HERE

A LIDAR map of a road in Michigan created by Here, the mapping company owned by Nokia.

The future landscape of the autonomous car industry is beginning to take shape with the impending acquisition of Nokia’s mapping software, Here, which already has a focus on “humanised driving.”

German companies Audi, BMW, and Daimler are reported to be making a deal with Nokia to buy the mapping software for more than $2.7 billion.

With this software, these automakers would be positioning themselves to compete in a market soon to be flooded with autonomous taxis by Uber and Google, and be able to offer comparable or premium autonomous driving products. Apple is also reportedly building their car, supported by their hires of a robotic car expert and senior executive from Chrysler, and ex-Tesla designers. (Not to mention potentially having the most-used map data in the world.)

It's also worth noting that Audi has already been developing its own autonomous, or "piloted," cars. In April, an Audi A7 named "Jack" drove a 550-mile span from Silicon Valley to Las Vegas, although the underlying map program wasn't made clear. Another company, Cruise Automation, announced a product that adds driverless capabilities to specifically the Audi A4 or S4, that works on certain California highways.

A robust map data set is crucial to operating an autonomous car--if the car doesn’t know where to go, it can’t go anywhere. Nokia identified this early on, and has already used its LIDAR-equipped cars to create high-definition maps of certain roads and highways, accurate down to 20 centimeters, according to the company. Their LIDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) system features 32 lasers mounted on a car, concurrently collecting 700,000 data points per second at distances of more than 200 feet. (Think the Terminator of remote mapping cars.)

Here's a look at what Here LIDAR data looks like, when put to use in a city like Philadelphia:

Nokia's Here has already used this to maps streets in Silicon Valley, Michigan, France, and Germany, which they announced would be made public yesterday. They’ve also announced a partnership with Mcity, the University of Michigan’s 32-acre faux city solely populated by autonomous vehicles.

Nokia’s Here is is far more accurate than even Google’s Street View car (or Trekker or Trolley or Snowmobile). And Uber, while it recently acquired Bing’s mapping services, has similar, albeit less robust, mapping data to Google. Uber was initially reported to be bidding on Nokia’s services, but dropped out a few weeks ago, according to Reuters.

The ridesharing company has a wealth of data from their drivers, but given that the whole point of the app is a decentralized marketplace for rides, don't expect your Uber driver to sport a LIDAR array anytime soon. Apple, on the other hand, also has mapping vans out on the road. All of which is to say: for companies looking to provide cars in our increasingly autonomous future, maps are a necessary cost of doing business — either making maps of their own from the ground up, or buying them.

A patient undergoing acupuncture

U.S. Navy via Flickr, CC by 2.0

The thought of having needles inserted into your body may sound stressful. But to those who regularly receive acupuncture treatments, it’s quite relaxing, though scientists haven’t really been sure why. Now researchers from Georgetown University have found that needles placed at just the right parts of the body interrupt the transmission of stress hormones—the most robust evidence yet to indicate that acupuncture’s positive effects go beyond just placebo.

“The benefits of acupuncture are well known by those who use it, but such proof is anecdotal. This research, the culmination of a number of studies, demonstrates how acupuncture might work in the human body to reduce stress and pain, and, potentially, depression,” said study author Ladan Eshkevari in a press release.

In the study, published recently in the journal Endocrinology, the researchers tested the effects of electroacupuncture, in which the needles carry a mild electric current, on stressed-out rats. They were targeting the stomach meridian point 36, which is located on the shin in humans, or behind the hind paw in rats. It’s considered in acupuncture to be one of the most powerful points on the body because it influences a pathway for chronic stress pathway called the hypothalamus pituitary adrenal axis.

When the researchers inserted needles at this point on rats that were stressed from cold, their stress hormone levels were much lower compared to those who did not receive the acupuncture treatment. Many drugs used to treat anxiety and depression tap into the same systems of hormones, bolstering the legitimacy of the findings.

