A Soft Touch

MIT/CSAIL

Robotic hands aren't typically known for being delicate or spontaneous. They're more likely to be part of an assembly line, or specifically designed to do one task perfectly, over and over. But those days may be waning. A new robotic hand printed out of silicone by MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) can pick up just about any object, no matter how delicate or strangely sized. The results were released today, and really, it can pick up any small object:

The variety is incredibly important. “If we want robots in human-centered environments, they need to be more adaptive and able to interact with objects whose shape and placement are not precisely known,” Daniela Rus, CSAIL's director said in a statement. “Our dream is to develop a robot that, like a human, can approach an unknown object, big or small, determine its approximate shape and size, and figure out how to interface with it in one seamless motion.”

Sometimes, that means that the robot needs to be able to pick up things lying in awkward positions. CD's may be nearly obsolete, but the fact that the robot can pick up a CD lying flat on a table is still pretty impressive.

The silicone fingers are equipped with sensors that analyze the object they are touching and compare it to other items in it's database. Then, they apply force accordingly and are able to pick up plastic bottles, individual pieces of paper, and even eggs without crushing them. Take a look at this guy delicately picking up a stuffed animal:

CSAIL isn't the only group looking into this. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University also announced this week the development of delicate, highly-sensitive robot hands equipped with optical sensors that actually let the hand see the object that it is picking up, increasing the robot's dexterity. Both the CMU and MIT research was presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, going on this week in Germany.

Watch the entire MIT demonstration video here:

This flea preserved about 20 million years ago in amber may carry evidence of an ancestral strain of the bubonic plague.

George Poinar, Jr., courtesy of Oregon State University

Your monthly roundup of infestations, contagions, and controls from around the web.

In microbe news

After a short hiatus, Legionnaires’ disease is back in the Bronx, according to New York Magazine.

There’s a horrible dengue outbreak in India, says Quartz. And this Smithsonian piece breaks down new research on what makes dengue so nasty.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is investigating Pentagon labs that apparently mishandled anthrax, plague, and encephalitis viruses, according to the New York Times. Then again, last year the CDC accidentally sent deadly flu through the mail, exposed workers to live anthrax, and found a misplaced container of smallpox in one of its labs. So there’s that.

In antibiotics news

Check out these scary maps that show how antibiotic-resistant bacteria have spread worldwide.

New research from Stanford suggests that it may be possible to knock out C. diff bacteria without harming beneficial gut microbes, according to the Washington Post.

Biotech companies are raising prices on antibiotics, anti-parasitics, and more, to much public outrage. Read more at the New York Times.

In vaccine news

Nigeria hit another polio milestone this month: The World Health Organization recently removed it from the official list of countries with endemic polio. Meanwhile, a few vaccine-acquired cases of polio have cropped up in Mali and the Ukraine, likely because of drops in vaccination.

Some patients are getting shoulder injuries from vaccines that are given too high on the arm and they may soon be able to get compensation for it, according to Wired.

And the recent GOP debates showed that many of the Republicans vying for the presidency have really disappointing views on vaccines. Read this Forbes piece for a good take-down of one candidate, Ben Carson.

In agriculture news

Researchers in upstate New York plan to use genetically engineered insects to help control gypsy moth outbreaks on farms, which will lower the use of insecticides. Read more at the New York Times.

A new study suggests that bats may be able to save farmers $1 billion worldwide in pest control. Read more here at Popular Science.

And lawyers are keeping sulfoxaflor pesticides, related to neonicotinoids, from the market after winning a successful lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency. Read more at New Scientist.

In invasive species news

New research suggests that a virus may help control invasive Argentine ants, according to Science.

Western States are trying to keep the invasive quagga mussel away through boat inspections, says the New York Times.

And according to Fusion, 159,000 invasive giant African snails have been taken down in Florida.

In creepy crawly news

Scientists published a new study showing how easy it is for bed bugs—my favorite!—to spread in apartment buildings. In order to track the bugs in the study, the researchers painted individual bugs to see where they ended up. Read more at Discover.

Climate change in the Arctic may be boosting swarms of mosquitoes, reports Popular Science (check out that creepy alien-like gif).

And bacteria inside a 20-million-year-old flea, which researchers found in the Dominican Republic, may give clues to the origins of the Bubonic plague. Read more at the Washington Post.

Aidan Monaghan

It almost feels wrong to label The Martian as science fiction. Based on the book that computer programmer Andy Weir researched for three years, the movie feels like it could happen in real life any day now. You’ll find no suspended animation, jump drives, or wormholes in this flick—just technologies that NASA is already using or could develop in the near future.

True, in real life we’re not headed for Mars anytime soon. America doesn’t even have a spacecraft to get us there, let alone a habitat to keep us alive while we’re there. But if and when we do go to Mars, it’s probably going to look a lot like you’ll see in The Martian, according to a panel of NASA scientists and engineers who spoke at Columbia University on Sunday.

“To the level of detail that you see in the film and in the book," Dave Lavery from NASA’s Solar System Exploration program told Popular Science after the panel, "it overall is actually pretty closely in line with what we've been thinking.”

Warning: Mild spoilers follow, but we won't give away any major plot points.

Quibbles

The scientists that Popular Science talked to were hard-pressed to really find fault with the movie. But there are a few persnickety things, which actually originate from the book--although The Martian is now getting lots of love from NASA, when Weir started writing the story, it was just a blog. Here are a few of the minor issues these scientists spotted that aren’t exactly true to life.

The Sandstorm

This is a big one, and it’s one that’s been harped on before. At the very beginning of the book, a sandstorm causes astronaut Mark Watney’s crew mates to leave him for dead, abandoned on Mars. Although Mars does have huge, powerful sandstorms, the destructive force of the storm is lessened in real life by the planet’s thin atmosphere and low gravity (about 1/3 of Earth’s).

“Yes, we do have 100-mile-an-hour dust storms on Mars,” says Lavery, “but they have the inertia and the dynamic pressure associated with an 11-mile-an-hour wind on Earth. So you wouldn't get that level of damage, or big pieces flying through the air, causing all these events to happen.”

Real Martian sandstorms do have at least one potentially deadly force, though, says Lavery: lightning. “We haven't actually photographed a bolt of lightning on Mars yet, but we've seen ground traces before and after lightning has occurred. It's associated with these sandstorms. Andy [Weir] has said 'Had I known that at the time, I would have had lightning make this whole thing work.'”

The RTG

Without including too many spoilers, at one point, Mark Watney has to dig up a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG). Originally used to charge the mission’s Mars Ascent Vehicle, it was later buried to protect the crew from any potential radioactive emissions. NASA really does use RTGs—the Curiosity rover is driving around with one right now—but Lavery says NASA would never choose to bury an RTG. That’s because the plutonium inside stays hot for a very long time.

“Mars has got a fairly significant storage system for water,” Lavery says. “Most of it is basically frozen mud in the subsurface, maybe a couple of meters down, but the idea of taking a big heat source, burying it, and putting it near that frozen mud, potentially turning that subsurface into liquid water… You would create a perfect growing environment” for Earth bacteria. That would be bad because Earthlings are supposed to avoid “harmful contamination” of other worlds, and also because if scientists ever want to find out if there’s native life on Mars, we can’t go mucking it up with Earth germs.

Matt Damon ("Mark Watney") leans against a rover

Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

Untethered Space Walks

When astronauts on the International Space Station go outside, they leash themselves to the station so they won’t float away. The Martian movie includes a few untethered space walks, probably to add dramatic effect. Yes, there are packs that would let an astronaut jet around without a tether, but NASA doesn’t like to use them. In real life, NASA astronauts have only ever performed a handful of untethered excursions.

Radiation Protection

Because of its thin atmosphere, Mars is pummeled with space radiation that can be harmful to humans. If NASA were planning a long-term stay on Mars, says Lavery, they wouldn’t use the inflatable habitats you see in the movie and the book. Instead, the habitats would probably be placed underground or, if above-ground, covered in Martian soil to protect against radiation. Still, according to Lavery, Mark Watney’s overall exposure probably wouldn’t have been intense enough to cause noticeable health effects during the time period of the story.

