165 degrees is a temperature at which you might consider setting your oven. It's the safe minimum cooking temperature for any number of foods. And it's also what the air felt like today in Bandar Mahshahr, Iran.

The heat index there reached the stunning height of 165 degrees Fahrenheit a combination of the heat (115 degrees Fahrenheit) with incredibly high humidity levels. The dew point, a measure of the moisture in the air reached 90 degrees, a very unusual and very high number that indicated there was a lot of moisture in the air.

People tend to feel the heat more when there is high humidity because the moisture in the air prevents sweat from evaporating. The evaporation of sweat from the skin helps the body to cool. Without it, humans can feel like it is much hotter than the temperature on the thermometer outside. The National Weather Service says that at a heat index above 125 degrees"heat stroke is very likely". Earlier this summer, in Pakistan, a heat wave killed over 1,200 people. The temperatures in the Middle East are expected to remain high for the next several days prompting some countries to order mandatory days off in an effort to keep people out of the heat.

The heat index in Bandar Mahshahr is the second highest ever recorded according to the Washington Post. They say the highest was recorded in 2003 in Saudi Arabia, where the heat index reached 178 degrees Fahrenheit.

There's a chill in the air

Michael Himbeault/FlickrCC by 2.0

It's the height of summer here in the Northern Hemisphere and in many places that means that while temperatures are soaring outside, inside many office buildings they're plummeting.

Why so chilly? It turns out that many offices set their thermostat to a comfort standard that hasn't been updated since the 1960's, the Mad Men era of male-dominated office spaces. A new study published in Nature Climate Change observed the physiology of 16 women working in a typically chilly office and found that their metabolic rate was lower, suggesting to the authors that women in offices might not need the lower temperatures to be comfortable indoors.

There are a few caveats, the largest of which being that this is a very small study with only 16 people, and looked at a select subset of the working population; young adult women.The researchers measured participants' skin temperatures as they worked in an office, and also recorded if they were sweating or shivering, both key signs that the body is trying to regulate temperature.

But the idea that the authors put forward isn't that all offices should change their thermostats to a higher temperature, but rather that offices should take a look at what their employees actually want and need to be productive instead of relying on an outdated comfort standard. The study (again, with a very small sample size) found the comfort zone for women is between 73.76 degrees Fahrenheit and 78.98 degrees Fahrenheit.

There has been plenty of anecdotal evidence that women feel the chill more acutely than their male counterparts. And while making a rising percentage of the working population more comfortable at work should be enough to get employers to change the thermostat, there are other advantages to turning down the air conditioning.

A widely referenced study by Cornell University Alan Hedge in 2004 found that upping the temperature by a few degrees from 68 degrees Fahrenheit to 77 degrees Fahrenheit in an office reduced errors and increased productivity on typing tasks. There's also the economic fact that using electricity-guzzling air conditioners in the summer can jack up an office's power bill, not to mention the fact that all that energy comes at an environmental cost. The Department of Energy estimates that about 100 million tons of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere each year is due to air conditioning in American homes.

Do you wish you could visit Mars, but aren't quite prepared to die there? Well, now you can at least visit the Red Planet safely in your mind. A new video from the European Space Agency takes us on an imaginary helicopter ride through the Atlantis Chaos region of Mars.

If you want to know how the region got such a cool name, check out this topographic map:

Topographic Map Of Terra Sirenum In Mars' Southern Hemisphere

ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGA)

Atlantis Chaos is that rough region right at the center.

See that really busy region in the center, in blue? That’s Atlantis Chaos. It’s located in the Atlantis basin—a crater so old (like, 4 billion years old) that its edges have eroded.

The Chaos region measures just 105 by 90 miles, but long ago, the entire basin is thought to have been connected to other basins, forming the hypothetical Eridania lake. If it existed, the lake would have been huge, covering about 385,000 square miles.

In the video below, you can see channels that may have been carved by water, as well as some of Atlantis Chaos’ hundreds of peaks and mesas, wrinkly cliffs, craters, and cracks that may have formed from ancient tectonic activity.

The map and the video are made from images taken by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter in December 2008, February 2009, and January 2014.

Connected cars promise better safety and security, but, like anything connected to a network, they can be susceptible to attacks from hackers.

And General Motors Companyis just the latest automaker in the news due to cyber security concerns.

Security researcher—or "white hat" hacker—Samy Kamkar has posted a video on YouTube showing him using a device called "OwnStar," which allows an unauthorized user to access some of the functionality of GM's OnStar system.

