We could've just added great photos of Neil Armstrong that popped up this week--and we did include a few--but we also have some great images from terra firma, including this self-conscious penguin, a surreal fireworks photo, an ominous take on Hurricane Isaac, and a controversial bike without pedals or a seat. Check out the gallery to see them all.
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You'd dream of steak too if you were just coming off a Pepto-Bismol bender.
Want to win this inscrutable Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of their friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the t-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:
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Amazon presented its new Kindle lineup in Los Angeles today, and there are a whole bunch of new rectangles for you to read and watch and work and play on, which I'll get into after the jump. But the big news, the thing that we didn't expect and which seems crazy, is that the new Kindle Fire HD With 4G LTE (I swear, that's its real name) offers a full year of 4G LTE service for $50. Fifty bucks. That's about $4.17 per month.
So, first, the new hardware. There's now a backlit Kindle, just like the Nook Simple Touch With Glowlight. Like the Nook Etc With Etc, the backlit Kindle has an appended name--Paperwhite. This kind of backlighting is great--it glows softly for nighttime or low-light use but it's still a good old electrophoretic (E-Ink) screen, so when it's daylight, it's easy on the eyes. That'll cost $119 for the Wi-Fi-only model and $179 for the 3G. The screen itself has been upgraded; it's sharper and turns pages faster. The cheapie Kindle, which we love (and we were namechecked loving it! Thanks, Bezos), is even cheaper at $69, and has the new screen (though no backlight).
Then there's the Kindle Fire. Last year's Kindle Fire was updated with some better hardware and a lower price, at $159. There's a new 7-inch model called the Kindle Fire HD, with a better screen, better processor, double the storage (it's now 16GB), all that stuff, at $199. And there's a big boy, an 8.9-inch tablet also known as the Kindle Fire HD, I think. It's squarely aimed at the iPad--Amazon is touting the quality of the screen, the responsiveness of the apps, all that stuff. There are even some cool ideas, like X-Ray, which lets you tap on the screen while in the middle of all kinds of apps to get more information. Click on an actor's face while watching a movie and it'll take you to their IMDb page, for example. Pretty sweet! The Wi-Fi-only, 16GB model will cost $299.
The 8.9-incher also has a 4G model, which'll cost $50 a year for 250MB per month. That's not a lot of data, but it's also really not a lot of money. It'll also have a bunch of cloud storage and a $10 app store credit. That one'll run $499, and given that it has 32GB of storage and 4G, it's waaaay cheaper than the equivalent iPad.
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PopSci is pleased to present videos created by Motherboard, Vice Media's guide to future culture. Motherboard's original videos run the gamut from in-depth, investigative reports to profiles of the offbeat forward-thinking characters who are sculpting our bizarre present.
We all know that as technology empowers us to do more, it carries with it all manner of problems. But one of our biggest pickles tends to slip right by us: We're not free.
So argues Tim Wu, law professor, author of The Master Switch and recent appointee to the Federal Trade Commission. In the face of corporate control of the Internet, Wu's concept of "network neutrality" - the notion that networks should be equally accessible by the people using them, and that the people who own the pipes can't place restrictions on access to it or on the content that passes through it - has sparked nothing less than a philosophical war over the future of how we communicate.
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We've seen schemes for remotely-controlled cyborg insects before, including at least one DIY kit for building your own robotically-enhanced cockroach, but researchers at NC State are really moving this discipline forward (literally). A team there has developed an electronic interface that allows them to remotely control cockroaches along fairly precise paths, and they have the video to prove it.
The idea here is to find a way to pilot sensor laden insects into places humans wouldn't want to go, like a chemical contamination site or a collapsed building. By piggybacking on the cockroach's evolutionarily-tested physiology, robotics researchers can skip the difficult step of building a reliable robotic body to carry their sensor loads. But in order for this to work, of course, users have to be able to control the cockroaches.
Doing so isn't necessarily easy, but the NC State team has found a way to do so that also taps the cockroaches natural sensory pathways to stimulate certain movements. The team wired a 0.7-gram micro-controller that is fitted to the roach's back (the team used Madagascar hissing cockroaches) to its antennae and cerci. The cerci is an organ on the roaches abdomen that senses movement in the air and gives the roach a sense that something is approaching from behind, prompting it to move forward. The antennae sense obstacles in front of the roach and spur it to turn right or left to avoid the physical impediment.
By sending small electrical impulses to these organs, the researchers have demonstrated that they can both prompt their "biobotic" roaches to scurry forward and steer them along a curved path. Creep yourself out with the video below.