What It Gets Right

These criticisms are all minor, and they don’t ruin the movie at all (well, ok, the space walk thing was kind of annoying…). What’s more notable, really, is how much The Martian gets right.

How We’ll (Probably) Get To Mars

Barring any surprising innovations, we’ll travel to the Red Planet in a spaceship that’s built for long-term human spaceflight, land on Mars in a descent vehicle, camp out in pre-delivered habitats eating pre-delivered food, and then go home via a Mars Ascent Vehicle that docks with the same big spaceship we arrived in. Just like inThe Martian.

“A lot of that stuff is actually very much in line with what our current thinking is right now about how you might structure a mission to Mars,” says Lavery. On one level, he continues, we know how to get to Mars—we’ve done it several times with robots. But for a human mission, everything from the life support systems to communications technologies still needs to be scaled up and fully developed.

The Little Things

Wearing a space suit is often compared to wearing a giant balloon. The suit is inflated to mimic Earth-like air pressures, but it also makes it really difficult for an astronaut to move, particularly the fingers. It takes a lot of effort to bend the inflated gloves—something Mark Watney complains about in the book.

It’s a known problem and NASA’s looking into it, said David Miller, an MIT aerospace engineer and NASA’s chief technology officer, during the panel. “What we're working on is how to make gloves that still keep the right pressure on the skin so the blood doesn't boil, but still allow you to do a lot more work.”

Although direct mentions of these sorts of details clearly couldn’t fit the movie, Weir’s meticulousness shines through in subtle ways.

Real Scientists, Real Astronauts

The Ares 3 crew in "The Martian"

Courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

Unlike most movie scientists, whose job is to pop into a scene and use big words to explain usually unrealistic concepts, the scientists in The Martian seem more like real people with distinct personalities, working together to solve a problem. That’s what pulled screenwriter Drew Goddard into the project.

“I had never read anyone capture scientists the way Andy captured scientists,” said Goddard, who grew up in Los Alamos—a town full of scientists, thanks to the national lab there. “What Andy captured was much closer to my experience of being around scientists, which is the intelligence mixed with the camaraderie, mixed with the humor, that sort of happens when you get a lot of really smart people together to solve a problem.”

Former astronaut Mike Massimino, who also spoke at the Columbia event, says the astronauts in the book and movie were also portrayed accurately. “I'm very excited about the way that the relationships between the astronauts were portrayed,” he said. Between adventure training, survival school, and getting thrown into extreme environments together, astronauts build up a strong bond. “We take care of each other as best we can. When someone needs someone, there's nothing we wouldn't do.”

Eventually, S*** Is Going To Hit The Fan

The Martian trailer has Mark Watney saying, "I guarantee you that at some point, everything's going to go south on you, and you're going to say, 'This is it, this is how I end.' Now you can either accept that, or you can get to work."

As overquoted as it is, the line makes a good point: no matter how many precautions you take, space is a dangerous place, and stuff is bound to go wrong. Sometimes those problems are fatal. Other times, human ingenuity pulls through.

The Martian is basically MacGyver on Mars, and there’s actually historical precedent for it. If the Apollo 13 astronauts hadn’t been able to use tube socks and duct tape to fix a carbon dioxide filter, they would have died.

“Sometimes you need to use a technology in a need that you did not foresee,” said Miller. “It's always worth thinking about that in advance.”

There’ve been plenty of space disaster movies. But what’s great about The Martian is that the problems are solved without resorting to incorrect orbitals or “the power of love” (we’re looking at you, Gravity and Interstellar).

In the end, that’s what will likely secure The Martian’s place in science fiction canon. In 20 or 30 years, when real-life astronauts will supposedly visit Mars, we'll likely look back on this book and movie without thinking it’s ridiculous. If anything, maybe (hopefully) we'll laugh at how conservative it was in its estimation of human technological prowess.

Platelets under a scanning electron microscope

Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania

It’s notoriously difficult to direct cancer drugs to only the cells you want to target—they often kill many healthy cells in the process, making the patient feel sicker, or the body attacks them assuming that they are invaders. For the past few years, researchers have been devising new ways to disguise drug molecules so that they will reach cancerous cells more efficiently. Now a team of researchers from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill may have found the best cloaking mechanism yet, masking drugs as blood cells, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Advanced Materials.

Platelets, a type of blood cell, are a good disguise for drugs because blood cells naturally stick to cancer cells, so the drugs can go directly to tumors or destroy cancer cells in the blood stream before they colonize new organs. Plus, since the platelets are derived from the patient’s own body, the immune system doesn’t immediately try to destroy them, allowing the drugs to stay in the system for longer, the study authors tell Science Beta.

A schematic of the cancer-fighting drug coated in platelet membrane

Quanyin Hu et al, Advanced Materials, 2015

In this study, the researchers tested their method on 231 mice with tumors. They first separated the platelets from the blood drawn from each mouse, then removed the platelet membranes and combined them with two cancer-fighting drugs. The result was a sphere with a drug on the inside, surrounded by the platelet membrane. The researchers then injected the spheres into the mice’s bloodstream. They found that the particles stayed in the bloodstream for 30 hours, 24 hours longer than the particles not coated with platelet membranes, and that the coated molecules killed cancer cells and stopped tumor growth much more effectively.

Since this is a study in mice, this technology isn’t yet ready to be used in humans. And while it makes sense that blood cells would be a good disguise for drugs because of blood’s relationship with tumor cells, it’s unclear if the platelet membranes work better than similar efforts to camouflage drugs as innocuous viruses or bacteria. The researchers plan to answer some of these questions in future studies. They also anticipate that this method could be used to send other types of drugs to targeted places in the body to heal leaky veins or combat conditions like heart disease.

The researchers flying the samples in the drone.

Timothy Amukele et al, PLOS One, 2015

No matter what country they’re in, people living in rural places often don’t have access to high-quality medical care. Everything from emergency facilities, to pharmacies, to sophisticated labs for tests are often farther away. But according to a study published recently in the free-to-read journal PLOS One, drones could help bring better medical care to rural communities all over the world.

Companies like Amazon and researchers have already shown that drones can be a great way to transport small objects—the paths in which they fly are often more direct than cars’ sinuous routes, without the fuel use, or wear-and-tear of roads to boot.

To the study authors, drones would be most useful in bringing patient samples to more sophisticated labs, where they’re tested to be used in diagnoses or even regular checkups. As they write in the paper: "the majority of specimens are obtained in physician offices or clinics that tend to have small laboratories with limited testing menus. Thus samples must be transported to larger, more complex laboratories to provide the testing required for clinical care.”

How the researchers packed the drone with samples.

Timothy Amukele et al, PLOS One, 2015

To test if putting the samples in the sky disrupted them, the researchers took a total of 336 samples from 56 patients. All of these samples were brought out to a field. Half of them were put in a drone and flown around for 6-38 minutes, while the other half stayed stationary. The researchers then brought all the samples to the lab, where technicians performed 33 of the most common tests on the samples. They found that flying didn’t make a significant difference, no matter how long they were in the air, though the tests done on the drone-transported samples were a bit less precise.

The drones would be useful to bring patient samples from clinics to labs where they can be tested—and maybe in many more ways, like bringing sensitive drugs directly to clinics or even patients most in need.

But regulation stands in the way, study author Timothy Amukele said in a Q&A on ResearchGate. “Currently regulation of drone flight is trailing the technology by at least a decade. Medicine is inherently conservative so the medical system will likely wait for the regulations to catch up before there will be widespread adoption," Amukele said. In order for drones to become widely used in medicine, the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and its equivalents in other countries, would have to grant special exemptions.