If acupuncture works the same way in humans as it does in rats, it would be a promising alternative to medication; acupuncture may have fewer side effects and wouldn’t require so much tinkering with dosage. The researchers hope to test the mechanism in humans in future studies.

Listening

Sascha Kohlmann

Although there’s no doubt that music preferences change over time and are shaped by social factors like what our friends listen to and where we live, research has shown that our musical preferences is closely linked to our personality—from how conscientious to how neurotic we are.

But are there other psychological mechanisms at play? Surely there is an explanation that might explain why some songs have us scrambling to skip the next track while others trigger us to hit to the repeat button.

In a study published today in the journal PLOS ONE, a team of psychologists the University at Cambridge show that our thinking style plays a much bigger role than we had realized. Specifically, people with high levels of empathy typically have different preferences when it comes to music than those who are systemizers—that is, those who likes to analyze and understand the rules and patterns in the world.

In fact, whether a person skews toward one of the other “can be a better predictor of what music they like than their personality," said David Greenberg, a PhD student at Cambridge and the principle investigator of the study.

A team of researchers led by Greenberg conducted multiple studies with over 4,000 participants recruited primarily through the now defunct myPersonality, a Facebook app developed by the Cambridge University Psychometrics Centre that allowed users to take validated psychometric tests.

The app asked study participants to complete psychology-based questionnaires—the Empathy Quotient and NEO Personality Inventory-Revised—and then, at a later date, to rate 50 music excerpts. Researchers selected the excerpts from a library of 26 genres and sub-genres of music to minimize the chance that study participants would have any personal or cultural association with the songs. They then gave assessed musical preferences by calculating each participant’s scores for each of five MUSIC dimensions—Mellow, Unpretentious, Sophisticated, Intense, and Contemporary.

Researchers found that people who scored high on empathy preferred what researchers categorized as “mellow” music—such as R&B, soft rock, and adult contemporary tunes—“unpretentious” music—such as country, bluegrass, and folk—and “contemporary” music—which included everything from acid jazz to Euro pop. They disliked “intense” music, such as punk, hard rock, and heavy metal.

In contrast, people who scored high on systemizing liked intense music, but disliked mellow and unpretentious musical styles.

Researchers note that these similar correlations were found also found within a single genre of music. For example, when listening to rock music, empathizers preferred mellow, soft rock—rock ballads come to mind—while systemizers preferred intense—think shredded vocals and guitar solos that blow the windows out—hard rock.

When the researchers dug even deeper, they found those who scored high on empathy preferred music that had emotional depth. Those who scored high on systemizing preferred music with a high degree of cerebral depth and complexity.

Wherever you fall on the spectrum, there’s something for everyone. And chances are not everyone will like it.

Now C. Elegans can live twice as long

National Human Genome Research Institute via Wikimedia Commons

From the second we’re born, our cells are given their marching orders for how to grow, mature, and maintain our bodies. But at a certain point, the repairs become faulty, and we age and eventually die. Now a team of Korean researchers has found a way to modify a particular type of enzyme in roundworms to double their lifespan—and they suspect the same mechanisms might work in humans.

Caenorhabditis elegans, the roundworm in question, may not look much like humans since they measure just one millimeter in length, but a number of their biological processes are similar to ours. In the study, published this week in PNAS, the researchers turned their attention to a family of enzymes called RNA helicase. These enzymes are known to regulate RNA, which is found in every living cell to carry instructions from DNA to control protein synthesis and maintain cells. Though RNA helicase is well studied, researchers don’t know much about the role it plays in the aging process.

When the researchers suppressed one particular helicase, HEL-1, as well as a gene called daf-2, the mutated roundworms were not only more immune to environmental stresses of heat, cold and pathogenic bacteria, but also their lifespans were double that of wild roundworms.

They suspect HEL-1 plays a key role in how cells convert DNA to RNA, and even conscript other enzymes to do it too. "In contrast to the expectation that RNA helicases have general housekeeping roles in RNA metabolism, our findings reveal that the RNA helicase HEL-1 has specific roles in a specific longevity pathway,” the researchers write.

