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What Happens When You Ask A Cartoonist for Free Work?

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I don't get many chances to talk about being an artist on a science blog, but as somebody who only recently was able to make comics a full-time profession, I am a huge proponent of fair wages and practices for creative professionals.

Particularly when it comes to being paid. In my early years, I did a lot of unpaid work. After graduating college, it was 100% normal to pencil and entire comic book on the promises of "money after publishing." It was a rotten system, and I quit drawing comics for years until I started my old science comic. So when I was asked by a science organization to submit a comic for their annual calendar, the timing couldn't have been better. I was already ramped up about creative contests. It all started with a tweet1.

It came from an employee at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit science advocacy organization. No doubt they reached out to me because they figured I could help spread the word about their contest. I mean, they wouldn't ask a professional cartoonist to work for free, right?

The details of the contest are as follows: The UCS commissioned six comics to go in their yearly calendar, the other six would be decided by the contest in the aforementioned tweet. I had to wonder: Why not just commission 6 more comics? It's not like money was an issue. The problem with contests is that, unless you win, you've done work for no pay. Depending on the amount of entries, a company can basically "commission" thousands of pieces of work, but only pay for what they want. As a non-winner, If you're lucky and read the contract2, you might end up keeping the rights to your work. Maybe you can publish it someplace else. But more than likely, the piece was created with the contest in mind, and you just wasted your time chasing a carrot on stick. With all that in mind, I retweeted the contest proposal and posed my query.

The same UCS employee responded predictably3. This was a fun thing they were doing and that they wanted to find fresh voices for the other comics rather than just commission all twelve. They shored up their defense by adding that they had been doing this contest for years. I'll let the dismay of hearing a science organization appeal to tradition when confronted about exploitative practices sink in. I told them there was never a better time than the present to change. I think respecting creative professionals is a pretty solid moral standpoint. But, maybe that's just me.

Curious for more, I looked at their timeline to see who else they reached out to, I was met with this internet atrocity.

Pictured: It's spam all the way down. I'm starting to reconsider scrubbing the name.

The ham-fisted method in which they made people aware of their contest should be embarrassing enough, but then I noticed the tweet addressed to The Nib, a publication known for how fairly it compensates its contributors. A publication I have eagerly contributed to in the past. The lack of awareness presented is staggering. Seriously, that screenshot probably isn't even a tenth of the tweets that went out. It was downright spam. Glancing at the names, which include folks like Erika Moen and Bill Nye, it was clear that they had just done a twitter search for "science" and "comics" and stopped there.

If I have only one piece of advice for young creatives looking to "break in", "make it", or get "discovered", it's this:

I want to take this time to stress that in all likelihood, the employee was just following orders. Organizations tend to be pretty clueless on social media etiquette.

I'm being pretty hard on the UCS, which is probably a great organization. But as of the writing of this post, their contest is still on, which means they pretty much ignored me. They got their spam blast out, the deadline is right around the corner, the damage is done and they got what they wanted. Hooray for the status quo. Science already has a reputation for being woefully out of touch, and blind spamming comic professionals to ask for free work is not helping.

Thus, I'd like to spend the next part of this post outlining all the measures your organization can take in order to be better to artists:

  1. Is your contest spec work? Find out at No!Spec's website.
  2. If you're looking for fresh voices, artists on the internet usually make themselves pretty known. Just scroll through Tumblr sometime.
  3. Oh hey, Symbiartic's Glendon Mellow put together a handy list of science artists on twitter.
  4. Don't spam this list with your contest. There are circles of hell reserved for such betrayals of trust.
  5. Glendon also wrote this piece titled, "So You Want to Hire a Science Illustrator." He's really cool like that.

As for the contest? In the end, against better judgment, I did end up submitting a comic. Because, why not?

I submitted this one.

*1While the author of the tweet would be easy to find, I've scrubbed their name because any criticism should be directed at the organization, not the author.

2I could draw a whole comic on contracts, and probably will in the near future.

3Unfortunately, they deleted their responses sometime after our conversation, so I don't have them anymore. I'll know better to screenshot early next time. My end of the conversation is still there if you need at least some contextual proof*


Q&A With A Zip-Line Designer

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On The Ropes

Courtesy Bonsai Design

A Bonsai Design challenge course 60 feet up in the trees, located in Mount Hermon, California.