During the demonstration, he is able to unlock, remote start, and track the vehicle.

Fortunately, driving away isn't on the menu, as the device can't mimic a key fob. Gaining access to the vehicle requires an attacker to be near a user who opens their OnStar app, but the location of the actual vehicle is unimportant.

The video above includes a basic breakdown of how the attack works.

According to Kamkar, the exploit works indefinitely, and is possible due to a flaw in the mobile software, not the vehicle itself. And while he is set to present his findings during the Def Con hacking conference—scheduled for August 6 through 9 in Las Vegas—he says GM engineers have been proactive in working to solve the problem.

The news comes on the heels of a Fiat Chrysler Automobiles recall of 1.4 million vehicles that was prompted after Wired magazine demonstrated hackers taking control of a 2014 Jeep Cherokee.

And it's only a matter of time before the next vehicle hack is revealed.

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Deep Graffiti

Kirk Kaiser

Software developer Kirk Kaiser created Deep Graffiti using Google's DeepDream code to trick Facebook's face recognition program, DeepFace.

In the future we may have to use neural networks to defeat neural networks.

The popularity of neural networks has skyrocketed ever since Google released the source code last month to part of its artificial neural network system dubbed DeepDream. The artificial intelligence program is what Google’s search engine uses to sort and categorize images online. The program learns to do this as it sifts through thousands of labeled images such as “starfish,” “bird,” or “banana,” and begins to recognize each distinct thing. The program can also be used to generate images of its own, however it often gets confused and creates beautiful and sometimes frightening chimeras of slug dogs, bird cars, and amoeba-like houses.

Although we are in the beginning stages of this technology, neural networks are already very effective at categorizing and tracing. This has software developer Kirk Kaiser wary about the future of privacy. So he conducted an experiment on whether he could throw a wrench into Facebook’s face recognition system, DeepFace by distorting his image using DeepDream.

“Every time somebody takes a photo of you or you upload a photo of yourself, it’s added to the training data set that exists in the ether of who and what you are,” says Kaiser. “The general idea is to corrupt the data set that exists on us and get back a little bit of control.”

Kaiser used DeepDream to alter an image of himself as many people did last month, and uploaded it to Facebook. He found that even though the image was distorted, DeepFace could still recognize him by his bushy beard. When he uploaded the distorted image, it pointed to his beard and tagged it, "Kirk Kaiser." He then used an image of a randomized tile of his face as well as an image of a tree and ran DeepDreams over them and another open source neural network meant to detect age and gender. This generated a tiled image of tree bark and warped faces splashed with neon green and hot pink. DeepFace was confused by this and recognized around 92 distinct faces in the image, none of which were Kaiser’s. He calls his code Deep Graffiti.

Kirk Kaiser

Tagging an image altered with Deep Graffiti to trick Facebook's DeepFace

The final step of Kaiser’s experiment was to tag the faces as his own to corrupt DeepFace’s data on him. However, whether this action is truly corrupting DeepFace’s ability to recognize Kaiser’s face or simply adding extra data to recognize him even with noise is still unknown.

“It's going to take some more experimentation to get to the point where we can tell whether we're ruining the data set or not,” says Kaiser. “It also brings up another question of when an image stops being me.”

As machine learning through neural networks advances, it may become more difficult to control our data and have privacy. As shown by Kaiser, our best defense might be a good offense where we use neural networks to trick one another and fight fire with fire.

iPhone 5s

Kelvinsong, Wikimedia Commons

Apple isn’t content with just selling you their phones—they want to be your carrier, too. Business Insider reported today that Apple is secretly testing a mobile virtual network operator service (MVNO), a “virtual” cell service that switches between cell towers depending on the strongest signal. The company has allegedly been in contact with telecommunications companies for years, and would plan to launch the service in both the United States and Europe.

This would allow Apple sell the whole package, phone and service, rather than having an iPhone be sold in conjunction with a carrier’s plan. While it’s far down the line, at least 5 years away, and might not even come to fruition, Apple’s history shows this has always been in the works. In 2006, the company filed for a MVNO patent, and extended it in 2011 adding the capability to work with all carriers.

The Apple SIM, released in 2014, is a similar concept, but scaled down for limited use on cellular iPads. The Apple SIM is only partnered with EE, GigSky, and T-Mobile right now.

