A manmade spacecraft will fly by Pluto for the first time ever on July 14. As it speeds through the Pluto system at 35,000 miles per hour, the New Horizons spacecraft will send back the first closeups of the former planet and its moons. The spacecraft will only be in the Pluto system for 12 days, but it will gather a wealth of information and, over the course of the next 16 months, send back imagery that will give us a much clearer view of this mysterious icy world. We'll update this gallery with the incredible images as they come in.

Now: Smart Watch

Apple II Watch

Jon Brown

The Apple II Watch has three hours of battery life

When the Apple Watch was announced, designer DJ Harrigan didn’t line up to buy one. Instead, he built his own: a wearable version of the 1977 Apple II computer. “I wanted to go back as far as possible in Apple history,” says Harrigan, “but the Apple II is more iconic than the original.”

The 3D-printed watch, less than 3 inches in length, resembles the original full-size machine. (It even includes miniature, nonfunctional floppy disks.) But it’s much more powerful. A Teensy 3.1 ARM processor runs at 72 megahertz and has 64 kilobytes of random-access memory (RAM). The screen is a 1.8-inch liquid-crystal display—inconceivable in the late ’70s. The user interface, though, is simple: a knob that winds through several parody apps, including a clock that displays an arbitrary time, a fitness tracker with progress bars that change randomly, and a weather app—a green, low-resolution picture of Earth.

Harrigan’s technological tribute earned the approval of the Internet—and Apple II’s creator, Steve Wozniak. As he told Harrigan, “I would buy this over the Apple Watch and would wear it too!”

Then: Desktop Computer

Apple II Computer

Wikimedia Commons

In the February 1978 issue of Popular Science, William J. Hawkins lauded the Apple II’s versatility, recommending it for both beginners and experts. A 1-megahertz processor with up to 48 kilobytes of RAM allowed the computer to run the BASIC programming language, as well as machine code. Users could write their own routines, Hawkins said, or use “prepackaged cassette programs, which include everything from games to check balancing.”

This article originally appeared in the July 2015 issue of Popular Science.

A reverse osmosis filtration unit filters out drugs, viruses, and more.

SVAWPC

The people from the San Francisco utility suggested I talk to Pam John, a civil engineer and manager at the Silicon Valley Advanced Water Purification Center. Last year, the SVAWPC launched a pilot wastewater recycling facility—the first and largest of its kind in Northern California. The project wasn’t created in response to the drought—it’s part of a much larger long-term goal to conserve water in the region. Still, it’s certainly helpful technology during a drought. So far, the South Bay Water Recycling Center has used 15,000 acre-feet of the recycled water from the facility for non-potable uses, such as large landscape irrigation and industrial cooling. That’s about 4.9 billion gallons of water.

So where does the wastewater come from? “We make no bones about it. Wastewater is water that comes from homes—your bathrooms, your toilet, your kitchen—and businesses along sewer lines. It all goes into the common sewer pipe,” John says. “That sewer water goes to the regional wastewater facility were it undergoes screening, primary treatment, secondary treatment, nitrification. And then we take the treated wastewater and purify it.”

Before it’s purified, that wastewater may be teeming with pathogenic protozoa, such as giardia and cryptosporidium; a host of bacteria and viruses; and pharmaceuticals, from cholesterol drugs to hormones. Unsurprisingly, the new facility has the latest technology to filter out all these nasties (we’re talking Silicon Valley, after all). “All water is recycled,” says John. “The facility is doing what nature does, but faster.”

The process has three main steps. First, the water goes through a microfiltration system, which has a membrane with tiny holes in it that are around 0.1 microns across to strain out bacteria, protozoa, and large viruses. Next, a reverse osmosis membrane, which has a pore size of just 0.001 microns to filter out virtually all other viruses, dissolved salts, pharmaceuticals, endocrine disrupting chemicals, and other contaminants. The, the water is treated with UV light, which deactivates DNA in any remaining organism that has managed to break through the membrane (this is unlikely; the UV light is a redundant function, just in case).

Although no one in Northern California is drinking the treated water quite yet, that’s the eventual goal. According to John, if the California drought persists, the facility is working on an expedited project to add the recycled water to potable sources within the next three to five years. (Water from this type of treatment plant isn’t directly injected into, say, your kitchen sink; instead, it’s added to the groundwater, which eventually is used for drinking water, among other things.)

But some lucky people have gotten a taste already. In 2014 at the groundbreaking ceremony for the facility, local dignitaries took a sip.

Brown is the New Green. Dignitaries taste recycled wastewater at the grand opening of the facility in 2014. From left to right – Santa Clara Valley Water District Directors Richard Santos and Barbara Keegan, County Supervisor Mike Wasserman, a little behind/second row- Santa Clara Mayor Jamie Matthews, in front of the lectern – District CEO Beau Goldie, SCVWD Director Linda LeZotte, and San Jose City Councilman Pierluigi Oliviero.

