Oslo

Rikard Fröberg/FlickrCC by 2.0

Oslo might be building bee highways, but when it comes to human highways, they're shutting them down.

By 2019, no private cars will be allowed into the Oslo city center. They're not quite tearing up the pavement to install a natural paradise; trams and buses will still be available to help Oslo residents get around, and a network of bicycle lanes will expand dramatically. But the change will be big, restricting the city's estimated 350,000 cars to the suburbs and beyond.

Cars powered by fossil fuel-guzzling combustion engines produce emissions that go straight from the tailpipe into the atmosphere. Those emissions contain pollutions such as nitrogen oxides, which can cause smog or acid rain and generally lower the local air quality--a health concern for people with compromised respiratory systems. Also, anyone with lungs.

Of course, there are ways for cars to reduce emissions, but those environmental controls are not universal, as we recently saw with a certain cheating scandal. {Cough} Volkswagen {cough}. Electric cars don't produce emissions, but they still take up space in the streets. So, in order to make the streets more pedestrian- and cyclist-friendly and reduce pollution from cars, Oslo is getting rid of cars entirely.

Other cities in Europe are also making the attempt to eliminate or reduce cars in city centers.

In 2014, high levels of air pollution inspired the French government to dramatically restrict the numbers of cars on the road in Paris, only permitting cars with license plates ending in odd numbers to drive the streets. (Even numbers got the run of the road the next day.) The measure was so successful that last month Paris decreed an entirely car-free day, banning all vehicles that weren't taxis or emergency vehicles. Even though only certain parts of Paris were affected by the ban, pollution levels in the city dropped by 20 to 40 percent that day.

Reducing cars to reduce pollution isn't an idea limited to Europe. Today, New Delhi, a city that has long struggled with air pollution, began instituting voluntary car-free areas on high-trafficked sections of highway. And Beijing, another notoriously polluted city, has seen blue skies when cutting the city's volume of cars in half.

Hyperloop Track

Courtesy Hyperloop Transportation Technologies

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies plans to break ground in 2016 on a 5-mile track that will serve Quay Valley, a real-estate development in California. It will start carrying passengers as soon as 2018.

There's good news and bad news about Hyperloop, the revolutionary transportation idea proposed by Elon Musk in 2013 that involves whisking people between cities in sealed pods through vacuum tubes at breathtaking speeds.

The good news: Dezeen reports that the first test track for the Hyperloop will start construction in California in a matter of weeks. The five-mile test track will be the first of its kind, a place where inventors can test designs for pods that (in theory) can transport passengers at speeds of up to 760 miles per hour.

The bad news: It's going to cost a lot of money. Initial reports estimated the cost of the project at $100 million, but as the construction approaches, that number has ballooned up to $6 billion. Considering that this is a huge leap in technology, and that the test track needs to be engineered to withstand earthquakes, a $6 billion price tag does make more sense than the earlier estimate. As with most technologies, costs will likely fall as the prototype becomes a production model.

The sad news: Even though the Hyperloop is being tested and developed in the United States, it's unlikely that the first full Hyperloop network will be built here. Hyperloop Chief Operating Officer Bibop Gabriele Gresta told Dezeen, "There are other countries that are in a more advanced discussion phase and they have the political will, the lack of infrastructure, a high density of population, and less regulatory problems to make it happen."

But before we worry too much about the regulatory environment around infrastructure, a working Hyperloop and pods need to be invented. The California test track is being built as part of a planned sustainable community, but it isn't the only Hyperloop game in town.

The first stage of the Hyperloop Pod Competition (not affiliated with the California project) will happen in Texas in January. Updated competition rules were released this week. Once the teams progress past the first stage a select few will proceed to actually build prototype pods. The final stage will have two winners from two different classes of pods (those with wheels and those without) in addition to a class of mini-pods, for teams who can't afford to build a full-scale model. The winners will be judged first by how fast they can go through the test track/tube without crashing, and then assessed with a rubric consisting of four categories; 'Final Design and Construction,''Safety and Reliability,''Performance in Operations,' and 'Performance in Flight'.

We can't wait.

• Update: This story has been updated to clarify that the test track in California is not related to the Hyperloop pod competition in Texas.

This week the PC industry launched a splashy $70 million ad campaign promoting its new generation of personal computers. These aren’t the tired old PCs you’re used to, the ads convey. These PCs are cool, with thinner-than-ever bodies, 360-degree flip screens, bezel-less displays, and graphics to suit all your gaming needs. “PC does WHAAAT?!” is the campaign’s slogan, in suggestion that we should all be very surprised at just how cool these new PCs are.

Right away the campaign comes across as a little desperate and forced—like the PC industry is trying to rise above the clumsy, square persona that's been foisted on it (remember the "Get a Mac" campaign featuring Justin Long vs. John Hodgman?), but maybe it's overcompensating a little too hard.

Then, on closer inspection, another thing seems peculiar about these ads—they're not just from one company. They’re actually a joint effort from Microsoft, Intel, Dell, HP, and Lenovo—five big companies that sometimes spend a lot of resources to compete against one another. So what’s the logic here? (And does all that manpower make the campaign smell even more desperate?) Popular Science reached out to a couple of experts to find out.

According to Wesley Hartmann, a marketing professor at Stanford, there are two general ways to approach advertising. One is to try to steal shares from your competitor. The other is to grow the category that your product belongs to.