This service has been ruminated about before, and Apple is known for playing hardball with phone companies. (Remember their exclusive Cingular deal for the first iPhone?) However, if Apple is using the cell towers of the companies it's looking to shirk, the carriers are bargaining from a place of strength.

Apple could be making this move to have more control over the content it sends to iPhones. Apple has already made a deal with T-Mobile so that any data used streaming Apple Music won't count against the user's data plan. This is a long-term strategy for T-Mobile, which they call "Music Freedom," but Apple may want to offer this service for all its listers. There are net neutrality concerns with Music Freedom, however, and any move towards this kind of service be Apple would face the same assertions.

And it wouldn’t be a forward-looking tech story without Google and Facebook. Google, once only concerned with searching the internet, has already launched Project Fi, their Wi-Fi and MVNO service that works with the Nexus 6 phone. Their concept works the same way, switching between T-Mobile, Sprint, or Wi-Fi based on which connection is strongest. They’re also expanding the roots of Google Fiber, their high-speed internet service, and Project Loon for wireless internet around the world.

Facebook should also be considered when looking at the future of communications, as their Internet.org plans get off the ground. Facebook Messenger has integrated voice and video calls into the standalone app, and report 700 million users on their service each month. (However, there aren’t any stats on how many people call through Facebook. I’ve never gotten a Facebook call, and would be weirded out if I did.) Internet.org also gives 1 billion people internet access in 17 countries, according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, with Facebook as a mainstay of the service.

These curly locks are in danger.

Janine Dupree via Flickr, CC by 2.0

Those of us with unruly, curly manes are constantly searching for ways to tame them. For those who choose to straighten their hair using heat (applied with gadgets like flatirons), getting the desired look without singeing the hair into an amorphous mass is difficult, and the various products that claim to protect hair are a font of misinformation. One curly-haired engineer from Purdue University and her team have taken on the problem; the researchers are presenting their first paper on the heat capacity for different types of hair today at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers' International Design Engineering Technical Conference.

Put simply, hairs are curly or not because of their chemical structure, influenced by genes and the distribution of the protein keratin. To make a curly hair straight, you apply heat to break the chemical bonds. Apply too much, either through an iron that’s too hot or styling it too often, and the bonds can be permanently broken, leading to fried hair that can’t regain its natural shape. Lots of products claim to protect hair from this frying, but the formulas are highly variable and ineffective.

The Purdue team has received funding from several hair care companies to fund their work. The Washington Post reports that the researchers will analyze how heat moves through individual strands of hair and categorize hair by the tightness of its curls, not by the ethnic group from which the hairs were plucked, as other researchers (and hair care companies) have done in the past. Reid hypothesizes that the amount of heat a hair can take without frying will depend on the hair’s texture, even within ethnicities.

"The hope is that a person could make reference to a chart that we can put in their hands, so that they’re clearly able to identify their own hair type, and say 'All right, here is the range of temperatures that have been empirically validated to not damage my hair,'" Reid told the Washington Post. Eventually her team may evaluate the various products that claim to protect hair from heat, but that’s a secondary objective—first, she just wants to better understand the chemicals that make her hair curly.

We have a funny relationship with Pluto. Now that the breathtaking New Horizons flyby is complete, Pluto has already begun to slink back into the inky dark. Never fear, no doubt as all the New Horizons data is downloaded, we'll be hearing more about our favorite dwarf planet in the days, months, and years ahead.

Beach View

Jill Shomer

Popular Science Managing Editor Jill Shomer captured the moon still hanging out at sunrise on Fire Island, July 31, 2015.

The only way to really see a blue moon is after an event like a volcanic eruption or a wildfire pollutes the sky. Particles of ash 1 micron thick — which are about 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair — can block red light, letting blue light pass through so the moon appears blue.

That wasn’t the case for most viewers of the blue moon on Friday, July 31, who likely saw nothing more than the beauty that is a typical full moon. That’s because a blue moon really just means that two full moons occurred in the same calendar month. This explanation comes from a 1946 Sky & Telescope article that attempted to (incorrectly) clarify how the Maine Farmer's Almanac defined a blue moon. The incorrect definition stuck, however. But the phrase itself dates back to Shakespearian times, when “once in a blue moon” just meant something that rarely ever happened. On average, blue moons only occur every 2.7 years, according to NASA. The next one isn’t until January 2018.

For this blue moon, Popular Science hosted a photo contest on Instagram asking readers to submit their best photographs that they took of the blue moon. The three winners are:

Apple

The Apple TV, which received its last hardware update in 2012.

