Just as expected, the images of Pluto keep getting better and better as the New Horizons spacecraft swoops ever nearer to the former planet. The latest depicts Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, locked in their celestial dance. The two bodies, separated by 12,200 miles of space, orbit around a common center of gravity, forming what planetary scientists would call a binary planet.

Pluto And Charon

NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI

This portrait was shot on July 8 from a distance of 3.7 miles.

The spacecraft snapped the portrait on July 8 from a distance of 3.7 miles. NASA notes that “Most of the bright features around Pluto’s edge are a result of image processing, but the bright sliver below the dark ‘whale,’ which is also visible in unprocessed images, is real.”

Here you can see the same image with color information that was obtained earlier.

Pluto Plus Charon Plus Color

NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI

The second image highlights the contrast between Pluto and its partner. While the former is reddish brown, rocky, and about 1500 miles in diameter, Charon is half that size, icier and gray.

“These two objects have been together for billions of years, in the same orbit, but they are totally different,” said New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, in a statement.

The new images seem to depict brighter areas on Charon that could be impact craters. If so, the New Horizons spacecraft may be able to take a gander to see what the moon’s interior is made of.

Divine Eagle

weibo.com, tiexue.net, cdjby.net

The Divine Eagle is a low observable, high altitude UAV meant detect stealth aircraft at long ranges, using special purpose radars. This low resolution photo shows that similar to the port (left) side seen in the next photo below, the starboard (right) side of the fuselage is also colored grey.

Divine Eagle

Blitzo at China Defense Forum

By using the single deck bus in the background (probably 3.2 meters tall, like most buses of its type) as a very crude visual yardstick, a very rough comparison suggests that the Divine Eagle is about 6 meters tall, and 15 meters long (since most high altitude large UAVs have a wingspan to body length ratio of 2.5:1 to 3:1, the wingspan of the Divine Eagle is likely its be 35 to 45 meters across). With a maximum take off weight of at least 15 tons, the Divine Eagle is the world's largest UAV, edging out the RQ-4 Global Hawk.

Color in the Eagle

Iron Eagle via Weibo

This CGI offers a view of the differing yellow, green and grey blue primer coatings on the Divine Eagle suggest the usage of different materials like composite and aluminum alloys for different sections of the UAV. For example, the grey blue forward dome on the port (left) body is likely to contain a satellite dish for long distance communications, while the grey blue sections on the twin bodied fuselage likely house radar arrays.

Divine Eagle Hunts

Hongjian via China Defense Forum

The offensive applications of the Divine Eagle are demonstrated here, as two Divine Eagles mark out not just the enemy aircraft carrier, but also its escorting warships and aviation wing, while vectoring friendly aircraft and ships into combat. One presumes that the Divine Eagle would also be able to find targets for the infamous DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile.

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In its three-year development phase, the Oculus Rift headset has been a sandbox for coders interested in creating immersive virtual reality experiences. And when developers have three years to play with a piece of technology, they put together some outrageous mashups, like a gaming exoskeleton or the omnidirectional treadmill. So far, these innovative virtual experiences have been just that — virtual, that is, confined to the inner world of the Oculus Rift headset. But that's beginning to change, thanks to a new project that lets you see and manipulate virtual objects in the air in front of you as though they were tangible holograms.

The project relies on the Leap Motion controller, a small puck-like device that tracks the motion of your arms and hands. Oculus and Leap Motion started supporting each other's software last year, making it easier for developers to make exactly this kind of software.

In his video made for an office hackathon, Leap software engineer Raffi Bedikian shows off the new system by managing app windows in the air in front of him, scrolling through lists, and even lowering the brightness of his surroundings. He imagines possibilities for the switch between VR and AR space far beyond an office environment.

“You could toggle the passthrough on when the flight attendant is handing you your drink, then toggle it off again to resume your immersive 3-D movie experience,” Bedikian told Wired.

This feature could also help dispel some concerns that Oculus and other burgeoning VR platforms are too disconnected from the real world. With this feature, users could quickly switch out of their virtual space and get their physical bearings — a danger especially when working with motion capture.

But Leap developers aren’t the only ones exploring the controller’s use for Oculus. For example, graduate students at France’s École Nationale Supérieure d’Ingénieurs Sud Alsace recently took on a six-week project to create an interactive 3D space using Leap Motion and Oculus, coding their environment with the Unity game engine.

Last year, Popular Science wrote that “medical students might take nanoscale walking tours of the brain,”, and that’s pretty close to what these enterprising students, Paul Bourgeois and Cyprien Beaucreux, are trying to do. After building a virtual operating room, they’re turning towards specialized medical training like introductory courses for surgeons.

“With VR headset and Leap, these beginners could train in a world created for them, with the same tools as in the real world, a patient with the same diagnosis and a body with real characteristics,” wrote Bourgeois in an email. “It surely will not change the feeling of a true tool in his hand but he can train or learn the right movements for a specific surgery.”

For their next project, however, Bourgeois and Beaucreux are working on a “Room of Errors,” according to ENSISA professor Germain Forestier, who led the initial project. Forestier says that a medical student would be placed in the virtual room, which would have certain elements that could be dangerous to patients. The medical student would then have to identify what was wrong based on what they observed, a better learning experience than just answering questions on a test.

