Last week, a team of Canadian doctors tried an experimental new procedure on a patient in dire straits. Bonny Hall has a brain tumor that she had been managing for years with medication, but it was growing. Her doctors decided to try a new technique in which powerful anti-cancer drugs could burst through the blood-brain barrier and attack the tumor—the first time such a procedure has been done in a human, though researchers have been trying to do it for years. Just how big a deal is this, and why hasn’t it happened before?
The blood-brain barrier is made of a thin layer of cells tightly fitted together around blood vessels in the brain. The cells separate the blood in the rest of your body from the blood in your brain. While the rest of your body has frequent fluctuations of chemicals like hormones or potassium, the delicate cells in your brain might be thrown out of whack by these drastic variations. This barrier also ensures that pathogens that might be in your blood don’t make it to the brain. The brain needs special microenvironments to function properly and stably, so the blood-brain barrier in healthy adults is nearly impenetrable, though a number of neurological diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s or stroke have been connected to disruptions in it.
While this barrier’s impenetrable quality is good for regular function, it’s a real pain when doctors are trying to treat diseases. About 95 percent of drugs administered through typical means (pill, injections, enemas, patches) don’t have any function in the brain. So doctors have been looking for ways to penetrate it so that medications can treat the brain without permanently damaging the barrier, which would leave the brain vulnerable to infection or chemical imbalance. The researchers have had a couple of leads—they found that certain tiny molecules, such as alcohol and nicotine, can penetrate the barrier, so they thought maybe they can just make drug molecules small enough. Others found that different drug delivery mechanism—enzymes, or ultrasound, or nanoparticles—might make the barrier passable.
So far, scientists have been limited to testing these methods on animal models. And though lots of progress has been made in the past five years, some researchers suggestion that the research hasn’t progressed further due to a lack of interest from pharmaceutical companies, as well as an aversion to trying risky procedures on humans.
Now, the researchers from Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto have tried it on a human being. To do the procedure, the researchers administered chemotherapy drugs intravenously, along with tiny air bubbles. Using targeted ultrasound, the researchers were able to compress and expand some of the bubbles once they flowed into blood vessels in the brain. The vibrations were just enough to loosen the junctures between the cells lining the blood vessels, enabling the drug to penetrate through the barrier and into the brain tumor.
Based on initial brain scans, it seems that the procedure was successful in reversibly opening the blood brain barrier, though the researchers don’t yet know how much of the chemotherapy drug reached its intended target. The researchers are paying close attention to Hall’s status and side effects; as part of this initial trial, they intend to test the procedure on several more patients like her. Much more research needs to be done, they admit. But the ability to safely send drugs directly to certain parts of the brain could lead to more effective treatments for conditions such as epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, and beyond.
After much delay, an important space bill has finally passed in the Senate.
The Space Act of 2015 would do a lot of things to encourage the private space industry--including extending the "learning period" wherein fledgling spaceflight companies can operate without too much government oversight. It would also give companies the rights to the resources they might one day extract from asteroids, such as platinum and water (which, believe it or not, is a valuable resource in space).
The bill has just passed in the Senate with unanimous approval and a few amendments. Now it will be sent back to the House of Representatives, which is expected to approve the changes, and then on to President Obama.
Although the bill hasn't officially been signed into law yet, Planetary Resources--one such company that hopes to extract resources from asteroids--issued an effusive letter thanking the Congressmen who supported the bill.
"Many years from now, we will view this pivotal moment in time as a major step toward humanity becoming a multi-planetary species," said Planetary Resources Co-Chairman Eric Anderson in the press release. "This legislation establishes the same supportive framework that created the great economies of history, and it will foster the sustained development of space."
Toward Mining Asteroids
At the moment it's not clear whether space mining is legal. Although there's nothing expressly forbidding asteroid mining by private companies, the Outer Space Treaty declares that no nation can own property in space. The wording of the treaty is vague enough that companies want to ensure they'll own the resources they mine from asteroids before investing millions or billions of dollars trying to extract them.
