MultiFab

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Right now, the typical 3D printer is a tool for making plastic objects. Assembling them in layers according to a pre-programmed plan, the printers can quickly make weirdly shaped parts, but they’re often limited to working with just one material at a time. Additive manufacturing, as 3D printing is also known, offers so much more. A new printer, created by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), can print up to 10 materials into a single object —and incorporate other, finished parts directly into the design— all at a fraction of the cost of complex industrial 3D printers

Their new printer, known as the MultiFab, is a system of systems. A central computer runs the printing program, but as it does so it receives feedback from 3D scanners and machine vision, which map the object as it’s being made, allowing the computer to adjust the printing process and materials accordingly. Here’s how MultiFab sees a circuit:

Another thing the scanning does it let the printer add in already-made objects and then print onto and around them, like this blade holder that incorporates a pre-made razor blade:

MultiFab was built from off-the-shelf parts with a total cost of about $7,000. That’s more expensive than hobbyist models but a fraction of the cost of some high-end industrial 3D printers.

Watch a video about it below:

[MIT]

Guayule plant

U.S. Department of Agriculture via Flickr

Sometimes, lowering the environmental impact of a car can be done by changing the materials its components are made from.

For years, the U.S. tire industry has sought substitutes for both imported natural rubber and the petroleum that is used in synthetic rubber.

Cooper Tire is expected to demonstrate tires this week with components made from the guayule plant, a desert shrub from the Southwestern United States, according to The New York Times.

The company says it will be able to make a complete tire from guayule-sourced rubber by 2017.

Helping in that effort will be PanAridus--which grows the plants and manufactures rubber from them--as well as Cornell and Clemson Universities.

Several companies have also reportedly shown interest in guayule as a substitute for costly imported rubber and environmentally-questionable petroleum.

Cooper Tire test center

Cooper Tire test center

Bridgestone opened a "bio-rubber" research and manufacturing center last year, and Ford has a partnership with Ohio State University to find automotive uses for the substance.

A startup called Yulex--which previously worked with Cooper on the tire project being replaced by PanAridus--is also working to use guayule rubber in consumer products, including a line of wet suits for Patagonia.

Cooper's project is part of a $6.9 million Biomass Research and Development Initiative grant, being administered jointly by the U.S. Department of Energy, and Department of Agriculture.

In addition to yielding latex that can be processed into rubber, guayule also reportedly produces resin that can be used in adhesives, flavors, fragrances, and biofuel. Fibrous material from the plant can also be made into biofuel, as well as construction materials, proponents say.

Cooper Tire test center

Interest in cultivating guayule as an alternative to hevea--the source of natural rubber--has waxed and waned since the early 1900s. It became particularly strong during World War II--when advancing Japanese forces cut off U.S. access to hevea--and during the 1970s.

Guayule grows much faster than hevea, but the latter still has certain advantages. Hevea is less prone to cracking, and doesn't allow as much heat buildup as rubber made from guayule. However, Cooper claims it has already made some tire components from 100-percent guayule rubber, and that it is well on its way to replacing others with the domestically-sourced material.

Tires already account for 70 percent of global rubber use, and demand is expected to grow as more countries fully industrialize.

Companies believe the industry could consume an additional 21 million acres of hevea by 2024.

More from Green Car Reports:

• Dodge SRT Hellcats And HEMIs Could Die In 2019

• 2016 Chevy Camaro Priced From $26,695, Camaro SS From $37,295

• Honda Pilot Vs. Toyota Highlander: Compare Cars

• Hyundai To Launch All-Electric 'Prius Fighter' Model In 2016: Tip

The view from inside a carbon nanotube.

Michael Ströck via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists have long been on the lookout for more efficient ways to identify particular molecules in the body, because their levels can be indicative of dozens of different health conditions. Now a team of researchers has developed implantable carbon nanotubes that light up in the presences of specific molecules, as the scientists announced last week at the meeting of the American Chemical Society and reported in Nature News. That could lead to faster—or even automated—diagnoses of diseases that currently take several days.