We might typically think of PC companies as engaging in the first approach. “That’s why it seems odd to us that they would be collaborating,” said Hartmann. “It goes against our idea that they’re trying to steal shares from one another.”

But in the case of this new ad campaign, which aligns with Hartmann’s second approach, shared messaging could expand the overall market for PCs—one that has suffered both from Apple’s encroaching dominance over laptop and desktop computer markets, as well as from a general shift away from personal computers towards devices like smartphones, e-readers, and tablets.

Along with growing the overall PC market, a joint advertising campaign can help prevent a type of stalemate that often arises among competitors, according to Michael Sinkinson, a business economics professor at Wharton. “Joining up with your rivals to advertise together overcomes a classic problem in advertising called the spillover effect,” he said.

The spillover effect refers to when advertising from one company spills over and enhances sales for that company’s competitors. Let’s say you see a commercial from a Toyota dealership in Los Angeles. The ad might sell you on the merits of a Toyota, but when it comes time for buying a car, you end up going to a different Toyota dealership in L.A. Much to the misfortune of the original advertiser, the commercial ended up benefiting a rival.

To address this problem, Toyota might create a local advertising board to boost sales for all L.A. area dealers as opposed to one specific one, said Sinkinson. There are other examples too, he pointed out, such as the iconic “Got Milk?” campaign that united California milk producers in 1993 or the synchronized release of similar movies, such as with A Bug’s Life and Antz in the fall of 1998.

The spillover effect also afflicts PC markets, said Hartmann. In the case of the new PC campaign, the five companies involved are all offering slightly different products. Microsoft is selling an operating system, Intel specializes in processing, and Dell, HP, and Lenovo all produce hardware. But they all face a similar dilemma of how much to invest in improving and advertising their products relative to the other companies' efforts.

“If Microsoft invests to create a better operating system,” said Hartmann, “that’s going to sell more of the end user product—meaning that’s going to help HP and Dell.” But that spillover might encourage HP and Dell to rely on upgrades from Microsoft to help sell their products rather than making big investments themselves.

“Where there’s spillovers, there’s a tendency to say ‘maybe I don’t need to make the investment,’” said Hartmann. “One outcome is that nobody makes the investment. Another is that only one party makes the investment—usually the party with the most to gain.”

That might explain why Microsoft, arguably the player with the most to gain in the PC world, recently decided to put out a new Surface Pro 4 tablet that competes with Apple’s new iPad Pro, Google's upcoming Pixel C, and Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy View tablets.

“HP and Dell weren’t strong enough players to make those investments, so Microsoft did it themselves,” said Hartmann. Microsoft’s move might then pave the way for HP, Dell, or Lenovo to catch up with their own tablets—which would run on Microsoft operating systems and Intel processors.

An aligned campaign combats the pattern of certain parties freeloading off the spillovers of others, instead encouraging competitors to help each other help themselves. In forming a united front, Microsoft, Intel, Dell, HP, and Lenovo are owning up to the fact that, in the face of a shrinking market, they all stand to benefit from cooperation.

Is it possible that, say, HP could have abstained from the collaboration and still reaped some benefits at no cost? Sure. But an arrangement that holds all five players accountable for both giving and taking is “a more efficient way of promoting PCs,” said Hartmann. “They’re promoting the entire category of PCs and trying to change the whole perception of what they’re capable of. I think it’s a smart thing to do business-wise.”

As for whether the campaign will win the hearts of consumers, or simply make the PC industry seem even more out-of-touch than it already does, Hartmann said he's "gotta leave it to customers to determine that answer."

Boomerang

Instagram

Feel like a tool is missing from your digital communication strategy? Good news: Instagram just made it a lot easier to create and share GIF-like videos with your followers. Starting today, you can download its newest recording-and-editing app: Boomerang.

Boomerang lets you capture a photo series similar to a GIF, and share it with your friends via Instagram. Like last year’s Hyperlapse, which helps users create time-lapse videos, the new tool is a separate app that shares to Instagram, rather than an integrated feature.

Image sharing isn’t anything new. Everything from Twitter and Facebook to Snapchat, Vine, and even Instagram lets you share photos of a short snippet of video with a network of your choosing as well as with the public. And apps like GIFBoom have provided the software to make GIF-style collections of images to be shared on other platforms.

But Boomerang’s appeal—one second of GIF-like stuttering video—seems to be similar to that of Vine. Once you’ve recorded your one-second, Boomerang plays it through, rewinds it in front of you, and then plays it again, making the video actually several seconds long.

The effect is something that could have come straight from a music video from the ‘90s. It could also make for good reaction GIFs, or for well timed captures from things like fireworks displays.

If you look deeper into the source coding, it turns out that Instagram is taking the stuttered images and posting them as MP4 video. So, while your post may look like a flipbook, it’s really a stylized video recording. That gives you interesting parameters to work with for creation.

We already know the sorts of stories people can tell with six seconds of video, 140 characters, or a single image, so it will be interesting to see what if anything people use this add-on to create. One second of recording is enough to capture a single moving image: a bubble popping, a friend going off the diving board, or an explosion if you’re into backyard science. It’s also enough to capture a single emotion, so maybe what we should expect from Boomerang is a lot of reaction GIF-like images.

The genetically modified lettuce wouldn't look any different than this one.

