into clouds. The moist air moved into the mountains, where the cooler air condensed quickly, causing dramatic evening storms.

“We were amazed at the scale of the effect the pollution had,” Jiwen Fan, an author of the paper told Science. “Effectively it redistributed the precipitation from the wide area of the basin into the mountains.”

When the rain finally fell in the mountains, it fell faster and harder than it would have normally, in an area with steep slopes.

There have been other instances of air pollution causing severe natural disasters. A study published earlier this year found that smoke from wildfires had the potential to make tornado outbreaks in the United States more intense.

Researchers are still trying to figure out the exact link between air pollution and storms. The effects of air particles on weather seem to vary based on the type of air particle, the landscape, and many other factors. But these studies do provide another incentive for governments meeting at this winter's Climate Change conference in Paris.

Ocean view

Stephanie Watson/FlickrCC by SA 2.0

A policy paper published today in Science is asking authorities to hold off on approving any more underwater mining contracts until more environmental controls are put in place.

The timing of this policy paper is key. Currently in Kingston, Jamaica, the International Seabed Authority (ISA)--the arm of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea that governs mining in international waters--is holding its annual session. ISA has already issued exploration permits to both national and private companies all eager to get a piece of the action. In this year's session, the Authority is expected to figure out how to impose some environmental regulation on the nascent underwater mining industry.

Deep-sea mining of the ocean floor is still very much in the exploration phase. The real action likely won't start for a few more years. Nautilus Minerals, one of the leading deep sea mining companies expects to have its deep sea mining vessel built in 2017, and would start mining at some point after that.

The scientists writing today's paper want the ISA to hold off on issuing new permits until a network of protected marine areas can be put in place, potentially safeguarding an environment that we know very little about.

The advantages of underwater mining are that there is potentially a lot of resources there that we need for high-tech devices. And by using remote controlled machines instead of human miners, deep sea mining has the potential to be safer for humans.

There's also the fact that all the action in deep sea mining is happening ... well, deep in the ocean. As in, not where we live. The environmental impacts happening 20,000 leagues under the sea will be further from the public's gaze. And while that's good for people, it might not be good for the environment in general. The authors of the paper warn that deep sea environments tend to recover very slowly when disturbed, some so slowly that they likely wouldn't recover in a human's lifetime, if ever.

The exact effects of long-term or extensive mining on the ocean floor remain unclear, but they probably won't be for long. A European team of scientists announced this year that they would be studying the ecological effects of deep sea mining on the environment and organisms living on the seafloor.

In the meantime, the ISA has the tricky task of balancing humanity's need for valuable commodities of metals and rare earth elements against a biologically diverse seafloor that we're only just starting to explore. We could see a decision by the time the session closes on July 24.

It’s weird timing, but today NASA revealed the astronauts who will make history by becoming the first to launch into space in a commercial vessel. Astronauts Robert Behnken, Sunita Williams, Eric Boe, and Douglas Hurley will train to fly on SpaceX and Boeing spacecraft. Three of them will be selected to pilot the first test flights in 2017.

What would normally be exciting news comes on the heels of a disastrous unmanned SpaceX cargo resupply mission to the space station, which saw SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket break apart in mid-air shortly after launch. SpaceX still hasn’t released its full analysis of what went wrong, but the failure underlines the inherent danger of these missions.

NASA has stated that the malfunction will not delay the 2017 timeline for launching manned missions to the International Space Station, and that the lessons SpaceX engineers learn from this failure could make crewed launches safer. For better or worse, things certainly seem to be moving forward.

Of course, Behnken, Williams, Boe and Hurley could just as well travel into space in a Boeing spacecraft. Although SpaceX has been shuttling cargo to the ISS for some time now, NASA placed its first human spaceflight order with Boeing.

The four astronauts will work closely with SpaceX and Boeing to develop their spacecraft. NASA spokesperson Kyle Herring told Popular Science that after both companies have finished their unmanned testing, each will launch a 2-person test flight to rendezvous with the International Space Station, dock, and prove that the spacecraft works as planned. Later it will undock, de-orbit, and (hopefully) splashdown or land safely. Boeing has reserved one spot on its test flight for a company member, so that means three of these four astronauts will be test pilots for the first commercial crewed spaceflights.

The benefits of using private spacecraft to send astronauts into low Earth orbit are three-fold. First, we can launch astronauts from American soil instead of relying on the Russians. Second, private spaceflight will be cheaper: compared to a $76 million ticket on the Soyuz, SpaceX and Boeing think they can lower the price to $58 million per seat. And thirdly, delegating ISS transportation to private companies will supposedly free up NASA to focus on cooler things--like getting us to Mars.

