If you're tired of relying on your merely-mortal hands to catapult popcorn into your maw during snack time, there's a better way. The Popinator will do it for you, do it better, and do it wherever you are in the room. Just say "pop."

Brought to you by snack company Popcorn Indiana, The Popinator will not only shoot you a piece of popcorn like it was an NBA star at the 3-point line, but also home in on the source of the sound for pinpoint accuracy (from up to 15 feet away).

Check out the video to see it in action. One person recommends it for use during video-game sessions, which sounds practical enough. It's better than trying it out in a movie theater, at least.

[Popcorn Indiana]

The 3-D printing world just took another big leap into the consumer market. Next stop: world domination?

MakerBot, the unofficial leader of the hobbyist 3-D printing movement, is putting the finishing touches on a consumer store located in the posh Manhattan neighborhood of NoHo.

Sure, the rare 3-D printer can be found in the corners of business service centers across the United States. But MakerBot claims their location at 298 Mulberry Street is the first one in the country dedicated to selling 3-D printers, supplies for the machines, and bespoke objects printed on-location.

If the new business proves successful, 3-D printing stands to expand from a relatively high-cost hobbyist venture into a mainstream consumer market.

"This is the first retail 3-D printing store" in the United States, said spokesperson Jenny Lawton from inside the shop. "We haven't combed the world over, but we're pretty sure it's the first ... of its kind."

On the heels of today's announcement the company also unveiled a 3-D printer called Replicator 2. The device is about the size of a cooler and can build objects three times more finely than MakerBot's previous desktop 3-D printer. It can also print more than a third larger, or about size of a big loaf of bread.

"It sets the standard in desktop 3-D printing," said MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis during a press briefing. "[Printed objects] won't feel rough like hobbyist 3-D printers' of the past."

Things From the Thingiverse

Pettis and others founded MakerBot Industries in Brooklyn in 2009. Replicator 2 marks the company's fourth machine, but they plan to sell a fifth model early next year called the Replicator 2X -- a device branded as experimental to cater to get-under-the-hood extreme hobbyists and professionals.

The Replicator 2 uses corn-based plastic called PLA, which offers lightweight, shrink-free and rigid 3-D prints. (The Replicator 2X, true to previous MakerBot models, will print in ABS -- a more pliable but tricky, petroleum-based material.)

To show what the Replicator 2 can do, MakerBot sells models from its home-grown online community called Thingiverse. At that website, users upload their 3-D models, license them, and allow other enthusiasts to download and then print them for free.

During PopSci's visit on Sept. 18, we saw watches, bracelets, a model house, jigsaw hearts, a man's bust and even a pliable trilobite for sale. Most of the items between $50 to several hundred dollars.

But for those on a budget, a Japanese gumball machine offers $5 cats, robots, apples, stick figures and other collectible knick-knacks.

Lawton says MakerBot doesn't allow customers to order any one of the 28,000-plus designs on Thingiverse and have it printed for pickup in the store. MakerBot curates the selection, and that seems to be their business case: Draw people in, show them the possibilities, and convince them to fork over $2,199 for their own machine.

"You can always buy a Replicator and some plastic, take it home and make whatever you imagine," Lawton said.

3-D World Domination

MakerBot released its first 3-D printer in 2009, quickly claiming 16 percent of the nascent market for industrial and hobbyist 3-D printers. In 2011 alone they claimed more than 21 percent of the market.

Competition in the 3-D printing market is escalating to grab a slice of the pie. Shapeways, for example -- another New York-based 3-D printing company -- allows users to upload their designs, print the object, and have it shipped to them.

Until now, however, no company in the U.S. 3-D printing market had a physical toehold in the retail world. (A company in Switzerland opened a concept store last month.)

"The purpose of this is to demonstrate how a 3-D printer works," Lawton said. "People [can] come in and experience how a 3-D printer works -- see it, feel it, hear it -- as well as walk out with something that it's made."

Although MakerBot is a competitor to Shapeways, that company offered their support.

"We're thrilled that MakerBot is bringing this incredible technology to a retail environment," wrote Carine Carmy, Shapeways' marketing director, in an email to PopSci.com. "Once you see how 3-D printing works, the wheels start turning and you start to re-imagine the objects around you,"

MakerBot says it has big plans for the next five years but would only reveal one of them: "Our goal is to take over the world with 3-D printing," Lawton said.

Correction: Jenny Lawton was misidentified in the original story. Her name has been corrected throughout the piece.

You want to get more into photography. You've got somewhere between a few and several hundred dollars to spend on a camera. You want to learn a little bit about how this stuff works, so you can tweak some settings to get better shots, but mostly you just want your pictures to look good. You want a nice background blur. You want sharp focus, accurate colors. You want shots taken in low light to have a minimum of noise and blur. Great! This is exciting for you.

Here's what you shouldn't do: you shouldn't buy a DSLR.

Photokina 2012, going on this week, might be the moment when the DSLR loses its ascendancy among aspiring amateurs. Two years ago, DSLR was the obvious best option. Alternatives (which I'll get into) were in their infancy, still too expensive and too limited to really recommend, and entry-level DSLRs were starting to get really good, so if you wanted to jump into photography, you bought a DSLR. That's what everyone's always said (well, "always" meaning in the digital age). Want to get into photography? DSLR. But that's no longer true. DSLRs have serious weaknesses for the entry-level photographer, and suddenly there are options without those weaknesses.

Photokina this year has been, in large part, about making tiny, easy-to-use cameras with startlingly good image quality. Here's what you should buy instead of a bulky, difficult DSLR.