Despite a rocky start, Apple will reportedly unveil their new iteration of the Apple TV this September, along with their annual line of iPhones. It’s about time; the last hardware update to the Apple TV was in 2012. That’s like 328 billion tweets ago. (~500 million tweets per day for 3 years.)

A lot has happened since 2012. We’ve seen a surge in competition for streaming boxes like the Roku 3 and Amazon’s Fire TV, as well as the emergence of streaming sticks, like the $35 dollar Chromecast.

There are some things that seem likely: an upgraded A8 processor, a new interface for home screen and an SDK to let developers make their own apps and games. But Apple is going to need a big win to make a splash in this market. Here are some things that we think would make the Apple TV a contender.

Fingerprint-based profiles

Early reports say that Apple is going to be including a Touch ID sensor in the new Apple TV remote. This could be an immediate home run, if it’s implemented correctly. If each user was able to make their own profile and home screen, unlocked based on their fingerprint, families wouldn’t have to worry about parental lock passcodes and roommates could each have their own unique account. Even better if you can add another Apple ID to a separate profile.

Siri, who knows TV

Apple touted Siri’s new knowledge of music during the Apple Music announcement in June. It lives up to the hype—Siri works really well with Apple’s robust library. If Apple were to integrate it with shows and movies available in their store, it could be a killer feature. Even better, if all that content were available in a subscription service like Apple Music, but for movies and television. “Siri, play me the best-rated episode of Seinfeld. Then ten more after that.”

4K Support

Apple is traditionally behind the curve on resolutions and pixel density, easily outmaneuvered and ever-reluctant to directly compete with the Android operating system’s carousel of hardware. (Example: the iPhone 6’s 750 x 1,334 screen vs the Samsung Galaxy S6’s 2,560 x 1,440 screen.) But in the streaming world, 4K support would be a nice surprise and make the design future-resistant, especially if it plans on waiting another 3 years for an update. The argument against 4K is that there isn’t a lot of 4K content out there right now. Netflix and YouTube are the biggest repositories of the ultra-high resolution video, and even they don’t seem to be pushing it on consumers.

Live TV

All the features listed above would be nice. People would like them once they own the Apple TV. But if we’re talking about driving people to buy a product, there’s no substitute for having available content. Amazon has learned that with the success of the Fire TV and Stick (the Fire TV had a 30 percent market share of streaming devices as of June). If Apple wants to make the new Apple TV a living room mainstay, it needs to make watching live TV easier and cheaper. It’s been reported that a TV service is coming, although won’t launch until later in the year, or even possibly next year.

Apple TV’s current lineup is fine. You can watch Netflix, the exclusive HBO deal was great for Game of Thrones fans, and even live sports are available through different packages. The broadcast new outlets are there, but it’s often pared-down clips of segments, and no live coverage means it’s not the place for breaking news. (That’s still the domain of the internet and broadcast.) The current services are stale now, and cord-cutters are looking towards live services like Sling TV, which grew by 150 percent from April to June 2015 (although that’s only from 100,000 to 250,000 subscribers). CBS CEO Les Moonves indicated that CBS would “probably” make a deal with Apple for their programming, according to Re/code, and has been in talks with Apple’s Eddy Cue.

The Apple idea behind this live TV seems to be a total replacement of network to premium television: from local programming to HBO. Apple has already shown that they want to get into the market of distributing content. Early reports say that Apple Music has 10 million subscribers, and Apple threw a considerable amount of marketing behind the product. Now it just needs to make a similar strategy play out with video to make the Apple TV a real success.

PatentYogi's Visualization Of The Hypersonic Airbus

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Crossing the Atlantic used to take months, but a new patent for Airbus for a hypersonic jet airliner wants to reduce that time to under five hours. Granted in the middle of last month, the patent --“Ultra Rapid Air Vehicle and Related Method for Aerial Locomotion”-- describes the outline of a plane powered by turbojets, ramjets, and a freakin’ rocket, all designed to help propel either 2 or 3 tons of cargo or 20 passengers at speeds of up to Mach 4.5, over distances of roughly 5,600 miles in three hours.

History has seen supersonic airliners before. Airbus’ patent mentions both the British Concorde, which operated from the 1970s to 2003, and Russia’s briefly flown Tupolev Tu-144. Both of these planes exceeded Mach 2, and both had their fair share of problems: on July 25th 2000, a Concorde airliner crashed, killing all 113 on board. The Tupolev Tu-144 crashed at its 1973 Paris Air Show debut, and had a wretched safety record after that.