A chimpanzee hooked up to electrodes for a 2012 experiment.

Hirata et al 2013, Nature

For the first time researchers have used the combined brainpower of several rhesus monkeys to move a digital arm and complete various tasks with it, according to a study published today in Scientific Reports. If such a connection were possible in humans, we might be able to solve problems far better than any individual alone.

Researchers have known for a long time that brains have a tendency to sync up. When two people are tasked with the same activity, neurons in their brains start to fire at the same speed and in the same place, even if the people weren’t instructed to cooperate. No one really knows why this happens, but it’s a well-observed phenomenon—our brains are naturally inclined to cooperate with one another.

The researchers behind this study knew that the same held true for monkeys, and they wanted to see how this convergence could be applied to the brain-machine interface. In the study, they sat groups of two or three monkeys in separate rooms in front of a computer screen. Each of these monkeys had electrodes implanted in the parts of their brains associated with motor skills and somatosensation, the sense of where the body is positioned in space. The monkeys all shared control of the digital arm, able to move it along various axes so that, together, the monkeys could complete a common task of moving the arm towards a circular target on the screen. Once they achieved that, the researchers gave them juice as a reward. They first learned to move the arm with a joystick, then the researchers hooked up their brain implants to control the arm with just their minds.

Over the course of several weeks, the monkeys got much better—and faster—at working together. Collecting data from the monkeys’ brain implants, the researchers found that more neurons fired when more monkeys were working together, and that their neurons were lighting up in the same parts of the brain.

This type of neurological collaboration in humans could be useful for tasks where more minds are better than one, such as a surgery in which different members of the surgical team control a different tool, New Scientist suggests. And though that reality is still pretty far away, studies like this one indicate that it could happen much more quickly than previously thought.

Izzy Swan's Walker

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

The humble electric hand drill, staple of workbenches everywhere, is more than just a simple tool for carving holes into walls. Put to other uses, it’s a powerful engine, capable of driving all sorts of contraptions. Like this weird drill-powered walking machine by Izzy Swan, that looks like if H.R. Giger had designed the Segway. Watch it move below:

What.

Izzy Swan is inspired, like many other creators of weird walking machines, by the work of Dutch artist Theo Jansen, who makes giant, wind-powered walking sculptures known as Strandbeests. Swan’s vehicle is no idle beachcomber, shambling forward with the breeze. It’s an electric-powered machine.

To make the 20-volt drill drive the legs, Swan used a worm drive. The drill spins a screw-shaped gear, which meshes with a disk gear that in turn gets the legs moving. Despite its metallic appearance, Swan’s odd walker is mostly made of wood that's painted silver. It shambles slowly, and methodically, like a cyberpunk centaur that’s running low on battery.

Here’s the full video of Swan testing and building the concept. Stay tuned to the end for some drone-captured footage of it walking down a street.

Nosferatu needs an update.

FICG.mx via Flickr, CC by 2.0

There are people out there who are certain that they are vampires. No, they’re not kids who saw Twilight too many times and can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction—human vampires are people who truly believe that they gain energy by consuming another person’s blood. There are whole online communities devoted to it. But even human vampires have relationship or family issues, so they sometimes turn to psychologists or other clinicians. A new paper published in Critical Social Work looks at the fraught relationships between people who have alternate identities and the clinicians trying to treat them.

“We live in an age of technology and live in a time when people can select new, alternate identities to fit how they understand themselves better,” says DJ Williams, a professor of social work at Idaho State University and one of the authors of the new study, in a press release. People who identify as vampires tend to be socially and psychologically stable. More often than not, they tend to keep their alternate identities private because they fear being discriminated against or misunderstood. And though no one knows how many there are in the world, real-life vampires may be more common than you might think.

“People with alternative identities have the same set of issues that everybody has,” Williams says. “People of all kinds sometimes struggle with relationship issues or have a death in family or struggles with career and job-type issues. Some of these people with alternate identities may come to a therapist with these issues, and if clinicians are open and educated about this group they should be able to help the individual much better.”

In the study, the 11 self-identifying vampires surveyed noted that they were very skeptical of seeing a clinician for fear of being thought to have a psychological problem or seen as “wicked” or “evil.” Williams suggests that clinicians take the time to understand how the client’s vampirism manifests itself—is it a lifestyle choice, or real-life vampirism? What does that self-identification mean to the patient? If clinicians are able to approach a session with a vampire with as little judgment as possible, he would be better able to understand the client’s worldview and help her get the best treatment possible for those issue that are truly detrimental.