Carbon nanotubes are minuscule cylinders made of graphene and coated with another type of polymer—they are flexible and easy to modify for different purposes, which is why researchers have found uses for them in bringing molecules in and out of cells or checking to see if meat has gone bad. To use the nanotubes to diagnose diseases, the researchers designed special polymers that respond in the presence of a biological molecule they’re interested in. A special sensor in the nanotube transmits the signal back to a computer that can process it.

In their presentation the researchers outlined experiments conducted in mice with carbon nanotubes designed to detect insulin, key for diagnosing diabetes; fibrinogen, a protein necessary for blood clot formation and an indicator of liver disease or other inflammatory diseases; and nitric oxide, a molecule the body produces if cancer is present. The researchers engineered the polymers to sense a particular molecule. They tested the carbon nanotubes in blood samples outside the mice, then they implanted the devices inside the mice. The nanotubes worked—they transmitted a continuous signal and, when inside the body, didn’t break down or cause a reaction for 400 days. The nitric oxide sensors in particular worked well, as they were injected into the bloodstream and were even able to pass through the tiny capillaries in the lungs.

Given the cost of carbon nanotubes, it probably makes more sense that traditional blood tests will be used for most types of diagnosis, at least in the foreseeable future. But if carbon nanotubes perform similarly well in humans, they could be useful for continuous monitoring of patients in precarious conditions.

Aerosense Drone

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

For decades, aircraft design has focused on a central compromise: if an aerial vehicle wants to fly fast, it needs a plane-like body that cuts through the air and generates lift, but if it wants to take off and land vertically, it needs rotors and a much slower body. Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) is the kind of ability that usually comes with a pricetag of billions of dollars, like in the F-35B or the V-22. New drones can offer that ability at a fraction of the cost, like this new one from Sony’s drone wing Aerosense.

Watch how it takes off vertically, no runway needed:

And then flies forward like an arrow:

A pair of counter-rotating propellers sit in a ring inside the body of the plane. When parallel to the ground, they allow for a helicopter-like takeoff. Then in flight they turn perpendicular to the ground, propelling it forward like an airplane.

Made by Aerosense, a collaborative venture between Sony and ZMP Inc, the drone is expected to fly at speeds of up to 100 mph for over 2 hours while carrying cameras or other payloads weighing up to 22 pounds. The idea is to develop a drone for business customers. For example, a vehicle like this could potentially take off from the back of a truck and then inspect miles and miles of pipeline. Dull work, clever solution.

Watch the full video below:

Thermal Plant

Makai Ocean Engineering

There's a big difference between the warm, shallow seawater lapping up against a beach and the icy depths of the ocean. Now, researchers are turning that temperature difference into energy at energy plants all over the world. The newest one opened up in Hawaii last Friday, where it expects to generate enough energy to power 120 homes per year.

The plant, built by Maki Ocean Engineering and situated at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA) is the largest plant of its kind in the world.

The plant uses a concept called Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC). Inside the system is a liquid that has a very low boiling point (meaning that it requires less energy to evaporate), like ammonia. As ammonia passes through the closed system of pipes, it goes through a section of pipes that have been warmed by seawater taken from the warm (77 degrees Fahrenheit), shallow waters. The ammonia vaporizes into a gas, which pushes a turbine, and generates power. Then, that ammonia gas passes through a section of pipes that are cooled by frigid (41 degrees Fahrenheit) seawater pumped up from depths of around 3,000 feet. The gas condenses in the cold temperatures, turning back into a liquid, and repeats the process all over again. The warm and cold waters are combined, and pumped back into the ocean.

The idea of harnessing the temperature gradient to generate power has been around for a while. The Department of Energy says the OTEC concept originated in 1881 with a French physicist named Jacques Arsene d'Arsonval. In 1930, his student, Georges Claude, built the first plant in Cuba, but it was destroyed by storms soon after it was built. Other plants followed but they were small, and didn't generate much energy. The idea came back into vogue in the 1970's and 1980's, but went out of fashion again when oil prices dropped.

Now, with renewable, environmentally-friendly energy sources in demand, OTEC is edging back into the spotlight. A similar technology was used in 2010 to create a thermal engine that could power an unmanned submarine indefinitely.

