A green laser

FastLizard4/Flickr/CC-By-2.0

A high power laser

Aircraft lasing -- directing a laser or another bright light at a moving aircraft -- is becoming a huge problem, and authorities on the subject are worried that a growing number of reports will eventually lead to a serious incident.

At least 43 incidents were reported in the last two days; a huge spike and potentially the largest volume since the authorities began keeping records over a decade ago.

Special agent Celeste Danzi, a spokesperson for the Newark office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, says the office is working with law enforcement partners to track the incidents. While this isn't the first incident, the numbers for this week are some of the highest on record.

“We’ve had some past laser incidents,” says Danzi. “These laser strikes can imperil the aircraft, because it can disorient the pilot on takeoff or landing. They can be temporarily blinded. It’s like being in a dark car and then having a flash bulb go off," she says. “It’s extremely dangerous, it’s a federal crime, and we take it seriously.”

Danzi said they weren't commenting on methods, but the truth of the matter is that law enforcement only has so many options to catch the perpetrators.

Patrick Murphy, an independent expert on the topic who runs LaserPointerSafety.com, says that in most cases, planes are not able to identify the origin of the laser. “The only real way to find them is if a helicopter is hit--usually it’s a police helicopter--and it can hover there and call in officers. If an airplane is hit--fixed wing--it is very, very hard to identify where it came from.”

Murphy worked on the issue professionally in the ‘90s when laser light shows were first reported to interfere with aircrafts. He started his site in 2008 to inform the general public. “Unfortunately it’s been entirely unsuccessful, in that these things keep increasing and the word has just not gotten out.”

Murphy also thinks that people don’t understand why it's so dangerous. “[There are] people that genuinely feel it’s not really a hazard. [They say] 'Oh I'm hitting the bottom of the plane. It’s a tiny dot on the plane like when I'm playing with my cat.” They may legitimately think 'Oh the light stops somehow magically after 300 to 400 feet and it really isn’t going to reach the plane.' They’re wrong.”

Luckily, or unluckily for some people, it’s easy to bait the suspect with lasers and identify the perpetrator. “Sometimes [law enforcement] will send up a police helicopter after an airplane has reported being hit,” says Murphy. “And sometimes that helicopter will draw the laser, and then they'll be able to identify the perpetrator very, very easily.”

Authorities used this method in Brooklyn earlier this year when a similar problem plagued La Guardia airport. Police followed the beam to an exact location and helped direct patrol cars to the address.

Still, the problem grows. In the past couple of years, there have been just under 4,000 events reported each year, and Murphy estimates this year the number may be somewhere between 5,600 and 7,400. And the only favorable something is better public education and awareness.

Banning the use of high-power lasers may not be a viable solution. It’s important to note that these aren’t always the heavy-duty, balloon-popping lasers you see in videos, Murphy says. "Even a standard laser pointer, around five milliwatts used for presentations is bright enough to distract a pilot. If a helicopter is flying low enough, it can also cause glare.” There isn't much data to go on, but Murphy thinks the activity is likely split evenly between low and high powered lasers.

Currently, anyone can own any laser of any power. Murphy thinks the very coverage of the issue may be contributing to the sudden increase. “The only thing I can possibly think of is perhaps the increased publicity about some of the prosecution causes a copycat effect,” says Murphy.

Murphy says the word needs to get out that this sort of activity at the wrong moment can cause pilots to lose control, and cause hundreds of deaths. “It’s just like drunk driving. At some point hopefully society will say lasing aircraft is equally stupid, and hopefully we will come down on that.”

The penalties are certainly angling to do just that. As the FAA and law enforcement coordinate efforts to curb the practice, fines in the range of tens of thousands of dollars, and years of jail time have already been handed down to offenders for lasing aircraft--if and when they're caught.

February 1941

Popular Science

Aerial Faceoff

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Fighter Planes Defend The Home Front.”

Thin, flexible, mind-altering probe

Jeong lab, University of Colorado Boulder via NIH

Researchers have a hard time understanding how tiny changes to networks of neurons in an animal's brain can affect its behavior. Now a team of researchers has figured out a way to tinker with the neural networks of mice in real time, using a wireless controller that can both shine light on the brain and deliver drugs to it. The device even lets scientists control the movements of their test mice from afar.