THE INTERCHANGEABLE-LENS CAMERA

The ILC needs a decent name, and quick, because for a category that's so well-suited for so many mainstream photographers, it has a name that's simultaneously arcane and vague, intimidating and uninformative. ILCs, also called mirrorless cameras, consist of a very thin, very small body, the size of a medium-sized point-and-shoot. But they have sensors bigger than any point-and-shoot, and tons of advanced options, and if you want, you can swap out lenses (hence, "interchangeable lens"). Here's what's important about them: they're only marginally bigger and more complicated to use than point-and-shoots, and they take photos in the same league as entry-level DSLRs.

Normal folks don't carry around two pounds of misshapen camera with them. A slim, 350-gram camera like the Sony NEX-6 slips into a jacket pocket or purse--or, if you don't wear especially tight pants, into a pocket. And the NEX's lens is tiny, a little 30-mm pancake lens, meaning this is one of the first ILCs that will in fact slip into a pocket.

Another great advantage to ILCs that often gets overlooked is that their navigation is informed much more by point-and-shoots than by DSLRs. The Sony NEX-C3, an interchangeable-lens camera, has a clickwheel, shutter, movie button, play button, and two context-sensitive buttons. That's it. It looks pretty much like the crappy point-and-shoots everyone's used to.

The argument every photographer will make is, well, DSLRs are laid out that way for a reason--for speed when you need to change settings on the fly. But you know who doesn't need to save two seconds while adjusting the auto-exposure lock? Pretty much everybody. The NEX series, one of the best in the ILC category, has a menu system that's "pretty similar" in featureset to Sony's Alpha DSLR series, says Pop Photo's Stan Horaczek, a definite pro and DSLR user himself. "Though," he said, "it can seem easier for a novice to navigate ILC menus because there are fewer buttons and knobs all over the place." And that's great, because by removing the camera as a technical object to be mastered, budding photographers can focus on what's arguably more important--the photo itself, and skills like composition and timing. Many of these cameras, like the Olympus Pen Mini, have modes to help you do just that.

But the most important thing? The images you can take with these cameras are amazing. I've completely switched from my big ol' Nikon to a combination of the Olympus PEN E-PM1 and miscellaneous Sony NEXes, which are half the size, as little as half the cost (in the case of the Olympus), and do very, very few things worse. They do everything I need, and I'm so much more excited to use a tiny sleek camera than my old DSLR. It's a flat-out more pleasant experience.

ILCs have tradeoffs, of course. DSLRs have a dedicated sensor for autofocus, one completely separate from the sensor used to take a picture. ILCs are too small for that, so they use the same sensor. That means autofocus is slower. The sensor in an ILC is a bit smaller, which limits the amount of light it takes in, which in turn means worse performance in low light. The lenses are more expensive and fewer in number. There's often no electronic viewfinder, so you have to use the live-view screen, like you would with a phone or lesser point-and-shoot, which can be hard to see in sunlight and may make it hard to keep the camera steady.

That's all true, and every photographer will go on at length about it, but here's the thing: it doesn't really matter. Because ILCs are small, attractive, increasingly inexpensive, and take great pictures. They offer manual control when you want it and simplicity when you need it. That's what matters.

EVEN SMALLER

You can even go down a step from the ILCs to, well, non-interchangeable-lens cameras, a category name somehow even more cumbersome than the ILC. (Some folks are calling them "advanced compacts.") Essentially, these are tricked-out point-and-shoots. The big boys in the category are the Canon S100-series (the S110 will come out soon) and the Sony RX100. The S100 is a great point-and-shoot with tons of manual options that turns out great pics. The RX100 is, well, we're not really sure what it is yet. It looks like a point-and-shoot, but it has a monster sensor for that category, and the test shots we've seen are astounding. And that's the direction compacts are going. Stan quipped "Sensor size war is the new megapixel war," and it's a war we all want, because bigger sensors equals better photos (unlike megapixel count).

And that's why, if you don't really care about stocking up on multiple lenses, you might want to look to this category. Brian Lam, proprietor of the no-nonsense gadget-recommendation site The Wirecutter, says "Most people who buy entry-level DSLRs don't get a second lens, typically. The RX100 is a great replacement for that." If you have a DSLR and your only lens is the 18-55mm that came with it? You made the wrong call.

If you want a look at the future, check out the Sony RX1--kind of like the RX100, which is expensive at $650 but also a great option for lots of people, taken to an extreme. At $2,800 and with a non-interchangeable prime lens (meaning, no zoom at all), the RX1 is definitely not for the beginner; though we haven't seen final image quality yet, Lam said, "The RX1 is right for someone who is a pro and wants a specific backup camera, or someone who makes over $250,000 a year." But it's a sign of things to come. It's got a full-frame CMOS sensor, the same sensor as in giant DSLRs that cost thousands of dollars, and the image quality to match. And it fits in your pocket.

How do these exist? For advanced compacts, camera manufacturers can put in any kind of weird sensor size they want, since the camera doesn't have to conform to a particular lens system. ILCs all have to work with the dozens, sometimes hundreds, of lenses in their lens system. But if you take away its ability to exchange lenses, the camera can have any size sensor at all, because you're creating the lens system individually for this camera and nothing else. So make it huge! Make the lens awesome, since there's only one! Then the photos are incredible, and what you've lost might not be something that many people need in the first place.