[NC State]
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This month, as part of our special on the future of education, PopSci presents 10 labs where students do serious research (and career training) by blowing stuff up.
Lab: Plasma Physics Laboratory at Princeton University
Career: Plasma physicist, fusion scientist, mechanical engineer
Each summer, 45 undergraduate physics and engineering students from schools across the country converge at Princeton for a crash course in plasma physics. A state of matter found in stars and frequently in interstellar space, a plasma is an electrically charged soup of ions and free electrons made by superheating atoms until they rip themselves apart. Over the summer, students get to use the lab's collection of plasma-creating machines, some of the best in the U.S., to study plasmas firsthand. For example, students ionize lithium atoms with radiowaves to see how plasmas are created. They also study how magnetic fields, such as those found in the sun, interact to create solar storms. And after an upgrade, students will work on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX), a device that physicists will use to study fusion. The NSTX will heat plasma to 100 million degrees until the atoms fuse together and release energy. This is the same process that fuels the sun, and it could one day be a source of clean energy.
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The first direct brain-machine interface, developed in the 1990s, connected a computer to a rat. By 2003, scientists had mostly replaced rats with nonhuman primates. One of which is Jianhui, an eight-year-old rhesus macaque at Zhejiang University in eastern China.
Electrodes implanted in his motor cortex intercept electrical pulses fired from approximately 70 neurons. A computer interprets those signals and sends commands to motors in each finger of the robotic hand. When Jianhui completes a task, such as grasping onto an extended handle, he receives a sip of water from a tube. The imposing device in which he sits keeps his head immobilized during the experiment. Training sessions last for two hours, five days a week. Jianhui has recently mastered grasping, so researchers will now begin teaching him to use all of the fingers on the robot hand in a single, coordinated motion.
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There is a reason why so many of you were enthralled by former President Clinton the other night. It's the same reason why Barack Obama had a tough act to follow last night at his own convention. The art of speechwriting and speech-giving -- and it is an art, no doubt -- is also, in many ways, a science. A good speech flows sort of like a backward scientific method; it starts with a preconceived idea, and is supported by evidence reinforcing the idea. And politics aside, there may be no one better at doing this than William Jefferson Clinton.
The best speeches, political or otherwise, follow a set of five basic guidelines, says Greta Stahl, content developer (read: speechwriter) at Duarte, a communications firm that advises TED talkers, CEOs and companies from Cisco to Twitter. "Most great speeches really start with a message, and choose strategically which evidence to cite. It's sort of the opposite of how you form an opinion," she said.
This is actually pretty hard in a political convention, because you're playing to two separate audiences: The cheering one on the convention floor who will already vote for you, and the one at home, watching on TV, minds maybe or maybe not made up.
"If you think about Mitt Romney, people didn't really see him as very personable or relatable, so you could see a pattern in all the speeches at the convention that would go out of their way to address that," Stahl said. "I think why a lot of people think Bill Clinton succeeded was he addressed what people wanted to hear - am I better off than I was four years ago? He sort of started with that question. What do voters think, and what do I need to do to convince them?"
Nancy Duarte, CEO of the eponymous firm, has charted the mechanics of great speeches, including Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. In the video below, the ebb and flow of ideas - the negative "what is" and the positive "what could be" - are starkly obvious, if they're not already just by listening to it. There's a specific structure here, and it's that structure, Duarte and Stahl believe, that can make spoken words so effective. And yes, Clinton's speech from Wednesday night followed this structure. More on that in a moment.
Before you can think about structure, you have to have the message, which Duarte and her company call the Big Idea. Everything in the speech is built around that. "For Ann Romney, the message was, ‘Here is this guy who I love and trust, and because of that you should love and trust him too,'" Stahl said. "For Bill Clinton, it was ‘Barack Obama is the better choice for the middle class.'"
Once you've nailed that down, step three is the balance between emotion and fact. This, Stahl points out, can get complicated. It's important to balance anecdotes and personal stories, which can make someone sound more interesting, with some data that puts their story in greater context - but you'd better be honest.
"[GOP vice presidential nominee] Paul Ryan talks about a plant that closed in his hometown, and balances that out with statistics about jobs lost in America. So that works, because it gives you a sense of scale, and it's personal. Now there's been some controversy in the press over whether that story was actually true," Stahl said. "But as a tactic, I think it works."