HEL-1 is found in many different types of organisms, including mammals—even humans. And while it’s not clear that helicases play the same role in human longevity, some evidence suggest that it could be. That could be particularly useful in treating neurological diseases that become more common with age like Alzheimer’s. But ultimately researchers hope that this work could lead to new ways to increase human longevity.

Macroscopic printout of the DNA model of the bunny and other shapes.

Erik Benson and Björn Högberg

3D printing on the nanoscale--which could lead to new methods of drug delivery--just became a lot closer to reality. Folding DNA into tiny 3D shapes usually requires manual adjustment, but now a research team has developed a new way of folding DNA that's done entirely by software. They've already tried it out by folding DNA into the shape of a miniature bunny figurine and other small shapes. They new, more efficient method was published today in Nature.

The structures that the team created are physiologically stable, meaning that they don’t degrade inside the body. The researchers are hoping they can be immediately tried as a new way to deliver drugs to the right place in the body.

The new printing method is based on a famous mathematical question from the early eighteenth century, known as “the seven bridges of Königsberg.” Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad in Russia) is sprawled in and around an island with seven bridges connecting the island with the rest of the city. The question asks if it’s possible to come up with a looped walking route that visits all four parts of the city by crossing each bridge once, but only once. Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician, found it wasn’t possible, and discovered what would come to be known as Eulerian circuits. This type of circuit, or loop, could only exist if the number of edges touching an object or area was even.

To create a 3D object out of DNA without tangling it, researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, used a similar approach: to route a single strand of DNA along the edges of a 3D computer graphic of an object--they used objects of varying complexity, including a scan of a ceramic rabbit figurine, a ball, and a human-like figure--without crossing the same edge twice. The computer algorithm found a route whenever possible, and when that wasn’t possible (i.e. when there were an odd number of vertices) it introduced “helper” edges.

Creating a 3D bunny using DNA

Erik Benson and Björn Högberg

This isn’t the first time scientists have constructed 3D objects using DNA -- its known as DNA origami--but this new method may present a more versatile and efficient design by allowing the process to be fully automated by a computer. Now, they need to find a way to create these figurines at a cheaper, more rapid pace, which would pave the way for their use in drug delivery.

Swarm of Locusts

Niv Singer/ Flickr CC By 2.0

Weather radar has picked up thousands of insects flying over Knox County, Texas, according to the National Weather Service of Norman, Oklahoma.

Rangers at Copper Breaks State Park in Quanah, Texas confirmed that the radar is picking up a large swarm of both grasshoppers and beetles. It is difficult to correlate a specific amount of insects to what the radar is seeing because it depends on the size and proximity of the insects as they fly, says Forrest Mitchell, Observations Program Leader at the National Weather Service of Norman, Oklahoma. They are swarming from the ground up to 2,500 feet, covering a distance of over 50 miles, he says.

“It’s fairly common during the warm season,” says Mitchell. “It’s a testament of the sensitivity of the radars we use.”

Andrew Maynard via Twitter

The gene editing technique CRISPR was launched from relative public obscurity to the mainstream today when #CRISPRfacts began trending on Twitter, quieting some of the hype surrounding a Wired story.

CRISPR does hold a lot of promise. Unlike previous gene editing techniques, the CRISPR-Cas9 system is so specific that it can quickly and cheaply change individual base pairs of DNA. It might one day remove antibiotic resistance genes from bacteria or help to clone woolly mammoths in elephant cells, but it likely won't be accomplishing anything quite so revolutionary anytime soon.

The Twitterstorm started when Daniel MacArthur, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and the Broad Institute, tweeted that Wired's August cover story may have gone too far. The story suggested CRISPR would change the world, from making designer babies to species-specific bio-weapons. Chris Dwan, also from the Broad Institute, replied to MacArthur with a joke using the hashtag, and Twitter took it from there.

You may recognize CRISPR from when it set off a bioethical firestorm this spring after Chinese scientists published results claiming that they had edited the genome of human embryos. Though their experiments were not entirely successful, scientists called for a ban on using the technique on humans.