THE PROBLEMS OF THE DSLR

Size: DSLRs are enormous, problematically-shaped gadgets. There's no other portable gadget with such an unapologetically non-portable shape--your phone, tablet, laptop, gaming console, ebook reader, those are all flat. Hell, even giant headphones fold up into themselves. But DSLRs are bulky, heavy, roundish and squareish at the same time. They do not fit in a pocket, purse, or neatly in a messenger bag. They don't rest well against your back in a backpack. There's a reason there's a thriving economy of DSLR-specific bags.

I have a Nikon D5100, a low- to mid-range but quite nice DSLR. I love the photos I can take with it. And I never use it, because I never have it with me, because it is a giant lump of black buttons and screens and lenses. And the D5100 is small for a DSLR. But something like a Sony NEX? It fits comfortably anywhere. I take it with me everywhere. By downgrading my camera size, I've significantly upgraded the quality of my photos, because I actually use the nice fancy camera.

Approachability: Look at the back of this Sony A55 (above)--an excellent camera and winner of Pop Photo's Camera of the Year award. You've got: a shutter with an on/off switch, a ring with nine options, an unlabeled click wheel, a five-way directional pad (with each direction doubling as a secondary function), and and array of buttons scattered around the body, including Menu, Finder/LCD, D-Range, Movie, AV, AEL, Fn, Play, Trash, and one tiny unlabeled black button underneath the lens. Are you exhausted? That is exhausting.

If you're just getting into more serious photography, a DSLR's button layout is a major obstacle to overcome, and, more importantly, an unnecessary one. It's not that people can't learn, or even that they shouldn't--it's just that for many users, there's no need. To someone who's only used a point-and-shoot, you know what a DSLR looks like? A fucking airplane cockpit. A simpler layout lets a novice learn at his or her own pace, adding skill and expertise, feature by feature, without that initial wall to climb. There's no need for that type of user--which, it bears mentioning, we all were, once--to feel threatened. This isn't school. This should be fun.

Commitment: Buying a point-and-shoot is easy; the decent ones are pretty similar. But buying a DSLR is more like buying a smartphone. You're not just buying a camera, the same way you're not just buying a phone. You're buying into an ecosystem, where only certain accessories are available to you. Canon lenses don't work with Nikon bodies. A case made for a T3i won't fit a 5D Mark III. And like a smartphone, your first purchase is just that--the first of what is supposed to be many. You need apps for your phone, and you need lenses, different kinds of flash setups, bags, straps, tripods, microphones, and more for your DSLR. DSLRs are fantastically flexible, but they rely on modularity.

Someone who just wants to take their photography one more step, who may do it on impulse and not ever buy another lens, doesn't need that flexibility. DSLRs should be, and will be very soon, for experts. For pros, or passionate amateurs. Sports photographers, bird-watchers, people who want to build a multi-thousand-dollar collection of lenses. But for those of us who just want to take better pictures, dammit, there are amazing options just for us.

We know people default to bad passwords, whether for their computers or banking PINs. But, we have to stress this here, people are really bad at picking passwords. This infographic visualizes that idea by taking all of the possible combinations and mapping them based on frequency of use.

A data set of 3.4 million pins was used. The first two digits are on the horizontal end; the second two on the vertical end. That perfectly diagonal yellow line streaking across it shows the frequency of 1111, 2222, etc. Data Genetics crunched the numbers (based on "released/exposed/discovered password tables and security breaches") used in the graphic, and came up with some fascinating finds:

• You can crack more than 10 percent of random PINs by dialing in 1234. Expanding a bit, 1234, 0000, and 1111, make up about 20 percent.
• 26.83 percent of passwords can be cracked using the top 20 combinations. That would be 0.2 percent of the passwords if they were randomly distributed.
• For the data set used, 8068 is the "safest" password, used just 25 times out of 3.4 million.
• Birthday years are big. The 1900 PINS--1986, 1960, 1991, and so on--are extremely popular, with PINs from later in the century used the most.
• A full 17.8 percent of PINs are couplets, such as 7878, 8181.
• 2580 seems random, but comes it at No. 22 most-used on the list. Why? Because it's straight down the middle row on a telephone keypad.

There are better ways to pick a password.

[Data Genetics via visual.ly]

Apple's iOS6, the operating system that will drive the new iPhone5 as well as previous iterations of iPhones should users opt to upgrade, is out, and not necessarily to rave reviews. The operating system itself is not the issue, but Apple Maps--the replacement for the much beloved Google Maps program that is no longer embedded in new iOS products--is turning out to be about as big a failure as many had imagined. Reports The Guardian: "Users were reporting that Paddington station had vanished, London had been relocated to Ontario, the Sears Tower in Chicago had shrunk, and Helsinki railway station had been turned into a park."

So much for a seamless rollout. Most of the faulty cartography complaints appear to be coming in from the U.K. and mainland Europe, though there are also complaints rolling in from Asia. In Tokyo, a city known for its trains and its citizens reliance on them, some railway stations are missing entirely--including Tokyo station, one of the world's largest train terminals.

One Twitter user has even pointed out that Apple Maps has tried to solve a particularly thorny and timely political problem by creating two sets of Senkaku--or Daioyu, depending on who you ask--Islands. These disputed land masses are claimed by both Japan and China and have recently been the source of rising geopolitical tension between those nations. It's nice to think that Apple might be able to calm the escalating friction there, but let's not forget that faulty digital cartography has led to international incidents in the past.

Elsewhere, one of Helsinki's principal rail stations has been turned into a park and one of Dublin's Park's has been turned into an airport, a problem that a local minister says could lead to a serious issue should a pilot, with no other information available and looking to make an emergency landing, decide that Airfield (that's the name of the park--see the confusion here?) is a reasonable place to set down an aircraft.

