Copepod

Matt Wilson/Jay Clark, NOAA NMFS AFSC

A copepod plankton, with eggs (blue).

Plenty of animals leap out of the water: whales, dolphins, flying fish, plankton. Yes, that's right, plankton. Those tiny microscopic creatures that are at the very bottom of the food chain do sometimes have the power to transcend their watery habitat, even if only for a brief moment. But some plankton can jump, and others can't, a puzzle that has confronted scientists for years. Now, there might be an answer. Like a lot of things in nature, plankton's ability to jump comes down to just two factors; speed and size.

In a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, researchers looked at plankton that could jump out of the water in response to a threat or disturbance and those that couldn't. Using a high-speed camera they watched how plankton leapt out of the water, and then repeated the motion by shooting tiny plankton-sized balls (less than 3 millimeters wide) towards the water's surface from the bottom of a tank. They varied the size of the balls and the speed at which they were shot, and found that plankton need to be relatively large and fast in order to break the water-air barrier.

Why is it harder for plankton than other animals? The authors explain in the paper that while larger animals mostly just have to achieve a speed that overcomes the force of gravity in order to leap out of the water, plankton are so very small that the surface tension of the water is another barrier. Surface tension is a property of liquids like water, where the molecules are attracted to each other.

Usually water molecules are equally attracted to their neighbors, but at the top of a glass of water (or a pond, or any body of still water, for that matter), the water molecules right at the barrier have no neighbors on top of them to grab on to, so they cling to one another even more tightly. This forms almost a film at the top of a body of liquid, called surface tension, which animals can't move through quite as easily as the rest of the water. While that isn't a problem for a salmon, or a whale—which are much larger and stronger—it can be an issue for small creatures like plankton.

In their experiments, the researchers found that a plankton 2.4 millimeters in length would be able to escape the water if it were going fast enough (somewhere between 1.3 miles-per-hour and 1.7 miles-per-hour), but plankton smaller than that (especially those around 1 millimeter in size), or traveling slower, wouldn't be able to escape the water's grip.

The researchers write that they hope "even though the present work is motivated by plankton, the illustrated theoretical model is relevant across multiple disciplines, due to the fundamental interest in the particle–interface interaction and the corresponding potential engineering applications." No word on what those engineering applications are, but we're looking forward to finding out.

Skycatch Smart Construction

Screenshot by author, from Vimeo

Japan’s Komatsu makes construction equipment, and has for almost a century. Construction vehicles are nothing without people to drive them--or at least they used to be. As either an alternative to rising labor costs or simply a solution when workers aren’t available, Komatsu now makes construction vehicles that can drive themselves. To get the most out of these self-driving machines, Komatsu recently paired with American dronemaker Skycatch with a plan to have drones survey and map construction sites, and then have unmanned bulldozers and other vehicles go to work.

First, drones fly over a construction site, taking pictures of the ground below. Software then stitches these pictures into 3D maps, and site planners add in the information about what earth they want moved, which areas they want left intact, and what the next stage of construction should look like. The machines then set about their tasks, working on the site under the watchful eye of a remote human controller/manager, instead of individual drivers. It’s an excellent use of drone mapping.

Komatsu and Skycatch are calling this “Smart Construction,” but it’s as much about replacing human workers as it is about machines getting smarter. Japan is currently building stadiums for the 2020 Olympics, and is suffering a shortage of native-born laborers for construction. There are plenty of foreign-born workers available, but Japan's tight controls on visas are inhibiting the country’s use of migrant blue-collar workers. Komatsu and Skycatch’s collaboration is as much about what technology can do as what the politics of Japan can’t: create workers the population finds acceptable, substituting machines for humans.

Watch a video about it below:

NextVR camera used during the first CNN Democratic presidential debate

NextVR/CNN

CNN partnered with NextVR, a virtual reality media startup, to livestream the first 2016 Democratic presidential debate to viewers wearing Samsung's Gear VR headset.

Last night was the first debate for the 2016 Democratic presidential candidates, but it was also the first presidential debate in history that could be viewed in virtual reality. CNN teamed up with software company NextVR to broadcast the event live in a 360-degree virtual reality video accessible only to users of Samsung's Gear VR headset, which is available now for $100 on the Samsung Store, and requires a Samsung Galaxy Note 4 smartphone as the viewer.