There's still a lot of CRISPR kinks to be worked out, and the hashtag actually helped to turn down the hype surrounding the technique a little.

Here's a collection of some of our favorites:

Windbot Concept Drawing

NASA/JPL-Caltech

This geometric robot could one day explore the skies of gas giants. To steer itself, its sides might pop out and spin around.

Jupiter and Saturn are two of the least explored worlds in our solar system. As gas giants, they have no surfaces to land on, and their atmospheres are crushingly heavy and violently windy.

The Galileo spacecraft dropped one probe into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 1995; after an hour, it was never heard from again. In 2016, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will become the second spacecraft to orbit Jupiter after Galileo, to see whether it has a rocky core. Saturn, too, has only been explored by flyby missions and one orbiter. The data those spacecraft send back is not quite as detailed as flying through their skies and tracking their crazy weather patterns. For that, NASA scientists are designing ‘windbots’.

For now, windbots are just a concept. NASA’s not really sure exactly what the bots will look like or how they’ll work, but the team has got some ideas. They’d be designed to stay aloft in the atmospheres of gas giants, without relying on balloons or wings. Instead, they might have sections that pop out and spin to create lift, sort of like a dandelion seed.

To generate the power it needs to stay afloat and collect atmospheric science data, windbot might bob around on wind turbulence, using it to charge a battery the way some wristwatches are powered by shaking, says a NASA press release.

With a $100,000 grant from NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program, roboticist and principle investigator Adrian Stoica plans to refine windbot’s design and test a prototype.

Smoke Rings From A Bottle

Photograph by Jonathon Kambouris

You don’t have to take up bad habits to blow smoke rings. On the YouTube channel DaveHax, life hacker David Haxworth simply uses a balloon, an incense stick, and a plastic bottle. “I first saw the homemade smoke rings idea on a TV show when I was a child, and I remember thinking it looked like great fun,” Haxworth says. The balloon propels puffs of smoke through the bottle’s mouth, creating picture-perfect smoke rings—no inhalation required.

Stats

• Time: 10 minutes
• Cost: $4
• Difficulty: Easy

Materials

• 16.9 oz. plastic bottle
• Balloon
• Incense stick

Instructions

1. Use scissors to cut off the bottom of a dry, empty plastic bottle, while taking care not to slice your skin on the sharp plastic.
2. Cut off and discard the narrow mouth of a balloon. Carefully stretch the balloon over the bottom of the bottle until it’s taut.
3. Light an incense stick with a match or lighter, and then blow it out. Hold the smoky end inside the bottle, covering the opening.
4. Once the bottle has filled with smoke, remove the stick. Lightly tap on the balloon end of the bottle to produce a smoke ring.

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

JPL-Caltech/UCLA

A diagram showing the design of NASA and UCLA's Wi-Fi chip.

Our modern world rests squarely on the shoulders of wireless communications; phones, computers and wearables all rely on a select few wireless protocols, like Wi-Fi. Upgrading one of these protocols means a potential upgrade to the way the world interacts.

A researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, Adrian Tang, working with UCLA professor M.C. Frank Chang, has developed a Wi-Fi chip for use in mobile electronics that uses 100 times less power than traditional receivers. This could extend battery life in nearly every device that uses Wi-Fi, and Tang is trying to focus on the expanding market for wearables.

To do something on the internet (like view this website), your smartphone generates and sends a signal out to your router, and your router generates and sends a new signal back to it. Tang’s Wi-Fi chip reflects a constant signal sent by a specialized router, instead of generating its own original signal. Data is imprinted on the signal when it’s reflected, so all the heavy lifting is essentially done on the router’s side.

“Because you’re only imprinting on a Wi-Fi signal, you’re not generating it, you don’t need power,” Tang said.

Low energy doesn’t mean slow, either. The researchers claim to have reached speeds of 330 megabits per second when transferring files with this technique, which outpaces a majority of consumer Wi-Fi routers. (In more real-world terms, 330 megabits per second is just over 40 MB/s.) They did this test with a mock wearable, built in their lab.