Thaddeus Shrader used to cruise the skies as an airline captain. But in 2008, he switched to a career creating new ways to soar: zip lines. He’s now the CEO for Bonsai Design, which specializes in building zip-line courses that minimize the damage to forests. “You’re flying in and out of living structures,” Shrader says. “We have to figure out a way to make the whole thing safe and legal.”

How did you go from flying planes to designing zip-line components?

I went to college for aeronautical engineering. At that time, there wasn’t a lot of work for aeronautical engineers, so I got a job as a pilot. After my wife and her brother started running this company, I came over and brought my engineering background. That’s when Bonsai really started inventing new components: new trolleys, harnesses, braking systems, and emergency-rescue devices.

Thaddeus Shrader

Courtesy Bonsai Design

What’s the appeal of zip lines?

This is the closest you can get to the real feeling of flight. The wind is in your hair, you’re above the ground, your wings-slash-arms are out from your side, and you’re blasting along. It’s beautiful.

Do you get to play with your designs?

We’re always trying to figure out new ways for people to fly, and we have to test all those ideas. My kids are our test monkeys. We actually develop a lot of stuff in our backyard—and we get paid to do it.

This article originally appeared in the September 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Zip-Line Designer."

How To Turn A Rainy Day Into Art

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Seattle artist Peregrine Church uses rain as his medium. By stenciling images and words on the sidewalk in water-repellent spray, he creates Rainworks—art pieces that appear only when it’s wet outside. Instead of shelling out $45 for the paint Church uses, you can follow the lead of DIYer Dan Rojas to make your own. Rojas discovered that spray antiperspirant contains a commonly used hydrophobic chemical. Clear spray paint binds it in place, creating a cheap water repellent that can last for months. “A lot of the stuff you see,” Rojas says, “was made when people put two or three products together and came up with something new.”

This article originally appeared in the September 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Turn a Rainy Day into Art."

Stats

  • Time: 1.5 hours
  • Cost: $15
  • Difficulty: Easy

Materials

  • Cardstock
  • Clear spray paint
  • Aerosol antiperspirant

Instructions

  1. Cut a stencil out of cardstock and place it on the sidewalk. Spray with clear paint.
  2. While the clear coat is still wet, mist with deodorant.
  3. Remove the stencil and let the paint dry for about an hour.
  4. Wait for rain to reveal your art—or just use a garden hose.

Do Those Guys With Metal Detectors Ever Find Treasure?

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Jason Schneider

In 1975, a metal-detector hobbyist named Morton Leventhal made the front page of The New York Times when he stumbled on a piece of Roman antiquity. The Wall Street stockbroker was scouring a field overlooking the Jordan River in Israel when his Metrotech device started bleeping. He pulled out his knife and scraped away the dirt to reveal a life-size bronze statue of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, from the second century—a piece so rare it’s now in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.

Finds like that fueled the metal-detecting craze of the late-1970s and 1980s. “Detectorists” of that era benefited from a major technology upgrade: the Very Low Frequency detector, which offered better ground-penetration than earlier models. In fact, hobbyists became so adept at finding buried treasures that professional archaeologists recruited them to scour Civil War battlefields and other historic sites, which they still do today.

But their prowess might be a bit overblown. Amateurs do, on rare occasions, turn up valuables: an Iron Age cache of Celtic coins in June 2012, another collection of Roman coins a few months later. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good way to prepare for retirement. A 1990s British survey of the hobbyists found that hardcore detectorists reported a median 13 finds per year.

“It’s incredibly unlikely to find an item that is worth millions of dollars,” says Suzie Thomas, a museologist at the University of Helsinki in Finland. She adds that most detectorists are simply in it for the hunt. “If you’re in it to get rich, you’ll probably give up after a few months.”

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of Popular Science.

Can Hypnosis Kill You?

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Jason Schneider

The first account linking hypnosis and death in the medical literature was in 1894. Ella Salamon, niece of a Hungarian count, was put into a trance and then “fell from her chair with a hoarse cry,” according to an attending doctor. “There is no doubt that she died in hypnosis,” said Richard von Krafft-Ebing, a noted psychiatrist of the time, “but that she died by hypnosis is questionable.”