By pointing out the scheme’s obvious benefits, maybe studies like this one can speed up the process. And some enterprising researchers are already moving ahead with their own ideas for using drones in a medical capacity, such as testing drones for transporting blood to patients who need infusions.

Facebook Embraces The Moving Image

Facebook

Users can now record video as their profile picture

Facebook has placed increasing importance on video lately. With muted, autoplaying video the social network has cracked the code to increasing their online video impressions—skyrocketing from one billion to four times that, according to News.com.au. Last week, Facebook introduced 360-degree videos that let you spin around and control what you're looking at while a video clip plays. Now, the world's largest social networking website will let you use a short video as your Facebook profile picture.

The video clip can only be a few seconds long, and it will play on loop, similar to Vine (which is owned by rival Twitter). And in a sign of our smartphone-addicted times, you'll need to be on Facebook's mobile app for iOS or Android in order to use the feature.

These changes are just the latest and most noticeable to come to Facebook's mobile app. The company has actually continually improved its apps with less flashy, but still useful features. When friends have liked a post, for example, a slide-in transition shows who of your favorite people have liked or commented on the status. Other updates can be seen when browsing video within Facebook — after tapping one video, a list of related videos appears underneath, for example.

With Facebook's overall greater emphasis on video across the site, Profile Videos could prove hugely popular. Facebook’s new Profile Video can be recorded within the iOS or Android app by tapping on the video camera icon on the bottom right of your picture, though still images will be supported.

Facebook's new feature comes at a time when other tech companies are increasingly looking to offer users the ability to upload short, looping moving images that are somewhere between still images and movies. Earlier this month at Apple’s fall event, for instance, the company introduced many new improvements included in the iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus. Among them were "Live Photos," a feature that records the moments before and after a photo is taken, then turns them into a moving image you can use on your iPhone's home screen and lock screen. While Apple claimed that live photos will be shareable on Facebook, it's still unclear at the moment whether Facebook's new addition of moving profile images will let you upload iPhone Live Photos directly, in place of short movie clips.

But we've reached out to Facebook to ask about support for Apple Live Photos as well as the vintage moving image format that has had a massive revival online in recent years: the GIF.

In another update to its mobile apps today, Facebook is also adding the ability to add Temporary Profile Images. Knowing that many users change their profile pictures based on occasions such as birthdays, anniversaries, or, in Facebook's video example, the #ThrowbackThursday #TBT hashtag, the new feature lets users schedule a profile image to last a certain dedicated period of time before disappearing and reverting back to a dedicated profile image (from one day to one week, though Facebook also offers a custom time option as well).

Those who changed their profile picture for Celebrate Pride, for example, could now set a timer for how long they would want rainbow colors as part of their image.

Facebook already has over a billion users, over half of whom primarily access the site on mobile devices, but the company clearly does not want to stop there. With Zuck and Google both racing to snag the next billion, features like the new Profile Videos and Temporary Profile Images will help keep people coming back to Facebook, and should only further cement its dominance as the world's largest social network.

Sandstorm in The Martian

Screengrab from trailer

Let’s get one thing straight: The Martian is a darn good movie and you should definitely go see it when it comes out. (Or better yet, read the book!) In addition to just being a great tale about man versus nature, the story is a culmination of years of research by the author and computer programmer, Andy Weir, and it’s pretty accurate as a result.

Caution: Mild spoilers follow.

Although we’ve noted a few nitpicky quibbles, the story does have one gaping technical flaw: the sandstorm that leaves astronaut Mark Watney injured and abandoned on Mars never could have happened.

When the Ares 3 crew runs into a dust storm with 105-mph winds, the team is ordered to evacuate, out of fear that their return ship might topple over. As the crew struggles against the winds to reach the vehicle, a flying piece of shrapnel hits Watney, and his crewmates assume he’s been killed.

It’s true that Mars’ sandstorms can be massive, enveloping the entire planet in shadow for days or weeks. And they can be quite wild, with winds topping out above 100 miles an hour. But it would feel a lot different from a 100 mph storm here on Earth.

“If I were standing on Mars, a 100-mile-per-hour wind is going to exert the same effect on me as about an 11-mph wind on Earth,” Dave Lavery from NASA’s Solar System Exploration program told Popular Science. According to the Beaufort Wind Force Scale, that’s a gentle breeze.

“So you wouldn't get that level of damage, or big pieces flying through the air, causing all these events to happen,” says Lavery.

Why are Martian sandstorms so much less powerful? It all has to do with the density of the atmosphere.

Mars’ atmosphere is only about 1 percent as dense as ours, “as if you were standing on a 100,000-foot mountain on Earth,” says Lavery. (That would be about three times higher than the peak of Mount Everest.)

"You wouldn't get that level of damage, or big pieces flying through the air."

Because the atmosphere is so much thinner, the amount of energy in its winds is much lower. The energy is determined by how much air there is, and how fast it’s moving. Or in other words, momentum = mass times velocity. Assuming velocity is constant, having fewer molecules in the air lowers its mass, which brings down its momentum.

Conversely, “the thicker the atmosphere is,” says Lavery, “the more energy it’s able to store as it moves, and therefore the more stuff it can pick up.”

It’s sort of like the difference between getting hit by a 20-mile-per-hour river versus a 20-mile-per-hour wind. Which one is going to pack a more powerful punch? The river, because water is denser than air.

As a result of its thin atmosphere, winds on Mars carry about one-tenth of the energy of those on on Earth.

Mars' weak gravity is partly to blame for its tenuous atmosphere. With one-third the gravity of Earth, the red planet has a harder time holding onto its air molecules. Gravity’s pull on the air column is weaker, so the air pressure is lower and the molecules are more spread out. And without a strong magnetic field to protect it, Mars’ already thin atmosphere is constantly being pelted with solar radiation that breaks apart the air molecules and sends them flying off into space.

But don't let all this stop you from enjoying the movie and/or book. There are plenty of ways for Mars to try to kill us. And in fact, even though the winds of Martian sandstorms probably won't be causing any near-death experiences, sandstorms can be deadly in a different way--via lightning. All those sand particles swirling around together can stir up electric charges that could certainly cause problems for future Martians. "Andy [Weir] has said, 'Had I known that at the time, I could make lightning make this whole thing work,'" says Lavery, adding helpfully, "Meteorites would work, too."

ESA's AIM watches NASA's DART Crash Into Didymoon

ESA - ScienceOffice.org

Artist's rendering.

We've smashed into the moon, and bounced onto a comet, but a whole 17 years after Deep Impact and Armageddon debuted in 1998, we still haven't managed to change the course of an asteroid.

Sure, we landed the NEAR-Shoemaker orbiter on an asteroid in 2001, but we didn't even try to see if we could change its orbit. Come on, everyone, we can do better. Now, the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA have announced plans to fill that gaping hole in our asteroid knowledge by smashing a spacecraft into an asteroid's moon and watching what happens.

The mission is called AIDA (Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment) and involves two different spacecraft. The first, ESA's Asteroid Impact Mission (AIM) will launch in 2020, and take two years to get to the asteroid Didymos. Once there, AIM will map Didymos and its small satellite, nicknamed "Didymoon." Then AIM will move to a safe distance and deploy its own satellites to get an up-close-and-personal view of NASA's Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft slamming into Didymoon in 2022. It will be watching to see how DART changes Didymoon's orbit around Didymos.

Patrick Michel, the lead of the AIM Investigation Team offered this statement in a press release"To protect Earth from potentially hazardous impacts, we need to understand asteroids much better – what they are made of, their structure, origins and how they respond to collisions. AIDA will be the first mission to study an asteroid binary system, as well as the first to test whether we can deflect an asteroid through an impact with a spacecraft. The European part of the mission, AIM, will study the structure of Didymoon and the orbit and rotation of the binary system, providing clues to its origin and evolution. Asteroids represent different stages in the rocky road to planetary formation, so offer fascinating snapshots into the Solar System's history."