This is where Clinton really soars, Stahl said. The Washington Post notes that the transcript of his prepared speech rang in at 3,136 words, but the former president spoke for 48 minutes and 5,895 words. So that means he made up almost half of it on the fly.
"You have to be a really awesome, comfortable public speaker to do that, and add remarks. It can go really awry if you do it without thinking about it," Stahl said, noting Clint Eastwood's mind-boggling RNC speech. "Clinton also has this amazing ability to feed on a crowd - he really benefits from being in a room with 20,000 people. He feeds on that energy and it feels like he's really talking to them. He's pretty unique."
Back to that structure. The this-or-that contrast that finds its model in King's speech can be found in plenty of political oratory, including Clinton's talk the other night. It can be very effective as a comparative technique, as Clinton used it over and over. While Obama's speech last night was notably lacking in the King-like oration that made him so famous, he, too, painted a broad characterization of choice. You can choose, he said, to reduce the deficit without raising taxes on the middle class; to export more products; to improve early childhood education; and so on.
Stahl said speeches that work share this basic form, and she, Duarte and others have found it throughout some of the best-known public talks throughout modern history. The key is to end on the high note, which they call the "new bliss" -- show the contrast, and end on "what could be." Stahl said there is some research to back up the fact that this really works, including psychological studies of storytelling, but she added that sometimes you just know.
"There is some analytical element to it, but there is an element that is emotional, too. It's something you can see in the audience. When you're getting a reaction, you can evaluate the speech in terms of, 'What is happening in that moment, and what made that work?'"
This contrast between the despair of now and the hope of tomorrow, the heart of what makes a speech so effective, has also become the centerpiece of the election. You can vote for them, and get this; or you can vote for us, and get something different. Both parties say it, and it's true - the candidates have dramatically different ideas, and the parties have different ideas, for how to run this country. Acknowledging those differences is more than just a tactic for a political speech.
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This month, as part of our special on the future of education, PopSci presents 10 labs where students do serious research (and career training) by blowing stuff up.
Lab: Trauma Mechanics Research Initiative at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln
Career: Helmet or body armor designer
At least a fifth of the wounded U.S. soldiers evacuated from Iraq and Afghanistan returned with traumatic brain injuries, many of which were the result of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). To better understand how shock waves from IEDs affect the body and brain, members of
Namas Chandra's lab at the University of Nebraska simulate actual blasts with a piston driven by compressed helium.
The piston propels air down 40-foot tubes at 900 miles per hour, mimicking a shock wave from an IED. The blast impacts live pigs, human cadavers and dummy heads. Sensor readings from the dummy heads quantify movement and the strength of the event's pressure waves. Students examine the neurons in the animal and human models to see how they reacted during the blast. And students analyze video of the test, taken at 500,000 frames per second.
Eventually, Chandra says his work will help designers improve helmets to better withstand blasts from IEDs, something current protection does not do very well.
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After 30 Earth-days on the surface of the red planet, the Mars rover Curiosity has stretched its neck, zapped its first rock and taken its first strolls. More firsts are still to come in the next couple weeks - like scooping, drilling and baking rocks - but the rover is pretty much ready to go, spending the next two years trying to determine if Mars could ever play host to life.
For the next two years, engineers at JPL will drive this car on Mars, determining exactly how to spin Curiosity's wheels to send it wherever the science team wants it to go. Many of the Curiosity drivers earned their training wheels driving Spirit and Opportunity, but the rovers are very different. Curiosity is much bigger, to start with - and it's nuclear-powered, so tilting its body toward the sun is not a major concern, like it is with the Mars Exploration Rovers.
But there are some similarities. Like its forbears, Curiosity has six wheels, a head-like mast and cameras, and a team of engineers who will spend their entire days planning every inch of its journey. PopSci talked to rover driver Vandi Tompkins just as Curiosity was preparing to look around at its new home. An edited transcript of our interview follows.
PopSci: Why does it take so long to finally drive around?
Vandi Tompkins: We were landing with one version of software, and they have to transition over. This mission has got so much interesting complexity in its landing - but you don't need the landing part anymore, so the control systems will be updated. This rover doesn't have as much unfolding of its mobile system - MER had to unfold and drive out of the parachute. Here, that happens during EDL. We are on our wheels. So the rover driver in me is like, ‘Let's go!' But Spirit and Opportunity have been operating over 8 years. We have plenty of time. So we want to make sure we have all the checks.
We send all the instructions in one package. A lot of people will describe it as sending an email to Mars.
PS: When did you switch rovers?