Accounts of such fatalities or psychiatric harm from hypnosis have appeared sporadically ever since. In 1979, a stage hypnotist asked a young Israeli mother to regress to childhood—a time when she’d been hiding from the Nazis. She later reported that the newly uncovered memories put her in a state of distress for years. Other reports tell of trance subjects left stuporous and suicidal.

But these cases are anecdotal. Studies suggest that the negative side effects are generally mild at worst. In the 1970s, researchers from California State University in Fresno looked into the risks by hypnotizing 209 undergraduates. A few suffered headaches or nausea; 25 reported feeling light-headed or drowsy—hardly worse than what the students experienced taking an exam or sitting through a lecture.

“Hypnosis, in and of itself, isn’t dangerous,” says psychologist Bruce N. Eimer. It can be a therapeutic tool; but like all tools, he says, in the hands of someone incompetent or who uses it inappropriately, it can cause harm. “Would a massage therapist perform acupressure on an 84-year-old with osteoporosis?” Eimer asks. Probably not. Similarly, it would be unwise for a clinician to use hypnosis without first assessing if a patient is too psychologically fragile.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of Popular Science.

Will Practicing A Skill In Your Head Make You Better At It?

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Jason Schneider

When Carson Palmer, the two-time Pro Bowl quarterback for the Arizona Cardinals, hurt his elbow a few years ago, he took a week off from throwing the football. But in his head, Palmer practiced every day. “You stand right behind the center, and you see the coverage unfold as you would if you had the ball in your hands,” he told ESPN. It seemed to do the job. The following weekend, Palmer had the best game of his career.

For more than a century, scientists have been trying to understand how this mental training works. In the 1930s, researchers demonstrated that when you’re imagining an action, your brain sends signals to your muscles—subtle triggers too weak to make the muscles contract but ones that might help train the body to perform. Alternatively, mental practice might create a blueprint in your head, like an inner how-to guide for a particular skill.

Sports psychologists have conducted hundreds of studies comparing imagined and physical practice for actions such as throwing darts, juggling, and tap dancing. Overall, the research shows that mental training works. A 2012 study, for example, compared 32 amateur golfers who putted to another 32 who merely held a golf club in their hands and visualized their swings. Under the same training regimen, both groups improved their putts by getting the ball about 4 inches closer to the hole.

Visualization has advantages over the real thing: You can do it anywhere, even when injured. It’s safe—a major plus for high-stakes performers such as gymnasts and surgeons. And you can practice for longer periods of time because you’re not constrained by physical fatigue. That’s not to say it’s easy: “We’ve had Olympic-level athletes sitting in our lab, visualizing for two hours,” says Tadhg MacIntyre, a sports psychologist at the University of Limerick in Ireland. “When we’re done, they’re absolutely exhausted.”

It doesn’t work for everyone, though. “If you’re a novice, the impact can be negative,” warns MacIntyre. “If you’re trying to visualize a free throw, and you don’t even know the proper handgrip and movement, then you’re probably going to mentally rehearse the wrong skill, and your skill is going to be impaired.”

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of Popular Science.

From Our Archives: How We've Searched For Alien Life

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The October 1984 cover of Popular Science with radio telescopes

October 1984

Popular Science

In October 1984, Popular Science wrote about one of the more promising chapters in the search for intelligent life. NASA was set to embark on a 15-year mission: An 85-foot-tall radio tele­scope would filter out the torrent of chaotic radio signals it received while it scanned the universe, “seeking the one unambiguous pattern that would signify something totally extraordinary,” we wrote. Sadly, those efforts didn’t yield much, and today NASA is focused on finding any life--intelligent or no. In the decade to come, the agency plans to send a spacecraft to Jupiter’s moon Europa, which could possibly harbor life beneath its icy surface. To learn more, click here.

How to Spot An Alien

Gamma-Ray Bursts

In 1995, a scientist at MIT Haystack Observatory proposed that extraterrestrials might communicate with gamma rays. Since then, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been on the lookout.

Technosignatures

Since 2005, Fermilab in Illinois has been surveying the universe for city lights, atmospheric contamination, or any other infrared sources that could indicate the use of advanced technology.

Optical Experiments

A Harvard-Smithsonian group is building a 72-inch telescope to detect powerful lasers, in case extraterrestrials use them to communicate.