SVAWPC

Color Images of Pluto and Charon

NASA

This photo was captured at 3:38 a.m. EDT on July 13.

Scientists have tie-dyed Pluto and Charon, proving that the New Horizons flyby really is a scientific Woodstock. In the false color images above, the colors are stretched to reveal Pluto and its moon's geology, molecular composition, and how radiation has shaped the surfaces. NASA released the photo this afternoon, though it was taken at 3:38 a.m. EDT on July 13.

The colors in this photo aren't what Pluto and Charon actually look like, but are exaggerated so scientists can tell apart the chemical makeup and features. They show that Pluto's beloved “heart” is actually composed of two distinct patches. The western lobe of the heart is shows up peach, in contrast to its bluish eastern half. The colors hint that the two halves are made of different stuff.

On Charon, the source of the moon's surprisingly dark pole is revealed. "We've been looking at this dark polar spot for a while, and sure enough it is quite red," said New Horizons astronomer Will Grundy during a press conference. Grundy's theory is that the source of Charon's red head is Pluto. The moon orbits in close proximity to Pluto, which is red in color, and it may be that some of the planet's escaping atmosphere sticks to Charon.

The team is looking forward to getting data back from the spacecraft's spectroscopic instruments, which can shed light on which materials are causing these interesting color shifts.

“We knew that there were a lot of different colors on Pluto, but we never imagined anything like this,” said deputy project scientist Cathy Olkin.

New Horizons cruised past the dwarf planet at 30,800 miles per hour at 7:49 a.m. EDT. Until about 9 p.m. EDT, the spacecraft isn't communicating with Earth as it takes as much data and as many images as possible

We all know what it feels like to be sick. Sometimes it's a dragging, tired feeling when you can't get anything done; or a loss of appetite; or even the inability to get out of bed. So what happens to other animals when they get sick? Specifically, what about the bees?

That's what Lori Lach and her colleagues wanted to find out. There have been plenty of studies and even Federal task forces about what's killing bees, but not quite as much research into what's making bees sick. So Lach and her team attached tiny radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to 960 bees, half of which were infected with a non-lethal gut parasite called Nosema apis.

“We just had to hold them in our hands and hope the glue dried quickly," Lach said. "It was actually quite a process - they had to be individually painted, then individually fed, then the tag glued on. Then individually scanned so we knew which tag was on what color and treatment bee and which hive it was going into. It all had to happen within about eight hours of emergence because as the day goes on they start learning how to fly and they get better at stinging.”

The results are published in the Journal of Invertebrate Paleontology. They found that the bees infected with the parasite were 4.3 times more likely than healthy bees to not carry any pollen from flowers. And just like a person with a head cold, the infected bees had trouble getting to work (pollinating flowers) tended to go home early, and weren't nearly as productive as their healthy colleagues. They also died earlier.

Other efforts to promote healthy bee populations have focused on creating habitat and eliminating lethal threats like pesticides, but this research suggests that in order to help these pollinators stay productive, we might need to look into keeping them healthy, not just alive.

Pluto And Charon

NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

New Horizons shot this portrait of Pluto and Charon on July 11, just a few days ahead of its closest approach. For some reason, it kind of reminds us of the American Gothic painting of the farmer and his wife.

When the New Horizons spacecraft launched in 2006, scientists had no idea what it would find when it arrived at Pluto nine years later. “We might have seen a cloud-enshrouded nitrogen haze that we'd zip by and say, 'Well, that was fun,'” says John Grunsfeld of NASA's Science Mission Directorate. “Or we might have seen something that looks like an ancient monolithic crater-laden body.”

Now we've finally seen the face of Pluto, and just as expected, it is full of surprises. Here's what we've learned so far.

Pluto Has Had A Change Of Heart

Pluto as seen just before the New Horizons flyby

NASA

The bright heart-shaped patch of frost visible in the latest images of Pluto hasn't always looked that way. Using ground-based telescopes, “we have been monitoring what we now know as the heart for 60 years,” says New Horizons planetary scientist Bonnie Buratti, “and it does look like that heart thing has been eroding away over time.” Most of the erosion seems to have occurred near the dark “whale” shape, which makes sense since darker materials absorb more sunlight.

But don't worry, Pluto's heart isn't going anywhere anytime soon. If we were to return to Pluto in 100 years, the heart would be smaller, but Buratti says “it's really hard in that cold to sublimate a patch of frost that big.”

It's Active And Complex

Pluto's surface seems to be much younger than Charon's gray facade, New Horizons leader Alan Stern said in a press conference today. Its relative lack of impact craters suggest the dwarf planet's surface is renewing, either by geological or atmospheric activity, such as erosion.