Watch a very detailed explanation of the mission here (the impact starts at 3:50):

AIDA isn't the only asteroid mission in town. NASA's much-maligned Asteroid Redirect Mission (ARM) is also set to launch in the 2020s where it will aim to capture a small asteroid and put it in orbit around the moon, where astronauts will be able to visit it and collect samples.

Gemini 5 was NASA’s first real long-duration mission. In August of 1965, Gordon Cooper and Pete Conrad spent eight days in orbit testing their spacecraft’s fuel cells to make sure this new technology was up for the minimum length of a trip to the Moon. Between the two astronauts, they had four bowel movements during the flight. It wasn’t pretty, and it didn’t get prettier throughout the Apollo era.

Al Shepard sealed in Freedom 7

NASA

Waste management was a bit of an afterthought when the space age started. Waiting for his Redstone to launch on May 5, 1961, astronaut Al Shepard famously (or perhaps infamously) wet himself. The mission was slated to last just fifteen minutes, so mission planners reasoned he would certainly be able to hold it for a quarter of an hour. The problem NASA hadn’t foreseen was that Shepard was sealed in his Freedom 7 capsule for hours before the short flight. With no urine collection system on board and no way to get him out of the spacecraft without significantly delaying the launch, Shepard was forced to urinate in his suit. He lay in his waste until the suit's cooling system evaporated the liquid.

After Freedom 7, urine collection improved. The astronauts could use simple bags to store the waste and, being a liquid, it was easy to jettison from the side of the spacecraft. Fecal containment was another matter.

The Gemini missions were the first missions long enough that astronauts would need to defecate, in spite of low-residue diets designed to minimize bowel movements. The fecal containment system, properly called a defecation device, was a rudimentary solution to this need. It was a cylindrical bag about a foot long with a 1.5-inch opening on the end covered in an adhesive. The bag came with wipe and a material that would kill bacteria and neutralize odors when added to the waste. This was an important part of the system since there was no provision to jettison solid waste. The astronauts had to store their filled defecation devices on board the spacecraft for the duration of the flight. The stowing problem was actually the biggest challenge on Gemini 5.

But there were others. We don’t think about it on Earth, but gravity plays a part in defecation, namely in separating the waste from the one producing said waste. In space, everything is falling at the same rate giving the impression of floating, so waste that would fall away from the buttocks on Earth doesn’t separate from the buttocks in space. To circumvent this problem, NASA added a little extension in the defecation device to help the astronauts with the separation issue. The extra material gave them a clean way to manually flick waste away from their bums.

Adding to the indignity of the act, the physical act of defecating in a bag was difficult. On Gemini flights, the defecating astronaut couldn’t give his companion too much distance from the bowel movement; the spacecraft was about the size of the front seat of a small car. On Apollo missions, the astronaut needing to move his bowels would float his way into one corner while the other two men would move as far away as possible. He’d typically strip completely nude, removing rings and everything. Water was limited on board so washing fecal matter from clothing was impossible. Then he’d stick the adhesive opening to his naked buttocks and use the facilities. The whole exercise from stripping down to redressing could take more than an hour.

The Apollo fecal containment system

National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

And it didn’t always go according to plan. Rogue waste terrorized Apollo 10 on their trip back from the Moon.

LMP Gene Cernan: Where did that come from?

CDR Tom Stafford: Give me a napkin quick. There's a turd floating through the air.

CMP John Young: I didn't do it. It ain't one of mine.

LMP Cernan: I don't think it's one of mine.

CDR Stafford: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away.

CMP Young: God almighty.

All three: (Laughter)

Of course, being on the Moon doing an EVA meant an astronaut couldn’t strip down to defecate in a bag. During lunar sojourns, the astronauts wore a fecal containment subsystem as part of the personal hygiene equipment. It was, in essence, a diaper. Similarly, spacewalking astronauts on shuttle missions and aboard the International Space Station can’t exactly strip down to go. So they wear what NASA calls the maximum absorbency garment, which is also basically a diaper. But astronauts try not to use it, preferring to use an actual toilet.

Al Shepard's Moon diaper

National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

With the dawn of the shuttle era, fecal disposal became much more sophisticated and more complicated. The first space toilet used a slinging mechanism to separate solid from liquid waste, the former being vacuum-frozen and stored while the former was jettisoned. And because this toilet was meant for astronauts of different shapes and sizes, NASA had to take all kinds of things into consideration designing these modern facilities.

One 1973 study for a space toilet considered the effects of pubic hair and labia in cleanly separating urine from female astronauts: “The residual urine remaining on the female vulva area with the 40 ft/sec air velocity will be removed by the use of tissue wipes. The residual will be relatively easy to wipe with a tissue because the pubic hair and the recess of the labial folds act to contain the small amount of residual in the area. The action of the pubic hair in containing the residual precludes any necessity to shave the pubic area.” The same attention to detail went into the diapers. Technicians had to consider the average growth rate of pubic hair and the relative placement of genitals between men and women in creating a unisex diaper.

As sophisticated as modern space facilities are, bags are still on board the space station just in case the toilets break. Because they can break. On STS-1, the very first shuttle mission, a problem with the toilet left freeze-dried fecal material floating through the spacecraft at the end of the mission. Not the best way to come home from orbit, eh?

Sources: Swider, Waste Collection Subsystem Development; NASA, Habitability Data Handbook Volume 6 Personal Hygiene; Charlie Duke "Moonwalker"; Apollo 10 transcript; Gemini VII mission report; Smithsonian; Megan Gannon on Space.com; Stapleton et al, Development of a Universal Waste Management System.

Edico Genome

A new genomic data analysis technology can perform whole genome sequencing and successfully diagnose critically-ill newborns in 26 hours.

Genetic diseases are the leading cause of death for infants in the United States. Many doctors treating these infants rely on whole-genome sequencing to target the exact cause of the illness, and hopefully treat the disease in time. However, even the fastest sequencing technique till now has taken about 50 hours to complete, and many severely ill infants simply can’t wait that long.

Researchers at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, MO, and the biotech company Edico Genome--the same group that developed the original 50-hour test--have managed to cut that time almost in half by using a new device that performs whole genome sequencing in 26 hours--the fastest sequencing technique to date. Their results were published Tuesday in the journal Genome Medicine.

While genome sequencing could help diagnose any individual with an unknown genetic disease, its rapid results are critically important for infants, as their symptoms are relatively vague--often just a fever, weight loss, or a cough--and they don’t yet have the ability to communicate the pain they feel. Whole genome sequencing can speak for that infant.

“In some babies, we have minutes or hours. If a baby's blood sugar is low, basically you are counting the number of minutes without sugar,” said Stephen Kingsmore, the lead author of the study and the researcher who led the development of the technique, “In those cases, any delays can result in disease complications.”

The new technique has yet to be used in a hospital setting, but has been tested on the genomic data of infants who were previously treated via the 50-hour sequencing technique. The team tested 35 infants--all of whom were critically ill, less than four months old, and had a suspected but undiagnosed genetic disease. The new technique gave a correct diagnosis in 57 percent of the infants. Kingsmore and his team hope this faster sequencing technique could help in two ways: to diagnose patients more rapidly and be much more scalable so that it can be implemented in more hospitals and thus reach and help more patients--something the previous technique wasn't able to do.

The slower, 50-hour sequencing technique was significantly more costly (three million dollars versus $6,500 with the new technique), both because of the technology it used and the number of technicians needed to run and analyze the data. In order to significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to complete, the researchers engineered an entire hardware system called DRAGEN, whose sole function is genome sequencing. DRAGEN is the first processor designed for genomic applications only and speeds up the data analysis from 22.5 hours to 41 minutes. "It's a processor that is developed specifically for genomic analysis, and is something that makes it significantly better than any software based solution," said Pieter van Rooyen, the CEO of Edico Genome.