Neural circuits are thought to be key for various neurological disorders having to do with stress, depression, addiction, and pain—researchers can study them by adding various chemicals or light to neurons to mimic the disease. But observing or manipulating neural circuits to figure out how they work has been notoriously difficult. When researchers do tests on mice, the animals have to be awake and moving around, but the devices to monitor their brain activity are usually hooked up to wires, so they can’t move freely. When they’re implanted, the devices often displace a substantial amount of the mouse’s brain tissue, which could change the outcome of the experiments.

In this recent study, published last week in Cell, researchers tested a device made of soft materials and just one-tenth the width of a human hair—much less invasive than the devices typically used in drug injection experiments. The devices were also hooked up to tiny batteries so that they didn’t need to be attached to wires and contained reservoirs of the drugs or viruses that they wanted to test so that they could be injected wirelessly.

Mice with the device implanted.

Jae-Woong Jeong et al, 2015, Cell

To test the devices, researchers implanted them in the brains of several mice, which were put in a cage about three feet from the remote control. The device allowed them to precisely map the mice’s neural circuits by injecting viruses that label cells with genetic dyes. By injecting a morphine-like drug to the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of the brain that controls motivation and addiction, the researchers made the mice walk in circles. Viruses injected into the mice’s brains using the device made certain neurons in the VTA very sensitive to light; when the researchers shined light on those neurons using the device, the mice stayed only on one side of their cage.

In the study the researchers provide explicit instructions for how to manufacture the device, which contains four LEDs and has the capacity to inject four different chemicals or drugs into the mice’s brains. The researchers hope that other scientists will use their plans to discover more about how neural networks work to create or treat diseases.

In the late '40s, the Tucker Torpedo featured a third headlight dubbed the Cyclops Eye.

The centrally mounted unit was connected to the steering rack, and thus could pivot its beam around corners. It was just one of the many innovative safety features found on Preston Tucker's doomed machine. And while illumination has come a long way in the decades since, by modern standards, headlights are still relatively dumb appliances.

But that's changing. And the Ford Motor Company is just one of the groups developing technology to bring automotive lighting into the 21st century.

The future, as they say, looks bright.

Ford's Camera-Based Advanced Front Lighting System will harness an infrared camera, GPS signals, and special traffic sign recognition technology to make navigating dark roads easier. Along with alerting drivers to pedestrians, cyclists, and animals in the vehicle path, the system will be able to "remember" previously traveled roads and adjust lights to better allow drivers to see bends and potential hazards. At this point, eight risks can be tracked at one time, and the system will even prioritize the top two threats.

Audi currently offers some of that functionality via its Matrix LED system, though, due to a technicality in domestic laws, it's not available stateside yet. General Motors Company, via its European unit Opel, is also working on headlights that can track your eye movements.

Of course, regulation that impedes new lighting technology isn't exactly new. Upon the debut of the Tucker Torpedo, its third headlight was illegal in almost 20 states. But when it comes time to offer the Camera-Based Advanced Front Lighting System on its vehicles, something tells us Ford will fare better than Preston Tucker did in getting the laws changed.

More from Motor Authority:

2016 Porsche 911 Carrera Spotted Completely Undisguised

Clarkson’s Final Top Gear Test Track Lap Done In Ferrari 488 GTB

Inside The Ford GT's Secret Underground Design Lab: Video

2017 Audi R8 Review

Earth

NASA

The Earth as seen from the DSCOVR satellite.

Earth has a new formal portrait. Taken by the Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), this photo is the first image of Earth sent back from the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite, which NASA released earlier today. EPIC is the first device on a satellite capable of taking an image of the entire Earth in one picture.

"The high quality of the EPIC images exceeded all of our expectations in resolution," Adam Szabo, a DSCOVR project scientist said in a press release. "The images clearly show desert sand structures, river systems and complex cloud patterns. There will be a huge wealth of new data for scientists to explore."

Since 1972, when Apollo 17 astronauts snapped the iconic"Blue Marble" image, NASA and other space agencies have captured innumerable views of our planet. The Voyager spacecraft took the famous "Pale Blue Dot" picture from 4 billion miles away in 1990.

DSCOVR is much closer, situated 1 million miles from Earth at the first Lagrange point -- a location that allows the satellite to maintain a steady orbit between the Earth and the sun. From that vantage point, DSCOVR will monitor the climate of earth, allowing scientists to track everything from ozone levels, vegetation, and even clouds of volcanic ash after an eruption.

We can expect to see more images like this in the future. NASA plans to upload new images to a dedicated website every day starting in September, when DSCOVR will be taking regular images of Earth.