Tang says that the biggest difficulty was isolating the specific signal that was reflected back, because the initial signal is also being reflected by every surface in the room.

“When you send a signal to the room, the whole room reflects back to you,” Tang said. “So you need to figure out what’s coming from the wearable and what’s coming from the background and get rid of the background.”

That’s where the specialized router hardware comes in, to not only send the signal, but be able to read what data was being reflected back with new information. While the technology bears some resemblance to RFID, according to Tang, it's actually much different in its long-distance operation.

NASA and UCLA have joint ownership of the idea and are in talks with a commercial partner to bring the technology to market, but they also see this technology being used to conserve energy in space.

These real-life X-Men are from ComicCon--and are probably missing the mutations in question.

Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons

Steven Pete can’t feel pain. Timothy Dreyer has bones several times thicker than the average human. Both conditions were caused by a combination of genetic mutations. While both conditions have negatively impacted the men’s health at various points in their lives, researchers at pharmaceutical companies are paying through the roof to have access to their DNA, and that of others like them. If the researchers can develop drugs that mimic the effects of the mutations, they may be able to create treatments to solve some of the most challenging disorders, according to an article published today in Bloomberg.

Take, for example, the pharmaceutical company Amgen. By looking at the effects of Dreyer’s thick-bone mutation, they reasoned, they could find a treatment for osteoporosis. People with sclerosteosis, the condition that results from high bone density, are missing a protein that inhibits how thick bones can grow. So the researchers tried hundreds of antibodies over several years to develop a drug that blocks the protein in osteoporosis patients to help their bones grow thicker, reversing the effects of the disease. They tested the drug on mice that went into space (where bones usually lose density) and it worked well--the mice that were given the drug gained bone mineral density while those who were not lost it. Now they are in the final stages of human trials that seem similarly promising.

Genentech has also used genetic information from patients who can’t feel pain to create better painkillers--a market worth $18 billion per year, Bloomberg notes. Some painkillers are addictive, have dangerous side effects, or aren’t potent enough to deal with severe pain, so finding one that stops regulating a sodium channel that Pete’s genes don’t regulate could allow Genentech to create a more perfect painkiller.

For patients like Pete and Dreyer, pharmaceutical companies aren’t creating treatments to reduce the negative effects of their mutations. From an economic perspective, this makes sense--millions of people have osteoporosis, for example, but just 100 patients have sclerosteosis, and the market is just too small. But some patients with these sorts of mutations still offer their genetic information, in exchange for a fair amount of money, and often in the hope that others can still benefit.

Testing a Snotbot with Snotshot, the team's custom whale-blow simulator.

Courtesy Ocean Alliance

Whales are awesome and important. But because they are so big and sensitive to sound, researchers have a hard time collecting all the data they need without freaking them out. Now, whale biologists from the nonprofit Ocean Alliance have teamed up with students from the Olin College of Engineering to create drones that can capture one of the most important biological materials--a whale’s snot--without disturbing the animals. They’ve launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund their research.

Whale “blow” is the combination of mucus, or snot, water, and tissue that may sound very gross, but is essential for whale biologists--from it, they can tell if the whales are stressed or pregnant based on their hormones, check their snot to see if they are infected with any viruses, or gather tissue samples for DNA analysis.

Normally, the process to collect whale blow requires the researchers to travel next to the whales in boats and extend a 10 foot-long pole over the blowhole in the hope of capturing some of the ejected substance. This is very annoying and disruptive to the whales, as the researchers note in their Kickstarter video in which they harass Sir Patrick Stewart, a friend of the founder of Ocean Alliance.