Pluto's highly reflective “heart” is also a good sign, says Buratti. “Bright is good because it means the planet is active.” Although we still don't know whether it has geologic activity such as volcanoes or tectonic, its frost does seem to sublimate and recondense in new ways when the seasons change.

Bunratti noted that it is also quite surprising that Pluto is home to very bright surfaces, like the “heart”, but also very dark surfaces such as the “whale”, which only reflects 10 percent of the light that hits it. Such contrast-y surfaces are rare in our solar system. “It really does seem to be complex compared to what we've seen before,” says deputy project scientist Cathy Olkin.

Pluto Might Not Be Triton's “Sister” After All

Pluto and Triton, Neptune's largest moon, have been considered siblings or cousins--both are small worlds with thin, nitrogen-based atmospheres and icy surfaces.

“We thought Pluto would be a kinder, gentler version of Triton,” says planetary scientist Bill McKinnon. “It's completely the opposite. Pluto is more like Triton on steroids.”

New Horizons Measured Pluto's Waistline, And That Of Its Moons

For the first time, scientists have a precise estimate for Pluto's diameter. It turns out it's slightly bigger than expected, so the former planet can keep its title of “King of the Kuiper Belt”. The size data also helped to reveal that Pluto's atmosphere is shallower than scientists expected.

In a press conference this afternoon, planetary scientist John Spencer announced that his team has measured the diameters of two of Pluto's tiny moons, Nix and Hydra, as well.

“We thought Pluto would be a kinder, gentler version of Triton. It's completely the opposite."

“Just last weekend, we first started to see Nix and Hydra as a little bit more than points of light,” says Spencer. “Well, they were still points of light, but they were fat points of light, and that meant that we could start to determine their sizes. We really hadn't any idea before as to how big they were. But it turns out they're 20 or 30 miles across, which is kind of in the range of what we expected, but we're not just guessing anymore, so that's a big step forward.”

Pluto's Heart Is In Pieces, And Charon's Pole Is Red

New, false-color images provide hints as to the chemical makeup of Pluto and Charon's surface. The images suggest that Pluto's heart is composed of two different halves of different composition, and that Charon is crowned in red deposits that may come from Pluto's escaping atmosphere.

The Best Is Yet To Come

Since it will take New Horizons 16 months to beam back all the data it's collecting during today's flyby, you can rest assured that this is just the tip of the (methane) iceberg.

Getting hot in here...

Ray Tsang/FlickrCC by SA 2.0

These kinds of temperatures could be good for a new ceramic developed by the University of Tokyo.

Even after night falls, a slab of concrete or asphalt might still feel warm to the touch. The surface has stored up heat after a long day of sitting out in the sun, and is slowly letting it go. It's something that happens naturally all over the world, but what if there were a way to control the process?

In a study published recently in Nature Communications scientists at the University of Tokyo announced that they had created a material that could store up heat and then release it on command, with just a little bit of pressure applied.

The material is a ceramic, but not the kind you'd use in pottery class. It's called stripe-type-lambda-trititanium-pentoxide and is made of titanium and oxygen. This new ceramic can store up heat energy over the course of a day, and then release it when needed.

Ceramic Diagram

Shin-ichi Ohkoshi

The new ceramic can release stored heat with the application of pressure. It can also use light or an electrical current to store energy that can be released as heat.

One of the big problems with machines, electricity generation, and basically anything with moving parts is that a lot of energy is released as heat, dissipating into the environment with no way to capture what was lost. Think of how a car engine heats up while in use, or a conventional lightbulb. When those items work, they create heat, which is basically wasted energy. With a ceramic that can absorb heat and then release it on command, that energy has the potential to be used instead of wasted.

The team hopes that it could help reduce industrial heat waste, become an integral part of renewable energy technologies, like solar panels, and eventually be used in electronics and computers. but don't expect to see it on shelves anytime soon.

Artist's Concept Of A Kuiper Belt Object

NASA

Nine years ago, a piano-sized spacecraft left the cradle of Earth to visit a strange world on the edge of the solar system. It traveled past the orbits of the familiar rocky planets and swooped through the region of the gas giants. After getting a speed boost from Jupiter, it didn't encounter another object for years. It persevered through the cold, dark space until reaching the twilight world of Pluto. There it made history on July 14th, becoming the first spacecraft to meet Pluto and encounter an ice dwarf. It took pictures and measurements that will serve mankind for years to come... And its mission may not be over yet.

What's next for New Horizons? In the near term, it's going to take about 16 months for the spacecraft to beam back all the data it has collected around Pluto and its moons over the past few days. It takes that long because the spacecraft can only send information at about 2,000 bits per second, which makes dial-up AOL seem zippy by comparison. Scientists expect the mission's major discoveries to occur in late 2015 and early 2016.