Microsoft also has been exploring medical training with its Hololens, their augmented reality headset. They've partnered with Case Western Reserve University to deploy the Hololens to students, seen marveling at the technology in a video on their YouTube channel. The video shows the Hololens in action, and most notably, the device's limited field of view.

All of these independent experiments point to a rapidly developing new landscape of computing, one that frees apps from the screens of our phones and PCs and other devices, and instead brings them right into the physical world alongside us.

Pluto And Charon

NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI

New Horizons snapped this image from a distance of 3.7 million miles on July 8.

It’s not everyday we get to explore a completely new planet. But on July 14, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft will become the first to visit Pluto. (And, oh yes, we did just call Pluto a planet!—more on that later.) The likes of this encounter haven’t been experienced in decades. We explored our solar system’s rocky inner planets in the 1960s and early 70s, the gassier middle planets in the late 80s, and now we’re finally about to add the final piece of the puzzle by probing the icy worlds of the outer solar system.

“There’s not another mission like this in our time,” says New Horizons principle investigator Alan Stern. “We’re the only 21st century team that’s planning to explore a frontier planet, and no one’s planning to do it again.”

What We May Find

NASA Concept Drawing

The New Horizons spacecraft will fly by Pluto on July 14 at 7:49am EST.

With its suite of optical, ultraviolet, and infrared imaging tools, the spacecraft will swoop past Pluto at a distance of about 7,800 miles. From there, the 1,500-mile-wide planet will appear about as large as a basketball that’s four feet away. Any closer, says Stern, and the images we get back will be blurry. Any further away and we won’t be able to see as many details.

Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, which is half the size of the planet, will be about 3 times farther away. The New Horizons team timed it so that Charon would be on Pluto’s dark side during the flyby, so that the light reflecting off the moon might light up the far side. “Nonetheless we’ll still get very good imagery,” says Stern.

The spacecraft’s trajectory was specifically planned to catch glimpses of Pluto’s four tinier moons as well—Styx, Nix, Hydra, and Kerberos.

The Countdown

After a nine-year journey, New Horizons will reach its closest approach to Pluto at 7:49 a.m. on Tuesday, July 14. In the mission headquarters at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, a roomful of scientists and reporters will count down to the approach, and the festivities will be broadcast live on NASA TV. Unfortunately, it sounds like the initial imagery won’t be available until July 15. Pluto is billions of miles away, so it takes 4.5 hours for information to travel from New Horizons to Earth. Plus, the spacecraft is going to be too busy collecting data during this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn around and beam stuff back to Earth.

“On Tuesday, it’s going to be raining Christmas presents, and we don’t know what’s inside them.”

What New Horizons Might Find

There’s no telling exactly what New Horizons will find once it reaches Pluto—that’s one of the things that makes it such an exciting destination. “On Tuesday, it’s going to be raining Christmas presents, and we don’t know what’s inside them,” says Stern. But scientists have made a few educated guesses.

1. Moons And Rings

Pluto has five known moons, and the New Horizons team is somewhat surprised that the spacecraft hasn’t spotted any new ones during its approach. But the spacecraft is still 2.9 million miles away, so there’s a small chance that more could turn up.

More probable is the chance of finding rings. Astronomers have suggested that Pluto could be encircled in faint disks of dust, but so far New Horizons hasn’t discovered any. Once the spacecraft has flown past the tiny planet, it will look back and if the rings are there, they might be easier to spot when they’re framed against the sun.

Pluto's Trajectory

Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory

2. Snow

Pluto has a thin atmosphere that’s a lot like our own in composition, containing nitrogen, oxygen and small amounts of methane, carbon monoxide, and hydrocarbon. Pluto also has weather. “We could see many different kinds of weather,” says Stern. “We know it snows there.”

3. Ice Volcanoes

Cryovolcanoes, or volcanoes that erupt frozen materials, have been found on Neptune’s moon Triton. Triton and Pluto are considered to be icy siblings, so maybe Pluto has cryovolcanoes as well.

4. Probably Not Rivers Of Neon

Pluto’s atmosphere is thought to contain neon, and at the freezing cold temperatures on Pluto, neon condenses into a liquid. So it is technically possible that neon could flow like water on Pluto, but it is highly unlikely, says Stern. “I might sit next to the Kardashians at dinner tonight. It’s not likely, but it could happen.”

We <3 Pluto

NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI

An image taken on July 7 from a distance of 5 million miles shows a mysterious heart-shaped bright patch on Pluto.

5. A Subsurface Ocean

Pluto, like many of the frigid worlds of the outer solar system, may harbor an ocean beneath its surface.

6. An Atmosphere On Charon

Charon is so large in comparison to Pluto that the moon does not orbit it nice, like Earth’s moon. Instead, like two ice skaters spinning, Pluto and Charon orbit around a center of gravity that’s somewhere in between them, forming a binary planet system. Because of this close interaction, some researchers have suggested that Charon might be suctioning off some of Pluto’s atmosphere. If so, it would be the first known case of a planet and a moon sharing an atmosphere.

A Planet?

In 2006, Pluto was downgraded from a planet to a dwarf planet, and Stern and other scientists have been fighting against the demotion ever since. The International Astronomical Union, which is responsible for naming astronomical objects, said that because Pluto doesn’t have enough gravity to clear its orbit of other space rocks, it couldn’t be considered a planet. Pluto is located in the Kuiper Belt, which is full of big space rocks, while the other planets primarily have their orbits all to their own. But it’s unclear whether any of those legitimate planets would be able to clear their orbits if they were in Pluto’s place.