VT: My last shift on MER was sol 3022, which is crazy to think about. I had to stop doing it because Curiosity is going to be on Mars time. MER is so extended, it's now on Earth time, and you can't be on Earth and Mars time at the same time. Most of us who were on MER are going to, temporarily at least, be doing Curiosity exclusively. Then after 90 days we'll go back to Earth time.
PopSci: How do you feel about living on Mars time?
VT: I was in grad school before on MER, so this is my venture into Mars time. I'm very excited about it. Working all these years that I have on this mission, you build this camaraderie. You're working through holidays and weekends; it's kind of like being in the field with the robot. Or you can think of it like camping. Everybody is there, you're around the campfire talking. It brings the team together.
PS: Would you ever drive both rovers on the same day?
VT: It's possible - I would love to do that. With Opportunity, we spent years driving across the plains and arriving at Endeavour crater, this crater with such incredible science potential. We haven't even barely been there, and we've already made incredible scientific discoveries. On my last shift there, I'm looking at the images, and it was like, ‘Wow, this is pretty cool.' It's nice to have two incredible things to choose from.
PS: How do you tell Curiosity what to do?
VT: Because of the time delay, even when we operate on Mars time, we don't send a command, wait for a response, and send another command. We send an entire sequence of commands to the rover. We get stereo images from the previous day, take the images and make a 3-D terrain map. We look at images with our goggles - you wear 3-D goggles at your desk. It's incredible how much more information there is in having a depth view. There might be something that looks really benign, but as soon as you put on the goggles, you can see there might be a curve to it, or a gap that we might not have seen.
After that, we have a tool where we sequence commands in it, the rover simulator. I wrote the code for the flight software engine that lives inside of that, that simulates what we do. If there are any tricks, we will detect it on Earth first.
PopSci: Why do you run it all through software first? Why can't you just drive?
VT:: We often don't have exact information about what is on Mars. Whether a terrain mesh has missing data at certain points, or we may make contact earlier, or when we are drifting, our wheels might slip. We can't predict where that might happen. So that becomes interesting. You have to try to go through your sequence, and think about all the places, do the what if - what if this were to happen, is this still good? - under all the conditions you could think of. Then we send it up.
PopSci: With 360 degrees of possibility, how do you decide where to go?
VT: The scientists pick the targets, and we ensure they are safe and that we can get them. Then the entire team looks at the rover simulation. We spend the day going through the commands, and everybody signs off on them, then we uplink it to the rover. We send it one package. A lot of people will describe it as sending an email to Mars. Then it does it, and then it goes to sleep. We have two eight-hour shifts - I come in at 6 a.m. [this is shifting by 40 minutes every day, as the team tracks with the Martian sol], the next person comes in at 3 p.m., and by that evening, we're ready to uplink it.
The timing of this all depends on the power, the data available, when the orbiters are ready, when the Deep Space Network is available, all of those things. Then it sends the data back to us, and we start the cycle again.
PopSci: Will Curiosity be able to decide for itself where to go, like Opportunity? Or can you tell it "do_Drive" and let it go?
VT: If it's something we are comfortable letting it handle on its own, we will have built a conditional - ‘if you encounter this situation, don't do this, but do this instead.' Sometimes, we need certain science and engineering analysis on the ground, and we will make sure nothing else happens, and it leaves itself in a safe configuration. Either we handle it, or we make sure that it ends up in a safe configuration, even if it doesn't complete what we intended.
If the rover goes outside of where we expect it should be, there's a check that will catch it. We use multiple checks to do that. We put these boundaries around regions we don't want to go, and we also have the ability to do autonomous navigation - ‘If you see terrain which is outside of this envelope, stop.'
So it's not just sending a drive command. Those sequences can have dozens of commands; depending on the complexity of the day, it can be 100. There are so many things it can do.
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This month, as part of our special on the future of education, PopSci presents 10 labs where students do serious research (and career training) by blowing stuff up.
Lab: DHS Center of Excellence for Explosives, Mitigation and Response at the University of Rhode Island
Career: FBI explosives expert, government defense contractor
Car bombs, improvised explosive devices and pipe bombs-for students at the University of Rhode Island's energetic materials lab, those tools are as common as a hammer is to a carpenter. The lab, run by chemist Jimmie Oxley and supported largely by the Department of Homeland Security, offers the most diverse explosives curriculum in the U.S. And many of the students who study there will advance to jobs on the front lines in the fight against criminals and terrorists.