This Could Be Us In A Few Years

Artist concept of a moon colony via NASA

Only 12 people have walked on the moon, and we haven't been back since 1972. But a new NASA-commission study has found that we can now afford to set up a permanent base on the moon, by mining for lunar resources and partnering with private companies.

Returning humans to the moon could cost 90 percent less than expected, bringing estimated costs down from $100 billion to $10 billion. That's something that NASA could afford on its current deep space human spaceflight budget.

“A factor of ten reduction in cost changes everything,” said Mark Hopkins, executive committee chair of the National Space Society, in a press release.

The study, released today, was conducted by the National Space Society and the Space Frontier Foundation—two non-profit organizations that advocate building human settlements beyond Earth—and it was reviewed by an independent team of former NASA executives, astronauts, and space policy experts.

To dramatically reduce costs, NASA would have to take advantage of private and international partnerships—perhaps one of which would be the European Space Agency, whose director recently announced that he wants to build a town on the moon. The new estimates also assumed the cooperation of Boeing and SpaceX, NASA's commercial crew partners. SpaceX famously spent just $443 million developing its Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon crew capsule, where NASA would have spent $4 billion. The authors of the new report are hoping that 89 percent price reduction will extend beyond low Earth orbit as well.

Similar to SpaceX's goals of creating a reusable rocket, the plan also relies on the development of reusable spacecraft and lunar landers to reduce costs.

Dive Bombing The Moon

NASA

In 2009, NASA's LCROSS spacecraft shot a spent rocket stage at the Moon to analyze the plume of debris it kicked up. The results indicated that water may be common on the Moon.

In addition to commercial partnerships and reusable spacecraft, mining fuel from the lunar surface could also bring down the trip's cost. Data from the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) suggest that water ice may be plentiful on the moon, especially near the poles. That's important because water can be broken down into hydrogen propellant for rockets (and, conveniently, oxygen for humans to breathe).

The report envisions setting up a lunar industrial base that mines water from the lunar regolith, processes it into hydrogen, then sends the hydrogen into orbit around the moon so that spacecraft on their way to Mars (or elsewhere in the solar system) can get a fuel boost. Such an endeavor could shave off $10 billion per year in the cost of getting to the red planet. The report estimates that this industrial base would house four astronauts, and within 12 years of the initial landings, provide 200 megatons of propellant at a total cost of $40 billion.

But before all that can happen, NASA and/or private companies would need to send robotic prospectors to the lunar poles to find out just how much hydrogen is available and whether it's economical to extract it. NASA scientists have already proposed one such robot—the Resource Prospector would deploy a rover that can search for hydrogen, drill into the lunar regolith, and heat samples to see what's inside. If the mission gets funded, it'll be the first mining expedition on another world.

Robo Prospector

NASA

A proposed Resource Prospector rover aims to be the first robot to mine resources on another world.

A 2014 Human Spaceflight Report found that the best way to send astronauts to Mars is to learn how to live on the moon first, but NASA went ahead with a cheaper path—the Asteroid Redirect Mission, which is largely irrelevant to the goal of traveling to and surviving on Mars. While there have been a few attempts to return to the moon after the Apollo program, those proposals had price tags ranging from $100 billion to a trillion dollars, says Charles Miller, the new study's principle investigator and leader of the Alliance for Space Development.

If mining for lunar hydrogen can be economically viable, it could pave the way for utilizing other valuable resources, such as helium-3, as well as making moon tourism more economical. "Now and forever, the most valuable thing in space is people," says Gary Oleson from the Space Frontier Foundation's board of directors.

The ideas in the report are just concepts and recommendations at this point, and NASA has no commitment to follow through on them as far as we can tell. But mining the moon certainly has the potential to restructure space travel. Rockets launching from Earth would no longer have to lift off carrying fuel and water for long journeys. Instead, they could pull over at the moon to top off their tanks. Leaving lunar orbit is a lot easier than leaving Earth, so these lunar way stations could potentially lower the cost of spaceflight dramatically, opening up a highway to Mars ... and beyond.

"A permanent lunar settlement should be a building block for settlement of the rest of the solar system," says Hoyt Davidson from Near Earth LLC.

In 1962, President John F. Kennedy famously said, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

Well, now that the Apollo program, Skylab, the International Space Station, and NASA's other endeavors have paved the way, it's not so hard anymore, says Tom Moser, who was the lead engineer and program manager for the Apollo program and the International Space Station. "Returning to the moon is easy, it's reasonable and affordable, and could be the pathway to Mars... But there has to be a will do it."