While it sounds great in theory to be standing on stage with the presidential hopefuls, several problems arose, the first of which is the weight of the Gear headset itself and the heat it produced.

Some found the experience was isolating; they missed the interactivity that comes with a dual-screen set up (watching the debate on one screen while following along on social media on another, usually a phone or computer).

Yet another issue is the lack of resolution in these set-ups. Mashable’s Jason Abbruzzese’s said it felt like “I'm sitting close but am also quite nearsighted and not wearing my glasses.”

First time VR users did enjoy watching though, and the experience will improve as the technology becomes more widely used.

The night even spawned a new celebrity – the Debate Wizard, and even he got in on the virtual action.

So how did NextVR actually set up the debate to be streamed? Believe it or not, it’s actually quite simple.

Four VR cameras were set up around the room – one in the back of the auditorium, one on each side of the stage, and one behind the candidates.

Each camera also has a set of binaural microphones meant to imitate how a human would hear the experience. The data collected is sent to and managed by NextVR staff, who set up their own control room at the venue.

Viewers could then control where they were looking (though not which camera they were viewing from) using their phone, the NextVR app and the Samsung Gear VR headset.

NextVR co-founder DJ Roller told the Independent Journal that VR broadcasting will become standard for news events of the future. Whether that’s true is still yet to be seen, but this was a certainly a good first step towards virtual reality journalism.

There are plenty of large, incredible things in this world, from canyons to oceans and huge fossils left behind by dinosaurs. But most of the things that make up our wide world are small--tiny even. Often, these things escape notice because they are simply to small for the human eye to see. Which is where Nikon's annual Small World competition comes in. Every year a panel of judges selects the most stunning images of very small things. Often, the people who capture these images are scientists, who come across these stunning images in the course of their daily work. Nikon received over 2,000 submissions from 83 countries for this year's competition.

DNA analysis is essential for evaluating human health and discovering the makeup of new substances. If humans were to spend long stretch of time in space, they would need to be able to sequence DNA. But scientists had never attempted the process in zero gravity—that is, until last month, when two geneticists tried it on board NASA’s reduced-gravity aircraft, according to an article in Nature News.

The researchers wanted to test two important tools that they suspected might work differently in zero gravity. The first involves moving liquid from one container to another using a pipette—a process that involves suction and usually relies on gravity to keep substances in their beakers. This would be important for preparing DNA for long-term storage, according to the Nature News article, but also for transferring specific amounts of a given solution to dozens of other biology experiments.

The researchers knew it would be difficult to move these liquids without spilling them. So they tested three different methods. Two methods resulted in imperfect samples; one was inconsistent and difficult to control, the other created air bubbles and caused the solution to creep up the sides of the container. The third method used a certain type of pipette called positive displacement. This works like a syringe without an air cushion and is usually used for dangerous or harmful liquids, but it also worked perfectly in zero gravity, and enabled researchers to move the sample between containers without damaging it.

They also tested a small genetic sequencer called MinION under zero-gravity conditions. The handheld sequencer already has a reputation for being hardy—it was used on the ground during the Ebola epidemic, displaying results in real-time and plugging directly into a laptop’s USB drive—but the researchers weren’t sure if this particular method, which sequences DNA by pushing it through nanopores in an electroconductive surface, would work as well in space. The researchers were pleased to find that MinION’s results were the same in zero gravity as they would be on the ground.

These are promising first results, the researchers say. They hope to test both devices more exhaustively aboard the International Space Station in the next few months.

Syrian refugees outside Erbil, in Iraqi Kurdistan

Mustafa Khayat via Flickr, CC by ND 2.0

This week, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that a cholera outbreak is rippling across Iraq. Since the outbreak started last month, more than 1,200 cases have been confirmed in 15 of the country’s 18 provinces.

Cholera results when the bacteria Vibrio cholerae infects the intestines. While most people can weather the relatively mild symptoms, others are hit harder by vomiting, diarrhea, and leg cramps. If these patients are left untreated, they can die within a day or even a few hours due to dehydration.