Students typically build their explosives in the lab, then transport them to a firing range on a 2,200-acre site 30 minutes from campus. There, they test new detection methods and blow up their devices to study what happens during and after a blast. They also analyze chemicals used in bomb construction, such as hydrogen peroxide, and test chemical additives that could reduce or eliminate the utility for bombmakers. Occasionally they assist Oxley in less dangerous pursuits: They help her advise television shows based on forensic science, including CSI and Curious and Unusual Deaths.
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Okay, so that's not a real bear being arrested. But, in this week's image roundup, there is a very real and very adorable baby Tasmanian devil, plus gorgeous space pics, a book that collects every single color the human eye can perceive, a web of sensors that'll help you on dates, and much more.
Click to launch the gallery.
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Popular Science has seen 28 presidents (Grover Cleveland twice) since its founding in 1872. Though the magazine tries to stay out of politics, there were two presidents whose contributions to science earned them our special admiration: inventor Thomas Jefferson and space-age champion John F. Kennedy.
Other commanders-in-chief, including Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, have also appeared in PopSci, but for less illustrious reasons (in 1929, we centered a whole article around Charles Hotz, a waiter who happened to look exactly like Calvin Coolidge.) Here is a gallery of our presidential coverage, from 1927 to 1989.
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Artificial lightning lashes the fastest robot in the world, as it reclines on its robotic carpet. That is this week in the future.
Want to win this irresistible Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of their friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the t-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:
And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:
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Somewhere around 2014, if all goes according to plan, Turkey will complete the Ilisu Dam, a major component of one of the world's most ambitious-and controversial-hydro-engineering projects. The dam is the latest addition to the $32-billion Southeastern Anatolia Project (known by its Turkish acronym, GAP). Along with 21 other dams, Ilisu will lock up the entire Tigris and Euphrates watershed, creating 7,476 megawatts of hydroelectric capacity and irrigating a parched farm region nearly the size of New Jersey. Ilisu's reservoir, however, will also flood the ancient city of Hasankeyf, uproot as many as 70,000 members of Turkey's struggling Kurdish minority, and give Turkish engineers an alarming degree of control over the fate of their downstream neighbors in Iraq.
Many nations depend on rivers that flow across borders, but none so much as Iraq, which gets its water from only two sources: the Tigris and the Euphrates. When Turkey filled another GAP reservoir in 1990, it shut down the Euphrates for a month, and the two nations nearly went to war. Once Ilisu is complete, Turkey will be able to shut down the Tigris, too.
GAP is perhaps the starkest demonstration to date of how engineers can exacerbate longstanding water conflicts. Fortunately, there are ways engineers can also help ratchet tensions back down.
First, they can provide better data about how much water there is to share. Researchers at the University of California at Irvine are using NASA Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites to measure tiny changes in the gravity of aquiferous regions in order to determine how much water has been removed over time. "When it comes time to negotiate treaties, people are going to think ‘Well, we really can't hide stuff from our neighbors,' " says Michael Campana, a hydrogeologist at Orgeon State University who studies water-resource management.
Second, they can provide more to share. Many municipalities are exploring artificial recharge systems for storing water in aquifers (rather than in open reservoirs), substantially reducing evaporation. Engineers on a pilot project in Gujarat, India, meanwhile, have covered a half mile of irrigation canal with solar panels, preventing nearly a quarter-million gallons' worth of evaporation annually.
Finally, engineers can provide other things to share in place of water. "Hydroelectric energy is a nonconsumptive use of water," says Jonathan Lautze, a researcher at the International Water Management Institute. "There is potential for both water and energy to be shared." Iraq has struggled for decades to build its electrical capacity. And so Turkey, by running high-voltage lines south, could share something Iraq wants almost as much as water: It could share the GAP itself.
Luke Mitchell (luke.mitchell@popsci.com) is the magazine's Ideas Editor
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Since Mars Curiosity Rover's landing in the Red Planet's Gale Crater last month, we've seen pictures from just about every imaging instrument aboard the robotic geology lab. But today, we're seeing a different kind of image: a self-portrait of Curiosity snapped by the Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI, the camera fixed to the end of the rover's seven-foot robotic arm. Everything you snapped on Instagram over the weekend suddenly pales in comparison, no?
If the image looks hazy, that's no post-photo manipulation. MAHLI keeps its lens free from contamination with a transparent lens cover, which was still fixed over the lens--and covered in the planet's signature red dust-- when the photo above was snapped.