The bill would make those property rights official, at least under U.S. law. Although companies can't own the asteroids themselves, the current version reads:
“A United States citizen engaged in commercial recovery of an asteroid resource or a space resource under this chapter shall be entitled to any asteroid resource or space resource obtained, including to possess, own, transport, use, and sell the asteroid resource or space resource obtained in accordance with applicable law, including the international obligations of the United States."
An earlier version passed in the House in May. Since then, the Senate amended it with a few interesting changes. For one, by adding the word "abiotic" to the definition of "space resources," they specify that living things are not considered a resource.
The term ‘space resource’ means an abiotic resource in situ in outer space.
In other words, companies can't own any potential aliens they might find out there.
In other words, companies can't own any potential aliens they might find out there.
Secondly, the Senate made sure to cover its bases when it comes to the Outer Space Treaty, to hopefully avoid angering other countries.
It is the sense of Congress that by the enactment of this Act, the United States does not thereby assert sovereignty or sovereign or exclusive rights or jurisdiction over, or the ownership of, any celestial body.
However, this points to one of the problems with the bill, according to Michael Listner, lawyer and founder of the consulting firm Space Law and Policy Solutions. Because the U.S. can't own property in space, it can't really dole out rights to pieces of that property. "It would be like you asking me for a piece of pie, and me saying, go over to my neighbor's house and take a piece of their pie, and then come back and thank me for it," says Listner. He thinks there should have been more international discussions about space mining before a U.S. law was proposed.
Thirdly, the Senate also took out a lot of language that would protect space miners from "harmful interference," or things that might disrupt a company's normal operations, such as, potentially, the U.S. government, other nations, and other space mining companies.
The loss of the harmful interference clauses won't be a big deal, according to Planetary Resources spokesperson Stacy Stearne, since the Outer Space Treaty provides some protection from harmful interference. "We are completely confident that the existing Outer Space Treaty language provides us with protection from harmful interference and, if that fails, we have the legal standing to seek relief."
A lack of snow is bad for skiers, but it's even worse for our future. Earlier this year, a study found that the snowpack in California's Sierra Nevada mountains was at its lowest level in 500 years, which is bad news for a state deep in drought, but California is hardly alone.
In a study published in Environmental Research Letters, researchers found 97 drainage basins that depend on snow melt for their annual allotment of water. A drainage basin is any area of land where water drains to a certain point, like a river or reservoir. The researchers examined 421 basins, but focused on these 97 basins because they not only supply fresh water to 2 billion people, but there is also a 66 percent chance that the snow available to those basins would decline in the coming years.
In those areas of the world, snow during the winter acts as a watery savings account for warmer, drier months. When snow melts in the spring, it fills rivers and streams, providing a steady, seasonal water supply.
"Snow is important because it forms its own reservoir. But the consequences of reduced snowpack are not the same for all places—it is also a function of where and when people demand water," lead author Justin Mankin, a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University’s Earth Institute said in a statement. "Water managers in a lot of places may need to prepare for a world where the snow reservoir no longer exists."
In some areas, rain could make up the difference in the snow deficit, with rain increasing even as snow decreases. But other areas face a more challenging future. In 32 of those drainage basins, snowmelt is the primary source of water for the 1.45 billion humans that live there. Relying so exclusively on that single source of water means that a dry or warm winter could have disastrous consequences in the future. Among the areas at risk are the drought-stricken American West, areas of Europe from Portugal to Italy, countries in Asia, Morocco, and perhaps most worryingly, areas of the Middle East, including Syria, and parts of Saudi Arabia and Iran. Adding additional stress to a volatile region is a worrying issue for international security.
Snowpack around the world
Mankin et al., Environmental Research Letters 2015
In blue are areas where rainfall may be enough to meet water demand. In grey, areas where rainfall might not be enough, and in red and yellow, areas where decreased snowfall may lead to shortfalls in meeting water needs.
Last winter was the sixth warmest on record and many parts of the United States have a high probability of a warmer-than-normal winter this season. Right now, these situations are worries, but not doomsday predictions. There is still a lot of uncertainty about how future weather patterns will unfold, and what is the best way to prepare. But if past is prologue, the outlook doesn't look great.