The bacteria can be transmitted between people in food or water. “In an epidemic, the source of the contamination is usually the feces of an infected person that contaminates water and/or food,” according to the CDC web site. That can rapidly become a problem in a place like Iraq; much of the country is dry and much of the infrastructure designed to bring water to citizens is outdated or non-functional. As a result, people living in close quarters with unreliable water supply—such as hundreds of thousands of refugees, many of which live in camps—are the most at risk of contracting the infection.

In fact, this is the third cholera outbreak to hit Iraq since 2007, which together have caused about 4,500 people to be infected, and several dozen deaths. The WHO press release doesn’t say how many people have already died from this outbreak, but public health officers know that they need to take dramatic action now to prevent further infections. Officials are distributing bottled water and water disinfection kits throughout refugee camps, and plan to decontaminate septic tanks, water sanitation plants, and bathing facilities. Some refugees may also be offered cholera vaccines.

These steps are merely a quick fix for a larger issue: refugee camps are notoriously overcrowded and unclean, providing an ample breeding ground for infectious disease. Without a break from the fighting or the necessary funds, Iraq will continue to lack the proper infrastructure to provide its inhabitants with one of their basic human rights: clean water.

Mobile payment service Square filed for an initial public offering (IPO) today. Here's what it means...

What is Square?

The startup company, founded in 2009 by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, allows vendors to accept credit cards with the Square Register app for iOS and Android. The company also makes a Square Cash app for consumers on iOS and Android that allows for easy transfer of money between people, and is designed for occasions when cash or credit cards aren't handy or wouldn't be appropriate, say, splitting a bill at a restaurant.

For businesses, Square additionally makes a tiny physical card reader that plugs into the headphone jack of any smartphone (square-shaped, of course), a tablet-based terminal stand for vendors to use in place of other checkout systems, and a wireless checkout station that works with Apple Pay.

Why did Square IPO?

So what does an IPO do for Square? For one, it will allow the company to raise a lot more money and potentially expand (by selling shares of stock). Square's official S-1 filing, the paperwork required to go public, lists the company's net revenue for 2014 at over $850 million, while the company's net loss was over $154 million. According to the Wall Street Journal, Square is valued at $6 billion after it goes public.

Square seems to be aware of some of the risks it is taking by going public. Now that it's more accountable for turning around a profit and showing growth to investors, it will need to justify more of its actions and products. And the company's co-founder and CEO, Jack Dorsey, was also just named CEO of Twitter (for the second time, following his original ouster from Twitter in 2008). Square's S-1 paperwork explicitly says “Jack Dorsey, our co-founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer, also serves as Chief Executive Officer of Twitter. This may at times adversely affect his ability to devote time, attention, and effort to Square.”

Dorsey clearly believes in the mobile payments company though, and his ability to lead it.

As he wrote in his statement:

The strength of this business is more than the money it generates. The collective power of our millions of sellers sustains a scale from which we can build valuable financial services and marketing services, creating reinforcing and virtuous cycles back to our core business of payments. We’ve made getting capital as easy as tapping a button. We replaced pen and paper accounting with real-time insights into sales patterns and customer trends. Everything works together seamlessly to help our sellers make smart decisions for their businesses. When they succeed, we succeed. By making our services accessible to everyone, we can build a more fair and productive system that serves instead of rules. This is both good for Square and the right thing to do. We’re off to a strong start.

If approved, Square intends to trade its shares on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) under the symbol SQ.

National Fossil Day

National Park Service

The National Park Service's artwork for this year's National Fossil Day is a chalicothere, a giant herbivore that lived in plains area during the Miocene a period of time between approximately 23 and 5 million years ago.

Happy National Fossil Day! Today is the fifth annual National Fossil Day, a day trademarked by the National Park Service and celebrated in schools and parks across the country.

Why give fossils their own day? And what even is a fossil? Put very simply, a fossil is the remains of a living organism preserved naturally for a long time. The ways a fossil is preserved can vary dramatically, but typically we think of bones that were quickly buried by sediments like dirt and other rocks, and eventually became part of a new rock formation years down the line. Certain rock formations, like the Burgess Shale yield thousands of fossils every year.