Just imagine a whale instead of the "snotshot"

Courtesy Ocean Alliance

So it seems much easier to deploy a remote-controlled drone that could follow the whale and be there to collect samples as they are blasted into the air. By flying 10 feet above the surface of the ocean, the researchers calculated, the drones would be far enough from the whales that they wouldn't disturb them. Typically, robots don’t do so well with seawater, but the engineering students found a way to cover the sensitive electric parts of the drone with a light plastic shell. The drones collect the mucus samples with a spongy material typically used in hospitals to soak up bodily fluids, as Beta Boston reports.

The researchers are still waiting on the go-ahead from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Marine Fisheries Service, but in the meantime they've tested their flying drones with a floating robot that mimics the whale’s blow. They plan to make three trips later this year down to Patagonia in Argentina, to the Sea of Cortez in Mexico, and to the Frederick Sound of Southeast Alaska--provided that they get the proper approvals and funding they need.

You can visit the project’s Kickstarter page (and see Sir Patrick Stewart’s cameo in the video) here.

Coral Reef

USFWS Headquarters/ Flickr CC By 2.0

Corals are great at absorbing toxic heavy metals, which is one of the many reasons they are dying off. Now researchers have created synthetic corals that use these same properties to soak up the pollutants instead.

Industrial and manufacturing processes release heavy metals such as mercury and lead into the ocean. Not only can it kill wildlife, but it can lead to terrible physical and cognitive side effects in humans who consume fish that have absorbed the pollutants as well. In a study published in the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, researchers at Anhui Jianzhu University in China created nano-sized, coral-like structures that use aluminum oxide to absorb mercury out of the water.

Synthetic Coral-Like Nanostructure

Elsevier

Aluminum oxide has been used before, often in a powdery form or hollow tube shape, to remove pollutants from the water. However, those structures clumped together upon absorption, so they were not as efficient at using their surface area. Instead of grouping together, the new structures are made of nano-sized discs that are self-curling and porous like coral or a plastic loofah, which optimizes their surface area and enhances the absorption properties. The synthetic coral was able to pull 2.5 times more mercury from water than previous aluminum oxide structures.

This is not the first time synthetic corals have been made to solve an environmental issue. Since corals also house more biodiversity than any other shallow-water ecosystem, as they die off, tons of other organisms go with them. To solve this problem, Alex Goad, a designer in Melbourne, Australia created Modular Artificial Reef Structure (MARS), a giant ceramic and concrete reef that snaps together like LEGOS. It won a 2015 Popular Science Invention Award

“Materials that mimic biological adsorbents like coral have potentially huge applications." said lead author of the study Xianbiao Wang in a press release. "We hope our work provides inspiration for more research into the development of materials that mimic biological organisms."

I drew a comic, and while I was writing a post for it, realized I had written another comic. So there you have it. What began as a post about Pluto has turned into a 3 page series about Pluto. Enjoy page one!

Future Soldier

Graham Murdoch

Equipment upgrades will give soldiers an advantage on the battlefield of tomorrow.

Intelligence

Augmented reality combat goggles—such as those being developed by Israeli Defense Forces and for the U.S. Special Operations Command’s Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS)—will record everything a soldier sees. They will also provide an information overlay: The projected data could include navigation instructions, intelligence on enemy sites, and real-time translations of local languages.

Protection

Next-generation body armor will use layered scales, like those on a fish, for light, flexible protection. Scientists from MIT and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are designing a material that would fuse hard plates to a soft, pliable substance, just as actual fish scales anchor to tissue. The eventual armor could be fine-tuned to specific roles, with more scales on the chest and back, and fewer at the joints.

Performance

Exoskeletons will not resemble Iron Man’s, at least not in the near term. Instead, DARPA’s Warrior Web program is developing an exo light and agile enough to fit underneath a soldier’s clothing. Using springs and actuators at joints, the suit, which is now in tests, could help soldiers carry extra weight and boost their endurance. The goal? “A four-minute mile,” says Lt. Col. Joe Hitt, the former program manager.

Black Hornet "Pocket Drone"

Richard Watt/MOD

Surveillance

The PD-100 Black Hornet is an 18-gram “pocket drone” recently tested by the U.S. Army. Made by Prox Dynamics, the hummingbird- size craft can be carried in a pocket for fast deployment and fly about a mile, beaming back full-motion video and snapshots as it goes.