They also employed faster software systems that were able to reduce the time even further including an ultra-rapid run mode on their sequencing instrument which saved five hours, an optimized software program that detects mutations in gene sequences, which saved two hours, and a software program called VIKING that translates the complex genomic data into clinical information that any pediatrician, neonatologist, or other doctor who hasn’t had specialized training in reading genomic data can use, saving another three hours. Using DRAGEN and its accompanying software, both Kingsmore and van Rooyan think this technique could be implemented in other hospitals to help more doctors diagnose patients with genetic diseases more quickly.

Kingsmore points out that “genome testing is still in its infancy,” and there aren’t enough doctors today who are trained in interpreting genomic data. It may take another generation of doctors who will learn this in school, so having the data given to the treating physician in a clinically usable format is crucial--especially in a neonatal intensive care unit where critical decisions must be made in a fastidious manner.

Edico Genome

The DRAGEN hardware system for whole genome sequencing is the first processor designed for genomic applications.

“At the end of the day, we have to deliver the information to generalist physicians in a way that they can grab it and use it,” Kingsmore said.

While the speed is crucial for diagnosing infants, Kingsmore thinks the relative ease of reading the genetic information could also have implications in treating cancer as part of the precision medicine initiative, which looks at cancer as a genetic disease and treats patients by using their unique genetic makeup and biological milieu.

Over the next three months, Kingsmore and his colleagues hope to test the new technique in a clinical setting at Rady’s Children’s Hospital in San Diego, where Kingsmore is now the chief executive officer of the Pediatric Genomics and Systems Medicine Institute within the hospital, as well as at Children’s Mercy in Kansas City. In the future, his team, in conjunction with Edico Genome, hope to further address readability by incorporating artificial intelligence into their system--which would interpret and analyze the results--so that physicians will be able to spend less time interpreting data and more time treating patients.

Yesterday, personal genetics company Veritas Genetics announced that it had reached a milestone: participants in its limited, but steadily expanding Personal Genetics Program can get their entire genome sequenced for just $1,000.

Relatively low-cost whole-genome sequencing has been a goal for biotech and health organizations for years. Precision medicine, the field in which treatments for diseases targeted to specific genetic mutations, has become much more feasible and popular in recent years. And despite a huge influx of research funding, scientists are having trouble detangling the knot of genetics to figure out how to treat individual diseases. People who have diabetes, for example, don’t just have a mutation in one gene—they might have 20 mutations, or even 100, that all affect one another, and can vary between individual backgrounds, ages, and lifestyles.

So even though researchers know that genes play a role in most diseases, they’ve been able to parse out the genetics behind only a handful of those conditions. And without that understanding, they can’t start crafting treatments to address them.

What these scientists need is more genetic data, enough to identify every little mutation that might be at play across the entire human genome. Widespread whole genome sequencing has so far been prohibitively expensive for scientists to get all the data they need; in 2001, sequencing just one person's genome cost $100 million. But $1,000 might be cheap enough to make sequencing much more common, giving researchers the data they need.

Veritas isn’t the first company to claim that it has reached the $1,000 milestone. Where Veritas differs, according to a press release, is that it can also offer interpretation of whole-genome sequencing, “which is the key to applying genetic information into decisions about disease monitoring, prevention, nutrition, exercise, and more,” according to the press release.

But the main issue with the other companies is that their technology just wasn’t fast enough to decode so much genetic information in a financially viable timeframe. The Veritas announcement doesn’t go into any details about the technology behind the $1,000 sequencing, so it’s impossible to know how it differs. However, Veritas is stacked with some of the biggest names in genetics research, including synthetic biologist George Church, so the company’s technology may be powerful enough to make good on its cheap price tag.

Patients interested in enrolling in Veritas’ Personal Genome Project can do so on the company’s web site.

So far, the 2015 hurricane season has been pretty quiet, just as NOAA predicted earlier this year. But that doesn't mean its going to stay quiet. Hurricane Joaquin is currently camped out over the Bahamas, moving southwest, but forecasters from NOAA's National Hurricane Center are worried that Joaquin might change course and head north, straight for the East Coast.

And after Sandy devastated the East Coast in 2012, all eyes are on Joaquin, hoping that this storm doesn't end up taking the same destructive path. New York City's Emergency Managment team is on the phone with the National Hurricane Center and other agencies multiple times a day, tracking the storm's progress. The city has made vast improvements to its infrastructure since Sandy hit, but no one really wants to endure a hurricane just to put them to the test.

Joaquin is the tenth named storm of the season, and only the third hurricane. Islands in the Bahamas are currently under hurricane warnings as Joaquin continues to strengthen.

It is still very early for Joaquin. The storm's track is highly uncertain, and it remains entirely possible that Joaquin will veer east and head back out to sea. but in the meantime, weather trackers from NOAA to NASA are keeping close tabs on the storm, collecting some striking data and images.

NASA's Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) satellite captured this 3D look into the center of the storm:

A few main points from NOAA's public advisory issued at 5:00 PM Eastern Time on September 30th:

Preparations to protect life and property within the warning areas in the Bahamas should be rushed to completion.

A significant adjustment to the forecast has been made this afternoon, and this shows an increased threat to the mid-Atlantic states and the Carolinas. However, confidence in the details of the forecast after 72 hours remains low, since we have one normally excellent model that keeps Joaquin far away from the United States east coast. The range of possible outcomes is still large, and includes the possibility of a major hurricane landfall in the Carolinas.

Because landfall, if it occurs, is still more than three days away, it is too early to talk about specific wind, rain, or surge impacts from Joaquin in the United States. Even if Joaquin stays well out to sea, strong onshore winds will create minor to moderate coastal flooding along the coasts of the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states through the weekend.

A hurricane watch for a portion of the U.S. coast could be required as early as Thursday evening.

Hurricane Joaquin

NASA/NOAA GOES Project

Hurricane Joaquin over Bahamas on October 1

The warm waters of the Bahamas are the prefect place to rest, recuperate, and get your strength back—especially if you happen to be a hurricane.

Scientists and meteorologists have had their eye on Hurricane Joaquin for the past few days as the storm evolved from a tropical depression, to a tropical storm, and finally, last night to a Category 3 hurricane, with winds of up to 120 miles per hour. Many were worried that windspeed would increase to the point where the storm became a Category 4 hurricane, the second-strongest type of storm on the widely-used Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

But that hasn't happened—yet. NOAA's latest public advisory on the storm from this morning announced that wind speed had increased to 125 miles per hour, still solidly a Category 3, still nothing to shrug at.

Joaquin is expected to continue strengthening over the next day, battering the Bahamas, before turning north, and heading for...somewhere. The exact path of the storm remains mysterious, with some models seeing it headed towards the Carolinas in 3 days, others predicting that it will hit Long Island and New England in 5 days, and others predicting it will head for Bermuda. In the discussion section of the public advisory, NOAA forecasters noted that "Confidence remains very low in the eventual track of Joaquin and any potential impacts for the United States, and further adjustments to the NHC track may be needed later today." But also added that "A hurricane watch for a portion of the U.S. coast could be required as early as tonight."

Hurricane Joaquin's possible path

National Weather Service/National Hurricane Center/NOAA

According to the National Hurricane Center, this graphic "shows an approximate representation of coastal areas under a hurricane warning (red), hurricane watch (pink), tropical storm warning (blue) and tropical storm watch (yellow)." However, as the NHC is clear to also point out: "NHC tropical cyclone forecast tracks can be in error," so this map shouldn't be read as definitive, or even necessarily accurate once new information is gathered about the storm.

Hurricanes are divided into five categories on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. The scale goes from the weakest, a Category 1 hurricane (sustained winds between 75 and 95 miles per hour) and the strongest Category 5 hurricane, with sustained winds of 157 miles per hour or above. A Category 3 hurricane has winds between 111-129 mph, and is considered a major storm. (For perspective, Hurricane Katrina made landfall as a Category 3 storm.)

NOAA says that if a Category 3 hurricane makes landfall:

Devastating damage will occur: Well-built framed homes may incur major damage or removal of roof decking and gable ends. Many trees will be snapped or uprooted, blocking numerous roads. Electricity and water will be unavailable for several days to weeks after the storm passes.