HuffPo has a long list of Apple Maps bloopers worth noting: Woolworth stores are back in business (many long defunct businesses are listed as present on the app). Stratford-upon-Avon doesn't exist, a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. The Falklands Islands are now uninhabited wildernesses. Even the Apple Store in Sydney is on the wrong side of the street.

For Apple, its a rare miss for a product release. For users, well, if you like Google Maps don't upgrade to the new iOS6 unless you absolutely have to.

[Guardian]

Science has been trying for years to grow the perfect sirloin in a petri dish, but animal hides, rather than animal meat, might be a simpler, easier-to-sell product you can harvest in the lab. A company called Modern Meadow could have a full-scale leather production facility up and running within five years, CEO and cofounder Andras Forgacs says.

Modern Meadow received a windfall this summer from PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel to bio-print meat and leather, but the company tells Txchnologist it will focus on leather first. Laboratory leather will use a similar process as lab-grown meat, but it would require far less regulatory approval--and it may be more palatable anyway, Forgacs admits: "There's much less controversy around using leather that doesn't involve killing animals."

Lab-grown leather would also need a shorter tanning process, because it wouldn't involve removing all the hair and tough outer skin layers.

Here's how it would work: First, the company would harvest cells from livestock that would normally be killed for meat or leather, potentially including exotic animals. The extracted cells could be genetically modified for improved leather qualities (but meat cells would not). These pioneer cells would multiply in a bioreactor, and would then be purified and fused together. There are several potential methods to do this, including 3-D printing or scaffold seeding. Finally, the cells would be allowed to mature, stimulating collagen production in leather cells and muscle growth in meat cells. You can read more about their process over at Txchnologist.

[Txchnologist]

Customers buying Kit-Kat bars in the United Kingdom could be unwrapping a 21st-century version of Willy Wonka's Golden Ticket--a GPS unit the candy-maker will use to find them, apprehend them and give them a prize. Nestlé claims to be the first to market its chocolatey wares with a GPS-based promotion.

The somewhat sinister-sounding "We Will Find You" campaign will place a GPS-enabled bar inside four versions of Kit-Kats. Inside the wrapper, it would look exactly like a regular Kit-Kat, according to the York Press newspaper, in the town where Nestlé is based. When the would-be snacker pulls a tab to open the wrapper, the GPS device will turn on, which will notify the company. Then a "prize team" will locate this person within 24 hours and hand him or her a check for £10,000 (about $16,000).

Nestlé said they devised the campaign to appeal to men, who presumably like GPS technology. It is backing the marketing blitz with TV ads and a smartphone campaign, wherein users are supposed to scan QR codes on Kit-Kat ads or use NFC-equipped phones to enter an online competition.

While Nestlé may be the first to do this with candy, they're not the first to use GPS to track their customers. As Network World points out, multinational soap-and-ice-cream supplier Unilever added a GPS device to a box of laundry soap it sells in Brazil, and stalked 50 shoppers to their front doors to give them prizes.

Soda, fast food and candy wrappers always have some kind of contest running, but those usually rely on the consumer to notice the special winning code or wrapper and go get the prize. Tracking people down is definitely a different concept.

[via Network World]

What is the sexiest job of the 21st century? If you said "data scientist," you're probably an editor at Harvard Business Review and probably not anyone else. The HBR has named the emerging practice of sifting through data to find hidden, below-the-surface meaning and otherwise extrapolate underlying knowledge the "sexiest" job of the new century. But while we love Big Data here at PopSci (we dedicated a whole issue to last year), we're going to have to argue semantics here. Data scientists are certainly in demand (you might even get away with calling it a "hot" profession), but unfortunately that's not what "sexy" means. It's an interesting piece, nonetheless. Read it here.

Anyone who's ever seen a cat knows how distinct he or she looks compared to every other cat--stripes and whorls cover their coats in seemingly endless variation. It turns out that one gene is responsible for regulating these patterns, and it's true for all of the domestic cat's larger cousins. Different mutations on a shared gene produce the blotchy patterns of pet tabbies as well as the stripes on a rare type of wild cheetahs. What's more, one geneticist thinks there could be an immunological reason for all these unique designs.

Cat coat genetics are complex and confusing, in part because phenotypes--the way cats look--are defined differently among various registries and associations. Stephen J. O'Brien, a scientist in the Laboratory of Genomic Diversity at Maryland's Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, said researchers wanted to pinpoint the genetic basis for this wide array of cat patterns.

"The same phenomena are seen in the rest of the cat family, too. There are 37 species in felidae - from clouded leopards, black panthers, cheetahs and so forth. There's a little bit of an evolutionary dance where these different forms are coming out," O'Brien said. "Nobody is really sure why there is so much variation."

Previous research suggested there were three main determinants for the color of a cat - whether it's solid-colored black or tawny, striped/tabby, or spotted, which is very rare in American cats. If a cat is not solid-colored, then it's spotted or striped. The genetic sequence that codes for this is called the Tabby locus, or the Tabby gene.

Scientists led by Christopher B. Kaelin at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Alabama re-sequenced this genetic region and found striped and "blotched" tabby cats carried three genes in the same region, two of which didn't cause any interesting substitutions. But a mutation in a third, called Taqpep for Transmembrane Aminopeptidase Q, causes the blotched patterns. That can be seen in the bottom two cats in the image above.

"This gene in housecats was clearly responsible for this characteristic, which had three separate independent mutations in the history of cats," said O'Brien, a coauthor.