Up until now, there hasn't been widespread public support for going back to the moon, partly because it's always seemed so expensive, says Miller. "We think the idea that this has to cost $100 billion should die a quick death."

Update, 3:50pm: This article was updated with new information from a press conference.

Traditional snake venom extraction

Kalyan Varma via Wikimedia Commons

Put snake genes in yeast and what do you get? Believe it or not, you get a blood-clot-fighting medicine based on snake venom, according to a study published recently in Scientific Reports.

In the wild, the pit viper Agkistrodon acutus has a reputation for being deadly—sometime it’s called the “five pace” because those bitten collapse after just a few steps. But in the lab the medicinal qualities of its venom have been known for some time. The protein agkisacutalin, found in the viper’s venom, is an effective anticoagulant, minimizing blood clots that cause stroke or heart failure with very few side effects. But the protein has not yet been isolated in a form safe enough for human consumption.

In the study, the researchers modified the genes of the yeast Pichia pastoris, often used as a model organism for genetic experiments (and also sometimes as a food additive). The researchers knocked out two of the yeast’s genes and replaced them with snake genes, then fed the yeast with glycerol at room temperature. After 18 hours, they added methanol, which converted the glycerol to the anticoagulant proteins found in the snake venom.

So far the yeast has passed biosafety checks in China where it was developed. Though this venom-based anticoagulant isn’t available yet, the researchers hope it will be soon; they have partnered with a private biomedical company to scale up the production of the anticoagulant so they can bring it to market, the South China Morning Post reports—the yeast tends to die after producing the protein for 38 hours. But if they are able to iron out the wrinkles of the large-scale yeast production process, the researchers could create as much of the protein each year as would otherwise be made by killing 15,000 snakes.

Smokestacks

Señor Codo/FlickrCC by SA 2.0

Cleaning up one toxic substance from the air is clearing up other problems we didn't even know we had.

In a study published this month in Environmental Science & Technology researchers found that upgrades intended to reduce the amount of mercury in emissions from a coal-fired power plant also managed to get rid of other pollutants at the same time.

The finding was unexpected. The researchers, from Oregon State University, weren't even looking at the power plant, or into mercury emissions at all. They were studying a different pollutant, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which can be highly toxic. The researchers were tracking how PAHs generated by air pollution in Asia moved across the Pacific, and noticed a huge drop between their 2010 and 2011 data. The PAH levels dropped by 72 percent, and another type of pollutant, oxy-polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (OPAHs) dropped by 40 percent.

"We looked at the data and said, 'Wow! 2010 is different from 2011, and why should that be?'" Staci Simonich said in a press release. "We had trouble understanding it from a trans-Pacific standpoint. So we started thinking about regional sources, and that's what led us to look at emissions from Boardman."

In April 2011, the Boardman plant, run by Portland General Electric, added mercury scrubbers to the power plant, attempting to reduce the amount of mercury released into the environment. In what can only be described as a win-win, in the process, they also managed to dramatically reduce the amount of PAHs released into the air.

Mercury scrubbers hit the news earlier this summer in a Supreme Court decision that said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) needed to consider the monetary costs of requiring coal-fired power plants to add scrubbers to their facilities earlier in the regulatory process. The decision was a fairly narrow one, and did not change the fact that the EPA can regulate emissions. It just has to weigh the cost to businesses against the environmental benefits of the required regulation. A lower court will decide on how the Supreme Court ruling might affect the installation of mercury scrubbers in the future. The majority of power plants in the country have already taken steps to clean up emissions.

The EPA's regulation on mercury was introduced in December 2011, and came into effect this year. Mercury was the primary focus of the regulation because it is so dangerous to humans, and power plants produce so much of it. Back in 2011, the EPA noted that 50 percent of mercury emissions in the country could be traced to power plants. Mercury is toxic to humans, especially when it enters the food chain in low levels, getting into the air and water, and from there into plants and animals, where a dangerous form of mercury, methylmercury, can build up in tissues, particularly in seafood.

Methylmercury is particularly dangerous to pregnant women and young children, where it can cause severe neurological damage, harming the brain and nervous system.

Mercury and PAHs are both released in the combustion of coal. And while mercury scrubbers are going into place in other power plants (despite the Supreme Court hurdles), there are signs that coal itself is on the way out. Last week, natural gas surpassed coal as the top source of electrical power in the United States for the first time ever. And the Broadman plant in Oregon that cleaned up its act? It's set to stop using coal in 2020.