Meanwhile, the plucky spacecraft will continue on its trajectory, traveling faster than 30,000 miles per hour based on sheer momentum—no fuel required. "Nothing that we can do is going to stop New Horizons from cruising out further into the outer solar system," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA Science Mission Directorate, during a press conference this afternoon. And the New Horizons team thinks they can put that momentum to good use. Since this is mankind's first foray into the Kuiper Belt—a rocky, debris-strewn ring around the solar system—why not spend a little more time looking around?

The Kuiper Belt

NASA

With the help of the Hubble Space Telescope, the New Horizons team has already identified three potential targets. These Kuiper Belt Objects, or KBOs, range in size from 12 to 34 miles wide. The spacecraft is healthy and it has plenty of power and fuel (hydrazine, which is used to reorient the spacecraft), says Alan Stern.

By next year the team will submit a proposal to get their mission (and its funding) extended. If it gets approved, we could lay eyes on another KBO by 2019.

Why do KBOs matter? Well for one, these icy rocks provide a sort of fossil record for the solar system. Untouched and heavily refrigerated, they may contain clues about what happened during the birth of our solar system.

And speaking of births, KBOs can also tell us about how baby planets grow into adult planets like our own Earth. At one point, Earth, Mars, and all the other planets in the solar system were Pluto's size. And before that, they were the size of KBOs.

“Think of a comet as a planetary embryo, a small KBO as a baby, Pluto is an adolescent, and Earth is the adult... and Jupiter as an NBA player,” says Stern, half-joking. “We want to visit examples of all the size stages in order to understand the planet formation process.”

"New Horizons is opening up a new realm of exploration, not only for Pluto and Pluto's moons, but where it goes afterwards.”--John Grunsfeld

NASA may never have another opportunity like this again, so the odds are pretty good for getting the mission extended. Grunsfeld says he is "pretty confident" the mission will be extended.

After it presumably visits a KBO, the New Horizons team may try for a second extended mission towards interstellar space. Regardless of NASA funding, the spacecraft's trajectory will carry it in the flight paths of Pioneer and Voyager, escaping the Sun's gravity to enter the space between the stars, though we'll likely lose communication with it before then, when the spacecraft's radioisotope thermoelectric generator runs out of power.

Still, scientists think the spacecraft has enough power to communicate for a few decades still, and there's a lot we can learn before it runs out of juice. New Horizons space physicist Matt Hill says the spacecraft is heading in a similar direction to Voyager 2. He says he'd like to see what New Horizons can measure at the termination shock--the mysterious boundary where the sun's charged particles bump into interstellar space. "It would be really nice if, 20 years from now, we can make another measurement of the termination shock with another instrument ... and also in a different place."

A wolf rests in an image captured at the Grizzly and Wolf Discovery Center at West Yellowstone, Montana

Ellie Attebery/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

Spending hours watching whales, wolves, and elephants in their natural habitats presents wildlife biologists with mountains of data that would quickly overwhelm most animal lovers. But when the time comes to catalog it all, renowned marine ecologist Carl Safina reminds us that the work is far from tedious. In his new book, Beyond Words, he calls it “beautiful, urgent, an almost holy quest for deeper intimacy” with the natural world. In effect, he’s describing his own book, which brings readers on a critical journey towards reevaluating their relationships with the natural world.

Safina’s quest challenges scientific convention. Classical behaviorists maintain that we cannot know what another species is thinking, mainly because those animals can’t talk back to us. “There’s a large dollop of truth here,” Safina admits, but this book’s combination of dramatic animal narratives (based on decades of field work) and ground-breaking brain research makes a compelling case for considering animals as individuals, with distinct identities and behaviors which are sometimes very comparable to our own.

We begin in East Africa, hunkered down amidst elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. Decades of human pressure have left visible and mental scars on these animals: they become anxious when rangers switch off their cars because “voices without an engine are frightening to them now…poachers don’t have engines.” Observation in this book is mutual. Elephants identify us just as we identify them, each distinguishing the other according to trademark behaviors and distinct personalities.

Elephant’s personalities are inevitably shaped by the enduring ivory trade, which was banned in 1990 until stockpiled ivory became legal in 1999. Now poachers have the perfect cover to continue a decades-old slaughter, at the expense of one elephant every 15 minutes. We might feel both outraged and exhausted by yet another story of carnage chronicled in numbers, dollars and cents, but Safina avoids this trap by giving urgency to his mission. Understanding animals, he writes, is “not a boutique endeavor. Failure will speed their end and the bankrupting of our world.”