Planetary scientists prefer to define a "planet" as an object orbits the sun and it has enough gravity to be round--a definition that Pluto fits into nicely.

The decision about how to define a planet should have been left up to the planetary scientists, Stern says, not the astronomers. “If you needed brain surgery, you wouldn’t call a podiatrist. You don’t go to a tax attorney to file your divorce papers. … Planets are completely different from galaxies.”

Since New Horizons will give us our first clear images of Pluto ever, Stern hopes the discoveries it makes could help to reinstate Pluto as a planet.

“There’s not another mission like this in our time.”

So When Will We Get To See Some Of This Awesome Stuff?

The short answer is, not soon enough! The spacecraft will blast through Pluto’s system at a speed of about 35,000 mph, snapping photos and collecting data for 12 days. The information it gathers will be stored onboard the spacecraft, to be beamed back bit by bit, across almost 5 billion miles of space, over the next 16 months after the flyby. Sixteen months is a long time to wait to get our Pluto fix, but the incredible photos and information it sends back will surely be worth the wait.

What Pluto Might Look Like

Illustration by NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

Snoopy Drone

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Wearing aviator goggles and a pilot’s scarf, a dog climbs onto the roof of his red doghouse. In seconds he is transformed into a daring aerial ace in combat against the Red Baron. Snoopy-as-dogfighter is now a reality in drone form, thanks to Otto Dieffenbach. Watch Snoopy fly over muddy, grey, wet terrain, a suitable stand-in for the Western Front, below:

Snoopy’s flying doghouse appears to be a light frame built around a remote-control quadcopter. It takes off with Snoopy on his back, nose pointed at the sky, and gives the appearance of a rather elaborate kite. While plenty of unmanned Red Barons lurk in the sky, there might be bigger risks for our WWI ace: there are TIE Fighters and Star Destroyers in the air now.

Below, Snoopy soars in bluer skies, free from any imperial threats.

[via Laughing Squid]

Cruise RP-1 Sensor Pod

Cruise Automation

Self-driving and autonomous cars are being tested by tech companies like Google and auto manufacturers like Audi, and almost every new car on the market has some kind of driver-assist systems. Now Cruise Automation promises to bring that bleeding-edge tech to your very own car (as long as that car is an Audi A4 or S4 in California, so far) with its RP-1 “highway autopilot.”

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.

United Airlines 787 lands at the O'Hare International Airport in Chicago

Piper/UnfinishedPortraitmaker/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

This week saw two nearly simultaneous infrastructure failures in major industries: finance and transportation.

On Wednesday, July 8th, the New York Stock Exchange abruptly went down for a big chunk of the trading day. Suspicions of a cyber attack erupted almost immediately after the exchange went dark, but the NYSE denied this, and later clarified that the problem had resulted from gateway software compatibility.

The same day United Airlines experienced a network crash due to what they say was a faulty router connection that degraded network connectivity. After 59 cancelled flights, the network was mostly back online.

Both were back online within a matter of hours, and while some damage was done the majority of people went on about their lives without problem. But the frequency of these episodes is increasing as networks become more complicated and as we rely more on them for day-to-day life.

A New Type of Natural Disaster?

There’s an argument to be made that network outages are becoming the world’s most frequent natural disaster: while the results are more often inconvenience than destruction, they’re complicated to fix, and affect telecommunications, service providers, transportation, finance, and sometimes even medical devices.

So what’s causing the problems?

David Erickson of Forward Networks, a startup focused on bringing more computer science practices into networking, says the problem is more than just human error: it’s an increasingly complex and uncoordinated system of hardware and languages. “You’ve now got organizations that have thousands or tens of thousands of devices that are moving packets: routers, switchers, firewalls--you name it,” he tells Popular Science,“and each of these things has upwards of between 1,000 and 1,000,000 or more rules that actually define the behavior of how what it does with packets as they come in and out.”

Those things can be taught to play nice together, but Erickson says it’s a steep learning curve. “The net problem is that it’s primarily humans that are having to install, roll these things forward, fix them, evolve them, everything. and it’s no surprise at all that one misconfiguration can pretty easily bring down major critical systems, which is what you saw with United.”

The problem increases with each passing year. Erickson says that over time, these devices “have become more and more complex, and you have more and more of them, they’re individually more and more complex, and there’s continually new software demands being placed on them.”

Erickson explains that many companies don’t realize that major chunks of their company and their operating systems are “just a couple of software misconfigurations away from being turned off or unavailable.” And it’s not just a time-and-money quandary when things go down. He pointed to a subreddit about network issues where a user offered an anecdote of neonatal heart monitors being configured on a network that was not functioning.

Mo Complexity, Mo Problems

Part of the problem comes from the fact that networks are a relatively new infrastructure. There are more safeguards for utilities like power and water, but they don’t exist for networking.

And they get worse with age not just because of new complexities, but the sudden appearance of old problems.

Eric Hunsader, of Nanex, LLC, a company that makes stock market information software. Hunsader has been in software development for the financial industry since 1986, and Nanex processes market data of stocks, options, futures and everything trading in the U.S. and worldwide. He explains that problems present from the start can take time to make themselves known. “As your product matures, after a while the only bugs left are the ones that nobody foresaw, and they tend to be the real difficult ones to figure out. So if technology is more complex with fewer errors, the few errors are significant.”