SpaceX Rocket Explodes

via NASA TV

A failed steel strut holding down a canister of helium probably caused SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket to explode shortly after liftoff last month, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said today. But the Dragon capsule riding on that rocket, bound for the International Space Station, would likely have survived if only software had been programmed to unfurl its parachute.

The June 28 explosion — the third ISS resupply mission to fail since October — was a huge blow for SpaceX, which had a flawless safety record over seven years. Data from the rocket and the cargo capsule revealed a likely fatal flaw in the strut, made by a third-party supplier to SpaceX. The company is planning to switch struts for future rockets. Meanwhile, the ongoing investigation and rocket upgrades will spell delays for Falcon 9 and its successor, the Falcon Heavy, Musk said.

“It just goes to show rockets are a fundamentally difficult thing. Generally, when there’s an idiomatic expression about something, there’s a reason for it,” he said in a conference call with reporters.

Falcon 9 rockets use liquid oxygen as propellant, and the fuel tanks are backfilled with helium, which maintains pressure in the tank as the fuel is burned. The two-foot-long struts holding down helium canisters are designed to withstand 10,000 pounds of force, but on June 28, one failed at just 2,000 pounds of force, Musk said. As the rocket careened skyward, the buoyancy forces of liftoff would have shot the bottle to the top of the tank in the rocket’s upper stage. This caused helium to spew into the oxygen tank and overpressurize it. All this happened within about nine-tenths of a second.

The rocket disintegrated and the Dragon cargo capsule plummeted into the ocean, carrying 4,000 pounds of supplies and experiments for the space station crew. But if Dragon had deployed its parachute, it may have survived, Musk said. It communicated with the ground until it dropped out of sight over the horizon, he said.

Dragon 2, the next-generation version that would eventually carry crew members into orbit, is designed with abort thrusters to push it away from a failing rocket. It also has software that will tell Dragon to deploy its parachute when it separates from the rocket. But the version that flies now doesn’t have the thrusters or that software, Musk said.

“One of the things we’ve decided to do is advance the software that was meant for Dragon 2 into Dragon 1, so that if this were to happen in the future, the spacecraft would save itself,” he said.

SpaceX is sending an autonomous underwater vehicle to search for Dragon debris, which might help engineers learn more about what happened. SpaceX engineers, as well as NASA and the Air Force, are still combing through telemetry from more than 3,000 data sources. The company is also making plans to switch struts and will test them all before launch, rather than relying on supplier data, Musk said.

The June 28 mishap was the first black mark in seven years for SpaceX, which has a contract to ferry cargo and eventually astronauts to and from the ISS. The failure won’t affect the company’s bid for the Commercial Crew Program, but it will push back the first Falcon Heavy launch until next spring, Musk said.

A sense of complacency had settled over SpaceX after its many years of success

A sense of complacency settled over SpaceX after its many years of success, Musk added. He said before every launch, he sends a company-wide email asking whether anyone can think of any possible reason to hold off, and if so, to call him on his cell phone or send an email.

“But the 20th time I send that email, it just seems like, ‘There’s Elon being paranoid again.’ Maybe it doesn’t resonate with the same force,” he said. “But I think now everyone at the company appreciates how difficult it is to get rockets to orbit successfully, and I think we’ll be stronger for it.”

IBM Watson Developer Cloud

A sample analysis using IBM's Tone Analyzer.

When I woke up this morning, I never thought there would be a way to stack my letter-writing skills up against one of the greatest authors of all time. Yet, as is the way of technology, I was proved wrong. IBM’s web innovation hub, the Watson Developer Cloud, came out with a demo of their new tool: the Tone Analyzer, made to detect “emotional tones, social propensities, and writing styles in written communication.” IBM wants to make us better writers--I can get down with that. So I took it for a spin.

As a stereotypical (read: neurotic) writer, my first thought was to see how my casual writing stacked up against that of a literary heavy-hitter--someone like Mark Twain. So I found a random letter Twain wrote in 1876, and put it into the machine. I did the same with my side of an email I sent to one of my editors at PopSci last week.

The results were surprisingly close (and I know my writing skills are objectively nowhere close to Twain's). The Tone Analyzer breaks writing down into three tones: emotional tone, social tone, and writing tone. Within those categories, Twain scored 4 percent emotional, 88 percent social and 7 percent writing. I went 2 percent emotional, 90 percent social and 6 percent writing. (The unaccounted percentage points seem to be proper nouns and other words the computer couldn’t understand.) It also picked other notes out of our writing, like words it deemed cheerful. Twain had 4 cheerful words (dear, pleasure, thanks and pleasant), and I had only 1 (hope).