On the other hand, proper treatment of animals—treating them “as they deserve”—enriches how we understand our own humanity. In Yellowstone National Park we meet the legendary wolf “21,” leader of one of the Park’s most successful wolf packs since the species was reintroduced in 1995. During his lifetime, 21 distinguished himself as a peaceful warrior who never lost a fight and also never killed his rivals. Safina recounts one of his conversations with wolf expert Rick McIntyre:

“If ever there was a perfect wolf, it was Twenty-One,” says Rick, using the wolf’s research-collar number as his name. “He was like a fictional character. “Twice, I saw Twenty-One take on six attacking wolves from a rival pack — and rout them all,” Rick recalls. “I’d think, ‘A wolf can’t do what I am watching this wolf do.’ Watching him felt like seeing Bruce Lee fighting.”

Mercy, compassion, social status and bravery no longer seem the exclusive province of human beings. What makes a great person can make a great wolf as well.

Then “why do human egos seem so threatened by the thought that other animals think and feel?” Safina asks. Our need to feel special is his harshest critique of how we relate to the world around us, and, he suggests, is the basis for some of our most out-of-touch theories about animal cognition.

Among these is his least favorite, “theory of mind,” the distinctly human ability to intuit another being’s thoughts and emotions based on their behavior. Reading others’ intentions appears critical to survival for all the animals discussed in Beyond Words, but ultimately we are left with “humans are better at reading humans. Dolphins are better at reading dolphins,” and so on. It’s an unsatisfying conclusion, and Safina knows it. “We’re not done,” he repeats throughout the book, giving a nod to the simultaneous frustration and excitement that comes with being on the frontier of animal communication research.

Other scientific discussions are more resolved. Safina compellingly describes the evolutionary links in our brain chemistry to that of dolphins and apes. The difference is just in the details, he says, like our physical exteriors and our emphases on different senses. He also debunks the famous mirror test, in which scientists have historically tested animals’ self-awareness by seeing whether they can recognize their reflections in a mirror. The explanation is simple: with little precedent for encountering mirrors in the wild, most animals simply don’t understand reflection. Boom.

The book convincingly argues that we cannot apply human measures of intelligence and cognition to other beings. Sitting in a tiny boat watching killer whales socialize, Safina and veteran whale researcher Ken Balcomb swap mind-bending stories of whales rescuing lost boats at sea, returning drowning dogs to their owners, and even detecting human death before we do. More than reflecting human nature, these stories leave us “shaken out of certainty,” in our ability to quantify what we observe.

Safina is right there with us, feeling unsteady but also grateful for the sense of wonder and mystery these animals introduce to the world we think we know. Let us share in that sense of wonder. We owe it to ourselves, and to those with whom we share the earth.

Spermatozoon

Department of Palaeobiology, Swedish Museum of Natural History

A 50 million year old spermatozoon (sperm cell) found in Antarctica.

We all know about how mosquitos trapped in amber:

Can lead to dinosaur biker gangs:

(Or, at the very least, awesome memes) But what about worm sperm trapped in a cocoon? It probably won't lead to insane theme parks with a death wish, but it could change our understanding of ancient microbes.

In a paper published today in Biology Letters, Benjamin Bomfleur and his colleagues announced the discovery of 50 million year old sperm cells found in a cocoon in Antarctica. This is the oldest animal sperm ever discovered, but what's really exciting is where it was found: in a tiny cocoon in Antarctica.

These cocoons aren't like cocoons used by butterflies to make their lovely transformation from lowly caterpillar to gorgeous winged creature. Instead these cocoons are integral to the mating process of many different species of worm and leech. After mating, the worms secrete a sticky gel like cocoon that contains the egg and sperm. Over time, it hardens, trapping the cells inside.

Leech Diagram

Benjamin Bomfleur

In that regard, the cocoons act just like amber, trapping tiny bugs inside. But unlike amber, which captures actual bugs, these cocoons capture tiny microorganisms, which almost never get preserved in the fossil record. Unlike dinosaur bones, organisms like bacteria, protozoa, and even worms, tend not to preserve well. Their soft bodies usually decay quickly — too quickly for them to make any kind of impression on the dirt and sediments surrounding them. That's what makes this research so exciting. By taking a closer look at the cocoons, researchers can get a better idea of what kinds of microorganisms were around in the past.

Bomfleur told Popular Science in an e-mail that the cocoons "literally occur from pole to pole, with some having been described from the Svalbard Archipelago in the Arctic and others having been described from Antarctica. Furthermore, they occur in sedimentary deposits of all ages younger than Triassic." The fact that the cocoons are so common make them perfect for learning more about the tiny creatures that came before, and could allow paleontologists to eventually develop a worldwide picture of what kinds of microbes were present in different areas over time.

Previous research into the topic found a nematode and a protozoa trapped in cocoons, and the future is wide open. The cocoons could contain bacteria, fungi, protists, amoebas, or micro-worms. "Personally, I would hope for a tardigrade!" Bomfleur said.