In addition to this new thermal plant, there are also plenty of other energy options in the sea. Hawaii is also the home of the first wave energy project connected to the electrical grid, and the Department of Energy is sponsoring a Wave Energy Prize looking for the best ways to derive energy from waves. The final competition for the Wave Energy Prize should take place next year.

Eventually, Maki Ocean Engineering hopes to move their operations offshore, to head directly to the source of the deep, cold water needed to power the OTEC plant. They hope that this planned expansion will generate enough energy to power 120,000 homes every year.

GLM ZZ Electric Sports Car

Roland

No cinematic car chase is complete without the classic revving sound of a speeding car. That sound happens when you accelerate in most cars, but not in electric cars, which can feel strange and make driving one less fun. Now Japanese electric car company GLM is teaming up with digital audio company Roland to create a sound system that brings that revving sound—along with several others—to the electric sports car.

The car, GLM’s ZZ model, will be equipped with Roland’s Supernatural synthesizer hooked up to the car’s speaker system. The sounds will change depending on how hard the motor is working, whether the road slopes, or if the driver is accelerating or slowing down.

Roland's SuperNATURAL sound system

Roland

Roland doesn’t go into much detail in describing what the car will actually sound like, only noting that the “ingenious neo-futuristic sounds…will give sports car enthusiasts the experience of driving a space ship on the road.”

The companies hope they can tap into a growing market for electric sports cars. In fact, sound effects like these could help bridge the transition between the new electric models and their gas-powered predecessors, providing an added draw and tinge of familiarity for skeptics. And there’s appeal for those who are already sold on electric—after all, who doesn’t want to drive something that sounds like a spaceship?

The sound system will be available as an option for GLM's ZZ Electric Sports Car starting this fall.

MIDEN virtual reality testing room upgraded with Unreal Engine

University of Michigan/UM3D/YouTube

One of the key revelations of the seminal 1999 sci-film The Matrix was (spoiler alert) that most of humanity was trapped inside an elaborate virtual world. At the time, the scenario seemed far-fetched, if not wholly outside the realm of possibility. But 16 years later, scientists are getting much closer to replicating reality with an increasingly indistinguishable computer-generated copy. Just take a look at the latest advances from the University of Michigan's UM3D Lab, which focuses on research into virtual reality, 3D modeling/printing, motion capture, and other emerging technologies.

Since 1997, the university has hosted an immersive virtual reality testing environment in the form of a small (10-foot by 10-foot) room covered with projection walls, which change perspective as someone moves throughout it. But only recently did researchers upgrade this room, called MIDEN (Michigan Immersive Digital Experience Nexus), with the Unreal graphics engine, previously used to produce some of the most detailed and beautiful videogames of all time, from Bioshock Infinite to the Mass Effect series.

MIDEN's upgrade to the Unreal engine allow the VR testing room to be able to render incredibly lifelike environments, complete with difficult features like plants, water, smoke, and flame. Furthermore, thanks to MIDEN's tracking system — which relies on stereoscopic glasses and a gaming controller, both festooned with tracking balls — these virtual environments can be made to span out infinitely in all directions, and human testers can not only move freely throughout them, they can manipulate objects (doors, weapons) as well. The results are nothing short of breathtaking, as the above UM3D video shows.

MIDEN virtual reality motion controller (left) and stereo glasses

University of Michigan/UM3D

UM3D says in a press release that the system is designed "not just for gamers, but for those seeking high quality visualizations for research and exploration," specifically, "studies involving human behavior and environmental effects." With 2016 shaping up to be the year that consumer virtual reality really comes to the fore, it makes sense that researchers such as UM3D are pursuing even more souped-up versions in dedicated test labs.

Garbage Truck In San Jose

Coolcaesar, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

San Jose, California, has a problem. The city, with a population of over one million, is hemoraghing police officers, with an expectation that they’ll only have about 800 duty-ready cops by 2016. To supplement that force, the city is considering enlisting robots, and attaching them to garbage trucks. More specifically, to combat automobile theft, San Jose is looking at purchasing more license plate readers, and attaching them to non-police vehicles which already drive routes in the city.