Though the storm's exact path remains uncertain, governments along the East Coast are marshaling their resources, preparing for the worst. Virginia and New Jersey already declared a state of emergency:

Even if Joaquin veers back out to sea, or weakens in the days ahead the National Hurricane Center is warning areas along the East Coast to brace for coastal flooding.

If Joaquin did hit land in the United States as a Category 3 hurricane or larger, it would be the first landfall of such a large storm in 9 years. The United States has been in a hurricane drought since 2005—despite the recent destruction Hurricane Sandy caused on the East Coast in Fall 2012—and everyone was kind of hoping it would stay that way. But nature could see otherwise.

Multi-color image of the brain used for imaging

NIH

The Kavli Foundation, along with its seven university partners, announced today that it has committed $100 million to neuroscience research. The money will help fund the BRAIN Initiative, which was launched two years ago by President Obama to gain a better understanding of how the brain’s individual cells work together to do everything from creating memories to drawing a picture. The Kavli funding is in addition to the $85 million that the NIH announced today for BRAIN initiative research. Neuroscience researchers hope the money will help develop tools that will allow neuroscientists to see the whole picture of how the brain works--currently researchers can only see a small piece of the puzzle.

The majority of the money will be allocated to three new neuroscience institutes at Johns Hopkins University, UCSF, and the Rockefeller University, which will become a part of seven Kavli neuroscience institutions within universities. Of the $100 million committed, about half will come from the Kavli Foundation itself and the remaining half will be provided by the seven university partners. During a press conference held by the Kavli Foundation in Washington, D.C., neuroscientists from around the country acknowledged the need for this funding in order to gain a full picture of the brain’s circuitry. This basic knowledge, they say, will help to reveal the causes and and potential treatments for neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and autism.

With this new funding, all three institutions hope to put a clear focus on the interdisciplinary aspect of neuroscience research by encouraging cooperation between neuroscientists, engineers, and data scientists. One of the biggest challenges in neuroscience research is developing probes, tools, and other data analyzing techniques that will help scientists see how a healthy brain works, which is the first step to understanding what happens in brain-related disorders. Specifically, the new Kavli Institute for Fundamental Neuroscience at UCSF intends to partner with engineers at two San Francisco-based private companies to develop the probes and tools to understand the brain’s plasticity, or its unique ability to continually modify its structure and function. In this way, the three new institutions hope to break the barriers and blind spots in neuroscience research by integrating different areas of science whose specific expertise can help create new tools neuroscientists need.

In the future, neuroscientists plan to continue to expand their coalition to bring in scientists from more disciplines and with other areas of expertise. Particularly, they see a huge place for computer science, since specialized technology for analyzing large-scale circuits is desperately needed. In addition, the researchers, especially a younger panel of neuroscientists at the conference, called for scientific research across disciplines to be more open and collaborative, which would allow scientists to work together and employ solutions to problems in neuroscience that neuroscientists themselves cannot tackle alone.

When in bear country, don’t leave your kayak lying around for bears to tamper with. The logic seems simple enough, but Mary Maley, a woman who posted a YouTube video of a bear eating her kayak, must have missed the memo.

According to her caption for the video, which she posted on Tuesday, Maley was on a 107-mile solo kayak trip and passing through a cabin owned by the U.S. Forest Service on Berg Bay in Southeast Alaska when she encountered a black bear gnawing on her boat.

At the beginning of the video, the bear is approaching Maley, and as it gets close, Maley yells “go away!” and lets out a short burst of pepper spray. The spray successfully deters the creature, but Maley seems unprepared for what happens next -- the bear turns around and transfers its attention to the untended kayak instead. At that point, Maley changes her entreaty, asking the bear to leave the kayak and come back to her.

As the video proceeds, Maley’s imploring grows desperate. “What am I going to do,” she laments, then screams for the bear to stop over and over. When that doesn’t work, she tries a rational approach with the bear, exclaiming, “It doesn’t even taste good, it’s just plastic.” At one point, she yells at the bear, “It’s the end of September, why are you here? You’re supposed to be asleep.”

Since the video’s release, many YouTube commenters have criticized Maley for the way she handled the situation. We were also curious. So we reached out to a few bear experts to see what Maley should have done.

The experts’ first point of consensus is that Maley probably shouldn’t have been surprised to see a bear rummaging around her kayak -- they are notoriously curious animals. “Bears ask questions with their teeth and claws,” says Tom Smith, a wildlife scientist at Brigham Young University in Utah, “and when they get done with the Q&A session, there’s not a lot left.”

It’s not unusual to see a bear chomping specifically on something like a kayak either, according to Douglas Clark, an environmental studies professor at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. Bears like exploring things that are oily or made of plastic, says Clark, and the kayak’s foam seat was probably a big attractant. “When you’ve got a kayak seat, you’ve got sweat, body odors, all kinds of things,” he says. “It didn’t surprise me at all to see the bear chewing on it.”

But while Maley probably invited trouble by leaving her kayak unprotected, bear experts do agree that she was correct to pepper spray the bear. “She did exactly the right thing,” says Clark, who is more concerned with what happened in the first 15 seconds of the video than anything that happened afterwards. “What the bear was doing to the kayak really isn’t the most interesting thing that’s going on here,” he says. “This is actually a really good video for illustrating offensive aggression.”

Offensive aggression, according to Clark, refers to when a bear proactively approaches a person, whether in search of food that person may have, or treating that person as prey (it’s extremely rare, but it does happen, says Clark). His guess is that Maley’s bear knew that there was food around the cabin, and came up to investigate. “It’s coming in and approaching her directly,” he says. “It looks like a bear that knows it can get food.”

In her video caption, Maley indeed said she had been lunching when the bear approached. The bear’s audacity seems to indicate that it was familiar with humans, according to David Garshelis, a bear researcher with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. “It is unusual that a bear would be that unafraid of a person,” he says.

As for Maley's point that the bear should have been asleep, Ryan Scott, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s regional wildlife supervisor for Southeast Alaska, says it's not out of the ordinary that the bear was there. “Certainly there are bears through Southeast Alaska that have already denned up, but I never would think that they’d all be denned up by September 30,” he says.

In fact, this time of year would be a particularly ravenous time for bears, according to Heiko Jansen, a professor at Washington State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. “It’s well-established that their appetites this time of year are just peaking, as they’re trying to put on as much body fat as they can to get into hibernation.”

For those who were concerned about the welfare of the bear after getting pepper sprayed, Clark says not to worry -- he himself has been sprayed twice while training to become a park warden. “It feels like someone put needles in your eye sockets and threw you across the room,” he says, “but there’s no lasting damage.”

Ultimately, though, experts agree that Maley should have employed some intimidation tactics after she sprayed the bear, rather than simply standing there and asking the bear to leave. "She was just sort of whining,” says Garshelis. “She should have walked down that walkway right to where the bear was and yelled at it and sprayed it from there. I’m sure she could have chased it out.”

“It’s like standing there and yelling at a seagull for crapping on you,” Smith says. “I don’t know what language bears speak, but I don’t think it’s English.”

On her YouTube post, Maley wrote that she swam out to an anchored sailboat shortly after the bear left and got a ride to a nearby city to repair her boat.

2016 Acura RLX Sport Hybrid SH-AWD Heads-Up Display

Hybrid vehicles have been available since way back at the turn of the twenty-first century, and the technology could be considered mature. Few people question its feasibility or resale value anymore, or the longevity of the batteries. Hybrids can even seem stodgy and tame, especially in the face of shiny new technologies like pure electric vehicles or hydrogen fuel cells.

But Acura isn’t willing to let hybrid technology become the pleated khaki pants of the automotive world. Its 2015 RLX Sport Hybrid SH-AWD marries the conventional gasoline engine-electric motor setup we’re accustomed to with another set of twinned electric motors at the rear wheels. Why bother? Two words: torque vectoring.