Plane design has come a long way since the Cold War. Besides the poor safety record of the Tu-144, the other major obstacle to supersonic airliners was the sound--the United Kingdom even produced an anti-Concorde movement called “Citizens League Against The Sonic Boom” which was opposed to the plane. Indeed, when the Concorde operated, it flew primarily across the uninhabited seas. The hypersonic Airbus makes the leap from subsonic to supersonic speeds vertically, while climbing like a rocket, which should dissipate the sound before it reaches the ground.

In fact, the plane is perhaps best thought of not as an airliner, but as a suborbital rocket. We’ve seen some tentative designs like this before, as military vehicles taking marines into space and then back down again. Turbojets on the belly of the vehicle get the plane moving, but rocket power takes it vertical to its cruising altitude as the jets retract into the plane’s belly. Once high up, the ramjets take over, pulling the craft along at high speeds before it descends down.

The patent was spotted by YouTube user PatentYogi, who has a video complete with a rendering that helps to explain how the plane could work. Watch it below:

Screenshot

It's an incredible time to be alive for gamers. Yesterday, Valve CEO Gabe Newell kicked off The International 2015, a five-day e-sports tournament with a $18 million dollar pool. In the past five years, Dota 2, a multiplayer online battle area video game, has become the most lucrative e-sport ever. These tournaments lend immense credibility to the world of e-sports, even leading ESPN 2 to broadcast the finals of Blizzard’s Heroes of the Storm earlier this year.

The International 2015 is taking place now, and 16 teams will continue to battle it out until Saturday, August 8. The first place team will make more than $6 million dollars, which isn’t bad for a tournament where some of the best players can be 16 years old. The tournament takes place at the 17,000-seat Seattle Center in Seattle, Washington, but most people will be watching online.

YouTube/ Screenshot

A view of The International 2015 stage, as Evil Geniuses are about to play Complexity.

The easiest ways to watch the insanely addicting gameplay is on Twitch or Youtube. WatchESPN is also streaming the tournament, as well as Steam Broadcasting. At time of writing, the Twitch stream is being watched by about 190,000 people, and has 48 million total views—so there’s no doubt this is a huge event.

For those who might not be familiar with Dota 2, there’s a very helpful (and must less-viewed) newcomer stream, where two commentators will break down everything you might not understand. With Twitch’s comment section you can also ask questions about the game. Since the audience on the newcomer stream is so small, there’s a good chance the commentators will address your question during the livestream.

If you want a more communal experience, there are events and meetups all across the country to watch the tournament. If you want to see Dota 2 on the big screen, Fathom Events is hosting a 6-hour long livestream on Saturday at dozens of theaters across the United States. “Pubstomps” are also being held across the world, so could watch your favorite teams battle it out with a cold drink in your hand. There will be 53 in the United States, but even more in the “Russian Federation,” which will house 57 pubstomps. Those in Latvia, Zambia and Sri Lanka might have to travel, because only one is being held in each of those countries. Belarus will luckily have 5 locations.

You can also follow Dota 2 on Twitter or on Facebook.

New visual simulations give us a glimpse of what it might look like to see the world through bionic eyes.

Since the FDA’s approval of the world’s first bionic eye system, the Argus II, more and more people who were once blind can now see (more than 80 by March 2014, according to a study in Neuroscience Letters). Although researchers estimated that the vision would be close to a grainy black and white film with a visual acuity of 20/1260, as opposed to general healthy vision of 20/20, there wasn’t a very robust model to back this up. In a study published in Philosophical Transactions B researchers have created realistic video simulations of what restored sight might look like.

Retinal cells in our eyes called rods and cones covert light into electrical impulses that are sent to the brain. The loss of these cells through diseases such as macular degeneration is one of the main causes of vision loss. Two of the most promising vision restoration devices is electrical prosthesis and optogenetics.

Someone may undergo an very invasive procedure and their vision isn’t what they expected to get

The Argus II bionic eye system is the major electrical prosthesis device on the market. It uses a digital camera mounted to a pair of eyeglasses that act as the eye’s rods and cones to wirelessly sends visual data to a computer chip implanted on the side of the eye. This chip then activates a small array of electrodes implanted in the retina that stimulates retinal cells to convert that data into vision.