New Horizons has phoned home. After a ten year, 3 billion mile journey, the spacecraft flew by Pluto this morning and has lived to tell the tale. At approximately 9pm, the New Horizons mission operations in Maryland locked on to the spacecraft's signal, sent across billions of miles at the speed of light. All systems reported nominal, which is NASA lingo for "A-okay."

"We have a healthy spacecraft, and we're outbound for Pluto," said Alice Bowman, the mission operations manager.

Because of the sheer distance to Pluto and the spacecraft's need to focus on data collection during its short trip through the Pluto system, all of its movements were pre-programmed so that it could function on autopilot during the flyby. Although the team calculated at 2 in 10,000 chance that the spacecraft wouldn't survive the encounter, Alan Stern, the mission leader, is surely breathing a sigh of relief right now.

Bowman noted that the spacecraft's data recorders are storing exactly as much data as expected, indicating that it took all the measurements as planned. The spacecraft has now passed Pluto and is turning around to look at the former planet as it is framed against the sun. The sun's interaction with Pluto's atmosphere can tell the instruments what's inside it. Tomorrow it should return some pretty amazing pictures of Pluto--including one 10 times higher in resolution than the fantastic imagery we've seen so far.

The Pluto flyby means the United States has now sent a spacecraft to every major world in the solar system. Earlier in the day, John Grunsfeld from NASA's Science Mission Directorate compared this achievement to the European explorers who mapped the globe. "Five hundred years from now ... astronomers will look back at this time and say that this was the classical age of solar system exploration."

Updated July 14 at 10:13 pm to include new information from a NASA press conference.

Solar Impulse Landing In Hawaii

Solar Impulse | Revillard | Rezo.ch

The battery problems on Solar Impulse 2 aren't going away anytime soon. The batteries, damaged by overheating, won't be repaired in time for the Solar Impulse team to continue on its round-the-world mission back to Abu Dhabi, where they took to the skies in April.

Even if the team could get the batteries repaired in a few weeks, their window for flying the last few legs of their journey is swiftly closing. As summer wanes and the days get shorter, there is less sunlight available to power the plane, especially on multi-day flights when the power gathered during the day is needed to power the plane at night. The mission will repair the batteries, and remain in their last port of call, Hawaii, before trying again next spring.

You can watch pilot André Borschberg's statement on the delay here:

Next year, the team will fly from Hawaii to Phoenix, then across the US, eventually making another five day journey over the Atlantic to get from North America to either Europe or Northern Africa. The team already broke records after making a five-day, five-night solo flight across the Pacific earlier this month.

Surgical complications depend more on the surgeon than the hospital where the procedure was performed.

CMSRC via Wikimedia Commons

In 2012, 71-year-old LaVerne Stiles had spinal fusion surgery to repair a small fracture caused by a car accident a few weeks before. When she chose between the three surgeons at her nearby hospital in central Florida, she assumed that which surgeon she picked wouldn’t make much of a difference—Citrus Memorial Hospital had a good reputation, after all. Unbeknownst to her, the one she picked had one of the highest rates of complications in the country, while the other two had much lower rates. Unfortunately Stiles was one of a number of people to suffer from these complications, and she died shortly after her operation from extensive internal bleeding.

Yesterday, the nonprofit investigative newsroom ProPublica published Stiles’ story, along with an extensive database of surgeons practicing in the U.S. and how often complications—like internal bleeding or infection—arise from their procedures. ProPublica calls it their Surgeon Scorecard, but it’s really a database searchable by location, hospital, type of procedure, and even individual surgeon.

This investigation, like others before it that ProPublica has conducted, addresses a much-needed gap in how the government and hospitals monitor our healthcare practitioners. Patients assume that the difference between a successful and botched procedure can come down to choosing the right hospital. But ProPublica reporters found that not to be the case; when they looked through five years’ worth of Medicare data for each of the 17,000 surgeons practicing in the United States, they found that the number of complication rates individual surgeons varied much more highly than those of hospitals.

Complications can arise for many different reasons—sometimes surgeons can just have bad luck—but often arise, in Stiles’ case, from sloppy surgeons. ProPublica looked at the number of patients that died in the hospital and the number of patients who were readmitted after 30 days for complications from the initial procedure. Final numbers are adjusted for a patient’s age and health, and make allocations for this good or bad luck that may befall a surgeon.

Results for one New York City hospital

Screenshot by Alexandra Ossola

The good news is that the overall complication rate was quite low at 2-4 percent, and only 11 percent of surgeons accounted for 25 percent of the complications. There are lots of good surgeons doing good work at institutions all over the country. But the bad news is that the systems designed to make sure that bad surgeons are being held accountable appear to be broken. Hospitals aren’t collecting enough data and are failing to spot telltale signs of systematic poor practices.