The team wanted to compare this marbling in wild cats. There's a cheetah phenotype called the king cheetah, in which the animal has bold stripes along its back, rather than just spots. They obtained blood samples from a king cheetah named Kgosi, who lives in a cheetah preserve in northern California. Turns out he also had a mutation on the Taqpep gene. Originally, this cat was described as a distinct species, but today's new cat paper, published in Science, shows it's genetically not.

To get a further handle on the genetics, the team then studied fetal domestic cats and cheetahs growing in the womb. They found that one gene, called Edn3, controls the color in the patterns. By studying the same gene in mice, the team was able to come up with a model for how Edn3 and Taqpep cause the colors and markings of cats, and why they remain the same even as the cat grows.

O'Brien - who lives on a Maryland farm with several outdoor cats of various colors and patterns - at first wanted to call the gene tabulin, after tabby cats, but was unsuccessful. Now that's just the name for the protein that the gene codes for. "The human genomics people didn't want to name a human gene after a cat," he said with a laugh.

There's clearly some evolutionary reason for all this variation, but no one is sure what it is. A common explanation is camouflage, in which mottled patterns make a cat more difficult to see in the bush or in twilight. O'Brien has another theory, which he admits is provocative: It's about viruses. Both Edn3 and Taqpep are membrane-spanning proteins, which interact with the outside portion of cells, he explained.

"[Such proteins] are well-known to be involved in immune defenses, and to be co-opted by viruses. There is always this pressure of viruses finding a new receptor, and there's a mutation that the animal survives," he said. He believes coat pattern proteins are a target for viruses, and cats are different colors and patterns because the proteins have evolved mutations to resist the invaders, with no other effects on the cat's health or characteristics.

While O'Brien admits there's no evidence for this, at least not yet, there are well-known connections between immune response and surface proteins, some of which are involved in color. Immune-deficient rodents, developed for testing in laboratories, are albino white, for instance. And the rare mutation in the CCR5 gene in humans - coding for a protein that, while not involved in color, is present on the surface of immune cells - confers immunity to HIV.

"There are functions associated with these things that we are just beginning to appreciate and understand better," he said. "This will probably stimulate more research into the function of this gene in humans and other model systems."

More than 23 years before MakerBot Industries opened the first 3-D printing store in the U.S., Popular Science got very, very excited about stereolithography, the first 3-D printing process. "There's an almost magical quality to stereolithography, a process that can coalesce liquid polymers into dazzlingly complex solid structures in a matter of hours," PopSci wrote in May 1989. We predicted that, before long, 3-D printers would let surgeons fabricate models of human bones and help automakers quickly create new car-body shapes.

The invention of California engineer Charles Hull, stereolithography was then being used by Apple Computer to make models of the plastic housings for its computer equipment. Hull's company, 3D Systems, had just released its second-generation stereolithography machine, which could make parts measuring up to 10 inches in each dimension.

Read the full story in our May 1989 issue: Presto! "Growing" Parts from Liquid Plastic.

It feels like not a week goes by without a scientific paper getting retracted. The article authors issue apologetic statements of "mistaken" data or "submitted the wrong photo" or whatever, and everyone shuffles around feeling embarrassed on behalf of science for awhile and that seems to be that. Turns out, most of the time those "mistakes" are intentional.

A recent study of retracted papers by Arturo Casadevall, Ferric Fang and R. Grant Steen has uncovered that 67 percent article retractions -- papers that the journal or researchers, or both, disavow -- are due to scientific misconduct. Fang et al. looked through the PubMed database at 2,047 article retractions back to 1977, when a paper published in 1973 got the axe, then cross-referenced those retractions with investigations done by independent bodies such as the Office of Research Integrity. They found that only about one-fifth of retractions were due to mistakes rather than chicanery. Further, they found that authors of the retracted papers were not always forthright in the reason for the retraction: At least 158 articles whose retraction notices claimed unintentional errors or the like were actually cases of scientific fraud.

What I found most interesting is the time it takes to retract a fraudulent paper versus one for which the authors made a legitimately honest error. Legit errors took, on average, 26 months to retract. Fraudulent papers, on the other hand, took almost 47 months. The authors attribute this to the likelihood that investigations into fraud take time and one suspected case of fraud will make a journal look into a suspected scientist's entire output, meaning that sometimes years-old papers end up being retracted in addition to newer scholarship.

Not much research has been done on scientific fraud, and despite some recent high-profile retractions (see the latest kerfuffle regarding XMRV), nobody really knows if fraud is getting more prevalent or if journals and colleagues are just better at catching it. Hopefully we'll see more scholarship in this area. At the end of an earlier paper on the subject, Casadevall and Fang muse on the reasons why fraud happens: "It is not difficult to surmise the underlying causes of research misconduct. Misconduct represents the dark side of the hypercompetitive environment of contemporary science with its emphasis on funding, numbers of publications and impact factor. With such potent incentives for cheating, it is not surprising that some scientists succumb to temptation." With any luck, this kind of finding will spur journals, universities and grant agencies to review their internal processes to try to prevent misconduct or stop a fraudulent study from ever seeing the light of day.

Understanding how major earthquakes happen is one of the biggest challenges in quake science - tremors of different sizes have very different characteristics, let alone outcomes. Lab simulations of earthquakes stick rock surfaces together and push on them with different pressures to a breaking point, causing them to slip against each other. But this doesn't fully simulate the physics of a huge and damaging earthquake, because the rupturing is too weak by five or six orders of magnitude. A new experimental earthquake setup offers a better fake-quake solution.