Argus II Retinal Prosthesis System

YouTube/ Screenshot

This stimulation may not be able to give full color vision, but it can show light and dark contrast, which is enough to begin to perceive objects in space. Optogenetics, on the other hand, is where proteins are inserted into the surviving retinal cells to make them more light-sensitive, essentially forcing them to do the job of the missing rods and cones. However, this technology has yet to be implanted in humans.

The team at University of Washington used data from optogenetics research as well as predictions based on the performance of patients who had received electrical prosthesis to create more accurate representations of restored sight. These new models show the potential distortions and difficulties that those who receive either the electrical prosthesis or optogenetics might have.

These things should come with a safety warning: fast moving objects may disappear entirely

There are around 20 different retinal cell types that send different kinds of visual information to the brain, such as where edges are on objects or light or dark spots. Since electrical prosthesis stimulates all of these cells broadly, it can lead to issues such as a fuzzy or an overall blurry image.

“If you play a movie on all of these cells they’d all have very different firing patterns, but when you blast them with implants they are all forced to dance the same dance,” says co-author of the study Ione Fine.

In optogenetics only one or two types of retinal cells are stimulated, which gives the image a strange edgy quality. Fast-motion object also streak and disappear since the cells can’t keep up temporally.

“These things should come with a safety warning: fast moving objects may disappear entirely,” says Fine.

Previous simulations to show what restored vision might look like used a “scoreboard model,” which is grid system where each retinal electrode produces a collection of dots. This shows the vision as a slightly overexposed greyscale image. However, patients performance never matched what the scoreboard model predicted, showing that it has not been an accurate representation of restored vision.

Different Vision Simulation Models

University of Washington

The image on the far left is a visualization of the scoreboard model, the center image is how one might see with electric prosthesis, and the far right image is how one might see with optogenetics.

Since bionic eye implants are extremely costly, these realistic simulations can help patients and their families to decide whether it is worth spending the money on the retinal implants, as well as go through all of the long surgeries required. In 2013 the Argus II costed about $100,000.

“I think the scoreboard model is very dangerous,” says Fine. “Someone may undergo an very invasive procedure and their vision isn’t what they expected to get.”

These simulations can also help researchers to better improve future implants.

“We can pin point very clearly what problems these are going to cause and how important they are, and what is more or less important to research.”

Human Torch Drone In Flight

Photos Courtesy of Emon Hassan / Thinkmodo

For the upcoming Fantastic 4 movie opening this weekend, viral marketing firm Thinkmodo created what appears to be a flying, burning Human Torch, just like the comic book superhero. Take a look at the takeoff:

And watch the full video here:

At the beginning of the video, a fireman carries the Human Torch frame (helpfully labeled “Johnny” and “Johnny Storm”), and sets it up on the launchpad. There are no visible motors or engines. Plenty of hobbyists are good at hiding the quadcopter rotors of their drone inside a larger body, but with this Human Torch, there was little room to hide the engines. Oh, and any engines it had would catch fire. So how did they do it?

By email, Thinkmodo co-founder Michael Krivicka explained to Popular Science how the Human Torch flew:

Until now, we have left it a mystery because we wanted viewers to figure out how we did it. The burning aircraft is actually not a self-powered drone. It is being pulled by one. You simply don’t see the cables because it is dark. We shot it so you wouldn’t see the drone pulling it. We originally tried to make each burning aircraft be remote-controlled and self-powered, but we never got it to work. Too many challenges and risk factors. Pulling it was the only way to achieve this effect.

Hollywood magic no more! This isn't a Human Torch drone, it's a Human Torch glider. Carrying the 60 ounce Human Torch is a DJI S1000, which can lift up to 35 lbs. Here’s a picture of the Human Torch with cables visible:

Human Torch Drone With Cables

Photos Courtesy of Emon Hassan / Thinkmodo

The flights took place at a training facility for fire fighters, many of whom were on hand to put out the burning Human Torch and the other pyrotechnics used in the video.

Update This post has been updated to include the model of the drone that carried the Human and the weight of the Human Torch used.

Lexus Hoverboard And Rider

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Lexus just unveiled what is by all appearances a working hoverboard. This concept was teased about way back in June. Every story about it comes with an obligatory reference to Back To The Future Part II, that 1989 film set in the distant and far-off future of 2015, which featured an iconic hoverboard chase scene. Here’s that hoverboard in action:

Later in the video, which is best thought of as a weird, high-concept advertisement, the hoverboard literally flies over a Lexus. Check that out:

So how does the hoverboard even work? Hoverboards have been faked before, but what Lexus is doing isn’t exactly a lie or a hoax. They made a real, working hoverboard, and that’s what’s on display here. It’s just an incomplete truth. Lexus also made a skatepark with magnetic rails buried underneath, which makes the whole thing possible. The mechanism is based on the concept that when magnets have opposite poles, they repel each other and force a space between them.