Biosignatures

The new James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2018, will search for exoplanets, but also for signs of life--oxygen and methane--in their atmospheres.

This article was originally published in the September 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Is Anybody Out There?”

A New Way To Identify Microbes Of Interest

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Identifying Microbial Species Using Computer Video

Source: Wikipedia; Modifications: Jason Tetro

“You are being watched.”

Much like the television show, Person of Interest, being subject to video surveillance in America is a reality. Cameras are everywhere, capturing every action in the hopes of spotting the most egregious activities and providing information to authorities. But there is a difference between our reality and the fiction of the show. Unlike The Machine in the program, the computers collecting all this information cannot predict a person's nature based solely on behavior.

Figuring out an equation to determine the nature and/or actions of a person in advance is not an easy task. The combination of possible options with each and every movement makes it almost impossible to accurately calculate, particularly on a single glimpse. There have been some successes, particularly in the game of chess. Examining eye movements can offer enough information to pinpoint a next move. But this requires continual observation over several matches and also an appreciation for the experience of the player.

In 2013, the technique was given a boost thanks to the concept of Social Signal Processing. This collection of principles from not just physical but also social, affective, and psychological branches of science was used to program software and determine possible next actions. Using Computer Vision And Pattern Recognition, the team suggested human interactions ranging from romantic to threatening could be foretold. While great as a theory, it was not tested.

Perhaps the most advanced form of tracking people through behavior came last year when a video-intelligent system was developed for pedestrians. In this case, behavior was assessed based on the speed of the individual crossing an intersection. If the pace was not fast enough to make it in the allotted time, the computer could instantly recognize the person might not make it and could be subject to being hit. While this was a great advancement, the prediction of behaviour was computed based on already known constants, such as the time for a green light and also the known speed of an individual through a set distance. Essentially, it was reactionary rather than predictive.

As the current state of the technology continues to develop for humans, one appears to have been made for microbes. As shown by a European trio of researchers video surveillance can help to identify a species based on its movements. The real time observations can also help to uncover and collect behavioral patterns to identify specific functions within a microbial group.

The team used a new processing, analysis and interpretation package, which they termed BEMOVI. The software was designed to extract a combination of population density, morphology, and movement over a real-time set of video images. When used with a high resolution camera, tens of thousands of individual bacteria could be detected and tracked.

The development of BEMOVI was done using open source, cross-platform software and honed in on two specific functions. The first was to locate and measure. The other was to link movement trajectories on a two-dimensional scale. Once this information was collected, it was checked for proper threshold values, comparison with background, and eventually, consistency of morphology. Once complete, the information could then be analyzed using a machine learning principle called random forest to predict the species based on the various physical and behavioral traits.

The actual experiments were performed using a collection of protozoa in a simulated aquatic environment complete with nutrient medium and bacteria. After a day of incubation to ensure the mixture was sufficiently dense with microbial life, BEMOVI was put to the test. The goals were to identify the species of protozoa accurately using nothing more than the images collected.

The first tests were done in a real-time environment. The results were indeed impressive. The success in solely visual species classification was 84%. When movement was included in the mix, the accuracy rose to 89%. The only downside was that extremely closely related species could not be determined accurately. The next test was to observe the culture over 28 days and predict the species based on its behavior. The team was able to accurately identify the species even with the various changes in morphology, density, and movement. This revealed how BEMOVI could not only monitor community ecology, but also provide insight into what might be happening in real time.

The results of the BEMOVI reveal how behavioral parameters can be traced and analyzed to identify a particular species. Granted,this particular study cannot be extrapolated to humans or our behavior. But the value comes in the relatively robust analysis of just a few parameters. This suggests predictability may not be as complex as we believe. A few traits such as movement, population density, and even interaction with the local environment may be all that's necessary to understand how an organism exists. Perhaps with a few more parameters as we move up the evolutionary ladder, we may be able to learn how animals and perhaps one day humans might act before they actually make a move.


Robot Pets Have a Leg Up on Fido

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Digital Woof

courtesy Sony

Humans have been bonding with domestic animals for tens of thousands of years, but Jean-Loup Rault, an animal scientist at the University of Melbourne, thinks new companions are coming: robot pets. Just as digital technologies have altered how we interact with each other, they could soon do the same for us and animals.