Screenshot

Analysis of Mark Twain's 1876 letter, compared to my email from last week.

So what does this say? Twain had more tone by 1 percentage point? He was four times cheerier than I am? No, the similarities in our results actually shows the underlying problem with this software: there’s no context from word to word. While testing that program, the words “I’m angry” gave the same exact “anger” readout as “not angry,” because the computer isn’t reading any more than one word at a time. This makes the software great at finding individual words that could trigger an unwanted reaction, but blind to the greater meaning of those words. If automated, or used blindly, this could cause trouble.

For instance, if you grew up with a basic word processor on a computer (I cut my teeth on Word 97), you can remember the initial joy of right-clicking on a word and replacing it with a more-important sounding synonym. The word “better” became “surpassing,” and soon your sentence bore no resemblance to what you initially wrote. That’s the same kind of idea here, and in fact, Tone Analyzer gives you that same option to replace words. My sentence “Sorry, brain in vacation mode” became “Grim, intellect successful vacation mode.”

Tone Analyzer isn’t the only, and definitely not the first, writing tool to fall flat, and it’s important to note that its still in development. It falls flatter than most given its large claim to effectively recognize and correct good writing. I don’t think we’re measuring it against an unfair standard, either. If a program wants to pick out social cues and writing style, a sample larger than one word at a time is necessary.

This issue is endemic to most pieces of writing software, and why our email applications don’t have little popups that say “Are you upset? You might not want to send this email.” It’s because our software can’t understand our human generated writing 100 percent of the time, although some have come extraordinarily close.

Automated Insights, which has partnered with the Associated Press to generate sports stories, reverses the use of software understanding language. With a set of inputs, like sports scores, the computer can use a bank of adjectives and verbs to describe the data. This is backwards from analyzing written material, but the same idea holds; software with guidelines to what makes readable and proper writing.

Other tools on the web with more limited objectives are the Hemingway editor, which focuses on brevity and reducing use of the passive voice, and the Text Content Analyzer Tool.

But IBM's tool isn't terrible; it reads your text word-by-word, and identifies common connotations with those words. This could be undoubtedly helpful, if integrated into a native email application or professional messaging service. However, in a modern world grasping at the fringes of artificial intelligence, this software only holds a mirror to how far away most programs really are from achieving that gold standard.

North Carolina has a history of shipwrecks. The area off the coast of North Carolina is known as the 'Graveyard of the Atlantic' for a reason. It is the final resting place of countless ships, sunk by storms and treacherous shoals and sandbars. Underwater archaeologists have located many of these wrecks, including the pirate Blackbeard's ship, The Queen Anne's Revenge. The latest shipwreck to make headlines was found offshore, 150 miles from the coast in frigid waters a mile deep, and it was found by a robot.

Sentry, an autonomous underwater vehicle, was running a routine check for a mooring that the scientific team left in the area three years ago.

“I have led four previous expeditions to this site, each aided by submersible research technology to explore the sea floor — including a 2012 expedition where we used Sentry to saturate adjacent areas with sonar and photo images,” Cindy Van Dover, the leader of the expedition said in a statement. “It’s ironic to think we were exploring within 100 meters of the wreck site without an inkling it was there.”

Storm and tidal activity likely uncovered the wreck. The researchers took the Alvin submarine down for a closer look. There, they found numerous artifacts lying on the seafloor, including timbers, bricks, pottery, navigational instruments, and bottles that could have held alcohol. (Unfortunately, it doesn't look like any still contained the original liquid, unlike some shipwrecked cargo.)

The early age estimate is that it dated from around the time of the American Revolution sometime between the late 1700s and early 1800s. Beyond that, it's still a mystery.

The team brought one of the bottles to the surface, but a full-blown underwater archaeology dig isn't possible at the moment, and the scientists on board are eager to resume their work investigating areas where methane, a potent greenhouse gas, is seeping out of the seafloor.

"We are finding amazing biological communities around the seeps, ranging from giant mussels that can be 100 to 200 years old or older, to giant tube worms that can be hundreds of years old as well, to a very strange-looking creature called a chimaera, which is a distant cousin of sharks and rays," Dave Eggleston, one of the researchers on the ship told Live Science.

The current mission will continue. An expedition to the wreck could be possible in a year or so, once funding is secured.

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Obsessed.”