In movies and TV shows, a sperm’s journey to fertilize an egg is often portrayed as an elaborate race course as it competes with millions of others to move through the hostile environment of a woman’s reproductive tract. That’s not too far from the truth, and in recent years researchers have turned their attention to how sperm swim in order to better understand why only certain sperm make it to the egg. Now scientists have discovered that sperm slither side to side like snakes, according to a study published this week in Nature Communications. That knowledge could help researchers pick the strongest swimmers to use in fertility treatments for couples having trouble conceiving.
A few years ago, researchers discovered that sperm tend to stay close to the walls of the reproductive tract, avoiding the middle part. But they weren’t sure how the sperm were swimming that way, especially because they were thought to mostly move in a three-dimensional corkscrew-type motion.
To get a better look, researchers from the University of Toronto used total internal reflection fluorescence (TIRF) microscopy, a technique that allows them to look at the 3D movements of particles in fluid within 100 nanometers of a flat surface. The researchers compared the movements of human and bull sperm in liquids of varying thickness, or viscosity. They found that sperm from both species would intermittently slither like a snake, moving their “tails” back and forth on a two-dimensional plane—the first time such a movement has been observed in sperm. When the liquid was more viscous, the human sperm moved this way more often, and moved 50 percent faster than the bull sperm. The researchers think that the human sperm might have to slither more often because human reproductive tracts are smaller and more confined than those of cows.
These findings could be important for fertility treatments—in-vitro fertilization, for example, currently relies upon just a few sperm to fertilize the eggs. And since low sperm count or poor-quality sperm account for 90 percent of male infertility cases, it’s important that doctors pick the right sperm for an expensive IVF procedure.
The researchers have a few more questions to answer before they can start to apply their findings to clinical settings—like whether all or only some sperm slither, or if slithering is advantageous for the sperm to win the race to the egg. They are conducting these trials now, which one researcher compared to the “sperm Olympics” in a press release.
The augmented reality creating HoloLens will be available to software developers at a price of $3000 in the first quarter of 2016.
The marketplace of virtual reality headsets is starting to become more clear: Oculus and the HTC Vive will be major top-tier players, while Samsung Gear and other low-cost phone mounts like Noon VR will target the casual viewer. However, in the realm of augmented reality, the Microsoft HoloLens has been the only mainstream contender. Until now.
Asus, the PC hardware manufacturer, is planning on releasing an augmented reality headset as early as 2016, according to CNET. While the exact price of the headset is still unknown, a low-cost offering could change the landscape of augmented reality, and bring it to people who might not be able to afford the premium HoloLens.
"It should be next year when we come out with a product," Shen said during an earnings webcast Wednesday. “We think AR will be very important for people's lives."
The developer’s version of HoloLens will cost $3000, and comments made in October by Asus chairman Jonney Shih indicate that their headset would cost less than Microsoft’s offering.
Asus has been known for taking risks with design in the past, as well as offering low-cost products that operate within the Microsoft ecosystem. You could even argue that the company has always been a bit ahead of their time. Their Transformer series could be seen as a predecessor to the iPad Pro, although not nearly as refined, and the PadFone, while ill-conceived, has the idea of a unified system that Microsoft is trying to push with their Continuum.
That being said, the company is well-known for making dependable, and professional-level gaming monitors, laptops, and desktop PCs.
We don’t know much about Asus’ augmented reality, like its price, release time, or even resolution. But we also don’t know much about the HoloLens, or augmented reality in general. Carefully curated demonstrations have sustainably hyped the product, but until Q1 2016 when the HoloLens developers’ kit ships, we won’t know how the technology stands.
If you are waiting for the selfie trend to go away, make sure you’re in a comfortable spot. As selfies continue to dominate social media platforms, a new app from the Swiss company Dacuda plans to bring the selfie into the three dimensional world. The company just unveiled an app that puts sophisticated 3D scanning technology in the hands of anyone with a smart phone and reasonable hand-eye coordination.