This may not sit well with pet-lovers. A plastic dog is hardly as cuddly as a Pomeranian. But Rault argues the robot variety has a lot going for it: “You don’t have to feed it; you don’t have to walk it; it won’t make a mess in your house; and you can go on holidays without feeling guilty.” Plus mechanical animals could open up pet ownership to people with allergies, mobility issues, or tiny apartments.

The biggest selling point might be that robot pets combine the utility of a machine with the companionship of an animal. Dan Goldman, who works with biomechanical robots at the Georgia Institute of Technology, spitballs what one might look like: “It’ll be a dog that can read your emotions and respond. It’ll be a snake that can slither under your bed to find toys.” One day we might even be able to transfer a robot pet’s memory to an upgraded model to make it a lifelong companion.

That’s convincing on a practical level, but it doesn’t address whether humans can actually bond with machines. Studies suggest we can: When companion robots like Paro, the sensor-studded interactive seal, have been given to nursing-home residents, they can improve moods, combat loneliness, and increase social engagement. “As humans, we’re eager to bond with things,” says Bill Smart, who studies human-robot interactions at Oregon State University. “People give their cars names. Kids give their stuffed animals back-stories.” So too with robots. When Sony shut down the last tech clinic for its discontinued dog Aibo in March 2014, owners in Japan held funerals.

—Bill Smart, roboticist at Oregon State University

In the end, what might hold people back from adopting robot pets could be as simple as their frame of reference. For those who grew up with living, breathing, slobbering pets, the mechanical kind might not do. Neither Rault nor Smart wants one. But for kids who constantly engage with smart technology, extending that connection to a robot dog or dino just might be the next logical step.

For more on robo-pets, check out our podcast.

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of Popular Science

Oura Is A Round-The-Clock Wellness Tracker For Your Finger

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Oura

In the last couple of years, wearable health monitors have gotten smaller, more accurate, and cooler-looking. But for many people wearing one or more of the 19.4 million wearable fitness devices in use today—a figure that’s expected to triple by 2018—they are still too clumsy for round-the-clock wear, especially during sleep.

Now, meet the Ōura ring, which Petteri Lahtela, co-founder and CEO of the company, describes as “unobtrusive enough to wear 24/7.”

The ring includes several trackers inside its tiny form: a sleep monitor, a step counter, tracker, a heart rate monitor, and a pulse oximeter. When worn continuously, the ring monitors how well you’re sleeping during the four phases of sleep, and how active you are during the day.

“It’s a basically a computer on your finger that interprets sleep and other rhythms of your body through built-in nanosensors,” says Lahtela.

Lahtela says Ōura's design was inspired by his own struggle to balance the grind of his work schedule with the demands of family life and his own health. Getting quality sleep and enough of it was a “constant challenge.”

He’s not the only one. According to the American Sleep Foundation, 45 percent of Americans say that poor or insufficient sleep affected their daily activities at least once in the past week. Sixty-seven percent of those also report “poor” or “only fair” health.

The Ōura ring provides descriptive data on the measures it collects--the number of steps taken, the number of hours slept--and also generates predictive data on how to improve sleep and performance.

“Some days 10,000 steps are too much, other days you can do more even more. The better it gets to know your patterns and influences, the better it is at making recommendations,” Lahtela says.

Data generated through the Ōura ring can be merged with other health data. One of the first partners is We Are Curious, a data analytics company founded by 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey. We Are Curious allows users to chart and probe multiple health data streams—be they genomic data, metabolomic data, electronic health records, or data from the Ōura ring and other wearables.

Avey said most early users in the testing phase were by far most interested in sleep, making Ōura a natural partner. “There are a number of things that people seem to be interested in looking at to see if they can improve better sleep behavior. Caffeine consumption is a huge one, of course, as well as the CO2 environment in the bedroom at night,” she said.

The Ōura ring is on Kickstarter starting today, in U.S. sizes 6 to 13.

IBM Chips Could Make Your Smartphone Think Like A Mouse

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IBM

An array of IBM's "neuromorphic" chips.

Last year, IBM introduced TrueNorth, a high-powered, low-energy-consumption chip inspired by the human brain. At the time, IBM compared it to ENIAC, the earliest iteration of a general computing machine.