HebiFot via Pixabay

For decades, scientists have modified plants’ DNA in the lab to make the crops more appealing, or to better resist pests or disease. And in spite of controversy, the advent of genetic editing enzyme CRISPR has sped up this process. Now a team of Korean researchers has altered the CRISPR complex so that it can knock out genes without introducing new ones, according to a study published this week in Nature Biotechnology. The modifications are so minor that they might not even qualify as genetically modified foods according to most regulatory definitions of GMO, as Nature News reports.

To modify the DNA in most cells, scientists program the protein Cas9 to find certain repetitions in the DNA. When it does, the enzyme can snip the strands of the DNA. The cell then goes to repair the DNA, which can sometimes introduce unintended new mutations. By changing how Cas9 gets assembled and transmitted to a cell, the researchers were able to knock out genes without adding any new ones. When the researchers tested their technique on tobacco, rice, and lettuce genes, they successfully changed the desired gene about 46 percent of the time.

This isn’t the first time scientists have used the CRISPR complex to edit crops. Some experts estimate that CRISPR-modified foods could be on your plate in five years.

But this new technique might sidestep the entire debate surrounding genetically modified foods. As they stand now, most countries' regulatory agencies define GMOs as crops that are modified in a way they would not be in nature. Since this technique does not introduce any foreign genes, it's feasible that these sorts of genetic changes could happennaturally, which could enable these crops to avoid regulation, as well as the entire debate surrounding GMOs. However, regulators are still catching up on how to regulate the most modern technologies including CRISPR, so that definition may change.

According to the Nature News piece, some plant genetics experts aren’t convinced that the researchers’ technique will be very successful with plant breeders. But the researchers themselves have high hopes. By knocking out the genes that allow disease to take hold, the scientists could save those crops most at risk, preserving them for future generations.

Facebook/ Screenshot

As Google proved in 1998, if you want to rule the internet, the key is search. Last year, Facebook expanded its search feature to include not just users, but individual posts. This, coupled with added news features and tools aimed at journalists in past months, is all a part of Facebook’s dream of being not just the biggest, but the only website on the internet that matters.

Today, Facebook announced Search FYI, an expansion of the traditional search tool, that lets users search the entire catalog of more than 2 trillion (2,000,000,000,000) posts. Everything you’ve ever posted publicly? Accessible. (Time to set some new privacy permissions, right?)

The expansion of search also pushes news to the forefront of accessible content. Simply typing “water on mars” or “Benghazi” into the search bar now brings up a little flag that says “Happening Now” and the number of how many people are talking about that topic, linked to a page with what Facebook’s algorithm sees as legitimate news sources. It also is tailored to you—the organizations and topics you "like" are ranked higher in your search results.

Facebook has invested a lot of time and energy into news, most recently with the full launch of Facebook Instant Articles this Tuesday, with partners like The New York Times, Vox, and The Atlantic (Popular Science is not among them at present). The trending bar has expanded into sections like Sports and Science, and the algorithms seem snappier than ever before. Cataloging every post, as announced today, means the ability to take on their largest competitor in the breaking news space: Twitter.

However, there are obviously some major differences—mainly post length—and Facebook is taking full advantage of that to provide the option with the most information and context. Instead of clicking on a news article in a tweet, Facebook logically wants you to read about it on the Facebook Trending page, and then maybe click on one of its Instant Articles.

This feature is live now, so you can try it for yourself. Try Popular Science, and catch up with the news from the future!

Marijuana is certainly popular with the kids these day (though this is a hand-rolled tobacco cigarette)

Chuck Grimmett via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0

If you’re an adult who has smoked marijuana in the past year, you’re one of about 30 million Americans who has done so, according to a new survey by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) that was published yesterday in JAMA Psychiatry. That number has doubled since the last survey in 2001-2002; then, only 4.1 percent of those surveyed had smoked in the last year, and now it has risen to 9.5 percent. The percent of people using marijuana to treat medical disorders has also risen in that period, from 1.5 to 2.9 percent of those surveyed.

It’s probably not surprising that so many people are smoking pot. In the past decade, public perception of marijuana use has shifted—more people are in favor of legalization, and, according to one Pew survey, 69 percent of people think alcohol is more damaging to a person’s health than pot. Legislation has followed—23 states have loosened their restrictions on marijuana use, most within the past five years. Several marijuana-centric online publications have sprung up, most recently Snoop Dogg’s merryjane.com.

But there’s a dark side: more people meet the criteria for a marijuana use disorder--a psychological addiction similar to other substances, “although the long-term clinical outcomes may be less severe,” according to drugabuse.gov. Marijuana smokers aged 18-29 are at highest risk for the disorder. “Given changing laws and attitudes toward marijuana, a balanced presentation of the likelihood of adverse consequences of marijuana use to policy makers, professionals, and the public is needed,” the study authors write.

It’s important to note that the study’s findings were based on participants’ self-reports. And though the sample size was large (with more than 36,000 participants in the most recent survey), self-reports about drug use can be influenced by public perception. So participants might have felt less inclined to be honest about their drug use in the first survey, which would throw off the calculated increase in marijuana use. Either way, the people who use marijuana most heavily should be reminded that even mary jane can have some addictive qualities.

The Jazz Ambassadors, a U.S. Army Band

Jeff Adams, U.S. Army, via Wikimedia Commons

Humans learn by doing, so why shouldn’t machines? A project funded by DARPA, the military’s future technology wing, wants a program that can adapt to human musicians as they perform, and join in with the right notes—literally. Called MUSICA, for “Musical Improvising Collaborative Agent”, the goal is a device that can create and play a jazz solo in time with humans.