For the NYSE, shutdowns aren’t necessarily a problem, but bad timing can create a nightmare. “The nightmare is it happening one second before close,” says Hunsader. “The best time for something to cause trouble is 15:59:59. The problem is that so much of the system depends on those closing prices. You would back up everything.” He says that trades and options would have to be rolled back, and an error in the last few minutes of the day could cause the market not to open the next morning.

The good news is that things like the stock market, which are frequently affected by panic, aren’t affected by network issues most of the time. Hunsader says it doesn’t have any psychological impact on the market. If it had been an attack, well, “I think it would be all the difference, because we’d all be thinking if they can take a server out, maybe they can do it again. Or even worse, to be able to do it without being detected or... the smart thing would have been to rake the system for money.”

Airlines are a little more sensitive: a down network means down planes, which can ruin everyone’s holiday weekends and cost millions in a matter of hours. But these problems aren’t so simple as someone kicking a power cord out of the back of a Netgear product.

Testing, Testing...

Right now there’s not really a technology in place that lets network experts test configurations in a vacuum. Erickson says changes are planned ahead of time, with group consensus being the only reliable estimate of what’s going to happen. Once it goes live, testing new system arrangements (like with the NYSE or United) is a race against time. “If you mis-configure a device that happens to be the core device at that moment in time, it doesn’t matter how much redundancy you have.”

The lack of a standardized language or set of practices means that experts are in demand. Erickson says to be a network’s perfect manager, “you’d need to be able to understand all of the devices you’ve got in your network. There are tons of vendors, hundreds if not thousands of devices.”

Is there someone trying to standardize these tools? Not really. competitors have no impetus to collaborate when they can earn more from beating one another on innovation. But the reality of the market is that companies aren’t often replacing every unit every time there’s an upgrade, so legacy systems and legacy software will always be a problem.

Erickson says that in the absence of customers saying, “we need some sort of unifying standard here so we can have confidence our network is doing what we expect it to do all the time,” then it’s just not going to happen.

And even if there was desire, it’s a huge undertaking. “For a company to solve this,” Erickson explains, “they have to then go out and talk to every one of these devices and understand them extremely well,” he says. “And that’s just really hard.”

Above The Mist

Ricardo Matiello, courtesy of Dronestagram

Aerial photography has never been more accessible. Thanks to the widespread availability of relatively inexpensive drones with cameras, capturing breathtaking photos from the sky is easier than ever. To honor this, and to highlight some of the best unmanned aerial photos taken, the Dronestagram app put together a contest of the best drone-captured pictures. The photos were judged in collaboration with National Geographic, and the results are stunning. The image at the top of this story is the contest's first place winner “Above the mist” by Ricardo Matiello, who captured the top of the Cathedral of Maringá, Paraná, Brazil.

Take a look at some of the other winners below:

Cliff Diver, Mazatlan, Sinaloa, Mexico

w00tsor, courtesy of Dronestagram

Plovdiv by Night

IceFire, courtesy of Dronestagram

Mont Saint Michel, Normandy, France

Wanaii Films, courtesy of Dronestagram

Lost island, Tahaa, French Polynesia

Marama Photo Video, courtesy of Dronestagram

The rest can be seen at Dronestagram.

E-Fan Crossing The Channel

Airbus

Six years after the Wright Brothers' first flight, Frenchman Louis Blériot became the first person to fly across the English Channel in an airplane. This week, three highly modern airplanes attempted the same feat, for a much smaller place in history: Which would be the first fully electric two-engined airplane to make the leap from Europe to the isle of Great Britain? As of this afternoon, it appears at least two planes crossed successfully, but there’s now a dispute over which was first.

The Airbus E-Fan looks like the tiny, electric-smartcar version of an A-10 fighter. Powered only by batteries, it has two fans situated behind the cockpit, promising up to 45 minutes of flight time with a top speed of 137 mph. Today, the E-Fan cross the channel in about 40 minutes. Here’s a gif of it landing in England:

There’s a good chance that the E-Fan’s channel crossing may be less historic than thought. Last night, pilot Hugues Duwal appeared to cross the channel in a tiny Columban Cri-Cri. It’s name comes from French for “cricket”, and it is an unbelievably tiny airplane. If the E-Fan is a Smart Car, the Cri-Cri designed in the 1970s, resembles nothing so much as a Peel Trident, the world’s second-smallest car. The Cri-Cri is a half-sized cockpit put into the middle of a quarter-scale plane, with two small engines powering propellers that stick out in front of the cockpit like catfish whiskers. The wingspan is just 16 feet, so flying the whole plane is like wearing giant wings. If Duwal’s flight was indeed successful, and his CriCri was indeed an electric one and not the two-stroke engines common to Cri-Cris, then he may have under the cover of darkness snuck past Airbus and into the history books, or at least the books of minor aviation feats.

Hugues Duwal In His Electric Cri-Cri

Anubis2202, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

Hilariously, a third electric plane was also supposed to cross the channel this week. The Pipistrel Alpha Electro (actual prototype name: WATTsUP) was supposed to cross the channel on Wednesday, but Siemens, who provided the engine to the Electro, recalled it, claiming that the engine wasn’t approved for over-water flight. In what can only be an unrelated matter, Siemens also provided the engines for the E-Fan.