License plate readers are very, very good at what they do. Usually attached to vehicles like squad cars, but sometimes hidden in cacti, the machines use cameras that scan in normal and infrared light for license plates, and record the plate’s unique combinaton of numbers and letters, using algorithims to peel away obscuring data--like a CAPTCHA test, but designed to be read by robots. Locations are tagged and timestamped, and often fed into a database, where local police then use this information to check for stolen cars or cars linked to people with outsanding warrants.

Typically, license plate readers scan parked cars in public. That hasn’t left them without controversy, though. Scanning the same car in two places reveals a little about the behavior of the person who drove it, and building a database that tracks the movements of cars then becomes a study on the behavior of a population, which threatens privacy in a way not really possible before the technology existed. Unsurprisingly, people have challenged the legality of the readers. Still, they’re popular among law enforcement. Over 70 percent of police departments in the United States use them.

San Jose is set to buy two of the license plate readers, which will cost the city about 70,000 dollars each. They may go on either police squad cars, or, adding a quirk, onto garbage trucks operated by the city’s private waste-hauling companies.

[Mercury News, via Jalopnik]

Image Credit: Chabacano via The Commons

Project: Speech Errors

When you're on a roll, there are few things more annoying than suddenly being tripped up by an inability to remember a specific word. That's possibly because the sensation is almost always accompanied by the feeling that the word is "right there" or "on the tip of your tongue" and that if you could just clear away whatever murky haze was in the way, you'd have it.

It's a common, probably universal feeling. Unfortunately, it's very random nature makes it so difficult to study. Scientists would love to know more about the phenomenon, but obviously potential study subjects are unwilling to hang around labs for days or weeks at a time so that researchers can observe the problem in real time.

That's why researchers at the University of Kansas' Life Span Institute want you to record your speech errors in a database they've set up at their website. In addition to tip-of-the-tongue errors, they'd love to know about slips of the tongue, mondegreens (things that are said correctly, but they are not heard correctly), malapropisms (using incorrect words in place of similar ones), and spoonerisms (when sounds from adjacent words are switched).

"We think the data will be useful to linguists, psychologists who study language, speech-language pathologists, audiologists and computer scientists and engineers working on speech recognition in computers," said Michael Vitevitch, professor of psychology at University of Kansas.

The tip-of-the-tongue errors will be especially helpful, as people tend to experience them more often when they get older. According to Vitevitch, "They tell us how the language system is built - for example, that meaning is stored in memory separately from the sound of the words - and they show that memories can be transient - you used the word last week, you can't retrieve the word right now, a few hours later the word comes to you. Older adults often complain they experience these states more often, so studying tip-of-the-tongue states helps us distinguish what happens during normal aging from what happens when certain diseases might be present, such as Alzheimer's disease."

To participate, simply register at the site linked above, and then bookmark it in your favorite browser. Return to it to record a speech error as often as you make them. The more you add, the better the database will become. You can also help by letting other people know about the project.

Chandra Clarke is a Webby Honoree-winning blogger, a successful entrepreneur, and an author. Her book Be the Change: Saving the World with Citizen Science is available at Amazon. You can connect with her on Twitter @chandraclarke.

Thunder, visualized

University of Florida, Florida Institute of Technology, and Southwest Research Institute

See how acoustic energy dissipates as a bolt of lightning strikes.

Lightning is incredibly powerful. One strike can contain 1,500 megajoules of energy—enough to power a 100-watt lightbulb for six months. But scientists know only the basics of how it works. Maher A. Dayeh, a heliophysicist at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, aims to change that.

In July 2014, his team triggered a bolt by shooting a rocket trailing copper wire into a storm cloud. Fifteen microphones captured the sound waves created as heated air around the bolt expanded and then compressed. The result? The first-ever acoustic image of thunder.

From it, researchers can infer how much energy went into forming the bolt, and how much it radiated as sound. Lightning is violent, Dayeh says. “Prediction and protection are almost impossible if we don’t understand the process in the first place.”