To understand jazz—an infamously improvisational and unpredictable style of music—the program will lean on a database of jazz solos that the researchers behind the project are compiling. Once the machine has absorbed jazz, it will then create responses, based on what it knows. It’s music as language, with the computer taking the role of a toddler learning to string phrases together. Ben Grosser, an Assistant Professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who’s working on the project, told LiveScience:

Our goal is to by next summer present a 'call and answer' system to DARPA, where I can play a line of music, and the system will analyze that line and give an answer as close to real time as possible...Let's face it—trying to develop a system that can play jazz is a crazy idea. It's not going to be Miles Davis. I think if we can make this thing play like a high schooler, we'll really have done our job.

So why is the military interested in musical machines? It’s (probably) not because DARPA’s looking to upgrade the U.S. Army’s Jazz Ambassadors into cyborgs. Instead, creating a machine that can learn appropriate, instant responses to human actions around it is likely to be useful on the robot-infested battlefields of tomorrow. In order for humans and machines to collaborate well, the machines will need to pick up what the humans are putting down.

[Scientific American]

Black holes got their name because it used to be assumed that nothing could escape from them, not even light. There are some challengers to that notion. Stephen Hawking suggested decades ago that heat might radiate from a black hole, and recently he suggested that information could escape as well. There may be a few quantum methods to recover information from a black hole. But, for the most part, things that come into contact with a black hole are swallowed into oblivion--in some cases, it just takes a little while for the black hole to get it all down.

That's what's going on in the video above. NASA created this animation based on observations of a supermassive black hole in a galaxy 290 million light-years away. The animation shows a star getting torn apart by the black hole's gravity.

“The black hole tears the star apart and starts swallowing material really quickly, but that’s not the end of the story,” said Jelle Kaastra, co-author of an accompanying study published in Nature. “The black hole can’t keep up that pace so it expels some of the material outwards.”

That material is the glowing 'cloud' you see in the video. The researchers found that some of the scattered remnants of the star are moving away from the black hole like wind. Unfortunately for the gaseous remains, they aren't moving fast enough to escape.

Events like this, where a star is interacting with a black hole, are called tidal disruptions, and can give off x-rays that scientists can observe for years. While scientists had observed tidal disruptions before, they're still learning about the mechanics of how they form. More observations of these dramatic star deaths could give us a greater insight into how black holes work, while allowing us to keep a safe distance. 290 million-light years is close enough for comfort.

Alexandre Roux/CC BY-SA-2.0

There’s this scene in one of the greatest movies of the 80s, "The Blues Brothers," that makes me laugh and cringe every time I see it. Jake and Elwood are careening through Chicago, sunglasses on, at 120 MPH, fleeing every representative of Illinois’ law enforcement community. Elwood doesn’t flinch as he dodges every pylon on Lower Wacker Drive, narrowly missing bicyclists, pedestrians and delivery trucks. Surely he’s about to crash in a horrible spectacle, you can’t help but think, even though of course he doesn’t.

This is the image that came to mind when I read a new bat study coming out today. Like ridiculous Elwood, hunting bats effortlessly avoid trees, power lines, and each other, appearing insanely unhinged but in fact behaving very carefully. They do this in total darkness, too. They have sonar, but it turns out the way it works is actually pretty simple, the new study says.

Scientists have assumed bats must use some kind of complex echo interpretation to figure out where they are relative to their prey, relative to each other, and relative to any trees or other obstacles in their paths. But inferring everything from simple ultrasonic echoes is hard, to say the least, and might actually be impossible. Could bats really be sending and receiving that many signals that quickly?

Researchers from the University of Antwerp in Belgium and the University of Bristol in the UK tried to find out. The team used lasers to scan a chunk of forest, and used this information to build three-dimensional models of horseshoe bat habitat. Then they modeled bats flying through two-dimensional and three-dimensional versions of this environment. They came up with an algorithm that can model what the bats are doing — and it’s not complex computation of dozens of point sources simultaneously.

Rather, bats use a simple binaural trick: They compare the loudness of the echoes from each ear, and turn away from the side that gets a louder echo. This requires ultra-sensitive hearing capable of distinguishing minute differences in the time it takes to make an echo. But on the whole, it’s not that hard, and it is pretty intuitive. When it takes less time for a bat’s call to bounce back, that means an object is closer. When it takes a little bit longer, that object is farther away.

In repeated computer simulations, bats following this algorithm steered away from obstacles, demonstrating this simple input is enough.The key distinction here is that the bats don’t necessarily figure out where obstacles are located. They just know where to turn to avoid them — or, based on the echo signature, where to get a meal.

This simpler signal processing allows bats to respond more quickly, turning on a dime at high speeds to snatch moths and mosquitoes while avoiding each other. And that’s good news for researchers building drones and other robots based on bat behavior — programming them might not be nearly as complex as we thought. The work appears in PLOS Computational Biology.

What do you get when you mix "cheesy vomit" with "popcorn"? What about when you add "hazelnut,""coriander seed," and a whiff of "smoke"?

Starting October 28, you'll have a chance to find out. At "Flavor: Making it and Faking It," the debut exhibit from the Museum of Food and Drink's MOFAD Lab, visitors can play these and other notes on the Smell Synthesizer, an interactive display that lets visitors explore the connections between chemicals and sensations. (Tickets are available online.)