While this is absurd theatrics for a minor first, it’s a promising sign for the future of electric aviation, and hearkens back to the early days of human flight, with multiple claims of firsts. Fortunately, when it comes to firsts in flight, there’s only one Wright answer.

[Ars Technica]

Pluto by moonlight

JHUAPL / SwRI

The sun on Pluto's moon Charon is 1,000 times dimmer that here on Earth, but it will still be bright enough to capture the first images of Pluto's night region.

At 7:50am EDT tomorrow, July 14, New Horizons, the fastest spacecraft ever launched, will perform the first close-encounter flyby of Pluto and its system of five known moons. During that approach, New Horizons will be flying within 6,000 miles of Pluto and collect 100 times more data than it can send home in a single day. The instruments on the spacecraft will take thousands of photos, measure Pluto’s temperature and magnetic field, map the surface topography, determine Pluto’s atmospheric composition, and search for undiscovered moons, rings and subterranean oceans. To send all of that data back to Earth will take 16 months.

“We’ll be sending home things that nobody has ever seen through the rest of 2015 and into October of 2016,” says Alan Stern, principal investigator for the New Horizons mission. “We could be running down the hallways with huge discoveries 12 or 15 months after the encounter.”

The Spacecraft's Seven Instruments

The New Horizons mission is mapping the surfaces and surface compositions of Pluto and its moons as well as determining Pluto’s atmospheric structure, escape rate and composition. To achieve these goals, the spacecraft is equipped with seven unique instruments. The VBSDC (Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter), built by students at the University of Colorado, measures the amount of space dust that hits New Horizons as it travels across the solar system. A passive radiometer known as REX (Radio science EXperiment) measures Pluto’s temperature and atmospheric composition.

The SWAP (Solar Wind Around Pluto) and PEPSSI (Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation) both measure particles emanating from Pluto into space. The SWAP measures the escape rate of atmospheric gases and observes Pluto’s interaction with solar winds, while the PEPSSI measures Plasma ions that radiate out from the dwarf planet’s atmosphere. These two instruments can help us better understand how distant planets are affected by their host stars.

But the LORRI, Alice and Ralph are the most likely instruments to send home major discoveries. The LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) is a black-and-white telescopic camera used for navigational purposes. It also provides high-resolution images of Pluto’s surface.

Alice, an ultraviolet spectrometer, is determining the structure and composition of Pluto’s atmosphere. It is also searching for atmospheres around Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, and other objects in the Kuiper Belt--the massive ring of icy objects orbiting the sun beyond Neptune’s orbit.

The most intricate piece of equipment on the craft is known as Ralph. “It is a very sophisticated instrument with a number of different capabilities including thermal mapping,” says Stern. Ralph consists of eight different cameras—four color cameras, three panchromatic cameras, and a composition mapping spectrometer. Ralph is taking a spectrum of tens of thousands of pixels, similar to a 3D image, of the surface composition to finally reveal what the surface of Pluto actually looks like, and what it’s made of.

The Mysterious Whale

Some of the most recent high-resolution photos of Pluto were taken by the LORRI at the beginning of the month, and color was added from data taken by Ralph earlier in the mission. These photos reveal a mysterious dark band that runs along much of Pluto’s equator, informally dubbed “the whale.” The contrast of these dark patches with brighter surface areas elsewhere on Pluto has piqued the curiosity of New Horizons scientists and eager onlookers alike. On the western end of the dwarf planet, this dark swath breaks into regularly-spaced circles, each hundreds of miles across. These circles appear to be similar to other surface formations in the solar system, craters or volcanoes for example, but New Horizons scientists are refraining from identifying these features until more detailed images are available.

Perhaps the most exciting possibility is that New Horizons will discover new moons orbiting Pluto. Two of Pluto’s moons were only discovered in the last four years--Kerberos in 2011 and Styx in 2012. The complex orbital behaviors of Pluto’s moons also make scientists wonder if there are more celestial bodies influencing the system with their gravity.

“Every time we’ve looked with more capability, new moons keep popping up, so we’ve gotten used to that trend” said Stern. “During the flyby, we’re going to look and see things much, much fainter than Hubble can detect from way back at Earth.”

The Possibility of Water

It is even possible that Pluto, out at the freezing edge of the solar system, has subterranean oceans.

“One of the biggest discoveries in my field is that the solar system is littered with oceans,” explains Stern. “The Earth is an oddball; it wears its oceans on the outside. The others have their oceans on the inside, below an insulating layer of ice.”

If Pluto has active geysers like those found on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, it will be clear that there is a vast ocean lurking below its surface. But there are other more subtle ways that New Horizons can detect a subterranean ocean on Pluto.

For example, if the ocean is not far below the surface, there will only be a thin layer ice. If this is the case, the shape of Pluto itself would be deformed by a few hundred meters, enough for the instruments on New Horizons to detect.

Ralph is also be taking a close look at Pluto’s topography for hints of an underground water system.

“It’s very hard to make strong relief features in a soft surface,” explains Stern. “If Pluto has an ocean, all of its topography will look like pancakes, like things that have slumped under their own weight. We won’t find big mountains, and a lot of the craters will look like circles instead of bowls.”