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

Mountain on Ceres

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

NASA's Dawn spacecraft has moved in for a closer look at the dwarf planet Ceres. Since descending to an altitude of 900 miles in mid-August, its view has gotten three times sharper. That has allowed scientists to zoom in on a 4-mile-high mountain in Ceres' southern hemisphere.

The cone-shaped peak, which is about as tall as Mt. McKinley (the tallest mountain in North America), has shiny sides that are composed of some kind of reflective material, possibly ice. The mountain pops out of a pretty flat region, and scientists aren't sure how it got there.

Here's a 360-degree view of the peak, from an older animation:

Dawn will continue to examine Ceres in this new closeup view until December, when it'll close in to 230 miles from Ceres' surface, which will hopefully help to shed some light on this and other strangely shiny spots on the dwarf planet's exterior.

The upcoming Apple event will unveil their newest smartphones

Mario Hernández/Flickr Creative Commons

The iPhone 6S release date is still unconfirmed, but several reports indicate that Apple will host a media event on September 9, and given Apple's regular annual update cycle, a new iPhone announcement — presumably including both the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus — seems all but guaranteed. Though it's hard to say exactly what will be included in the next-generation iPhone, purportedly leaked information about its hardware, software, and more have been passed around Apple rumor blogs in recent weeks. We've reviewed the information to identify realistic new features from the unlikely ones, and based on our observations, here's what we think you can expect from the next iPhone:

What will the new iPhone look like?

The next iPhone will likely have the same casing as the current model, the iPhone 6. Most experts predict that it will include faster processor and more RAM in addition to a brand new operating system, iOS 9, first previewed earlier this year at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). The updated operating system will position Apple to compete directly against Android’s unique functions like Google Now predictive search and Samsung’s multi-window feature.

Apple will put Siri’s new predictive search functions—called Proactive—front and center on the new operating system as well. Swiping right on the home screen will bring users to a Siri Suggestions section that will show users friends they may want to contact, relevant apps, nearby restaurants, and more. The updated operating system will also bring a much-needed update to Apple Maps. On the iPad, iOS 9 will allow people to run two apps at once and also have picture-in-picture functionality.

How much better will the new iPhone hardware be?

In addition to the new operating system, Apple is expected to update the rear-facing camera of the iPhone. Although the camera has been championed as “the world's’ most popular,” it has still failed to perform as well as the latest crop of Android phones in a number of independent camera tests. Apple is expected to increase the camera quality to 12 megapixels (from 8 megapixels in its current generation), which would put it on par with the type of specifications seen in phones such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6.

The iPhone camera's specifications have remained unchanged since the iPhone 4S, which was released back in 2011. The company squeezed great performance from the 8 megapixel camera sensor using software to add sharpness and color clarity. Apple upgraded its front-facing camera to 1.2 megapixels in the iPhone 5 in 2012. Instead of increasing pixel numbers the next year, the iPhone 5s increased the pixel size from 1.4µm to 1.5µm and brought better low-light performance with dual LED bulbs. The iPhone 6 added video functions such as time-lapse and the ability to shift focus while recording. Although it’s widely known that more megapixels doesn’t mean better performance, many iPhone users will welcome the increase.

An all new input option for iPhone users

Force Touch is a feature that debuted with the Apple Watch in April. It allows a touchscreen or touchpad to determine the amount of force exerted. Because it can differentiate the amount of force applied, the touchscreen or touchpad can interpret different pressures as different functions. For instance, a hard push could be used as a right click on the iPad.

Since its initial rollout with the Apple Watch, Apple has added Force Touch to the newest Macbook computers that were unveiled at WWDC in April. Now that two of Apple’s newest products have Force Touch, many experts (and fans) expect the company to bring that function over to its best-selling device, the iPhone.

Apple bends to customer pressure

When the iPhone 6 launched last year, some owners of the Plus model noticed their devices bending during normal use. Videos like the one from Unbox Therapy’s Lewis made their rounds across the web, launching a controversy now known as "Bendgate" (or "Bendghazi"). While Apple may not openly admit how severe the problem was, the company is still taking steps to address the issue.