As for their importance, well, fossils are a finite resource. Once they're excavated, they can't be put back. And unless they're dug up very carefully, a lot of the scientific knowledge about the fossil can be lost. Paleontologists need to know the 'context' of the fossil, not only where it was found, but what layer of soil or rock it was in (which helps date it) and whether there were other fossils of plants or animals nearby (which helps recreate the environment at the time). The National Park Service hopes that if people are educated about fossils, they will be more likely to treat fossils they find with respect, whether they're found in a backyard or a national park.

Here are some of our favorite discoveries from this year, in no particular order:

1. Scientists took dinosaurs' temperatures using fossilized eggshells.

2. 50 million year-old sperm was found preserved in worm cocoons in Antarctica. It is the oldest animal sperm ever discovered.

3. Today scientists announced the discovery of 125 million-year-old hair follicles on a creature that resembled a large rat. The hairs are 60 million years older than their closest counterpart, and they show that mammals were already a furry group of creatures even during the time of dinosaurs.

4. A feathered cousin of the velociraptor was found much to the delight of paleontologists, who weren't happy with the scaly look of dinosaurs in the Jurassic World blockbuster.

5. A study found that your tooth enamel might have started as scales on ancient armored fish.

6. We learned that human-sized sea scorpions once roamed the early oceans.

7. And a brand new relative of the triceratops was found in Canada. Scientists named her Wendy.

There are plenty of museums and national and state parks where you can see beautiful fossils for yourself, but if that's too far, check out online programs such as Fossil Finder, which lets you search for fossils online from the comfort of your own home.

Aeryon Skyranger Quadcopter

Aeryon

When a large fire occurs, so much smoke often surrounds the area that it’s nearly impossible to see through with the naked eye. But the Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service's aerial unit may have found a solution. Using an infrared camera attached to a drone, the rescue squad was able to see through the smoke.

The Aeryon SkyRanger drone is a 5.5 pound quadcopter that can fly for about 40 minutes at distances of over a mile, though by protocol it sticks to locations that are within 2500 feet. It can reach altitudes of up to 10,000 feet, but is restricted to flying below 400 feet, and it can operate in most weather except winds stronger than 30 mph. It’s controlled by a hand-held tablet, and streams video down to the pilot below.

Manchester adopted the drone after trials this past July, and is already earning its keep. This isn't the first time that drones have been usedto fight fires. Importantly, these types of drones are used by approved professionals only, as recently there had been concerns over amateur firefighters using drones in the U.S. to fight wildfires and getting in the way of professional firefighter equipment.

Here’s a short video about it from Manchester Fire’s Air Unit:

[Motherboard]

Mary Hood was worried that her 85-year-old grandmother, who walks with a cane, could fall and get hurt. So she developed a smart cane that vibrates in its users' hands when it detects obstacles. Other functions include a flashlight, pulse monitor, and smartphone-connected medication reminder. "What's so cool about our generation," she says, "is that we can start using technology to revolutionize these very basic necessities of life."

^Sponsored

Danger: Earthquakes

Andy MaguireCC by 2.0

On October 15, at 10:15 am local time, over 20 million people around the world will drop to the ground, take cover, and hold on tight to something sturdy for at least 60 seconds. No, it's not a mass hallucination, they're just participating in the Great Shake Out.

The massive earthquake drill is meant to give people across the country and around the world a chance to learn what to do in an earthquake before they're caught in one.

According to earthquake experts (and The Rock), these are the most important steps to take in an earthquake:

• Drop: Running or moving while the ground is shaking isn't the best idea. The best course of action is to drop directly to the ground, not try to run to safety.
• Cover: Get under a sturdy table or desk. The surface above you will protect you from falling debris, one of the most dangerous aspects of an earthquake.
• Hold On: Hold on to a sturdy object to help you stay in one place while the ground is shaking, and don't move until you are sure that the shaking has stopped.

In the United States, every single state and all inhabited territories are at some risk of an earthquake. The risk in California, where there are lots of earthquakes, is far higher than in North Dakota, which doesn't have that much shaking. Nevertheless, it's a good idea for everyone to be prepared.

Population Earthquake Map

USGS

A map showing the likelihood of an earthquake in the 48 contiguous states from light red (highest risk of shaking) to blue (lowest risk of shaking). Black and red marks indicate areas with medium and high population density.