If liquid is discovered, the Pluto system would suddenly become a principal target in the search for extraterrestrial life.

New Horizons scientists believe that Charon could have a subterranean ocean as well. If liquid is discovered on one or both of these celestial bodies, the Pluto system would suddenly become a principal target in the search for extraterrestrial life.

“The possibility of life would be a topic of active discussion if we had evidence for an ocean,” Stern says.

Back Online

New Horizons had a brief scare when a malfunction in the main computer caused the mission team to lose contact with the spacecraft temporarily. About 30 scientific observations were lost during this period. However, in a subsequent press conference, Stern said that when this data is weighted it only amounts to about one percent of the data New Horizons will collect--data taken at closest approach being the most valuable.

The New Horizons mission is completing the original reconnaissance of the solar system that began when the spacecraft Mariner 2 flew by Venus in 1962. But even this historic accomplishment is just another small step toward truly understanding the mysteries of the Universe.

Could we ever harvest resources from another planet? Is there alien life in our galaxy, or even in our very solar system? Can we even hope to travel beyond the planets orbiting the sun? We don’t know, and we may not in our lifetimes. But New Horizons is giving us our next set of clues.

Illustration Of New Horizons Arriving At Pluto

Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute (JHUAPL/SwRI)

The New Horizons spacecraft isn't scheduled for its closest flyby to Pluto until tomorrow morning, but it's already revealing intriguing new information. In a press conference this morning, NASA announced several new discoveries from the piano-sized spacecraft.

Ice Cap?

NASA

New Horizons photos from earlier this year indicated that Pluto might have ice caps, but it wasn't until today that scientists confirmed they were there.

For one, data from New Horizons confirmed that Pluto does indeed have a polar ice cap—something scientists only speculated about before. The ice cap is thought to be made from frozen methane and/or nitrogen.

Second, Pluto is a little bit bigger than expected. Until New Horizons showed up on the scene, we could only ever see Pluto as a tiny spec of light shining very far away, and because the dwarf planet has an atmosphere, measurements of its diameter have been a little fuzzy. Scientists previously estimated that its diameter was between 1430 and 1490 miles, the New Horizons team has now calculated that the dwarf planet is near the higher end of the spectrum, at about 1473 miles. The slight size increase means that Pluto's atmosphere must be shallower than expected, and it means that scientists have to refine their models of Plutos icy and rocky interior.

The third finding is somewhat mysterious. It turns out New Horizons started detecting ionized nitrogen streaming off of Pluto five days ago, from a distance of a bout 3.5 million miles out. That's twice as far as expected, and indicates that Pluto's thin atmosphere may be escaping the planet faster than expected.

Stay tuned for more updates about Pluto as New Horizons makes its historic approach tomorrow morning!

Signs Of Geology

NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

As Pluto pulled up to within 3.3 million miles of Pluto on July 9, the dwarf planet's surface features became clearer. “We’re close enough now that we’re just starting to see Pluto’s geology,” said New Horizons program scientist Curt Niebur in a statement. “It’s a unique transition region with a lot of dynamic processes interacting.” Of particular interest are the strange polygonal shape in the middle left-hand side, and the diagonal swipe of texture cutting from the lower left to middle right. The team hopes to learn more about these features as New Horizons moves in closer.

After a nine-and-a-half year, three-billion-mile journey, the New Horizons spacecraft is almost to Pluto and we are so freaking excited about it. The spacecraft will explore a completely new realm of our solar system, and you can watch history being made right here at 7:49 am EST on Tuesday, July 14.

If you've been living under a rock and haven't heard about the Pluto flyby, here's a quick primer on everything you need to know about the mission.

Although the countdown and all its excitement will happen in the early hours tomorrow, we won't have confirmation that the approach was successful until around 9pm tomorrow. That's because the spacecraft will be busy taking amazing pictures and data. The odds are very small (about 1 in 10,000) that dust or debris will mess up the spacecraft's approach, but even still, New Horizons principle investigator Alan Stern says he'll breathe a small sigh of relief when they get confirmation that the spacecraft is alright tomorrow evening.

The spacecraft has been flying on autopilot for most of its 9.5-year journey, so it should be all right, but the most dangerous part of the journey will be when New Horizons zips around near Pluto's smaller moons. This region, known as the Kuiper Belt, is filled with rocks and debris, which kick up a lot of dust. Conditions could become hazardous for the spacecraft.

Assuming all goes as planned, the spacecraft's closest approach will bring it 7,800 miles away from Pluto. While it's there, it will measure the surface geology and composition of Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. “We'll have stereo maps so we can see how high the mountains are and how low the valleys are,” New Horizons' Cathy Olkin said in a press conference.

After flying by Pluto and Charon, the spacecraft will turn back and watch the sun rise and set behind Pluto and Charon. Bucolic as that may seem, the purpose is scientific: As the sun shines through Pluto's atmosphere, it will highlight any clouds or rings that may hover nearby, and also tell scientists what's in inside the tiny planet's atmosphere. Plus, it will reveal whether Charon has an atmosphere with Pluto, and if so, whether it steals that atmosphere from Pluto or generates its own.

There's so much to be excited about, and the only downside is that it's going to take a while for it to get back to Earth. The first information from the flyby will arrive Wednesday afternoon. The spacecraft will hoard everything else in its onboard memory storage, beaming it back bit by bit over the next 16 months. We can hardly wait.