The biggest "eye" you see there on Curiosity's face is the lens for the ChemCam, which blasts nearby rocks with a laser beam and reads the chemical contents from the resulting optical signature from this flash of light. The two square sensors below it are the color Mastcam imaging system "eyes," and the four smallest sensors--two on each side of the Mastcam imagers--are the black and white Navcam imagers, used to help the rover "see" it's way across the Martian frontier.
Also coming down from Mars yesterday courtesy of MAHLI is the image below, taken to inspect the rover's wheels (that's the sloping beginnings of Mount Sharp in the background).
Curiosity is currently rolling toward a geologically interesting spot known as Glenelg, but will soon make its way toward Mount Sharp, which astrogeologists think will contain a good picture of Mars geological history stratified in its layers. Along the way, it will be doing what good little space robots do: lazrin ur rocks (lolz courtesy of Emily Lakdawalla over at the Planetary society; hat tip to MSNBC's Alan Boyle).
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We're about halfway through the Mercedez-Benz Fashion Week here in New York, which often doesn't have all that much of interest for us. But at the Diane Von Furstenberg show over the weekend, a special appearance by Google's most sci-fi creation made us take notice. Select models wore Google's Glasses, that crazy augmented-reality eyewear, as did Von Furstenberg herself and Google's Sergey Brin, who sat in the front row. The models were filming a short documentary, to be called "DVF Through Glass," which will be available to watch on Thursday.
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Japanese researchers have toppled a 19-year-old record for the deepest passage into the floor of the world, reaching 2,466 meters (about 8,024 feet) as of today. That's about 2,000 feet deeper than the lowest part of the Grand Canyon, from rim to floor. The old record, 2,111 meters, fell Friday.
"If champagne were allowed onboard the Chikyu, we certainly would have opened a bottle," Kai-Uwe Hinrichs, the mission's co-chief scientist, wrote on the mission blog.
The Chikyu is the largest research vessel ever built, and it's on an expedition off Japan's Shimokita Peninsula in the Pacific Ocean. The Deep Coalbed Biosphere Expedition is designed to obtain core samples from 2,200 meters below the seafloor. The team might find the deepest life ever encountered, including microbes that could be involved in the production of natural gas.
Their target at the Nankai Trough is 3.6 kilometers, or 2.23 miles. Chikyu is supposed to be capable of drilling to 10,000 meters, or 6.2 miles, into the Earth's crust. The expedition continues for another three weeks.
[via ScienceDaily]
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Attempts to create a vaccine for HIV have failed time and again partly because no one has been able to achieve the right vaccine balance - one that can spur the body into action, but not make a person sick. A new study in monkeys suggests a new solution: Vaccines could be more effective if they can be made to linger in the body.
Most vaccines work by introducing the body to a virus so it can build up defenses to fight off the invader. This works in one of two ways: Either the vaccines introduce a live, but modified, version of a virus - like the nasal-spray flu vaccine - or they introduce an inactivated version, which can still be enough to turn on the immune system.
In the early 1990s, researchers saw some promise with a slightly weakened version of simian immunodeficiency virus, the monkey equivalent of HIV. It conferred protection in some monkeys who were then exposed to the fully potent version of SIV. But other monkeys still developed full-blown AIDS, so the treatment was never considered safe enough to test on people. Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University set out to determine how this vaccine worked. They found that viral protection stemmed from T-cells (immune cells) that were maintained in the lymph nodes.
The takeaway: An HIV vaccine might have to persist in the body in order to work well. This might be possible by modifying other, less harmful viruses to perk up the T-cells, so that they're constantly on the alert, the study authors say. The paper is published online in Nature Medicine.
[via ScienceDaily]
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As wildfire consumes hundreds of thousands of forested acres every summer, NASA's Earth-observing satellites keep tabs on the destruction. The Aqua and Terra satellites can help scientists and land-use managers figure out how much land has burned and where, as well as how fires are responding to the changing climate. Now the visualization wizards at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center have stitched this data together into a timelapse video, which you can watch past the jump.
The video includes fires detected in the continental United States from 2002 through July 2011. 2011 was a banner year for wildfire, with 2.7 million acres burning just in Texas, and featuring a fire that threatened the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
From 2009 to 2011 alone, more than 200,000 fires consumed 18 million acres across the nation. NASA says that is equivalent to the combined area of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire, Delaware and Rhode Island. And that doesn't even include 2012, in which wildfires gobbled hundreds of thousands of acres in Colorado, New Mexico and throughout the rest of the West.
Check it out, and notice the fiery trends:
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