While its impossible to predict exactly when or where an earthquake will strike, scientists are working on technology that will increase the amount of warning time people have to get to safety once an earthquake starts with the ShakeAlert program. Using a series of sensors placed along parts of the dangerous San Andreas fault, scientists have developed a text-based warning system that gives people those often precious seconds to prepare. Check out how it works in the video below.

University of Michigan's Aurum Solar Racer

University of Michigan

The Bridgestone World Solar Challenge turns 25 this week, when 50 race teams head across the Australian outback for 1800 miles in solar cars of their own designs beginning October 28. The University of Michigan team has been solar racing for as long as this event has been held, and this year, they’re getting a bit of a boost from IBM’s “superforecast” system.

Hendrik Hamann, a physical analytics manager at IBM, says the system uses historical weather records and machine learning plus real-time sensors on the vehicle – which is named Aurum, by the way – to create the most accurate forecast of sunny conditions, which power the car.

The precise forecasts allow the UM team to make decisions for power management. If the skies are clear late in the afternoon and predicted to be clear again in the morning, maybe they’ll push a little harder. If clouds are settling in, they might drive more conservatively. And as with any race, there’s strategy to consider. “If they’re in fourth place and they want to win, they may want to consider taking a larger risk,” Hamann says. “We have seen cases in tests where we clearly know if the team had continued to drive a little longer, there would have been more sun and a better charge at the end of the day.”

The forecasting is all done at IBM, where records of sun, wind, and temperature – which all affect battery charging – in the outback in previous years are used to train a model to improve the forecast for the team. The sensors on the cars give real-time data to the IBM team to integrate with the historical data.

But why use sensors? Why not just tell the team to, say, look out the Aurum’s window? “A sensor will be more reliable,” Hamann says. “It can take consecutive images and use analytics to understand how fast the clouds are moving. It’s better than someone looking out of the window and gives a more accurate forecast.” He also points out that cell phone coverage in the outback is not so great, so the team moves data from the vehicle to IBM via a satellite link.

This ability to forecast with solar power production in mind has possibilities beyond racing. It could be useful in the future for power management with stationary solar panels on buildings. “Combining big-data technology and very traditional science advances the state of the art of something as established as forecasting,” says Hamann.

An illustration of the genetically engineered virus used in the experiment. Chromophores are in red.

Screenshot from MIT's YouTube video

Plants absorb sunlight and convert it to energy with nearly perfect efficiency—none of the energy goes to waste. Electrical engineers are always striving for that kind of efficiency, but nowhere is it more pronounced than in solar panels. Even the best of these can only convert about 44 percent of the light it absorbs into usable energy, and that's part of the reason why solar energy doesn’t fulfill more of the world’s energy needs.

How are plants so efficient? They’re able to take advantage of some quirks in quantum mechanics, often called quantum weirdness. When a photon hits a plant’s special light-sensing chromatophore, it releases a quantum particle of energy called an exciton. Eventually the exciton makes its way to the part of a cell where it’s absorbed and be put to use in the body. Thanks to quantum physics, no energy is lost in the process.

By changing viruses' DNA, researchers from MIT have been able to take advantage of quantum weirdness. The result could be solar panels that transmit energy with unprecedented efficiency, according to a proof-of-concept study published this week in Nature Materials.

In the study, the researchers changed the DNA of viruses so that they would bind with groups of synthetic chromophores, and light up when they did, so the researchers could monitor them using laser spectroscopy. They tested different types of viruses and different chromophore molecules in varying concentrations in a solution and they were able to show that the viruses and chromophores did have a meaningful transfer of energy. And though they haven’t yet found the ideal combination, the researchers were able to make the excitons travel at double the speed of those in existing solar cells, and to do so at much longer distances.

So far these viruses can’t produce their own electricity as plants do; they can only transmit it, as the press release notes. But the researchers write that more efficient energy transfer that scientists are able to control could have a number of applications across several scientific disciplines. They could create catalysts for chemical reactions driven by light, or create more efficient electronics, including solar panels.

Battelle's DroneDefender

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

The Battelle DroneDefender is a rifle made for electronic warfare, as first reported by Motherboard. The gun looks like a hodgepodge of science fiction props strapped together. Despite its appearance, it’s not made to fire any projectile. Instead, the DroneDefender works by jamming the communications of commercial drones, causing them to lose control and, ideally, land.