Say you’re going around a curve to the right. Torque vectoring is the vehicle’s ability to accelerate the outside right wheel to help you get around that corner fast and clean. Often in modern cars, this is done mechanically. Because of the RLX’s two rear motors, though, it can apply both positive torque (drive) to the outside wheel and negative torque (regeneration) to the inside wheel electrically. You get the performance benefit of torque vectoring and the energy recapture benefit of regeneration.

The Sport Hybrid system uses the most efficient mix of all these engines and motors to deliver the power the driver is asking of the RLX while being as fuel-efficient as possible. That means it can start with only the rear motors engaged, cruise on the highway with only the gasoline engine at work, or bring the whole system online when you mash the pedal to pass a poky semi truck. According to the numbers, the system has a total of 377 hp and an EPA combined fuel efficiency rating of 30 mpg.

The system becomes mesmerizing when you can watch it all play out from the driver’s seat using the heads-up display. The wheels and power train float in front of your eyes with blue or green arrows designating power being used to propel you forward or regeneration taking place as you decelerate. The trick is to remember to watch the road, not the animation as it changes according to your (probably by now inattentive) driving.

Fred Benenson's latest work

courtesy Random House Books

Fred Benenson is probably best known for his book, Emoji Dick, which may not refer to quite what you're thinking. The project, born on Kickstarter in 2011, translated Herman Melville's classic tome Moby Dick into the colorful Unicode characters known as emoji.

Silly as this may seem, the experience has provided Benenson with some interesting insights into how we communicate and express ourselves. His new book, How to Speak Emoji, was released this year. It's a playful (if impractical) riff off the phrase books you'd normally get when traveling abroad.

So next time you're wondering how to greet someone in emoji, or ask for directions to the bathroom, see how far these little cartoons can take you. They're not as universal as you might think, Benenson told Popular Science in a Q&A and during an interview on our new podcast Futuropolis​.

Popular Science: What originally got you into working with emojis?

Benenson: Apple supported emoji in Japan before they supported it in America. This was very intriguing to me; there are very few cases where you can’t get access to something anymore based on where you live. I had a friend who had a Japanese friend and they had figured it out and you could send emoji to people, but if they didn't have the keyboard they couldn't send it back. So it was this cool-kid-clique thing in early 2009. I figured out you had to download this Japanese app to basically awaken your iPhone to the emoji keyboard and then you could send emoji to people. So I got really into writing full sentences in emoji immediately.

Do you like them earnestly, or is there a little irony to it?

I genuinely like them a lot, but I’m not afraid to criticize them and observe idiosyncrasies and wonder why there are two camel emojis, and why there’s a pager and a fax machine emoji. There’s all these weird things about emoji that come from Japanese culture, so it’s this international set of icons, which is supposed to be universal, actually being quite closely tied to Japanese culture.

It seems to set up a contradiction: that it’s a universal language that everybody can access, but it has a real technological barrier.

That’s a good point. And it’s not just a technology barrier. I mean, it’s only on the most recent smartphones, and it wasn't until recently that operating systems could even handle it. But then there’s also the fact that the emoji set itself is highly constrained. I think there’s 872 or something right now in the Apple iPhone. It's a conflicted way of expressing yourself where you have to hope that the other person’s phone is going to support emoji.

What are the advantages of emoji over English or other traditional written languages?

I heard somebody explain it from a neurological point of view that when you see a smiling face, even if it’s a cartoon, it’s actually triggering the same parts of your brain that are activated when you see a normal person smile in real life. That caricature that you see in emoji is actually triggering real emotions in the same way that the physical manifestation of that person would be doing. And that’s super interesting.

It’s doing something that text can’t do: conveying emotion and subtlety of thought that you might not be able to do with a word or two. There’s a whole swath of human communication that we’ve been losing out on in text messages for years. Ever since everyone switched to text message to communicate, we've been missing some of the nuance of the tone of people’s voices, the expression on their faces. So you can see emoji as a reaction to that.

Its another degree of freedom for expressing myself using text. Trying to convey whole thoughts or sentences or works of literature in emoji requires you to think creatively. The act of trying to choose an emoji torepresent a word or a phrase or an idea really resonates with me. It's the act of creating something. I’m working in this medium. I’ve got a pencil or a piece of code or oil paint—here are the constraints I have to work with. You’re skilled, but you’re also limited by the medium. Within that you can express yourself, and I think that emoji just makes that really acute.

If all I want is a crab emoji, but I can’t find a crab emoji, which one can I find that’s similar? Maybe I can choose a dragon emoji but I’ll have to contextualize it with this other thing. That act is just really enjoyable to me, and that’s why I like to communicate with them. It’s like these little image-based punny puzzles you can send to somebody. And when they get it, you can share this moment where you’ve transcended normal text communication. I think that’s really fun.

What do you think emoji use is going to look like 10, 20, 50 years from now?

It’s a really great question, because I think a year or two ago, a lot of people were like, “The emoji set is too constrained! You only get these?!” Some people were proposing lots of additions to emoji and a lot of people are building their own apps that will let you choose custom emoji. Facebook and Skype all have their own weird custom sets of emoji and stickers. To me, those are kind of besides the point. If you see the limited set of emoji as a bad thing, then I think you’re missing the point. Maybe the list will get a little more robust, and maybe it will feel a little more international in the food selections, where about 70 percent of them are Japanese.

I can see the cultural items in emoji becoming more diverse, just in the way that they tried to solve some of the skin tone issues and gender diversity. I think that was good, but are we going to have a full-blown emoji language? I don't know. No one decides about a future language. It all just depends on people’s habits and usages.

That said, I’m not gunning for the end of text. Language, maybe even English, is worthwhile and it’s fine to express things in text because there are just some concepts that you’ll never be able to express in emoji.

It seems to me that emoji depends so heavily on the context. How is that different with things like great literature?

Well, with Emoji Dick—my project to translate Moby Dick into emoji—part of the point was to experiment with what it would be like to take a magnificent achievement of novel-writing and try to boil it down to this relatively new way of expressing ourselves. I think that Emoji Dick is successful on some accounts and unsuccessful on other accounts. It depends where you pick up the story and what you’re really looking for.

But the process of trying to do it was the interesting thing for me. It’s kind of like the way scientists think about things sometimes: What is the most extreme case I can prove? If I prove that case, maybe the rest will follow. Maybe that was what was going through my mind at the time: What is the most extreme case I could try to put into emoji?

Do you think there’s a difference between emoji as communication versus art?

In a lot of ways, I think of Emoji Dick as an art project rather than a true translation. And I’m much more comfortable with it being considered a work of art rather than a work of literature. What I was trying to communicate with Emoji Dick is this new language and its opportunity and the nature of distributed work, and maybe a little bit about literature. I wasn't trying to sell a story about a man searching for a whale, so I guess it kind of depends on what you’re trying to communicate.

I hope that emoji is used enough and we’re all fluent enough with it that we can tell grand, amazing stories with it. We’re beginning to see that. Some people are getting very good at this stuff. I hope that my new book, How to Speak Emoji, kind of inspires more people to communicate something about themselves or about the world in in this new language and have it be a cultural experience like reading a book or a magazine.

Is there anything in particular that you’re hoping to change or instill in people with this new book project?

I think it’s about being a little bit more accepting in terms of how we communicate. A lot of people early on would ask me, "Is this the decline of language?" and "Are you concerned about what texting is doing for us?" I’m not that hung up on that. I think we probably read more now than ever before. The effort required to interpret emoji and to follow along with what someone is saying, it really takes creativity. And if I have any goal, it’s to realize how vast and expansive our abilities of communicating and expressing ourselves can be. I love the experimental drive, being able to draw outside the lines, and being able to express yourself in whatever way you feel comfortable.

If emoji is creative and open to interpretation, do you think that will lead to a breakdown in communication? What if a message gets interpreted in a way that it wasn’t intended?