Courtesy of Varial

One of Varial Surf Technology's surfboards.

Edison Conner, a former SpaceX rocket scientist and co-founder of Varial Surf Technology, tried for years to create a durable surfboard from aerospace material. In his eyes, the surfboard industry was ripe for disruption. Makers had clung to one manufacturing method for more than 50 years. For strength and flexibility, they created a spine from a strand of wood (known as a stringer) and glued it into a polyurethane foam cast. The cast was sanded and wrapped in fiberglass and resin.

Peek Inside

Courtesy Varial

This 70x magnification of the Varial Foam microstructure reveals a tight cell structure made up of defined angles and polygonal shapes. The rigid structure of the foam makes surfboards lighter, stronger, and easier to ride.

Conner and the other engineers at Varial tried something different. They replaced the wooden stringer with an ultra­rigid foam similar to the type used in helicopter rotor blades and in rocket-propulsion systems. The foam is 30 percent stronger, with seven times the stiffness (or modulus) of conventional foam. It’s also 25 percent lighter. That means surfers have a board that’s easier to control and more durable.

Varial’s chemists altered the poly­mers of the foam, producing high levels of crystallinity. The crystallized foam consists of structured, rigid latticelike polymer chains. Crystallization also makes cell walls thinner. That lets chemists pack more cells into a tighter, more-angular (or poly­gonal) cell structure. The structure is stronger and firmer than the looser, more-bubblelike cell structure of conventional polyurethane foam.

Aside from strength and durability, the new boards have more action (or buoyancy) in the water. “They are ultra light, which I love in smaller waves,” says top pro surfer Shane Dorian, who won the Billabong Ride of the Year Award in 2015.

“Ninety percent of the time, I’m surfing head-high waves or smaller, so the responsiveness of the light boards is amazing.”

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "A Surfboard Made By A Rocket Scientist.”

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.

Dreamscopeapp/ twitter

Instagram meets DeepDream.

A web app called Dreamscope developed by A Lambda Labs Production allows users to upload an image and apply different filters, including ones inspired by the computerized nightmares “dreamed” up by Google’s artificial neural networks. There are 15 filters to choose from when an image is uploaded to Dreamscope, and an additional three “exclusive” filters become options if users create a free account. The basic filters, which include, “Inceptionist Painting,” “Self Transforming Machine Elves,” and “Trippy,” alter the image in the most classic DeepDream fashion by adding objects such as swirls, slug limbs, and dog faces to the pictures. The other filters, including the exclusive ones, are more mild, but still entertaining.

Basic Dreamscope Filters

Twitter/ Screenshot

Here is a before and after of the founder and first editor of Popular Science, Edward Livingston Youmans, transformed with Dreamscope's "Self Transforming Machine Elves" filter.

Edward Livingston Youmans

Levi Sharpe/ Popular Science

Here is Edward Livingston Youmans after being transformed with the exclusive "Angelhair" Dreamscope filter.

Edward Livingston Youmans

Levi Sharpe/ Popular Science

The DeepDream code was released last month by Google and is based on the Google Image software that processes and filters the mass amount of images coming through its browser. The program learns how to do this after it is shown a ton of different pictures of one object so that it knows what that object looks like. However, when the program is used to “dream up” images of the objects on its own, it gets confused and creates wild scenes of random globular limbs, cloud monsters, and other disturbing chimeras.

Dreamscope is a lot faster than Psychic VR Lab’s DeepDream image generator, which was one of the first DeepDream image generators that gained popularity. A DeepDream twitter bot spewed out a constant feed of those trippy images that could have sucked away your day. You can also spend hours sifting through a ton of Dreamscope's altered images on its twitter page.

Last week the DeepDream code moved from stills to video with the DeepDream Animator, however given the thousands of Facebook likes that Dreamscope has garnered thus far, there is still a huge interest in finding new ways to transform images with DeepDream.

Now if only somebody would make a DeepDream phone app.

Marijuana

Dank Depot/ Flickr CC By 2.0 (with modification)

Step aside milk. Weed could be could be the next big thing in bone health.

Marijuana affects our bodies in a lot of different ways, for example by giving us the munchies, decreasing motivation, or even by helping to fight off bacterial infections and parasites. Now researchers have found that a chemical in cannabis might just help build strong bones, too. A recent study published in the Journal of Bone and Mineral Research found that cannabidiol (CBD), a non-psychotropic component of cannabis, helped heal bone fractures in rats.