To their credit, in the “making of” video about the hoverboard, Lexus shows the magnetic rail, and the 403-day-long design process it took to make the board and the park work. This wasn’t new science: as Brian Fung at the Washington Post notes, “ this technology has actually been around for years. It's what powers maglev trains. Lexus just shrunk it down to the size of a skateboard and buried the rail.”

There is art in hiding that all behind the curtain. Watch the "making of" video, featuring hoverboard pilot and pro skateboarder Ross McGouran, below:

Actress, writer, author, and all-around awesome person Amy Poehler has long been a proponent of girl's education and empowerment. That's what her Smart Girl's project is dedicated to. Now, the website has created a new web series aimed at teenage girls and focused entirely on science, called "Experimenting With Megan Amram."

Amram, a comedian and writer is no stranger to blending satire and science. She wrote a fake textbook in the style of Cosmopolitan magazine called Science...For Her! As for her current project, "Amram plays what’s essentially a female stereotype equivalent to Stephen Colbert’s version of a conservative," says the A.V. Club. In this case, that means she is totally focused on appearance and superficial things. But in between the over-the-top character's outbursts, the show adds some hefty doses of science.

In creating a "biological clock out of a potato," Amram shows how to build a clock using a potato for a battery. The full instructions are available on the Smart Girls website. She also interviews Beverley McKeon, a noted aeronautics professor at CalTech.

The next episode, to air on August 10, will feature an interview with Sara Wasserman, a neuroscientist.

Whiskers

Dan Heatherly/ Flickr CC By ND-2.0

Many mammals such as cats, rats, and seals use their whiskers as a major sensory system to detect objects in dark environments or even to identify changes in currents in murky waters. In a study published today in Bioinspiration and Biomimetics, researchers took inspiration from the physiology and function of animals' whiskers to create robotic whiskers that could help vehicles or robots to navigate areas that are difficult to manage. The whiskers are designed to produce tomographic maps by measuring air flow and, theoretically, could help underwater vehicles find their way through cloudy water or even help guide a catheter to the right position in a patient's heart.

The device, dubbed the Whisker Array, is made out of super-elastic Nitinol wires covered with plastic straws. The 15-centimeter long whiskers were attached to a carpenter's level using LEGO plastic bricks and gears. A servomotor, a device used in robotics to control motion, was used to allow the whiskers to rotate to airflow. The team then used a Conair hair dryer that had a cooling system and two different speed options to test airflow pointed at the Whisker Array.

The Engineered Whisker Array.

Bioinspiration & Biomimetics

Even though the hair-dryer proved to have a weak signal strength as an air-flow source, the Whisker Array was able to capture airflow patterns with high accuracy.

Bioinspiration & Biomimetics

Images of the air-flow pattern generated by the Whisker Array

These robo-whiskers could work well in environments where radar or sonar has difficulty mapping. For example, underwater vehicles could use these tactile sensing mechanisms to more efficiently navigate around objects in muddy or clouded waters. These sensors may also have biomedical applications such as being attached to a catheter to help navigate through a vein without injuring the tissue.

“There’s no proof that animals do a similar ‘tomographic reconstruction’ in their brains,” said the lead author of the study, Cagdas Tuna in a press release. Regardless, he thinks this mechanism could be put to use. “This shows great potential to be a useful, if unconventional, sensing system.”

ESO 378-1

European Southern Observatory

A planetary nebula looks like a bubble in space.

This giant blob of star stuff looks like it floated off the end of a bubble wand, or at least out of Gene Roddenberry's imagination. But the picture above is actually the ghost of a dead star.

The object, known officially as ESO 378-1 and unofficially as the Southern Owl Nebula is a planetary nebula, a cloud of gas given off by a dying star. This is one of the stages of death for stars too small to undergo a supernova. Instead of exploding, when the star gets to the end of its lifetime it starts giving off gas. The star's hot core ionizes the gas, causing it to glow.

This nebula was observed by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile. This is the best view of this particular planetary nebula, but the Hubble has taken some gorgeous shots of other planetary nebulae throughout the galaxy. Researchers estimate that there are 10,000 of these star ghosts strewn about the Milky Way.