Ammunition

Self-guided bullets use tiny sensors and fins to change direction midflight. In February DARPA’s Extreme Accu­racy Tasked Ordnance (EXACTO) program ran live-fire tests with modified .50 caliber bullets (popular among snipers). The bullets swerved to hit moving or accelerating targets.

Firepower

With more than 100 million made, the AK-47 accounts for one-fifth of all the world’s firearms. It’s a good bet that its replacement, the AK-12, will appear on future battlefields. Its upgrades include an optical scope mount, swappable barrels, grenade-launcher attachment, and telescopic folding stock. In burst mode, it can fire at a rate of 1,000 rounds per minute.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of Popular Science, as part of our Future Of War feature. Check out the rest of the feature here.

The genome-editing enzyme known as CAS9 at work on a strand of DNA.

Credit: Nishimasu et al, 2014

Genetics researchers are really excited about CRISPR/Cas9, an enzyme that has made it easier than ever for scientists to target a particular strand of DNA, snip part of it out, and replace it. And though its use in humans is still in its infancy, many experts predict that engineering the human genome is inevitable.

Tests on human genes are expensive and controversial, and no one is quite sure whether gene changes will have their desired effect. Now the Canadian startup Deep Genomics claims it has developed a computer program that can play out the different possible effects of genetic manipulation based on computers’ deep learning.

Understanding how genes work is complicated because they exist in a dialogue with other genes, turning each other off or on and generating different molecules for the body to use. Researchers have been trying to understand these relationships to better treat medical conditions from cancer to schizophrenia, but the web seems to be too complicated for us to understand. That’s where deep learning comes in—using a huge dataset of people’s genetic information with its various mutations, Deep Genomics’ software can learn how cells read their genetic code and what molecules they make as a result.

This information would be just as useful for precision medicine treatments as for genetic editing: “We can use our system to determine the efficacy of therapies, whether it’s a drug, or a CRISPR/Cas-9 gene editing system, whatever it is, our technology allows us to predict the effects of those modifications,” Deep Genomics founder Brendan Frey told Motherboard.“That’s a very difficult thing to do computationally; most of the approaches are experimental."

Deep Genomics, which just launched this week, isn’t the only company using big data in the commercial genetics realm--23andMe is also developing predictive software. Deep Genomics’ program only looks at mutations that affect the process of splicing, in which new genes are inserted into DNA, which is not the only form of mutation.

So far, as the Motherboard story notes, it doesn’t look like the work conducted by Deep Genomics’ founders before its launch is any better than its competitors'. But as scientists are able to better decipher genes for treatments and the use of CRISPR becomes less controversial, genetic software, whether the Deep Genomics algorithm or others, will doubtless become important in precision medicine and beyond

Hypersciences

A head-on view of the projectile Hyperscience will use to bore into the Earth's crust.

It’s no secret—there’s a lot of energy held just a few thousand feet under Earth’s surface. To harness any sizable amount of our planet’s underlying geothermal energy for steam power, we would have to bore more than two miles into the crust. Unfortunately, the current drilling process is prohibitively expensive for most interested parties, ranging from $5 to 20 million depending on the depth desired.

Mark Russell, CEO of Hypersciences, wants to change that. His method? Repeatedly firing projectiles into the Earth’s crust, which Russell claims is ten times faster than traditional drilling. He received a patent last year for his projectile-based system, and was recently funded about one million dollars by Shell’s GameChanger program to continue his research, according to GeekWire.

The process works by loading a projectile with a special abrasive core into a ram accelerator, which serves as both the chamber and barrel of this ‘earth gun.’ Russell’s design pumps gases into the ram accelerator, which then ignite, pressurizing the chamber as the projectile passes through. This sends the projectile into the ground at almost 4,500 miles per hour (2 km/s). At that speed, the projectile obliterates whatever unfortunate rock or sediment it hits, and the refuse is sucked back out of the hole. The projectile itself is left fairly general in the patent, but Russell postulates that it could be tipped with a plastic explosive to add more drilling power. Another option is to embed sensors to gauge temperature and exact depth.