The team at Tel Aviv University injected CBD in one group of rats with mid-femoral fractures. They also injected another group of rats with the same type of fractures with a combination of both CBD and THC, the main psychoactive chemical in cannabis. After eight weeks, the researchers found that the rats who received CBD had healed better than rats who received a control injection of a saline mixture. But, before you roll a celebratory joint, CBD alone enhanced fracture healing, whereas the mixture with THC offered no advantage.

Not only could CBD enhance bone regeneration, it may increase the strength of the bones as well.

"We found that CBD alone makes bones stronger during healing, enhancing the maturation of the collagenous matrix, which provides the basis for new mineralization of bone tissue," said co-author of the study Yankel Gabet in a press release.

While some researchers hope to create synthetic marijuana that only targets certain serotonin receptors to separate marijuana's negative affects from its positive health benefits, the researchers at Tel Aviv University want to pursue the use of CBD in human trials, since it has no psychotropic properties and is primarily an anti-inflammatory, they say.

"Other studies have also shown CBD to be a safe agent, which leads us to believe we should continue this line of study in clinical trials to assess its usefulness in improving human fracture healing,” said Gabet.

Pete Souza, Instagram

President Barack Obama meets Alice Wong, founder of the Disability Visibility Project, at the White House on July 20.

This was her view:

Wong is founder of the Disability Visibility Project, an organization that aims to record the stories of people with disabilities. Wong was visiting the White House to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which Obama spoke about after they met. Her robot of choice was the BeamPro, which allows users to control its movements via their computer and have their face projected on the video monitor. According to the project's site, Wong was the first such visitor to the White House.

Popular Science has been using telepresence robots for years. Our former editor in chief Jacob Ward wrote about using them in 2013 when he was living in California, 3,000 miles away from our New York offices.

At the office.

Tim Soter

A robot boss can replace a physical boss in nearly any office situation. A) Editors often hide from the bot boss as they do from the physical one. B) A quiet boss can check up on the staff. C) Office drinks are difficult, but not impossible, to enjoy at a distance. D) Employees don’t always immediately show respect for the bot.

Today, Information Editor Katie Peek, Ph.D., uses the BeamPro to telecommunicate from Washington, D.C. (Sidebar: During my first staff meeting, I had to contain my considerable excitement when she wheeled into the room, and it was the first thing I told people about when they asked how my first week here was). I wonder how long it will be until telepresence robots are no longer surprising and just become another part of the workplace, even if that office is the Oval one.

PopSci Goes Presidential

Dave Gershgorn

Information Editor Katie Peek meets "President" (Online Director) Carl Franzen on her BeamPro as Intern Levi Sharpe and Technology Editor Michael Nuñez wait their turns.

Mountains And Craters

NASA/JHUAPL/SWRI

We were stunned last week when the Pluto flyby revealed that the dwarf planet has mountains that are up to 11,000 feet tall. Now it turns out they're not alone. Sixty-eight miles to the northwest of the Norgay Mountains, across the vast plains of Sputnik Planum, lies a second icy mountain range. These peaks are smaller, reaching up to about half a mile to a mile high--or about the height of the Appalachian Mountains. On the range's western side is a dark, heavily cratered terrain that scientists think must be older than the plains and mountains.

The image was taken from a distance of 48,000 miles during the July 14th flyby. It was just sent back to Earth yesterday.

A Digital Tattoo To Unlock Your Phone

Photograph by Jonathon Kambouris

Tattoos say a lot about a person. They’re about to communicate a lot more. A new wave of ultrathin, flexible stick-on sensors are entering the wearables game, promising to improve our lives with (even more) data.

For now adhesive mini computers are mostly in the “look-how-cool-it-is” phase. Google released a digital tattoo last summer that uses near-field communication (NFC) to unlock a Motorola Moto X smartphone. That’s fun. But that’s all it does. Other companies are jamming sensors and antennas into these nano-thin waterproof devices that could potentially save lives. The wider promise of digital tattoos will come with health and fitness trackers. The SEEQ Mobile Cardiac Telemetry System, created by Medtronic, sticks onto a cardiac outpatient’s chest and sends continuous heartbeat information to a medical monitoring service. The staff there can then analyze and send that data to a physician.

MC10, a company that specializes in stretchable electronics, will release the BioStamp system, which tracks heart rate, body movement, temperature, and other biometric data so people can monitor their own health at home. These sensors will provide real-time information for days on end—meaning smartwatches and wristbands might soon be a thing of the past.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Rise of the (Nearly) Invisible Wearable.”