IBM has taken that technology over the last year and magnified it, creating the computational equivalent of a mouse’s brain, according to an article in Wired.

This network of TrueNorth chips is made of 48 million artificial nerve cells (48 chips housing 1 million artificial cells each), and is designed to run deep learning algorithms with greater efficiency. They call the chips "neuromorphic," meaning they mimic organic brain cells. These algorithms are the backbone of current artificial intelligence platforms—software like Facebook’s image recognition and Google’s Translate app, that visually recognizes and translates text.

IBM

One of IBM's TrueNorth neuromorphic chips.

Networks of artificial neurons like the one built with TrueNorth will allow that level of computation in small devices like phones or watches, IBM told Wired. That’s because its most attractive feature, aside from computing power, is low energy consumption—just about 70 milliwatts powering 5.4 billion transistors. Modern processors have around 1.4 billion transistors and take far more energy, between 35 and 140 watts.

And because the chips don't rely on a traditional chip architecture, IBM has had to create an entirely new programming language and set of software for the chips to work.

The TrueNorth project is a conglomeration of funding from DARPA and IBM, and the project spanned the work of more than 200 collaborators, eight IBM labs and five universities.

Carbon-Consuming Power Plant Will Puff Rings Of Triumph

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We know that carbon dioxide levels are rising and that these rising levels are linked to increased temperatures. But actually visualizing how much carbon dioxide (CO2) is going into the atmosphere is a bit of a challenge. Even tons of an invisible gas are still, well, invisible.

One new power plant is aiming to change that. Copenhagen's new waste-to-energy plant, the Amager Resource Center built by the Bjarke Ingels Group will have both a ski slope and a rock-climbing wall on its modern exterior, while inside, household waste is incinerated and turned into energy. It's a relatively clean process, but still one that generates CO2.

To emphasize that, the architects have decided to install an art installation that will blow a nearly 70-foot-wide steam ring from the plant's smokestack every time a ton of carbon dioxide is generated by the plant.

The smoke ring is intended to be a visual and visceral reminder of the true environmental cost of this kind of energy. The team funded two smaller models (which both worked!) themselves, but have turned to Kickstarter to raise $15,000 for a 1/3 scale model of the steam ring generator.

The plant, and art installation are expected to be completed by 2017.

New Cameras In Japan Can Detect Drunks At Train Stations

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West Japan Railway Osaka Loop Line Kyobashi Station Platform

West Japan Railway Osaka Loop Line Kyobashi Station Platform

Onagadori, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

To save lives, West Japan Railway is installing cameras on the Loop Line around the Japanese city of Osaka that can identify drunk behavior. The logic is as basic as it gets: drunk people waiting for a train can easily imperil themselves or others, so the cameras can detect that behavior and then alert conductors, simultaneously saving lives and improving the functioning of the rail.

The cameras aren’t designed to record information about individuals, so there’s minimal risk to privacy. Instead, they pick up on actions, like staggering, lingering around the platform, or sleeping on the benches, Railway Gazette reports. West Japan Railway has already installed 46 of these special cameras on various platforms.

Traditional security camera footage at rail stations has previously led to some improvements in this area. After reviewing footage showing that, when drunk people went straight from the bench to the rail, railway personnel reoriented the benches so that they no longer faced the tracks. This new camera technology might lead to even more improvements that could keep people safe.

[Railway Gazette]

Comets Could Have Kickstarted Life On Earth And Other Worlds

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Ben Crowder/ Flickr CC By SA 2.0

Comets are typically associated with extinction. However, there is growing evidence pointing to their ability to "seed" or create life on planets, a controversial idea, but one boosted by a groundbreaking experiment that re-created a comet impact as it would have occurred on a young Earth.

Some of the most exciting information obtained from the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission — which involved landing a spacecraft called Philae on the Comet 67P — was the discovery of organic materials on its surface, which the Philae lander "sniffed" out with its instruments.

This wasn’t the first time organic compounds were found on a comet. In 2009, NASA’s Stardust spacecraft sent a return capsule back to Earth, which contained glycine, an amino acid that the probe collected as it passed through the cosmic dust emitted by the comet Wild 2.

In a study published in Geochemical Journal, researchers demonstrated that the impact shock of an icy comet containing these organic compounds could generate peptides, the building blocks of proteins, and all of life as we know it.