Scientists in California and Oklahoma built a rotary earthquake simulator that spins and stores energy inside a 500-pound flywheel. Its 100 HP three-phase electric motor provides
torque up to 3,000 Nm at any velocity from zero to 3,300 RPM, and it can accelerate to full rotation speed in 0.1 seconds. As it spins, a fast-acting (30 millisecond) clutch grabs a disc-shaped piece of rock and presses it against the flywheel, which forces the rock to rotate with the spinning hunk of metal. It moves until all the kinetic energy dissipates, which the researchers called an "earthquake-like slip event."

These ELSEs are similar to real earthquakes because they contain a finite amount of energy and the fault pressures change as the quake propagates, the researchers say. They compared ELSE runs to the energy release of six real earthquakes, and found the energy densities in the sample super-strained rock is reasonably comparable to those in real earthquakes, between 4 and 8 magnitude. For this reason, the fake quakes can be used to estimate the intensity of an energy release during a real earthquake, according to the researchers, led by Jefferson Chang and colleagues at the University of Oklahoma.

There are still several questions, however, involving the prediction of slip along a fault line under a given scenario - but further experiments with the flywheel may be able to help answer them, along with improving models of earthquake propagation and behavior. The flywheel experiment is published today in Science.

Nearsighted kids have to wear glasses to correct their lack of eye focus, but this doesn't cure the problem and may actually make the problem worse over time. A new type of contact lens refocuses light and coaxes the eye to grow in a different way.

Myopia develops when a person's eye is elongated, which makes it difficult for the lens to focus light onto the far-away retina. Glasses for nearsightedness fix the focus, but they can create farsightedness in the retina. As people get older, the eye grows to move the retina to where the light is - so it gets more elongated, exacerbating the problem, according to the Optical Society of America.

These contacts change how light is focused in the retina, which in turn changes eye growth so it doesn't stretch out extensively. Contacts based on this design could soon be available for optometrists to prescribe to children, the OSA says.

As long as these contacts don't squeeze the eye or perform any other type of ocular torture - besides the inherent torture in inserting and removing the contacts - they seem like a sound solution.

[via PhysOrg]

Every May for the past 10 years, Thomson Reuters analyst David Pendlebury has sat down and pored through academic papers, searching for a glimmer of glory. On the hunt for scientists who deserve a Nobel Prize, Pendlebury sifts through papers on topics from macroeconomics to macromolecules, judging their influence on their respective fields and choosing scientists whose work stands the test of time. PopSci talked to him about his methodology - the science behind predicting the science Nobel winners.

Pendlebury's picks include physics, chemistry, physiology/medicine, and economics - the Nobels for science, whose impact can be measured. Peace and literature are somewhat more subjective. Pendlebury begins with academic citations, he explained in an interview. Thomson Reuters is the only group to predict Nobel winners based on data, not just a bookie's odds, and has been quite accurate so far, correctly picking 26 recipients in the past decade. Last year, every single winner was previously predicted, either in 2008 or 2010.

Sometimes Nobel Prize winners are easy to spot; Francis Crick and James Watson, for instance, whose DNA-structure Nobel is 50 years old this year, were shoo-ins for an eventual win. But sometimes there are sleepers, and sometimes a victory comes fast on the heels of a finding, like Andre Geim's and Konstantin Novoselov's 2010 win for six-year-old papers on graphene. And, of course, sometimes there are snubs.

"We pay particular attention to highly cited papers, which are the rare birds in research," Pendlebury said. "The data so clearly emphasize which few people are at the top end of that distribution. It's like looking at a peak of a mountain - it's easy to see, sticking out right there at the top."

But the mountaintops have to form first. Often, decades of work must bolster original research before it's clear that its author is worthy of a Nobel Prize. The Nobel Committee chooses winners based on nominations and peer review; Pendlebury finds candidates by searching Thomson Reuters' journal article database, called the Web of Knowledge. Academics can use it to find scholarly articles of interest to them. Among a wealth of searchable data, it correlates papers with others that have referenced them, providing insight on a paper's impact, Pendlebury said. "Papers that are cited a lot are influential, or at least have utility. We do not claim that high citations equal quality - that is a human judgment," he said. "But there is a strong correlation between high citations and the people who end up getting Nobel Prizes."

Armed with well-cited and well-regarded papers, Pendlebury moves on to an analysis of the field. He'll study topics like epigenetics or welfare economics and ensure the mountaintop researchers really are the pioneers in that field. Then he'll study the field itself - is this something that counts as a major breakthrough in physics, chemistry, medicine or economics, and if so, has a researcher in this field won a Nobel in the past? Finally, he'll look at other citations, including some specialist awards that tend to foreshadow the Nobels. If all these criteria are met and the scientist in question is still living, he or she will make Pendlebury's list. He wraps up the process by September.

"We are not saying the people whose names we are putting forth this year will win this year - we actually have done that before, but we're not trying to do that. We're trying to recognize the Nobel-class people," he said. "The people we've named in previous years, we think, are as good of contenders."

This year's citation laureates include two researchers who published pioneering work on genetic regulation, which Pendlebury thinks is ripe for a prize. In economics, he cited two economists who have studied income inequality and poverty, an important political topic throughout Europe and in the U.S. in the past year. In physics, Pendlebury calls out quantum teleportation, but not the Higgs boson, noting the Nobel committee has historically been conservative in recognizing new breakthroughs.