Every year 200,000 patients die unnecessarily from hospital complications, and that number has not decreased in recent years, ProPublica reports. One way to improve this might be to let patients see the data on their practitioners—a step that is “long overdue,” according to Charles Mick, former president of the North American Spine Society. The investigators hope that their database can help individual patients make the life-and-death decision about who performs their surgeries, but also provide a national push towards greater accountability.

Check out ProPublica’s Surgeon Scorecard here.

Pluto As Seen Just Before The New Horizons Flyby

NASA

The day before the spacecraft was set to make its closest approach, Pluto sent us this love letter. The image was taken on July 13 from a distance of 476,000 miles, and it has a resolution of 2.5 miles per pixel.

After a successful flyby yesterday, the New Horizons team is about to unveil the spacecraft's preliminary findings, and it sounds like it's gonna be good:

New Horizons leader Alan Stern is definitely excited:

The images from the flyby are supposed to be 10 times better than the one that was released yesterday (seen above). If that's the case, then you can reasonably expect to have your socks knocked off.

Watch the event live, right here, starting at 3pm:

FIA Formula E Worldwide Race Schedule 2015-16

FIA

The streets of Paris will host a race next April, and London will host two back-to-back races at the end of the season. The UK gets an early peek at the racers too, since track testing will be at Donington Park in August. There’s one race still to be determined; officials are hoping to fill the March date with a race in North America. Last year, Miami hosted before the Long Beach Grand Prix, but it appears the city isn’t in the running for 2016.

Here’s the rundown of dates and locations for the second season of Formula E, which again begins in Beijing:

• October 17, 2015: Beijing, China
• November 7, 2015: Putrajaya, Malaysia
• December 19, 2015: Punta del Este, Uruguay
• February 6, 2016: Buenos Aires, Argentina
• March 19, 2016: TBD
• April 2, 2016: Long Beach, California
• April 23, 2016: Paris, France
• May 21, 2016: Berlin, Germany
• June 4, 2016: Moscow, Russia
• TBD: Two races in London, UK

Also new this year is the ability for teams to supply their own powertrains. In the first season, everything in the car was supplied for the teams and inalterable to keep costs reasonably on par for a new motorsport field. For the second season, powertrains are up for tweaking and redesign -- within FIA parameters, of course -- as part of the planned growth of the series. Look for more design and component rules to open up in the future.

Pluto's Young, Icy Mountains

NASA-JHUAPL-SwRI

This view from 478,000 feet shows that Pluto is home to huge, 11,000-foot tall mountains, probably composed of water ice. The lack of impact craters suggests that Pluto's surface is young, probably less than 100 million years old.

The first detailed images of Pluto's surface ever captured are in, and they don't disappoint. The dwarf planet's southern tip contains relatively young mountains reaching up to 11,000 feet high, according to a breathtaking new photo taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby yesterday and released to the public this afternoon. "They look to be tens of miles wide, so they stand up respectively to Rocky Mountains on Earth," said John Spencer, deputy geology and geophysics lead on New Horizons, and a scientist with the Southwest Research Institute.

According to a statement from Jeff Moore, another scientist on the New Horizons' geology team, the fact that the surface lacks many visible impact craters suggests, "this is one of the youngest surfaces we’ve ever seen in the solar system"— 100 million or so years old, compared to the solar system's 4.6 billion years.

Even more intriguingly, the mountains are probably made of water-ice, because the methane and nitrogen that cover much of Pluto aren't strong enough to build such tall formations.

As for what could be causing the mountains to form, scientists think there could be lots of action taking place beneath Pluto's surface. "We predicted that if we saw steep topography on Pluto... then there must be internal activity that's dredging nitrogen up like cryovoclanism or geysers, or some other process that's active into the present on this planet, " said Alan Stern, principal investigator on the New Horizons mission. "We haven't found geysers or cryovolcanoes, but this is very strong evidence that will send us looking. "

Best of all, there are even better, higher-detail images of Pluto yet to come: this photo was captured an hour-and-a-half before New Horizons made its closest approach to the dwarf planet, or 478,000 miles away, compared to the 7,800 miles at its closest approach.

Updated shortly after publication with additional reporting by Sarah Fecht.

Ultrasound

Application of ultrasound has been shown to speed broken bone regeneration by one third, and even restore memory to mice with Alzheimer’s. Now researchers have found that ultrasound can accelerate healing time of skin wounds too.

The elderly and those with diabetes can often develop chronic healing defects such as skin ulcers and bedsores. Chronic wounds like foot ulcers lead to major limb amputation if not healed properly. In a recent animal study published in the Journal of Investigative of Dermatology, researchers at the University of Bristol found that low-intensity ultrasound helped increase the healing time of wounds in diabetic and aged mice by 30 percent. This accelerated healing may not be as fast Wolverine’s, but it could be the difference between keeping or losing a foot.