The iPhone 6s is rumored to have a thicker body to Apple’s flagship phone. By strengthening the weak points near the device’s volume buttons, the phone phone is expected to be significantly more durable. The iPhone’s thickness will stretch an extra 0.2mm — from 7.1mm to 7.3mm—according to at least one report. Others suggest that Apple will be using a material that is much stronger than the current aluminum composite used on the iPhone 6. One way or another, we expect Apple to avoid the criticism it received with its latest iteration of the phone.

Splashdown

NASA Langley Research Center

Just call it NASA's greatest hits. Apparently everyone so enjoyed watching NASA crash an airplane into the ground last month that the folks at NASA Langley decided to put together an incredible clip showing some of the amazing crash and splash tests that the agency has performed over the years. (NASA likes to crash stuff on other planets too. We think they might have a problem.)

The tests took place at the Landing Impact and Research Facility, which was built in 1965 as the Lunar Landing Research Facility, designed to help test designs for the lunar lander. The centerpiece of the facility is a massive steel gantry, which NASA describes as resembling "a giant steel erector set". The structure is 240 feet tall and 400 feet long, large enough to hoist spacecraft as well as aircraft, which they then crash on purpose. The facility can lift things up to 64,000 pounds, and send them crashing into soil, concrete or water at 70 miles per hour.

The crashes aren't just fun to watch. Like other crash tests, the spectacular destruction serves a purpose, helping to test safety features such as emergency transmitters, structural integrity, and integral systems such as fuel lines.

None of the tests had people on board, but there were some familiar faces hanging around...

Watch the full crash-test video here:

Air Force Training Jet With Shockwaves

NASA Photo

To see the future of flight, NASA is borrowing a technique from photography’s past. Planes going at supersonic speeds generate shockwaves. Depending on how that plane sends off the waves, it can be loud and unpleasant for people on the ground. To create quieter supersonic planes, NASA wanted to see the shockwaves coming off the vehicle itself.

To photograph the air around the airplane, without getting distracted by all the other scenery, NASA employed Schlieren imaging. Invented by August Toepler in 1864, the technique uses lots of parallel lights focused on a single object. This captures areas where fluid flow is the most dense (like, say, where air makes shockwaves in a wind tunnel over an airplane model). It has a long history in supersonic flight, where it showed how models would react to air at high speeds.

Wind Tunnel Model Airplane With Shock Waves

NASA

Wind tunnels are something of an ideal state for aircrafts. NASA wants to capture what supersonic flight looks like outside, in the sky, so they’ve had to adapt a technique originally made for laboratories to be used in outside conditions, by using the sun as the light source. They started testing in 2011, contrasting images of a speckled background with a speckled background distorted by various patterns of shockwave. Software reads the image to see what pattern best matches the photo captured, and then edits out the background, leaving only a plane and its wake.

Once developed in the lab, NASA took the technology to the field, capturing lots of high-speed images of planes taken by other planes and then processing them to reveal the shockwaves. NASA is continuing to refine the process, with the hope that future aircraft design can learn from field tests to build quieter supersonic airplanes.

[NASA]

Galaxy Note 5

Michael Nunez / Popular Science

The new Samsung Galaxy Note 5.

Earlier this month, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Note 5 at a special media event in New York City. During the event, executives touted Samsung’s commitment to styluses made for touchscreens, emphasizing that — at least according to Samsung's device sales — there was a clear demand for them.

If only they'd known that the Galaxy Note 5 stylus would ship with a seemingly major design flaw: when inserted backwards (upside down) into the phone, the Note 5's stylus gets stuck and can actually break the very mechanism that allows it to be detected by the smartphone in the first place. The defect was first reported by Android Police in the video show below.

The new Samsung S Pen—the name of the stylus that ships with every Galaxy Note device—is the most advanced of its type, according to the company. The Note 5 is supposed to recognize when the S Pen is removed from the smartphone's body, and the S Pen is ejected from the body using a spring-loaded mechanism. This mechanism is activated when you push the pen in.