That’s like asking a question like, “Should we go to Italy for vacation? I don't know Italian. Well, maybe they’ll know a little English. Italy sounds great to me, let’s see if we can go there and make it work.” And then you’re in Italy and you’re like, “I don’t know if that’s the exit sign or the entrance sign.” And you figure it out, you know? There’s certainly a risk of getting confused and missing each other’s point, but humans communicate. We express things. Context matters a lot, and I think we’ll get along.

But if you’re really concerned and cynical about the future of culture, you could say well we’re boiling things down with emoji. Aren’t we going to miss the opportunity of language like Melville and Shakespeare? Shakespeare was famous for using words once and never again. You can’t do that with emoji; you’re always using the same thing. But I guess I’m not that concerned about that. I can’t get that worked up about it. Works like that will always have a place, and really sophisticated expression will always be a part of culture.

But I think when you’re dealing with these kinds of constraints, and you’re trying to make it work, amazing things happen. It’s like the way people might defend minimalism in architecture or art. You say, "There’s nothing there! How could you think this is beautiful?" And the minimalist would say, "Well, that’s the whole point." Maybe that’s how I approach emoji.

Benenson was recently featured as a guest on Futuropolis, Popular Science's podcast about everyday life in the future. Listen to Episode 6, 'Talk Emoji to Me,' to hear him and other experts discuss what language and communication might look like down the road.

Ross Marquand in New York City, July 2015

Jill Shomer

Let’s assume you know what The Walking Dead is. AMC’s zombie drama is the No. 1 show on cable television, and the most watched cable series of all time. Season six starts next week, and we, the nerds of Popular Science, are too ready.

Ross Marquand joined the cast of TWD in the second half of season five as Aaron, the altruistic former relief worker who mysteriously appeared in order to recruit Rick and his group for the Alexandria Safe Zone outside Washington, D.C. Initially mistrusted by Rick & Co. (“stranger danger!”), after several episodes, Aaron has become a friend and ally, and—spoiler alert!—was last seen returning to Alexandria with Daryl and Morgan just in time to witness Rick’s execution of Pete.

We spoke to Marquand about how some of the cooler stuff on the show gets done, his nerdy pastimes, and his thoughts on how best to survive an undead apocalypse.

Popular Science: This is an action-packed show; how much of what you shoot is stunts versus special effects? Is it easy for everyone to stay safe? Not to mention, you’re in Georgia—it’s hot!

Ross Marquand: Our crew tries to use as many practical effects as possible, but if you're, say, decapitating a walker with a license plate—that could get tricky without the use of CGI. And yes, even though we tackle so many wild stunts, safety is always our primary concern. If we're chopping off heads or stabbing walkers, we usually just hold a soft-hilt replica of our weapon, and the SFX team adds in the rest later. Unfortunately, they still haven't figured out a way to CGI-out the Atlanta heat—it’s pretty brutal.

PS: How long does it take the average walker to get into makeup? What can you tell us about that process?

RM: The stunt people and extras who play more-featured walkers—we call them “hero walkers”—are in hair and makeup for three to four hours. A walker in the back might take only an hour or two. Greg Nicotero’s team of incredibly talented SFX makeup artists are the best in the business, and the sheer amount of work they do on a daily basis is jaw-dangling. They sometimes prepare hundreds of actors for each episode—and one does not simply stroll onto set looking like the undead, no matter how rough their night was. It requires multiple layers of prosthetics, liquid latex, wigs, contact lenses, and dentures—all masterfully applied by a surprisingly small group of badass professionals.

PS: There’s an astonishingly creative level of mayhem on this show. Are the awesomely disgusting ways you can kill a walker dreamed up entirely by the writers or do the actors have any input?

RM: Yes! Such lovely, gory mayhem. There are some times when we as actors offer ideas, but most of the crazier walker deaths—flaring one up like a jack-o’-lantern, or impaling one on a goat’s horn—are concocted by our wonderful writers.

PS: That said, has the portrayal of extreme violence had any kind of effect on you? Does spending every day in dystopia ever become disorienting? I mean, how do you unwind after you’ve spent the day crushing a zombie’s head in the car door?

RM: Ironically, I've found that the subject matter actually makes all of our cast and crew a bit lighter; you need to have a sense of humor being on such a heavy show or you could easily go down an undead rabbit hole of despair. I usually decompress—doubly ironically—by killing zombies on my Xbox. I love playing zombie mode on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. We are creatures of habit, it would seem.

PS: Have you become desensitized to gore?

RM: Not at all. There are still times where I see an emaciated, decaying walker and think, “My goodness, what a terrible mess.” And I dislocated my pinky toe recently—it was hanging at a disturbingly acute angle, and it totally freaked me out. But then I started laughing at the cartoonish sight of it, so yeah, maybe I am a little desensitized.

PS: Let’s talk about Alexandria, which your character is a big part of; those episodes reminded me of an episode of The Twilight Zone: a walled-off community living in total denial of the horrors (in this case, literal horrors) just outside their door. It’s an interesting experiment in social psychology. Or are they just another group of survivors gone mad?

RM: Definitely interesting! I think the folks in Alexandria certainly lucked out in many regards—most of them happened to know about the township before the apocalypse, or were just fortunate enough to be near the well-stocked subdivision once society came tumbling down. I think it seems totally plausible, I'm just not sure how most folks would cope.

PS: What preparation did you do to play a survivor in a post-apocalyptic world?

RM: I’m from Colorado, and camping has always been a part of my life. Having grown up in Scouts, we learned how to survive attacks by wild beasts, starvation, exposure…so I just pretended Aaron was an Eagle Scout himself, and that has helped me shape the character a great deal.

PS: Xbox…Eagle Scouts…Are you a nerd?!

RM: Oh, most definitely. Ever since I was a wee lad I've been fascinated with all things nerd. Astrophysics, Star Wars, 2001, Vonnegut, They Might Be Giants, Ender's Game, Battlestar…that’s my jam right there. Hell, I even wrote and produced a musical version of Tron in college. I haz serious nerd cred.

PS: Million-dollar question: What would you do in a zombie apocalypse?

RM: I’d find the nearest Costco, secure it, and become king of my domain. Seriously, if you had just one Costco, you’d be set for life!

PS: Earlier this year, a team from Cornell University did a study indicating that the safest place in the U.S. to be during a zombie outbreak would be the high northern Rockies—areas of sparser population mean fewer humans to bite, slowing the spread. What do you think?

RM: I’ve been saying this for years! If the excrement hits the air conditioning, I'm definitely going to head to my aunt’s cabin in the mountains outside Denver. I think there’s even a Costco nearby.

Season six of The Walking Dead premieres Sunday, October 11.

Use An Electric Toothbrush As A Mini-Sander...Not A Tattoo Machine

Illustration by Chris Philpot

8,800: Number of times per minute the bristles of an electric toothbrush can oscillate

Good Idea: Sand The Small Stuff

Last June, professional DIYer Kip Kedersha turned an electric toothbrush into a $5 mini power sander. Kedersha, who posts how-to videos on his YouTube channel, Kipkay, first cut the bristles off an Oral-B electric toothbrush. Then he hot-glued a small plastic circle to the head and attached self-adhesive sandpaper. The sander can make small cuts or grind fine details on plastic models or miniatures. “It fits the bill for a hobbyist,” Kedersha says, “and it’s a deal.”

Bad Idea: Give A Tattoo

Daring inkers have discovered that an electric toothbrush can also drive the needle of a DIY tattoo machine. But it’s hard to control the needle’s depth, which increases the risk of serious infections and scars. “There’s nothing good about getting a toothbrush-machine tattoo, nothing whatsoever,” says professional tattoo artist Gerald Feliciano. “You can buy almost any rinky-dink machine that will work better than that.”

Warning: The bad idea...is a bad idea. Don't use a toothbrush as a tattoo gun.

This article originally appeared in the October 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title, "Use an Electric Toothbrush to..."