The graphene winners are one exception to that rule - and one Pendlebury correctly predicted. Geim and Novoselov published their original papers in 2004 and 2005, so if the Nobel committee followed past trends, it would be a while yet before they'd be acknowledged - in physics, the average time from publication to prize is 25 years. "But it was clear from the rapid accumulation of citations of those papers that this was really an exceptional discovery," Pendlebury said. He cited them as Nobel-quality citation laureates in 2008. They won in 2010.

Pendlebury said he'll set an alarm for 2 a.m. Pacific time Monday morning, when the prize for physiology or medicine will be announced. Physics and chemistry follow the next two days, peace is on Friday and the following Monday, Oct. 15, is economics.

He said he makes predictions to demonstrate that citations are a clear indicator of a particular paper's value to scientists - but it's more than that. "We also do it because we want to give recognition and honor to the scientists who have achieved the highest level," he said. "There are so few Nobel Prizes given out, relative to the people who are in a position to win them."

You can read Pendlebury's full list here.

Today, 3M became the first company to do something real with the new MHL (mobile high-definition link) connection standard. MHL is a standard that can theoretically be used on any kind of port, though currently the MHL group is focusing on the HDMI port on your TV or projector. (This is a hardware change, to be clear--you'll need to buy a new TV to get the advantages.) The new Roku's Streaming Stick is one of the first accessories to use the tech, and 3M's new Streaming Projector is one of the first displays to do so. The projector is bundled with a Streaming Stick, which they say is superior to a built-in system because it allows you to move your streaming capabilities from device-to-device with only one plug, and to upgrade the connected brains of the projector without having to buy an entirely new one.

Roku started show off the Streaming Stick earlier this year at CES. The 2-inch dongle contains all the hardware necessary to run any of Roku's video apps (which they call channels); that includes a processor and Wi-Fi radio. The MHL standard is what allowed Roku to cram all that smarts into such a small package; the standard allows the Stick to draw power through an MHL port, which is the same size as an HDMI port, so they save all the real estate a power-supply would take up. (There are about 15 other MHL-ready TVs available from companies including Samsung and LG.)

On its own, 3M's Streaming Projector is a completely serviceable, mobile home-theater device. The one-pound DLP projector produces 60 lumens and screens up to 120 inches across. A rechargeable lithium-ion battery provides about 2 hours and 45 minutes of battery life. It'll be available through Amazon.com for $299, which includes the Streaming Stick and a remote. (The Stick on its own is $100).

One of the great benefits of being in charge of a magazine like Popular Science is that a lot of doors are open to me. The name and prestige of the title make it possible to walk around the razor wire and see prototypes and experiments generally kept hidden from the general public. But until the National Geographic Channel asked me to do that same thing with a camera crew, I had no idea how secret certain things really are.

"Top Secret," part of Secret Access Week on the National Geographic Channel, is our effort to get inside the world of black-budget, off-the-books military hardware. Many of you are familiar with Area 51, where top-secret planes are tested. What you may not know is that there's another facility, Plant 42, that's even more interesting, and for the show's premiere, that's where we went. Plant 42 is the manufacturing facility outside Los Angeles, maintained by the U.S. military as a place where private companies can build prototypes under military contract. It's where Lockheed Martin has its skunk works, alongside private facilities for Boeing, Northrop Grumman, and others.

Palmdale, the small, eerily clean and orderly town where Plant 42 sits alongside Edwards Air Force Base, is part of a huge corridor of airspace that extends all the way into orbit and is controlled by its own air traffic control system, so that the military can fly as fast and high as its new toys allow. We did everything we could to figure out what those toys were. I drank with the pilots at a local bar, we camped out at the end of a test-flight runway in the middle of the night, and we chartered a small private plane and snuck into the air space for a moment.

And eventually, we negotiated our way inside Plant 42, and there, we saw the future, not least the autonomous X-47B warplane, our cover story from August. But it's the process of visiting a place like that that truly blew my mind. We underwent background checks, had our vehicles searched, were under tight control at all times, and had to submit our footage for review at the end of each day. We went to enormous lengths to get in, but it turns out the hardest part of filming a show about "Top Secret" places is getting out.

"Top Secret" premieres Tuesday, October 9 at 8pm PT/ET on the National Geographic Channel. Also check out America's Money Vault, a look inside the Federal Reserve's massive system for creating, protecting and destroying money, on Thursday, October 11 at 8pm PT/ET, also on the National Geographic Channel.

This weekend Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner plans to ride a balloon to the edge of space. Then, after reaching 120,000 feet, he'll jump into the unknown.

Only pressure chamber tests, computer modeling, and tales of a pilot who survived an emergency ejection at supersonic speeds offer Baumgartner, a professional BASE jumper, and his support team any measure of solace.

But a few things are certain. For a short time inside his pressurized spacesuit, Baumgartner will be the fastest man alive. Thirty seconds after leaping from a small capsule, in fact, he'll exceed the speed of sound in the thin upper atmosphere by traveling 690 mph. And if he safely parachutes to the ground between 12 and 15 minutes later, he'll walk away with at least four new world records: the highest skydive, the longest free fall, the first to reach supersonic speeds in free fall, and the highest manned balloon ride.

Energy drink company Red Bull is supporting the Stratos project with an undisclosed amount of money in the tens of millions of dollars (not including an out-of-court settlement for a recent lawsuit that put the jump on ice for more than a year). Project team members, however, insist that their effort isn't a mere publicity stunt.

"The objective is science. You don't go into a situation like this to set a record. You go in to get knowledge," said Joseph Kittinger, a key member of the Stratos team.