Pitcher plants are carnivorous plants that lure unsuspecting insects into their digestive juices using foul smells. But first they have to find a good, stinky perfume to entice the animals in. Luckily, in nature there are plenty of things that might smell appetizing to insects, including animal droppings. But how to get the animals to cooperate?

Evolution comes in handy. Researchers write that they have found one type of pitcher plant with a unique shape, designed to look attractive to bats using sonar to echolocate. Bats find their way around by emitting tiny noises that bounce off objects. When a bat's noise bounces off a certain part of the plant, called a reflector, it reflects back a loud, clear signal, telling the bat where to go (you can see the bat enter the plant in the gif above). The results are published in a new paper in Current Biology.

"With these structures, the plants are able to acoustically stand out from their environments so that bats can easily find them," Michael Schöner, one of the authors said. "Moreover, the bats are clearly able to distinguish their plant partner from other plants that are similar in shape but lack the conspicuous reflector."

But why would a bat want to go into the mouth of a pitcher plant? Unlike insects, the bat isn't flying towards its doom. In previous studies the scientists found that the pitcher plant was the perfect shape for a bat to fly in and take a rest. The bat is too large to fall into the much of digestive juices and fecal offerings at the base of the plant. In this case, almost everyone wins. The plants get bat poop which helps attract food, and the bats get shelter. The insects, unfortunately, are out of luck.

Stuart Caie, CC BY 2.0

Your little genes are about to take up a lot more space. In the next 10 years, genomic data could generate anywhere between 2 and 40 exabytes per year—at a minimum, that’s more than two million times what your home computer can hold. A study approximating the overwhelming quantity of genetic data to come was published this week in PLOS Biology.

As researchers parse out exactly how our genes are related to our health, more people will be taking them. The researchers estimate that one billion people will have their genomes sequenced by 2025. With the technology and systems currently in use, one person’s fully sequenced genome takes up about 100 gigabytes of space, and the amount of data that genomics produces every day doubles every seven months. It doesn’t take much mathematical prowess to calculate just how crazy the amount of genetic data could become, and despite the efforts of researchers and private companies alike, we simply don’t have the data processing software to be ready for the genetic revolution.

Right now, the field of astronomy, YouTube, and Twitter are coping with similar big data problems. So far all the data of human genomics is still only generating about a quarter of YouTube’s data every year. But by 2025, the study authors estimate that genetic data will be just as large—and need computing power to match.

With that much data, genetics researchers will need better ways to acquire, store, distribute, and analyze data, the study authors write. Some organizations like the New York Genome Center have tried keeping their own internal database, prioritizing the files they use most often, the Washington Post reports. Amazon and Google has invested in cloud computing for genetic data, which seems like the most likely route, study author Michael Schatz said. And though the study authors don’t have specific suggestions for the data-processing method that they think will work best, they do write: “Now is the time for concerted, community-wide planning for the ‘genomical’ challenges of the next decade.”

We <3 Pluto

NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI

Image was taken July 7 from a distance of 5 million miles.

Pluto is coming into focus so fast we can almost taste it. It tastes cold.

But that's beside the point. It turns out that along with the cameras and high-speed instruments, the New Horizons spacecraft set to fly past the former planet on July 14 is also carrying to Pluto a highly outdated piece of technology. A compact disc (yes, a CD) with your name on it.

Well, it might have your name on it. It might have your name on it if one day, back in 2005 you came across a submission form from NASA that asked you to be part of the "First Mission To The Last Planet," and you were one of the 434,738 people to sign up to have your name recorded on a CD and shot into space.

These guys did:

Elon Musk Certificate

NASA

Bill Nye Certificate

NASA

Neil Armstrong Certificate

NASA

Did you? You can check on NASA's website. And if you're one of the lucky ones, you can print out a certificate to shove in your friends faces when New Horizons flies by next week.

[H/T: Philip Bump]

After the cinematic masterpiece Sharknado came out in 2013 we all had such a good time making up funny sequel ideas. "Wouldn't Sharkcano be hilarious?" we laughed smugly to ourselves, thrilled by our own cleverness.

Nature is the only one that's laughing now.

National Geographic just released footage of sharks observed swimming inside the crater of an active underwater volcano called Kavachi near the Solomon Islands.

Just to reiterate, and this cannot be emphasized enough: They found sharks. In a volcano!

With this, we must all accept that the world is weirder than our imagination could ever be.