US Patent Office

A diagram detailing Mark Russell's novel drilling system.

The ram accelerator is fired over and over again, with multiple projectiles, until the desired depth is achieved; multiple ram accelerators can fire simultaneously for wider drilling or in tandem with traditional drills as well, according to the patent. Russell claims his technique saves money on tool wear and breakage, as well as the extended time traditional drilling takes. However, there are still questions surrounding how the technology will work in practice, and also what affect repeated concussive blasts could have on the sub-terrainian environment, groundwater, and geology.

The Department of Energy says that a geothermal station operating at peak levels could provide sustainable energy to 41,000 average U.S. homes. In other outside-the-box ideas, the DOE is also exploring the use of high-powered lasers to maximize the heat retained from geothermic wells.

Jeep Cherokee

FCA

Miller and Valasek plan to release a paper on their work and present it at the Black Hat conference, which focuses on digital security issues, in August. The vulnerability, according to the Wired article where the hack was revealed, is in the Uconnect system used by Fiat Chrysler in several models. The company has released a patch for the vulnerability.

Of course, Jeeps aren’t the only connected cars on the road today. And in the near future, cars will also communicate with each other and a city’s infrastructure, like smart traffic lights. At the Intelligent Transportation Systems World Congress in Detroit last fall, experts were predicting that 80% of vehicles on the road would have connected technology by 2020.

How worried should we drivers be? Jim Smith of Ixia, which provides network security for businesses including those in the automotive industry, says this kind of security breach isn’t a big worry today, but it could be in the next three or so years. He says the responsibility for data security in the connected car is on the manufacturers’ shoulders. “Security works best when it's built into every layer,” Smith said in a phone interview. “The industry is trying to add this as an extra software layer, and it’s not working.”

The potential benefits of connected vehicles are many, like fewer accidents, better traffic flow, and improved fuel economy. But the potential for having your car hacked is real, as Miller and Valasek showed. While the risk is low today, “Auto manufacturers have to make sure consumers know their data and cars are protected,” Smith said. “The need to communicate that security and safety needs to be their top priority.”

Senators Edward J. Markey (D-Mass) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn) agree. They’ve introduced legislation known as the SPY Act, for Security and Privacy in Your Car. It would require not only protection against vehicles being hacked but also establish requirements for data privacy.

F-35 Lightning II

Graham Murdoch

American air dominance has long rested on staying technologically ahead of the enemy. With high-speed stealth design, advanced avionics, and integrated computing, the fifth-generation F-35 Lightning II is built to keep that edge for the United States and its allies. The problem—aside from a spate of cost overruns, malfunctions, and delays—is that other countries are no longer far behind. The Chinese J-31 Gyrfalcon 1 resembles the F-35 not just in looks, but also in speed and strike capabilities. The Russian T-50 PAK FA is a fifth-generation fighter jet whose capabilities parallel those of the U.S. F-22. As more countries reach the technology frontier, the advantage gained by any one of them diminishes. And so military planners are looking for another edge: unmanned craft. That means the F-35 could earn a different distinction: As the U.S. Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said in April, it “should be, and almost certainly will be, the last manned strike fighter aircraft the Department of the Navy will ever buy or fly.”

The Replacements

X-47B Over Edwards Air Force Base

Chris Neill, U.S. Air Force, via Wikimedia Commons

A Stealth Hunter

Sometime in late 2014 or early 2015, China reportedly tested its top-secret Divine Eagle. Built by the “black project” division of the Shenyang Aircraft Corporation, the drone aircraft, as seen in leaked drawings, has a unique double-body design, which can carry up to seven radars of varying types. That mix of sensors could allow it to detect and hunt down stealth planes (such as the F-35) at long range.

This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of Popular Science, as part of our Future Of War feature. Check out the rest of the feature here.