Given that comet impacts were more common early in Earth's formation, this research not only informs about the potential origin of life on our planet, but of the potential of life on other planets as well. The research was presented at this year’s Goldschmidt geochemistry conference in Prague.

"There may be chemical evolution occurring on other planets or satellites"

The team at Nagoya University froze a mixture of amino acid, water ice, and forsterite (a silicate found on comets) with liquid nitrogen to around -321 Fahrenheit. Then, they proceeded to shoot out the encapsulated concoction with a vertical propellant gun the size of a two story house, at a velocity of up to 1430 meters per second, in order to simulate the conditions of an icy comet smashing into a planet. A chemical analysis of the post impact samples showed that the shock caused some amino acids to synthesize into linear peptides of up to three units long.

Vertical Propellant Gun

Haruna Sugahara

Haruna Sugahara, lead author of the study, stands next to a vertical propellant gun.

“Comet impacts might have had a key role in chemical evolution,” says Haruna Sugahara, lead author of the study. “It is possible that comets are delivering peptides to other extraterrestrial bodies, and that there may be chemical evolution occurring on other planets or satellites.”

Sugahara’s experiment shows the importance of frozen conditions in the formation of short linear peptides, which, once formed, don’t require as much energy to create longer more complex chains in terrestrial or aquatic environments. This experiment gives even more promise to the potential of finding life on icy worlds such as Jupiter’s moon Europa, says Sugahara. Europa was not only intensely bombarded by comets in the beginning of the solar system, but is believed to have an ocean underneath its frozen surface more than twice the size of Earth’s.

“On icy satellites like Europa there will be a lot of peptides synthesized by comet impacts,” Sugahara says. “This is a quite suitable place for the emergence of life.”

NASA plans to send a probe to Europa sometime in the next decade, so it's time to start getting excited for whatever lies ahead.

The Sun Briefly Built An 'Eiffel Tower' Larger Than Our Whole Planet

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Eiffel Prominence

Eiffel Prominence

A brief solar prominence on the sun. Click the magnifying glass to enlarge.

Apparently the sun has been taking notes on the work of architect Gustave Eiffel.

Yesterday, photographer Göran Strand noticed an odd shape coming off the sun as he was photographing it in his backyard in Sweden:

Though the solar copy bore an uncanny resemblance to the tower in France, this particular shape was a solar prominence, a loop of ionized gas that projects out from the sun's surface. Fittingly, the first observation of a solar prominence was made by a Swedish astronomer in 1733.

Solar prominences can be amazing displays and are usually massive. As you can see from the scale, this prominence was several times larger than the earth.

To create the image you see above, Strand took over 1000 photos of the sun and stacked the best 300 together to get the clear shot of the prominence. In order to get the details of the sun (instead of being blinded by looking at the sun through a telescope), photographers and astronomers use filters including a special kind called hydrogen alpha filters to get a richer view of the solar surface, which is mostly burning hydrogen. The filter works by blocking out most other wavelengths of light, only allowing a small amount of the light emitted by burning hydrogen to shine through.

In addition to Twitter, you can see more of Strand's work on his website, Instagram, and Facebook.


Watch A Hacker Take Over A Drone Remotely

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Parrot AR Drone

Nicolas Halftermeyer, via Wikimedia Commons

Small quadrotors like this are what most civilian drones look like right now.

Toy drone companies are not known for their cybersecurity finesse. Twice at this year’s annual hacker conference DEFCON, presenters demonstrated hacks on the Parrot series of drones that sent them crashing to the ground.

One, from Planet Zuda’s Ryan Satterfield, uses Wi-Fi and connects to an unsecured network port on the drone itself. With a simple text command, Satterfield sends a hovering drone crashing to the ground, like this:

Another hack, by Beltway-based security researcher Michael Robinson, takes advantage of the free Parrot app and the drone’s open Wi-Fi connection. With the right attack, Robinson switched control of the drone from the original pilot to a different Parrot app user.

These attacks are fairly basic, and according to Ars Technica, both researchers have informed Parrot about their drone’s vulnerabilities. While somewhat trivial for a toy, such weaknesses suggest caution when flying them for anything other than fun.