Solar Impulse Landing In Hawaii

Solar Impulse | Revillard | Rezo.ch

Solar Impulse 2, a plane powered entirely by the sun, recently broke records when it landed in Hawaii on July 3, completing a stunning five day flight over the Pacific Ocean from Japan. But it looks like the plane is going to have to wait before it continues on it's next record-breaking mission, to circumnavigate the globe.

In preparing for the next leg of the trip, from Hawaii to Phoenix, Arizona, the team discovered that parts of the plane's huge batteries had suffered "irreversible" damage. The batteries store solar energy, and keep the plane aloft at night. The first sign of trouble came on the first day of the trans-pacific crossing, when the ground team noticed that the batteries were overheating. The problem was extra insulation around the battery compartment, which kept heat in. With nowhere to stop for repairs over the ocean, they had to keep an eye on the problem until the plane landed.

The team won't be able to fly until at least August, as they wait for repairs and replacement parts. The hope is to get underway sooner rather than later. The days in the Northern Hemisphere are getting shorter, and for a solar-powered plane, that means they only have a small window to make it back to their starting point in Abu Dhabi, before the days get too short to generate the amount of power needed to keep the plane flying both during the day and overnight.

The plane has already endured weeks of delays due to bad weather and technical difficulties.

[insert caption here]

Radev et al, 2015, arxiv

One of the cartoons used in the study

Artificial intelligence can do a lot of things, like recognizing your face or identifying good art. But it still can’t tell a joke. And though humor has a reputation for being subjective and changing over time, researchers have long suspected that there might be a few basic elements of humor. Researchers from the University of Michigan, Columbia University, Yahoo! Labs and the New Yorker have teamed up, channeling the power of big data to help identify some of those building blocks of humor. The study was published in the online journal arxiv.

Every week, the New Yorker runs a caption contest in the back of the magazine. 5,000 people enter submissions, then readers vote on which of the top three is the best fit for the cartoon. That has created an enormous database of captions—more than two million captions for more than 400 cartoons in the past decade.

The researchers wanted to use this data to create an algorithm that can distinguish the funny and unfunny captions. The researchers picked 50 cartoons and the 300,000 captions that corresponded to them and used a program to analyze and rank the captions linguistically, looking at whether the captions were about people or dealt with positive or negative emotions. They also created a different ranking using network theory, which connected the topics mentioned in each. Then they got real people to weigh in on the humor, asking seven users on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to rank which of two caption options is funnier.

They found a few trends when they compared all the rankings to one another. “We found that the methods that consistently select funnier captions are negative sentiment, human-centeredness, and lexical centrality,” they write.

Those conclusions aren’t that surprising, given the New Yorker’s readership, they note. But it’s hard to know what these conclusions mean for people trying to develop a funny robot. As MIT Tech Review writes:

It’s easy to imagine that one goal from this kind of work would be to create a machine capable of automatically choosing the best caption from thousands entered into the New Yorker competition each week. But the teams seem as far as ever from achieving this. Did any of these automatic methods reliably pick the caption chosen by readers? Radev and co. do not say, so presumably not.

This kind of work in itself won’t help a functional joke-writing machine. But the team is also releasing the cartoon data they used to the public. So, as MIT Tech Review notes, “if there’s anybody out there who thinks they can do better, they’re welcome to try.”

Now you can turn any video into a computerized hallucinogenic fever dream with DeepDream Animator.

Self-proclaimed “code magician and narrative engineer,” Samim Winiger, just released the latest tool in the DeepDream arsenal: a video generator. The animation tool extracts frames from videos, processes them with Google’s DeepDream image code, and turns it into a new video file. Winiger worked with vocalist Calista Kazuko under the name Calista and The Crashroots, and generated a music video with the code. The video, entitled "DeepDream," is a vibrant psychedelic fantasy land of swirling clouds, dog faces, and floating eyes.

DeepDream is the name of the code that Google published last month for developers to play around with. In order to process and categorize images online, Google Images uses artificial neural networks (ANNs) to look for patterns. Google teaches the program how to do this by showing it tons of pictures of an object so that it knows what that object looks like. For example, after looking at thousands of pictures of a dumbbell, the program would understand a dumbbell to be a metallic cylinder with two large spheres at both ends. However, as we found out last month, when the program is used to “dream up” these images of its own, it can get things very wrong. What it creates are uncanny scenes of long-legged slug-monsters, wobbly towers, and flying limbs that look like a Salvador Dalí painting on steroids.

Last week hundreds of people morphed images of their own using Zain Shah’s implementation of the DeepDream image generator. A DeepDream twitter bot also makes it easy to spend hours sifting through a feed of these nightmarish images.

Winiger’s video generator is a natural and exciting evolution of the DeepDream code. He asks for those that use the program to include the parameters they use in the description of their YouTube videos to help other DeepDream researchers.

Usually the northern portion of North America is thought of as a cold, rainy, snowy tundra of a place. but lately, thing s up north have been getting uncomfortably hot. Right now, firefighters in Alaska, Washington, and Canada are fighting huge wildfires raging across the continent.

So far, over 11 million acres have burned in Canada and Alaska, and those numbers are still going up. As Chris Mooney notes at the Washington Post that's three times larger than Connecticut.