Planetary nebulae have nothing to do with planets. They were just named that after they were first observed in the 1700s. Astronomer William Herschel thought they were round like planets, and the name stuck.

This phase of a star's death only lasts for a small amount of time, maybe 20,000 years, which is a blink of an eye in astronomical time scales. Our sun is about the right size to form a planetary nebula when it starts dying. Lucky for us, that won't be for a few billion years.

Valve

With the The International 2015 (TI5) running all week until, Dota 2 is back in the spotlight. Already, the tournament’s Twitch stream has had more than 48 million views, and the tournament's prize pool totals more than $18 million dollars. So, for those who might not be familiar with Dota 2, here are five things you should know about one of the most profitable video games in history.

1. It’s played like a sport

Dota 2 is a multiplayer online battle arena game (MOBA) made by Valve, the video game company known for classics like Half Life and Portal. Valve runs the Steam Store, which is one of the best-known digital marketplaces for PC video games. In Dota 2, each team of five players chooses individual heroes, and then attempts to level up by defeating non-player characters (NPCs) or other heroes. Once the team is strong enough, they try to attack the opponent’s base and destroy their “ancient.” If they succeed, they win. Each team always has 5 players, the game always starts the same way (on opposite sides of the map, separated by a river), and it's always two teams playing against each other. Heroes are chosen based on their attributes, and certain heroes are better suited to fight in certain styles or against certain other heroes. (A lot like drafting players on a per-game basis in any other sport.)

Here’s is a pretty decent video explanation:

2. It’s free!

Like most other MOBAs, Dota 2 is free. This means there's a low barrier to entry, especially taking a look at the minimum system requirements for the game. Consumer-grade computers have made leaps and bounds in recent years, and now even mid-range laptops have the integrated hardware to run games that had top-tier graphics. Of course with the minimum specs—4 GB of RAM, a Intel dual-core processor, and a NVIDIA 8600 GPU—you won’t eye-popping detail, but the game will run on your machine. Valve, the game's creator, makes money through micro-transactions—but it’s not pay-to-play. Players can buy purely cosmetic gear for their heroes from the Dota 2 Store, or from the Steam Community Marketplace. (Either way, Valve gets a cut of the money.)

3. It makes a lot of money

Speaking of Valve’s profit from all of this, the game company makes about $18 million dollars per month from Dota 2 alone. It’s paltry when compared against League of Legends ($123 million dollars/month), but on it’s own the game stands as a huge moneymaker for Valve. What’s better, is that the $18 million dollar winnings for this year’s game doesn’t come out of Valve’s pocket. TI5’s pool is crowdsourced by Dota 2 players, who are buying The International Compendium 2015 (initially priced $9.99) which grants certain in-game treasures, effects and emoticons. Players can then pay more to “level up” their Compendiums, and as more money is raised, overall goals are unlocked for all Compendium owners. They did the same thing last year, garnering $10 million dollars from players.

4. It’s super popular

Dota 2 is the most-played game on Steam. It first peaked at more than 1 million concurrent players in February, and has more than 10 million monthly users. However, it’s not the largest game by a longshot. That crown goes to League of Legends (LoL), another MOBA that’s been around since 2009. LoL has about 27 million people who play at least one game per day, according to VentureBeat, vastly outstripping Dota 2. It also makes far more money than Dota 2: the company said its income was $123 million per month in January. However, with Valve’s backing Dota 2 has become far more lucrative for professional players. The largest payout for a League of Legends tournament was around $2 million dollars, for the World Championships in 2014. TI5’s pool has reached $18 million dollars.

5. It started as a fan-made Warcraft 3 mod

The predecessor to Dota 2 is DotA, or Defense of the Ancients. (Makes sense, now, right?) It started out as a custom-built level from Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, according to the Dota 2 wiki. DotA’s level design was based on another level from StarCraft, Aeon of Strife. The whole thing is one big mashup, which was formatted into a standalone game with Dota 2. (DotA still exists, too, and there’s a WikiHow on how you can play it.) DotA was originally maintained by a pseudonymous programmer called “IceFrog” who updated the scenario until he were hired by Valve in 2010 to work on Dota 2. According to IceFrog’s unofficial, fan-run Facebook account, he’s still the lead designer of Dota 2. “Apart from being known as highly-meticulous with game balance, IceFrog is renowned for his continued anonymity, having never publicly disclosed his actual name,” the also anonymous page-runner writes.