There are a few precursors to the Smell Synthesizer. In 1902, the poet and bizarre aesthete Sadakichi Hartmann played a "perfume concert" at Carnegie Lyceum, using electric fans and essential oils to transport his audience on a journey through the Far East; he was booed off stage in less than five minutes. A 1922 issue of Science and Invention introduces the "Smell Organ," a keyboard that plays scents corresponding to the musical scale. An illustration of the instrument shows a maestro with a Beethoven haircut playing a piano fitted out with valves and jars, but there's no evidence that the machine was ever built. In Michel Gondry's 2013 film Mood Indigo, based on Boris Vian's 1947 novel L'Écume des Jours, the Pianocktail mixes up drinks to match the song played on the piano.

But the Smell Synthesizer at MOFAD Lab is less like a Steinway, and more like a Moog modular synth, albeit one with fat, arcade-style buttons and corrugated tubes. How did MOFAD Lab design and build its instructively smelly displays? The technology that drives the Smell Synthesizer and the museum's other interactive smell displays has its origins in the laboratory — specifically, in the olfactory laboratories of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, the Philadelphia research institute investigating the sciences of taste and smell.

In the early stages of planning the exhibit, the MOFAD team brainstormed possible ways to make the complexities of flavor comprehensible and interactive. (I'm on MOFAD's advisory board, and helped out on other parts of the exhibit, which document the history of flavor additives and the growth of the flavor industry.)

Print-on-demand flavor strips, where visitors could choose their own flavor chemical adventures? Some sort of high-tech everlasting gobstopper, where each successive layer illustrates a different flavor interaction? "We wanted something that gave visitors a sense of limitless possibility," explains Emma Boast, MOFAD's program director, "and that also made these ideas about smell and taste, and how your brain might interpret the same chemical in very different ways, less abstract."

Then Dave Arnold, the cocktail technology wizard who is the museum's founder, came across a reference to a "Virtual Aroma Synthesizer" in Mark Schatzker's The Dorito Effect. Developed by Givaudan, one of the world's largest flavor companies, the aroma synthesizer is a "trumpet-shaped device" that puffs out different versions of flavors, and is used by the company to market-test and refine their products. MOFAD's team wondered whether a similar machine could be used in their exhibit. However, they soon realized that Givaudan's proprietary technology wouldn't be practicable for the museum.

Synth Panel

Nadia Berenstein

Enter Joel Mainland, a sensory neuroscientist at Monell. Mainland's lab is searching for what he calls "primary odors." By mapping patterns of olfactory receptor activity in response to chemical stimuli and correlating them with human sensory responses, Mainland hopes to identify a limited set of chemical compounds that can be combined in different ways to reproduce the entire human smellscape, the same way that a color printer can reproduce a full-color image using only three different colors of ink. But while there are only three types of photoreceptor cells in the human eye, our olfactory system has around 400 different receptors.

In order to solve what he calls a "400-dimensional problem," Mainland's lab uses an olfactometer, a device that releases precise quantities of volatile aromatic chemicals, and that scientists use to study how subjects perceive and respond to odors. Many olfactometers have only one channel, or at most a handful -- which is suitable for research that investigates things like sensory thresholds or the links between genes and olfactory receptors where only one compound is being tested at a time. But because he is interested in the ways that blends of different chemicals affect sensation and perception, Mainland needed a multi-channel olfactometer that could combine dozens of compounds, was relatively cheap to build, and was simple to modify and program.

Olfactometer

Joel Mainland

Mainland explains that researchers working on smells often end up building their own olfactometers, tinkering with the design to get the combination of features they need. (He learned some of the basics from his graduate advisor at UC Berkeley, Noam Sobel, who now heads the neurobiology department the Weizman Institute. "Before he was a neuroscientist, he was a plumber," Mainland said. "He builds great olfactometers.")

His current, 48-channel olfactometer is the one that Arnold, Boast, and others on the MOFAD exhibit team witnessed in action during a visit to Monell earlier this year. "The whole lab was redolent of caramel cotton candy and fruity notes," Boast recalls, "It was quite overwhelming."

But it also seemed like the perfect solution. For the MOFAD team, the attraction of the olfactometer used by Mainland's lab was that it was exquisitely customizable and programmable. The basic design could be scaled up and down, to add or subtract inputs. With some modifications -- including an exhaust system that continually clears the air, and a user-friendly interface by Labour, a Brooklyn design team -- the olfactometer plays a key role in three of MOFAD Lab's interactive displays.

With the press of a button, visitors can choose and change what they are smelling.

With the press of a button, visitors can choose and change what they are smelling. A scented stream of cool air emerges from the gridded top of a white corrugated tube, whose outer edge curls inwards like the tip of an elephant's trunk. One particularly effective display shows how perception shifts . Press the top button, and you get a whiff of old, cold coffee, stale grounds in a soggy filter at the end of the day. Press the bottom button, and you get a noseful of real skunkiness, furfuryl mercaptan. But press both buttons at once, and the two unpleasant compounds blend together to evoke fragrant, fresh-roasted coffee.

But for the full olfactometer experience, head over to the Smell Synthesizer.