The problem is that if a user inserts the pen the wrong way, with the button going into the smartphone body, the pen gets stuck and is extremely difficult (or even impossible!) to remove. Even if you do get the S Pen back out, as Android Police was able to do, the sensor that allows the Note 5 to detect and register touches from the stylus may be broken, rendering it useless (the phone's touchscreen still works with finger inputs, however).

To add to the issue, putting the S Pen in the wrong way is actually pretty easy to do. There is little or no resistance from the smartphone when you slide the pen in backwards. Samsung's response to the problem has also been somewhat frustrating, with the company putting the onus entirely on users not to accidentally insert the pen in the incorrect direction. “We highly recommend our Galaxy Note 5 users follow the instructions in the user guide to ensure they do not experience such an unexpected scenario caused by reinserting the S pen in the other way around," Samsung said a statement released to The Next Web and other media outlets.

Only time will tell whether or not this flaw is a big enough issue for Samsung to take action, and if so, what that would look like. Could a firmware update fix the broken sensor detection (unlikely)? For now, the only thing Galaxy Note 5 users can do is be extra careful when inserting their S Pen into the device. We'll continue to update as the story develops.

Wind Turbines

steve p2008/FlickrCC by 2.0

What if on your next rail journey, the train not only sped along the countryside fast as the wind, it was actually powered by the breeze? If you travel on a train in the Netherlands in 2018, that might just be your reality.

Under a deal written up in 2014, starting this year about half of the electric trains in the Netherlands run on wind power. But the contract between railway companies and power suppliers aims to push that number higher. As Railway Technologyreports, the agreement will see the trains running on completely on wind power by 2018. The energy will be generated from wind farms within the country but also in Belgium, and nearby Scandinavian countries.

The railway, which carries 1.2 million passengers every day, released about 550 kilotons of carbon dioxide before it started the switch to wind power earlier this year. The hope is to bring that number down to zero. The decrease comes at just the right time. Dutch citizens recently sued their government to reduce CO₂ emissions to levels 25 percent lower than those in 1990 by the year 2020. Cutting out all CO₂ from trains by 2018 is a step in that direction.

It will be a long while before wind-powered trains arrive in the United States. Currently, wind power companies in America are focusing on an earlier step in the process; actually building wind farms. The closest point of intersection between the wind power and transportation industries seems to be figuring out how to transport the massive turbine parts from manufacturers to the building site. With some turbine blades weighing thousands of pounds and stretching over 180 feet long just getting from point A to point B requires a logistics nightmare of conventional trucks and trains.

Once wind farms are ubiquitous, rail companies might decide to follow the Dutch model. In the meantime, the United States is developing more efficient train engines that release fewer pollutants into the air. It may not be wind-powered trains, but it's a start.

Tri Alpha Fusion Reactor Tube

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

For the blink of an eye, nuclear fusion appears possible. Nuclear reactors today are fission reactors, where decaying nuclear material heats water to power generators. Fusion reactors, in theory, create a sustained reaction, like at the heart of actual stars. Humans have attempted to create fusion reactors since the 1950s. This decade, Lockheed notably announced a secretive reactor in development in 2013. The typical way to get to the point of fusion is by superheating a ball of gas and then sustaining that heat. Earlier this week, Tri Alpha Energy, located in southern California, announced that they’ve created a superheated gas ball that lasts longer than expected, a crucial step on the road to fusion. Like Lockheed, instead of using a giant donut-shaped reactor, Tri Alpha is working with a cylindrical device.

In a hubristic imitation of the sun, fusion reactors combine hydrogen atoms at high temperatures. Tri Alpha heated their sample (using hydrogen and boron) up to 10 million degrees Celsius, or 18 million degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature at which it becomes plasma). Then a fusion reactor held that plasma in place, which is usually done with electromagnetic fields. This means that most fusion reactors have high energy demands, though they promise gigantic yields. The reactor made by Tri Alpha used 10 megawatts to heat the gases to just 10 million degrees. But to get to the three billion degrees that is required to provoke a fusion reaction, they'll need a lot more power. The design does seem capable of handling it--the field Tri Alpha created lasted for five milliseconds before their machine ran out of energy to maintain it.