In 1960 Kittinger claimed the world record for the highest and fastest skydive in the world (for now). The former Air Force command pilot has not only helped train Baumgartner throughout the 5-year-long effort, but also had a major hand in developing the capsule, its life support systems, and other equipment.

"I think all of us are dedicated toward the science, and none of us would be involved if this was a stunt," Kittinger said.

When Baumgartner's deed is done, Kittinger said the Stratos team plans to "share all of the data that we have" with commercial spaceflight companies and NASA. These parties plan to rocket people into extremely hostile environments, the thinking goes, so Stratos' hard data might help space fliers survive a suborbital calamity.

Collecting data should be the easy part. Safely launching a 600-foot-tall, 30 million-cubic-foot balloon with a human tethered to the end is another matter.

RISING TO THE CHALLENGE

Astronomers who loft telescopes to the edge of space with helium balloons know the problem too well. The final launch of the BLAST telescope, for example, nearly crippled the apparatus.

"Everything has to be perfect to launch the balloon. If we're able to manage that, we've accomplished a lot," Baumgartner said. "Without launching a balloon, there's no jump."

Stratos needs to lift a 2,900-pound capsule -- plus Baumgartner and the weight of his bulky spacesuit -- to at least 120,000 feet. The balloon is made out of a polyethylene material not too different from the thin bags launderers slip over dry-cleaned clothes. Even then, the balloon itself will weigh about 3,000 pounds.

It's a vulnerable setup: A rogue wind buffeting the balloon's taut skin could doom the mission. "There's a big potential that [the balloon] can tear apart," Baumgartner said.

Stratos is planning its launch attempt from Roswell, New Mexico. The semi-arid region is known for extremely stable weather. Pockets of wind shear during the 3-hour-long ascent could also threaten the balloon, however, so the team will scout with a weather balloon before the master attempt.

Should Baumgartner's ride pop during the 3-hour-long ascent, his capsule is equipped with an emergency parachute to deliver him to the ground in one piece. That capsule, however, suffered extensive damage after a 97,000-foot jump in August/>, forcing the mission's team to replace its outer components (the internal pressure sphere was allegedly unbreached). It's unknown how the device might fare after falling from 120,000 feet -- with or without Baumgartner inside.

SUITING UP

If Baumgartner receives a "go" for jump, a 36-pound spacesuit is all that separates him from a hostile world that would boil water in his flesh. The exposure could lead to ebullism, a lethal condition caused by gas bubbles escaping into the bloodstream.

Thankfully, Baumgartner will wear a chest pack crammed with data-hungry instruments to help ground controllers monitor the space diver and log scientific data. Some will keep tabs on Baumgartner's vital signs such as heart rate and oxygen intake to see how his body reacts to a boundary no person has broken in a spacesuit (and lived to tell the tale): the speed of sound.

Dr. Jonathan Clark of Baylor College of Medicine, a former space shuttle crew surgeon at NASA, said the team isn't particularly concerned about the feat itself, which will probably occur around 100,000 feet up. (Baumgartner may not know he's surpassed the speed of sound, so the suit is even designed to blip out a ring tone if he does.)

It's the emergent threat of shock-shock interactions, or colliding supersonic shock waves, that's worrisome. If Baumgartner's head-first, bullet-like position is compromised during the jump, such aerodynamic heating has the chance to break his suit.

The heating effect rises with increasing supersonic speed. During early tests of the X-15 spaceplane, in fact, hot air penetrated the machine's skin and "cut through electrical wiring and tubing like an acetylene torch."

"Shock-shock interaction is in my estimation, the biggest unknown ... we don't adequately understand," Clark said. "As nobody has done this before, this data will be invaluable in advancing human exploration."

In addition to beaming down a video feed of Baumgartner's face (which will help ground controllers assess his health), the chest pack will telemeter GPS location, atmospheric temperature, altitude, inertia, and speed. It will also allow the space diver to communicate with the ground -- in particular Kittinger, who plans to coax Baumgartner through every step of the jump.

One of the biggest dangers is a flat spin which, beyond 120 rotations per minute, can knock out the toughest of skydivers. "The possibility of spinning is inversely proportional to altitude. It's exactly what happened to me," said Kittinger of one of his project Excelsior space-diving attempts. "The centrifugal force was so great I couldn't pull my arms in to control it."

A special drogue chute will deploy from Baumgartner's spacesuit and help stabilize him if he enters an uncontrollable spin. But if his suit is compromised, he'll be exposed to deadly low pressure and a lack of oxygen.

"My primary concerns are the things that have killed people in this environment, ebullism and flat spin," Clark said.

LASTING SUCCESS?

If Baumgartner endures the risky balloon ride and supersonic free-fall, he'll be left to do what he does best: plummet to Earth, pull the ripcord and parachute to the ground.

"The rest of the free fall part is pretty much like a regular skydive," he said. "It's just faster, but you don't feel the speed because there's no reference. There's almost sound up there, so you don't hear the noise."

It remains to be seen if the jump is successful and if the scientific data captured during the attempt is valuable to both government programs or commercial spaceflight companies. (Many of the outfits have no plans for a pressurized spacesuit or escape system.)

Regardless, Baumgartner and key members of his team remain determined.

"This is cutting-edge science, this is the modern time of space exploration," Baumgartner said. "Space exploration is becoming more and more popular and those people ... need protection.

"We want to prove to the world that these conditions are survivable. This is where we are kind of pioneers, and hopefully people will use our equipment and our technology in the future."

Note: This article was first published at Txchnologist.com and adapted with permission.