Jack Fastag, senior flavor chemist at David Michael, a Philadelphia flavor company, worked with MOFAD to program the synthesizer — that is, to select the chemical notes it should play. His assignment was to choose a set of no more than twenty compounds that could create as many different smells as possible. The notes he chose are described in terms of both sensory qualities and chemical names, and range from the totally pleasant and immediately familiar (coconut, or gamma hexalactone) to the less pleasant but just as familiar (the aforementioned "cheesy, vomit," a.k.a. butyric acid) to compounds that are described in terms that sound not at all food-like, but that are (for instance, "nail polish remover," ethyl acetate, which adds a pop of sweet effervescence to fruity flavors).

Fastag also developed recipes, chords of two to four chemicals, posted above the synth to give some structure to free play. Play a triad of isoamyl acetate, isoamyl alchohol, and ethyl acetate, and you get, distinctly, candy banana. Add one more note (cis-3-hexanol, described as "green leaf"), and the banana unripens, transforming into a bunch of green bananas.

But visitors who mess around on the Smell Synthesizer are encouraged to depart from the score, to explore their own combinations, discordant chords of multiple odors, or arpeggios of different notes in sequence, perhaps discovering, in unlikely combinations, curious phenomena, sudden perceptual shifts, nice harmonies, unexpected pleasures.

It's instructive, but it's also really fun. As Boast puts it, "we want people to play like a flavorist."

Nadia Berenstein is a Ph.D. candidate in History & Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania; her dissertation tells the story of the history of synthetic flavors and flavor science in the United States. You can read more about her research on her blog, Flavor Added, or follow her on Twitter @thebirdisgone.

front page image by Shannon Sturgis

Talking Ally Robot

Toyohashi University Of Technology

“Talking Ally”, a robot made by researchers at Toyohashi University of Technology’s Interactions and Communication Design lab, can follow a human’s gaze and respond accordingly. For example, it can make a fuss if the person stops talking to it:

The robot’s small body looks a bit like a stylized version of the Pixar lamp, a pedestal with a bendy column and an oblong face. In the middle of the face sits a single unblinking eye, so that Talking Ally can maintain eye contact with its person. A second, tucked-away camera tracks the human’s face. Servomotors and springs give the robot a surprising range of movement.

Depending on where the human looked, Talking Ally could engage them in conversation about their focus. If the human was watching sports, Talking Ally could respond with sports news pulled from an RSS feed. If the human didn’t pay attention, the robot would try to make the human notice it. If the human turned to look at and talk to Talking Ally, the robot could nod its head vigorously to show it was engaged in the conversation.

Reading and demonstrating body language will help robots better understand and communicate with humans in the future. This is probably a good thing, even if it means robots will become more annoying.

[Phys.Org]

Inflated Bomb-Carrying Condom Balloon

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Condoms are very effective at preventing transmission of STI’s, but can they also be used as an effective weapon against aircraft? In a video, a group of what appears to be militants fill condoms with air and then attach bombs to them, in an attempt to create a defense against airplanes. With the Syrian government, an American-led coalition, and Russian planes all bombing targets in Syria, there are a lot of air forces for militants to defend against. This is what their condom bombs look like:

The condoms-turned-into-balloons appear to be filled with a lighter-than-air gas, and have small satchels of explosives tied to their ends. Released into the wind and carried into the sky, their transparent bodies almost disappear, which is probably the one advantage they have as an anti-air weapon. In the video itself, we see one balloon explode prematurely, and even without that the balloons aren’t a controlled weapon.

This is hardly the first use of balloons in war, though it may be one of the first uses of condoms-as-balloons in a conflict. In World War II, Japan launched thousands of bomb-carrying balloons into the jet stream to attack America, killing a total of six Americans in the continental United States. Thousands of these bombs remain lost and unaccounted for. In World War II, countries flew giant tethered barrage balloons, whose giant steel cables kept enemy aircraft away from low altitudes. Used in conjunction with anti-aircraft guns and fighter squadrons, barrage balloons provided part of a defense against aerial attack, but hardly a whole solution by themselves. It’s likely that these condom balloons in Syria will prove even less useful than their World War II predecessors.

The video was released by Russia Insider, a crowdfunded site designed to counter coverage of Russia that they feel is biased and inaccurate, specifically American and European media. In Russia Insider’s description of the video, it claims the militants are part of ISIS, the violent fundamentalist group currently carving out a state in eastern Syria and western Iraq. Yet the video description also claims this was filmed outside Idlib, which is under the control of Jabhat al-Nusra and its allies, none of whom are ISIS.

The skies above Syria are so crowded with aircraft that Russian pilots can film American drones. For militants on the ground, aerial attacks can come from either the Syrian government, an American-led anti-ISIS coalition, or Russian planes. Russia has been a long-time supporter of the Assad government in Syria, which is fighting against ISIS, Jabhat al-Nusra, and other factions in the country’s ongoing civil war. Recently, Russian forces arrived in Syria to bolster the regime, with the Russian Ministry of Defense even selling“Support Assad” T-shirts. While claiming to join the American fight against ISIS, the overwhelming majority of Russian airstrikes in Syria have been against non-ISIS groups.

Watch the video below:

American Beaver

Steve, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 2.0

For a glorious moment in the middle of the last century, it seemed as though Americans dropping things from airplanes could solve any problem. World War II ended, an embattled Berlin was saved from Communist blockade, and in Idaho, beavers were relocated by paratrooping out of planes.