Thousands of people were evacuated from their homes in Saskatchewan, and smoke from the fires spread south into the United States, where it could be seen across the country from Colorado to Boston, producing some of those beautiful sunsets you might have noticed last week. The plumes of smoke from the fires are easily visible from space.

The Canadian province of British Columbia has already spent over 100 million Canadian dollars ($78 million US) fighting the fires, and it's only July. International teams of firefighters are coming into the country to help battle the blaze.

There are plenty of reasons that this year's fire season is burning so brightly. Temperatures have been unusually high in some areas, and in the Western area of the continent, the ongoing drought certainly isn't helping matters.

In Washington, so little rain has fallen, that even a rainforest is on fire. The fires haven't broken any records yet. The worst year for wildfires in Alaska remains 2004 but 2015 is catching up fast.

Tsunami Debris

US Forest Service Alaska/Flickr

Debris from the 2011 tsunami seen on the Alaskan coastline in 2013.

When a massive tsunami hit Japan in 2011, the wall of water killed nearly 16,000 people and in one horrendous instant, washed out to sea schools, businesses, even whole neighborhoods. Some of the flotsam and jetsam of people's lives were buoyant, from soccer balls to giant docks, and washed up on the West Coast of the United States starting in 2012, a year after the tsunami hit.

Now, Alaska is trying to get rid of all the tsunami debris that litters their shoreline. The state has been collecting all the trash for years, but hasn't had a place to put it. Starting this week, workers will begin loading a a barge the size of a football field with trash bags filled with the remnants of the tsunami.

Getting those trash bags filled has been an ordeal, as the Associated Press reports:

Crews working at sites like Kayak and Montague islands in Prince William Sound, for example, get there by boat and sleep onboard. The need to keep moving down the shoreline as cleanup progresses, combined with terrain littered with boulders and logs, makes it tough to set up a camp, Pallister said. There's also the issue of bears.

According to the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation 70 percent of the material from Japan sank after it was swept out to sea, but over a ton kept floating east, eventually reaching North America.

Once the barge is full, the trash will be sent south, taking the material to Seattle for recycling. What can't be recycled will then head to Oregon for disposal in a landfill. The $1.3 million project is funded in part by Japan, which is still struggling with cleanup in that country.

Next month, a robot will attempt to assist the cleanup efforts at the Fukushima nuclear plant, which was destroyed in the tsunami.

NASA

In the June 1930 issue of Popular Science, we wrote about what was the most important finding in astronomy in nearly a hundred years: “a frigid little world, bathed in the dim light of perpetual dusk.” This frozen planet at the edge of our solar system would later be known as Pluto, which will finally get its close-up when the New Horizons spacecraft flies by it on Tuesday, July 14.

But well before New Horizons was even the glimmer of an idea, a 19-year-old “farm boy” from Kansas named Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto on February 19, 1930. Tombaugh was a new hire at the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona. One of his jobs was to sit at a “blink microscope” and examine thousands of fourteen-by-seventeen-inch photographic plates of the sky. The instrument overlays two images taken of the same portion of the sky so that they can be flipped back and forth to see what objects are fixed, such as stars, and what objects are moving, such as comets or planets. Although Tombaugh was the first to spot the planet as a flash of light on a slide, it was Percival Lowell, founder of the observatory, who predicted its existence 15 years prior.

Clyde Tombaugh

Wikimedia Commons

Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of the dwarf planet Pluto.

When astronomers found that Uranus didn’t follow an 84-year orbit around the sun as they had predicted, as if it was “pulled by some invisible hand,” they hypothesized that the “invisible hand” must be the gravitational pull of another planet. That planet was later discovered to be Neptune. However, the discovery of Neptune couldn’t account for all of Uranus’ anomalies. In 1902, Lowell declared that there must be another planet beyond Neptune, and in 1915 he published his research, which stated that the planet causing Uranus’ irregularities must be located in one of two positions in the sky.

With the invention of the most powerful photographic telescope of its time in 1929, and a little luck from a “farm boy,” the “Lowell planet” was finally found 14 years after Lowell’s death. The planet’s brightness is so faint that it is the equivalent of trying to see a candle’s light at a distance of 430 miles. With billions of stars in the sky that are brighter than the little dwarf planet, it’s easy to see why it had been so difficult to spot prior to Lowell’s calculations.

Percival Lowell

Wikimedia Commons

Percival Lowell, founder of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

After the announcement was made all of the earth’s observatories turned their telescopes to where the potential new planet was located in the constellation Gemini. The Brera Observatory in Milan, Italy took two of the best photographs. Astronomers found that because of the planet’s faintness it must be a solid, rather than a gaseous planet. Also, because of its distance from the sun its atmosphere could only be made out of hydrogen and helium gasses because all other gasses would liquefy and freeze.

Although astronomers were ecstatic, the discovery upset dictionary-makers and book publishers who had felt safe in listing the names of the first eight planets as the definitive amount of planets in the solar system.

The next order of business was to give it a name.

“One suggestion was to name the new planet after its prophet, Dr. Lowell. But astronomers believe, from past experience, that only the names of mythological deities, such as those that other planets bear, will stick,"Popular Science wrote at the time. "Some suggestions so far recorded are Atlas, Prometheus, and Pluto."

And today, as New Horizons whizzes past Pluto carrying the ashes of the dwarf planet’s discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, we prepare to get our closest view yet.