The equipment was not much different from what is used to monitor a fetus during pregnancy. However, the vibration of the sound waves activated a protein pathway that helped fibroblast cells, which are important to healing, migrate to the wound.

“Using ultrasound wakes up the cells and stimulates a normal healing process,” said lead author of the study Mark Bass (now at the University of Sheffield) in a press release. “Because it is just speeding up the normal processes, the treatment doesn’t carry the risk of side effects that are often associated with drug treatments.”

The ultrasound treatment restored the healing rate of the mice to what is observed in healthy animals. The team of researchers also found that the use of ultrasound could reverse the migration issues of fibroblasts from human venous leg ulcer patients, which showed that this approach is applicable to humans as well as mice.

“We could expect to see it in broad clinical use within three or four years,” Bass says.

Leopards have many different spots, but in some cases, we puny humans have trouble seeing them. The problem is especially in pronounced in the jungles of the Malaysian Peninsula, where conservationists are trying to keep an eye on the small population of leopards that have evolved without the same distinctive print that leopards are known for.

For some reason, either because the color scheme offered better camouflage or simply random chance, the leopards in this region are almost entirely black, which makes them really difficult to tell apart. Until now. In a new study published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, researchers found that by using infrared cameras, they could actually see a leopard's distinctive pattern of spots.

When a person looks at a black leopard, the distinctive pattern of spots (unique to each leopard) blends in with the dark fur. But cameras equipped with an infrared flash (usually used to take night pictures) can see the subtle difference between the two dark colors of fur. The resulting photograph of a leopard shows a unique pattern of spots that researchers can use to identify animals, and get a better idea of how many rare black leopards are left in the wild.

"We found we could accurately identify 94 percent of the animals," one of the study authors, Gopalasamy Reuben Clements, said in a statement. "This will allow us to study and monitor this population over time, which is critical for its conservation."

Black leopards are in far more danger from humans than humans are from leopards. Poaching and habitat loss keep their numbers relatively low. Nonetheless, if you should come face to face with a black leopard (which like most of the big cats is a member of the genus Panthera), remember the immortal advice of poet Ogden Nash:

The panther is like a leopard,
Except it hasn't been peppered.
Should you behold a panther crouch,
Prepare to say Ouch.
Better yet, if called by a panther,
Don't anther.

A manmade spacecraft will fly by Pluto for the first time ever on July 14. As it speeds through the Pluto system at 35,000 miles per hour, the New Horizons spacecraft will send back the first closeups of the former planet and its moons. The spacecraft will only be in the Pluto system for 12 days, but it will gather a wealth of information and, over the course of the next 16 months, send back imagery that will give us a much clearer view of this mysterious icy world. We'll update this gallery with the incredible images as they come in.

The Chimaera device

Reuters

A new handheld tool called the Chimaera will help surgeons find the right nerve with ease by giving them real-time feedback during operations. This kind of device, its developers claim, will usher in a new age of surgical devices, making delicate nerve procedures easier for surgeons everywhere.

Pain, whether it’s from a stubbed toe or a searing migraine, depends on electrical signals in the nerves. Researchers have been looking into ways to override those electrical signals by tweaking the nerves directly. In recent years surgeons have been able to implant devices called neuromodulators that can stop pain, if they can find the right nerve. But surgeons have a hard time accessing nerves that are behind the eyes or the face because it's difficult to identify the right one among the jumble, and getting it wrong would be very damaging to the patient.

The Chimaera device helps surgeons identify and access specific nerves. When a surgeon holds the wireless wand-like device near a place where he plans to make an incision, the Chimaera sends data about that spot to a computer where it is combined with information from a CT scan of the patient’s brain taken previously. This information is compiled into a single X-ray-like image that the surgeon can see in real time with Google Glass, allowing her to examine the blood vessels and nerves that surround the place of the incision so that the surgical tool is as precise as possible. Once the incision is made, the Chimaera can help the surgeon damage as little as possible on its way to the desired nerve, where the surgeon can implant the neuromodulator device.

Right now these most delicate procedures can only be conducted by a handful of surgeons worldwide, Reuters reports. But the Chimaera could make neuromodulators so much easier to implant that they could become more commonplace. That’s good news as the devices are becoming increasingly advanced—one day soon patients who feel a migraine coming on could simply “dial down” their pain from their smartphone, as Simon Karger of Cambridge Consultants told Reuters.

This initial version of the Chimaera is essentially a “concept car,” and its developers are currently looking for partners to produce it at a large scale. But for this company, Chimaera is merely the first of what will likely be many devices that give surgeons more feedback during a procedure, which will make surgery easier and more precise.

Check out video of the Chimaera in action here.