“Fur for the Future” is an educational film made around 1950 by the Idaho Fish and Game Commission. It was recently rediscovered, digitized, and released to YouTube by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game and the Idaho Historical Society. North America’s once-gigantic beaver population suffered greatly from the fur trade that accompanied European colonization of the continent, but by the 1940s was experiencing a fresh boom. Rather than just kill the creatures, Idaho relocated many beavers to new streams where they thought the beavers might thrive. After trapping the beavers, they were sometimes carried by car or cage and released right into the woods.

Other beavers were put into “beaver drop boxes” and released from the sky. Sorted into pairs of even weight, the beavers were tagged and then put inside small wooden boxes.

These crates were loaded into airplanes, ten per airplane, and parachutes attached to the boxes. Then, when the airplane spied a lake or stream in need of a pair of beavers, they released the crate into the sky. The beavers landed and emerged from their wooden rides as confused and frustrated as one might imagine an alien abductee would be upon return to earth.

Somehow, parachuting wasn't the weirdest thing beavers were up to last century. Published in the May 1930 issue of Popular Science, "Do Beavers Rule On Mars?" speculated that life on the Red Planet might resemble the furry, workaholic rodents.

Back on earth, Idaho relocated not just beavers but muskrats and martens too, who also feature in the full, amazing, video below.

[AP]

Multi-tasking

Michael Halassa

If you’ve ever had to cook dinner, prepare for the next day’s work meeting, while also listen to a friend complain over the phone, then you know all too well the importance of multitasking. But what's actually going on inside our brains that allows for us to strategically focus on one task over another? That's remained largely a mystery, at least until recently. Earlier this week, researchers at New York University published a paper in the journal Nature saying they identified one small region of the brain—the thalamic reticular nucleus (TRN)—as the one that controls our ability to multitask.

Working as a task "switchboard", the TRN enables our brains to focus on the sensory stimulus that is most vital at any given moment. Now, with a better understanding of how the process works, researchers hope to use the information to study diseases in which multitasking or sensory overload goes awry—autism, schizophrenia, and ADHD, for example.

“We have identified the [TRN] as a station. That is something that hasn’t really been described in the past, says Michael Halassa, a neuroscientist at NYU who led the research. “Now we can answer questions like whether individuals with autism have a broken TRN or potentially develop drugs that target [it].”

The ability to multitask is a vital part of life, as it's needed to perform everyday functions like driving, cooking, or even socializing with a group of friends. But at any given time, our brains are bombarded with a multitude of sensory information, and we're forced to decide what's important in that instant, focus on it, and tune out everything else. Researchers have known about this process for years, but they weren't sure exactly how it worked because they couldn't come up with a reliable experiment for identifying what parts of the brain were involved.

Back in the 1980s, Francis Crick had hypothesized that the TRN—a small, shell-shaped region located deep in the brain—helped the brain decide what sensory information to focus on and what to tune out. But at the time, he had little evidence to back that idea up.

Fast forward to today, and researchers at NYU were able to test Crick's hypothesis. By putting laboratory mice through a game-like experiment, they were able to show that different neurons within the TRN regulated which senses the brain should focus on and which should be set aside.

The experiment involved training mice to respond to a specific sensory stimulus, either light or sound. If the mice observed and followed the correct stimulus, they received milk as a reward. At the same time, the researchers would attempt to distract the mice with the opposite stimulus (the mice trained to respond to light would be distracted with sound, for example). In real time, the researchers would record electrical signals that came from the TRN neurons in the mice’s brain. They were also able to inactivate various parts of the neural network—specifically the prefrontal cortex, which seeks out certain stimulus over others.

When the mice were trained to pay attention to a particular sound and ignore light, the TRN neurons that control vision were highly active, meaning that they were suppressing visual signals so that the mice could focus more intensely on the sound. The opposite happened when they were trained to follow the light in order to receive their milk reward.

Further, when the researchers inactivated the prefrontal cortex—the area of the brain responsible for higher level functioning—using a laser beam, the TRN neural signaling went completely out of whack. This shows that the prefrontal cortex stores incoming sensory information, which the TRN then uses to suppress or not suppress certain senses, much in the same way that a switchboard works, explains Halassa.

The TRN acts as the brain's 'switchboard' and allow us to seamlessly multitask.

Michael Halassa

Halassa and his team hope to use this new understanding of the brain’s wiring to figure out what goes wrong in certain diseases that are characterized by overstimulation, in particular autism, ADHD, and schizophrenia.

“One commonality in patients with these disorders is that they have a really hard time suppressing [distracting stimuli],” says Halassa.

In other words, the things that most people ignore without even thinking about it, are the same things that make it impossible for some people with ADHD to concentrate, or make it difficult for people with certain types of autism to socialize.

Halassa thinks this new knowledge will direct future research and clinical applications. Now that we have a circuit that we know is involved in regulating sensory information (the TRN), we can begin to find out if people with autism have an altered TRN that can be readjusted through drugs or other medical procedures. But before that, Halassa wants to figure out exactly what processing happens at the prefrontal cortex and what happens at the thalamus, likely the next steps on the road to developing a drug to target the multitasking region.

All of which is to say, if you sometimes feel overwhelmed by multitasking, take comfort in knowing that you have a part of your brain dedicated to helping you prioritize, and scientists are working hard on ways to better understand it, repair it, and keep it healthy.

Patricia's Eyewall

NOAA/NASA

To reach Category 5, a hurricane must have sustained wind speeds of over 157 mphs. Right now, in the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Patricia is powering through at about 200mph. It’s likely the strongest hurricane on the record, and a gigantic storm to boot. The National Weather Service is warning that Patricia is “potentially catastrophic.” Here’s what that storm looks like:

Patricia is expected to make landfall in Mexico later today, between Manzanillo and Puerto Vallarta. Already three Mexican states have declared a state of emergency.