Assuming all of this works when scaled up, Tri Alpha Energy has the potential to unlock an astoundingly powerful source of energy. There’s a lot that has to happen first to make the fusion dream real though, and if Tri Alpha fails, they’d be hardly the first to promise an amazing energy source and only deliver hot air.

Watch a video about it below:

How Not To Write A Good Journal Title

Nucleic Acids Research/Modified by Popular Science

If you’re looking to cure your insomnia, try reading a scientific journal. If jargon, confusing abbreviations, statistics, and rampant use of the passive tone doesn't put you to sleep, who knows what will. The typical excuse for why scientific studies are so poorly written is that they’re produced for experts—there’s just not enough time or space to provide all the necessary background information for a novice.

Well, it turns out that even scientists themselves can't understand a lot of the techno-babble. A new analysis of 140,000 papers suggests that studies with shorter titles are cited more often by other scientists, and according to the authors, it may be because these papers are easier to comprehend.

In the world of science, citations are the main marker of success. When you publish a paper that a lot of researchers refer back to, it indicates your paper broke some new ground.

This study (economically named “The advantage of short paper titles”) analyzed the 20,000 most cited papers from each of the years 2007 to 2013. For each year, the data showed that shorter-titled papers got more attention.

The situation gets more complicated, though, when you take journal rankings into account. Papers published in more prestigious journals tend to get more citations. Once the authors controlled for that factor, the correlation between shorter titles and higher citations only held up for the years 2007 to 2010. But the results do show that, overall, journals that publish papers with shorter titles tend to receive more citations per paper.

Title Length vs. Popularity

Royal Society Open Science

As title length increases from left to right, the average number of citations decrease.

Previous studies have been inconclusive about the relationship between title length and popularity. One found no relation, while another found that longer titles receive more citations. The authors of this study say that their findings are more decisive because they analyzed a much larger sample of papers.

A culture of Streptococcus pyogenes bacteria, one of the types found in the study

VeeDunn via Flickr, CC by 2.0

The colonies of bacteria living in our throats could indicate whether or not a person has schizophrenia, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Peer J.

No one is quite sure what causes schizophrenia, but for decades scientists have beenlooking at the link between schizophrenia and the immune system. The immune system appears weaker in schizophrenic patients, but researchers didn’t really understand how the two were connected. Recent research into the microbiome—the colonies of bacteria that live in and around our bodies—has shown that these bacteria play a surprisingly large part in all sorts of functions, including regulating our moods and modulating our immune systems.

So a team of researchers from George Washington University decided to investigate which bacteria make up the microbiome in patients with and without schizophrenia. They took throat swabs of 32 patients, half of whom had schizophrenia and half of whom did not, and sequenced the genes of the bacteria they found there. They looked at which types of bacteria they were, and their concentrations.

The researchers found that the bacteria living in the throats of schizophrenic patients were very different from those in the control patients. Control patients had different concentrations of commonly found bacteria, and they also had a greater diversity of bacterial species. Schizophrenic patients had more lactic acid bacteria, which could indicate an imbalance in their microbiomes.

A visual representation of the bacteria and concentrations found in normal and schizophrenic patients

Castro-Nallar et al, Peer J, 2015

The study has limitations. The study didn’t look at fungi or viruses living in the throat that also make up the microbiome. 32 patients is too small a sample size to make a larger generalization about the microbiomes of all schizophrenic patients. Plus, the study only addressed the bacteria in the throat microbiome, not those living in the intestines, mouth, colon, ears, or on the skin—the researchers hope to do this in future studies. There were also lots of other variables that could have affected the microbiome population, such as whether or not the patients smoked—the researchers tried to account for this, but it’s not clear that they were fully able to do so. And researchers still don’t understand the mechanisms by which bacteria affect the brain.

Even so, the study is an interesting exploration into a factor of schizophrenia. If future studies reveal specific, universal differences between schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic patients, doctors could find biomarkers in the microbiome to diagnose patients more quickly and accurately. If researchers can also understand the mechanisms for how the bacteria cause or exacerbate the disease (uncovering causation, not just correlation), they could also find new treatments for schizophrenia.