The DroneDefender s weighs less than 10 pounds and can be mounted on any existing weapon with a picatinny rail—a fairly standard mount found on military rifles.

The attachment jams GPS signals, as well as radio signals normally reserved for industrial, scientific, and medical radio communications (the ISM band). It’s primary targets are small commercial drones flown in places the federal government doesn’t want them to be: the radio bands it uses to disrupt drone signals are restricted, so this isn’t a product for everyday consumers annoyed by their neighbors quadcopter. Not to mention the fact that currently, the cost hasn't been publicized.

The weapon is billed as a “non-kinetic solution,” which is fancy jargon for saying that it will stop drones without firing a bullet, or using an explosion, or another projectile.

This is best in cases where cops want to disable a drone without risking injury to bystanders or property. In war zones, bullets might be a more valid and easier alternative.

To work safely, the DroneDefender also puts a lot of faith in drone programming, relying on a confused quadcopter's ability to adopt lost-link protocols (a backup program in its onboard computer) that send it to the ground, back home, or keep it hovering in a holding formation. A drone designed to behave differently when it loses its signal could post a challenge.

Battelle’s is hardly the first anti-drone weapon, though it looks to be one of the lightest and smallest. Other systems, like the British AUDS and the Selex Falcon Sheild combine sensors into an automated jamming array, tracking drones over a vulnerable area and shutting them down. Battelle’s DroneDefender instead turns the guns guards may already have into small anti-drone rays, ready to protect against flying robots.

It may not be the most accessible armament for those looking to take down drones, but it's not too big a stretch to imagine DroneDefender—or something like it—becoming more popular among military/police/security personnel in the near future. Watch a presentation on the DroneDefender below:

Insects may be a tasty, environmentally-friendly source of protein...but not everybody is excited about chowing down on bugs. So Grubbly Farms is putting edible insects to another use: harvesting black soldier fly larvae for livestock feed. And because they feed the larvae on material that would otherwise wind up in the garbage, the company hopes to reduce food waste as well. At the 2015 Kairos Global Summit, Popular Science host Katie Linendoll caught up with Grubbly Farms cofounder Patrick Pittaluga to get the lowdown on these creepy-crawlies.

Popular Science tracked down ground-breaking startups at the Kairos Global Summit. Check out our complete coverage here. You can hear more from Katie on her podcast.

Chemical Hearth

Dan Addison

The chemistry workstation discovered in the University of Virginia's rotunda.

If these walls could talk, they might have something to say about science.

During a recent renovation of the Rotunda, one of the oldest buildings at the University of Virginia, archeologists came across a piece of the University's early history, a chemical lab constructed in the early 1800's.

The brick alcove has been boarded up since at least the 1840's, but in its heyday, students used the primitive workbench to carry out many chemical experiments. There were only five workspaces, but, like modern chemical labs, there were also heat sources (one with a wood fire and one with a coal fire) as well as ventilation to carry away fumes.

“This may be the oldest intact example of early chemical education in this country,” Brian Hogg, one of the university's historic preservation planners said in a statement.

The lab was probably built for John Emmet, the first professor of natural history at the University, appointed by Thomas Jefferson. Though Emmet was not Jefferson's first choice for the job, he ended up being an incredible asset, teaching not only chemistry, but also some medicine, zoology, mineralogy, geology, and, at the request of Jefferson himself established botanic gardens at the University.

Chemistry, though, was the subject that really seemed to light Emmets fire. In the 1830's he published numerous papers, covering a range of chemical topics, including "Iodide of Potassium as a Test for Arsenic" and "An Inquiry Into the Probable Cause of Electro-Magnetic Currents". In addition to doing research, he was also a great teacher, with a reputation for explaining complex concepts simply and clearly, and also for wanting students to perform experiments on their own instead of just watching him go through the motions. The early lab that was just uncovered was probably used by Emmet's students during his time there.

The building will re-open when renovations are complete in 2016, and the University hopes to preserve the chemical hearth for posterity.