As the storm has approached land, it’s continued to intensify, and by all metrics is an incredibly strong storm. Writing for Slate, Eric Holthaus notes“Patricia is now very close to the theoretical maximum strength for a tropical cyclone on planet Earth.”

The storm is strongest in a radius just 15 miles from its center, which bodes well for everyone removed from the direct path. It’s also headed into hilly and mountainous terrain, which will likely weaken the storm quickly as it moves over land. Before it hits, increased rainfall, of which the National Weather Service expects at least 8 inches, could cause flooding and landslides.

Landfall is expected later today.

Toulouse School of Economics

A Toulouse School of Economics study shows that more than 75 percent of respondents favored self-sacrifice if it would save 10 bystanders.

In philosophy, there’s an ethical question called the trolley problem. If you had to push one large person in front of a moving trolley to save a group of people on the tracks, would you? This abstract idea has taken hold in programming self-driving cars: what happens if it’s impossible to avoid everyone?

Researchers from the Toulouse School of Economics decided to see what the public would decide, and posed a series of questions to online survey-takers, including a situation where a car would either kill 10 people and save the driver, or swerve and kill the driver to save the group.

They found that more than 75 percent supported self-sacrifice of the passenger to save 10 people, and around 50 percent supported self-sacrifice when saving just one person. However, respondents didn’t actually think real cars would end up being programmed this way, and would probably save the passenger at all costs.

The questions were answered by paid participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk (compensated to the tune of 25 cents for their time), and in total 913 participants took three surveys with different questions. Since it was an online survey, the participants could have been from anywhere in the world.

One version randomized the amount of people that would be killed if the driver did not swerve (between 1 and 10) and asked if the car should sacrifice the passenger or bystanders. The second version tested how people would program cars themselves—always sacrifice the passenger, always protect the passenger, or random, and asked to rate the morality of each. The third group were read a story where ten people were saved because the car swerved, killing the passenger. They were asked to imagine themselves as the passenger, and then a bystander, and assess the morality on a slider.

When analyzing the demographics of their respondents, the team also found that those excited for self-driving cars were younger and less religious.

Researchers wrote that survey respondents were generally receptive to autonomous cars making decisions that prioritized many over few (called utilitarianism in philosophy). However, they foresee regulations being tricky, asking whether the public would support a law that requires cars to sacrifice their passengers under certain circumstances.

This is an issue that will undoubtedly plague the autonomous car industry even after they enter widespread production. Sure, driverless cars can reduce traffic fatalities by up to 90 percent. And like the field of ethics itself, what happens in the other 10 percent is still up for debate.

Seeing Red

Youtube

Youtube Red is a bold step for the streaming service. Let's hope they don't go the route of Hulu and its subscription service Hulu Plus...

This week Youtube announced plans for a paid subscription service. After years of ad-supported free streaming, the video site is offering Youtube Red. The $9.99-per-month subscription will eliminate ads and unlock access to specific Youtube content unavailable to nonpaying members. Where have I heard this before...

Oh right, Hulu.

When Hulu was first made available in March of 2008, the video service provided a way for many users to watch recent television shows online and—more importantly—legally. The site was an important first step in getting popular channels on-board with the idea of putting their shows on the Internet. In 2008, Hulu was not just novel in what it made available, but how much it costed users compared to traditional television. With fewer ads than television, it almost made more sense to watch online.

And then came Hulu Plus.

Hulu, March 18, 2008

Archive.org

For the low, low price of—you guessed it—$9.99 a month, users were able to use the service on non-traditional desktop devices. Phones, tablets and set-top boxes all became fair game while viewers got access to “every single episode of the current season…not just a handful of trailing episodes” for "almost all of the current broadcast shows on our service,” said the company in their launch statement. Which, if you’ve been using Hulu Plus lately, isn’t exactly true much of the time.

When the Plus version of Hulu launched, the option had fewer ads than the free tier. Now the number of commercial breaks between Hulu and Hulu Plus resemble each other, so in comes Hulu Plus Plus: a $12.99 no-ad version of the service. Unless you’re a fan ofNew Girl, Scandal, How To Get Away With Murder, Grey’s Anatomy, or Marvel’s Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D., the ad-free plan is fantastic and for you!

Now enter Youtube Red. Youtube went from a completely free streaming service, to adding ads on the sides of videos and then within them. Google’s video includes the ability to skip past many of their commercials after 5 seconds and longer ads don’t come often. Though this could possibly change if the search engine giant really wants to push people over to the more expensive Youtube Red, Hulu-style.

But, in Youtube’s defense, it’s an unfair comparison at the moment. My muddy history with Hulu shouldn’t color my Red experience. While the owners of Hulu (Disney, Comcast’s NBC Universal and 21st Century Fox) are traditionally very interested in charging users for video content, Google is much closer to the “offer-it-for-free” persuasion. Many of Google’s most popular products are offered with not much more than the cost of seeing ads based on the data you feed it. While Google could start to deteriorate the free product to sway watchers to Red, it’s likely they’d rather have you watching Youtube at all rather than take a gamble on squeezing more money out of you.

Though who knows: perhaps the day Youtube went Red is more of a warning sign than just a moniker.