[via Ars Technica]

Update An earlier version of this post misstated the group that Ryan Satterfield belongs to. It is Planet Zuda, not Project Zuda.

The Future Of The Internet, According To Its Father

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Vint Cerf, Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist

David S. Holloway/Contour Images/Getty

The Internet has changed a lot over its 30-something years. That terrible dial-up noise is gone; the Ethernet cord has been cut; Tinder happened. What’s next? If anyone knows, it’s Vint Cerf, Google’s vice president and chief Internet evangelist. He is considered a “father of the Internet” for developing the protocols that run it: breaking information into packets, sending them into cyberspace, and reassembling them onto your screen. Cerf has watched his baby grow up and get smarter. Now he’s envisioning how it will mature in the coming decades.

In his own words:

"When we turned on the Internet in 1983, having a powerful computer in your pocket was science fiction. But the Internet has evolved beyond even cellphones to encompass smart objects that talk to each other and to you. Those devices—called the Internet of Things—now need standard protocols that allow connected products from different companies to work as an ensemble.

Soon cars, buildings, cities, and people will have sensors and software that track resources, respond to crime, or take constant vital signs. In that environment, machine learning will become increasingly important—not insane robots but systems much smarter than today’s Google searches. Once we’ve connected everything to everything else, safety and privacy will be big challenges. It’s impossible to stop abuse, but we have to be able to detect it. We need to develop better security and authentication technology, as well as better international agreements to prosecute cross-country cybercrimes.

The Internet, though, will extend beyond political borders, and even beyond Earth. A prototype Interplanetary Internet already stretches between our planet and the International Space Station. Astronauts use it to communicate with Earth. The Interplanetary Internet will evolve and expand as old spacecraft become nodes in its backbone, helping pass along signals.

To handle the delays and disruptions that occur in space, we need robust protocols. I helped develop the new “bundle protocol,” which assumes the link will break occasionally. When that happens, it stores the packets of data and waits to send them until the connection becomes secure again. The United Nations is in the process of adopting it as the standard that will support manned and robotic exploration into deep space.

We initially designed the Internet to be a network of networks that could expand over time. And so it has. And so it will.”

This article was originally published in the August 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Vint Cerf, On the Interplanetary Internet.”

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Bacteria With Synthetic DNA Create Protein Never Found In Nature

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Court Turner, the president of Synthorx, left, looks at the results from an experiment.

Synthorx

Your DNA, like that of everything else on the planet, is made of four nucleotides: A, C, G, and T. These are like a blueprint that your body reads to produce 20 different amino acids, which combine to make up the proteins that enable everything your body does, like repairing damaged cells or breaking down food.

Last year, biotech startup Synthorx announced that it had pushed the limits of biology by adding new building blocks to a bacteria’s genetic code. Now they’ve gone a step farther: those engineered bacteria have created a well-studied protein that has an added function, according to a press release the company issued yesterday. This could be the first step towards the discovery of new, more effective drugs and vaccines.

Synthorx added two more nucleotides, X and Y, to a bacteria’s DNA. These combine with the other four to make up to 172 different amino acids—over eight times the 20 commonly found in nature. These can combine to make an enormous number of proteins never before seen on Earth.

How Synthorx's modified bacteria produce new amino acids.

Scientists have already invented thousands of amino acids in the past to do things like fortify foods with more nutrients or make synthetic drugs. But those amino acids have proven very hard to string together in proteins. Having bacteria that can pump out proteins with an extra amino acid in a specific place could be a game changer for the synthetic drug industry. It could also be used to make new vaccines that contain a modified form of a virus that will train patients’ immune systems without the risk of making them sick.

Synthorx’s experiments aren’t quite there. They added the X and Y nucleotides at specific locations in the DNA of the bacteria E. coli to generate a “well-studied protein” (they didn’t say exactly which one) that contained one or more new amino acids. When they checked the resulting protein in a mass spectrometer, they found that the new amino acid was where they had wanted it to be.

The company plans to start ramping up the complexity of DNA modifications to produce more novel proteins. “By advancing our technology to this stage, we are now poised to produce proteins containing multiple novel amino acids, to fill our drug discovery pipeline as well as enable our partners in many aspects of drug development and manufacturing,” said Court Turner, Synthorx’s president and co-founder, in the press release.

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