MQ-9 Reaper, Joint Base Balad, Iraq

Erik Gudmundson, USAF, via Wikimedia Commons

Earlier today, adversarial journalism outfit The Intercept (co-founded by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the Snowden NSA leaks) published a sizable eight-article omnibus titled “The Drone Papers.” Detailing several facets of America’s War on Terror, this new batch of leaked official classified papers looks at the tremendous, complicated, and morally fraught process that goes into drone surveillance and targeted killing. Among the most damning revelations: that nearly 90 percent of those killed during five months of drone strike operations in Afghanistan between 2012 and 2013 were not the intended targets.

One section, “Firing Blind” specifically honed in on the limits of drones, as found in the skies above Somalia and Yemen. Because airbases were far from the areas of Somalia that the Pentagon wanted to watch, drones and other surveillance aircraft spent much of their flight time just getting in place. This limitation meant that, instead of setting up persistent spying surveillance flights, drones were used a lot more for targeted killing, which “are intelligence dead ends” From the text:

The [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] study shows that after a “kill operation” there is typically nobody on the ground to collect written material or laptops in the target’s house, or the phone on his body, or capture suspects and ask questions. Yet collection of on-the-ground intelligence of that sort — referred to as DOMEX, for “document and media exploitation,” and TIR, for “tactical interrogation report” — is invaluable for identifying future targets.

Stating that 75 percent of operations in the region were strikes, and noting that “kill operations significantly reduce the intelligence available from detainees and captured material,” the study recommended an expansion of “capture finishes via host-nation partners for more ‘finish-derived’ intelligence.” One of the problems with that scenario, however, is that security forces in host nations like Yemen and Somalia are profoundly unreliable and have been linked to a wide variety of abuses, including the torture of prisoners.

Rather than confirming a vision of highly mechanized, robotic warfare, The Intercept’s report portrays the targeted killing program as one filled with profound compromises and hampered by limitations. Intelligence operations that trade attacks for further surveillance and rely on local parties who may, at best, lack America’s same priorities are a murky part of a long-running covert war.

The massive report deserves to be read in full over at The Intercept.

Facebook 360-Degree Video

Facebook

Facebook has taken to their site to explain the challenges of full-circle video

Facebook and its virtual reality subsidiary Oculus are betting on the new 360-degree video format, which Facebook introduced into your News Feed last month.

Whether you're on desktop or mobile, if you're on Facebook and see one of these new 360-degree videos published by media outlets, you can tap, click, or drag the video to change your viewing angle and see the action happening all around you. And the experience is even more immersive if you're one of the lucky few software developers who has early access to an Oculus Rift VR headset (the consumer model is coming early 2016).

But you may still be wondering: just how does this new 360-degree video work?

Facebook answered that question today with a new post on the company's Code website for software developers. In it, Facebook’s Evgeny Kuzyakov and David Pio explain how they went about creating the new video format for Facebook, the challenges they ran into, and how they overcame them.

The larger file sizes of 360-degree videos alone proved to be a major issue. That's especially with the social network doubling-down on autoplay video in the News Feed and mobile, where data caps are an issue for many users. As they write:

"To create a 360 video, either you use a special set of cameras to record all 360 degrees of a scene simultaneously or you have to stitch together angles from, say, four GoPros on a stick. Incoming 360 video files are 4K and higher, at bit rates that can be over 50 Mb per second — that's 22 GB per hour of footage. And 3D 360 Stereo videos are twice that — 44 GB for an hour of footage...We wanted to decrease the bit rate and save storage, but we wanted to do it quickly so people wouldn't have to wait for the video, and we didn't want to compromise the video quality or resolution."

File sizes were just a piece of the Facebook 360-degree footage puzzle, with video layout proving to be difficult as well. The entire behind-the-scenes is worth the read. Check out the entire post from Facebook here.

Harbor seal

Heather Beem / New England Aquarium

Almost all mammals grow whiskers. But all whiskers are not created equal. As great as George Clooney’s salt-and-pepper beard looks, the facial hairs of the harbor seal are even sexier. They enable the cunning predator to track its underwater prey from hundreds of feet away.

Now scientists have discovered the secret to those whiskers' success: their shape. Unlike the smooth hairs that stick out from the cheeks of cats and dogs, seal whiskers are wavy. They bulge along their lengths, like pea pods.

“This shape enhances their ability to detect flows created by fish,” says Heather Beem, author of a study on seal whiskers soon to be published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

Nature seems to have designed whiskers in different ways to serve different purposes. “Whiskers are likely to have many functions, from texture sensing to shape discrimination,” says Mitra Hartmann, a Northwestern University engineer who studies whiskers but was not involved in the new research.

Rats, for instance, use their smooth whiskers the same way that we use our fingertips: to detect the textures of objects. A rough surface brushing up against the hairs sets off different vibrations than a smooth surface.

For harbor seals, whiskers provide an astonishing sensitivity to slight ripples from a fish swimming by. In a previous study, seals blindfolded by German scientists and forced to wear headphones could still pick up the lingering trail of a fish, using their whiskers, half a minute after it had passed. That’s an especially useful ability for a predator that hunts its prey in murky waters difficult to see through.

The seals' wavy whiskers are fairly unique, says Beem, who studied the whiskers as a graduate student at MIT. They're found on only a few species of seal and on no sea lions or walruses.

To better understand how a whisker’s shape responds to ripples, Beem built an oversized plastic model of one. She then submerged her model at one end of a long tank of water and pushed it forward to simulate a whisker gliding forward on a swimming seal.

Whisker models

John Freidah

Researcher Heather Beem tested two whisker models: one was wavy like a seal's whisker, and the other was smooth.

A smooth whisker moving through water through would flap madly, like a car antenna in the wind. That’s because fluid flowing over a smooth object forms whirlpools. Those vortices would tug on a smooth hair, making it wiggle.

Wavy whiskers do not have this problem, the tank experiments showed. “The waviness breaks up the water flowing over it,” says Beem. A seal’s whisker can thus remain steady while in motion.

To see what happens when a whisker encounters ripples from a fish, Beem added a simulated fish to the other end of the tank--a large cylinder that moved forward ahead of the plastic whisker. Whirlpools shed in a regular rhythm by this fake fish traveled through the water and struck the faux whisker. Unlike a smooth whisker, the wavy whisker moved back and forth in time with the ripples. This tempo could in theory provide information to a seal about the speed or size of the fish creating the whirlpools, said Beem.

Hartmann calls the finding “intriguing.” But like any model, Beem’s single plastic whisker is a simplification of the real thing. Hartmann says she is curious to find out what happens when things get more complicated. How, for instance, might the massive head of the seal change the water flows and whisker behavior?

Inspired by her simple experiment, Beem has built a basic whisker sensor for detecting flows. She imagines one day mounting it on an aquatic robotic designed to track migrating schools of fish, or perhaps track flow patterns created by chemical spills.

Ever since the invention of the first microscope in the late 1500s, humans have been trying to see things normally invisible to the naked eye in order to better understand them. As technology has improved, we’ve discovered dozens of ways to glimpse the world on its tiniest scales, including finding new ways to capture the structures and movements of living cells. A video of some of a cell’s tiniest parts, which was achieved using a particularly high resolution microscope with increased aperture, was published in a study this past August in Science. It was touted again today on a blog written by Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health.

The video is a nanoscale view of the cytoskeleton, one of the outer parts of a cell that gives it shape. The red structures are actin filaments, fibers made of proteins that cause cells to move and contract; the green globs are clathrin-coated pits, structures that carry things that the cell needs, like hormones and signal receptors, from one vesicle in the cell to another. In the video, you can see the red actin fibers pulling the green clathrin-coated pits from the outside of the cytoskeleton towards the middle of the cell.

To make this video, the researchers used a special, high-resolution version of structured illumination microscopy (SIM). For living cells, SIM is a great option because it doesn’t destroy the sample and can capture a good image even if the subject isn’t totally still. SIM itself is extremelysophisticated, but its resolution has been limited because it relies on light that has been broken into several wavelengths by passing it through a slatted plate and angling it at the specimen. The researchers were able to record the video at a much higher resolution by increasing the aperture, or the opening of the camera, to allow more light to enter, and altering the wavelengths of the light sources to provide greater variation in those that hit the specimen.

A graphic showing the function of superresolution structured illumination microscopy

Zeiss

The researchers tried the imaging technique on other parts of the cell, too, including the interaction between fibrous actin and the protein myosin, which performs a similar function to actin and is essential for muscles to contract. See it here:

According to the NIH Director’s blog post, the researchers hope to collaborate with biologists to help them better understand cell processes on the smallest scales with their high-resolution imaging technique.