And yes, the new app is built around an algorithm precisely tailored for taking selfies.
A beta version of the new app — aptly named 3DSelfie — will be available later this year. In the meantime, Dacuda provided a preview earlier this month at TEDxCambridge 2015. Dacuda founder and Vice President Erik Fonseca recently spoke with Popular Science about the new app.
The app works by connecting mobile 3D scanning with related technology, namely 3D printing. As Fonseca sees it, the scanning-printing combination transforms the digital experience into something more complete and immersive.
“If people can capture everything that’s around them, and share it, then this would be like a dream come true,” Fonseca says.
Instead of hanging a photo on your wall you can create a whole statue.
“Today already there are many people who want to share their memories — so for example a wedding or a birthday, or if you are pregnant — and you can do that with photographs, but now you can also make these memories tangible,” Fonseca explains.
As Fonseca describes it, the guiding principle behind 3DSelfie is the democratization of technology. The new app enables nearly universal access to a system that would otherwise require special hardware, skills, and importantly, a lot of money.
In a unique approach to 3D scanning, the app creates a point cloud of an object by deploying algorithms similar to those used in robotics. That puts 3DSelfie a cut above first-generation apps for taking 3D selfies. These existing apps either employ GIF-like technology to create the illusion of 3D or they use head models that are slightly changed based on the scan input, which limits their ability to capture more minor facial variations among individuals.
“Unlike other solutions on the market we do not rely on the morphing of an underlying head model, which often results in unrecognizable generic faces. Instead we directly generate the high quality lifelike scans, that allows us to output polished 3D selfies that exquisitely feature your individual facial expressions," says Fonseca.
The app also enables users to view the image on their smartphone screen in real time, providing a seamless, intuitive experience akin to that of shooting a video on your phone.
Fonseca makes a good case for bringing physical elements back into modern digitized life. Most of us have a compulsion to preserve and share what we see, and 3-D technology literally adds another dimension to that experience.
The new app follows on the heels of Dacuda’s 3DAround, another 3D smartphone scanning app. Like 3DSelfie, 3DAround is specifically tailored for a particular use. In this case, it’s taking shots of your dinner and other items of food.
If this all seems a bit frivolous, it’s frivolity with a purpose. Selfies and food shots are among the most popular and accessible for smartphone photography. Aside from the potential benefit to Dacuda’s bottom line, the focus on universal experiences adds an extra layer of democracy to the aforementioned democratization of technology.
Fonseca also anticipates a torrent of practical uses for smartphone 3D scanning combined with 3D printing. One advantage is to speed up the design process.
“When scientists want to build stuff, they build it, they improve it, there are various iterations…with 3D printing you can capture an element and multiply it, so you can try out several iterations,” says Fonseca.
Another mashup that Fonseca anticipates is 3D scanning with virtual reality and augmented reality platforms.
“You can put on goggles and then you can physically build machines, games, or a house,” explains Fonseca. “It’s more immersive.”
This could all come about sooner than you think, so start working on your selfie game now. By the end of this year, Dacuda expects to nail down partnerships for 3D printing as well as gaming avatars and a platform for reproducing built interiors.
You can get a great view of the stars in the Atacama Desert in Chile. There's seldom a rain cloud in the sky (it's one of the driest places on Earth), and it's far from any big cities and their accompanying light pollution and smog. That's why it's already home to a telescope or two, and the view will soon get a lot better. On a desert mountaintop, a U.S.-led international consortium has just broken ground on the Giant Magellan Telescope (GMT).
The first stages of construction will mostly involve putting in roads and power supplies. But when the telescope begins operating in 2021, GMT is expected to be the largest optical telescope on Earth--at least for a little while. It will produce images 10 times sharper than Hubble.
The GMT will combine seven giant mirrors to create a lens that's about 85 feet in diameter. By comparison, the world's current largest telescope of this type--the Great Canary Telescope in Spain--has an aperture of just 34 feet. And the space-based Hubble has a measly 8-foot mirror.
GMT's larger mirrors will focus the incoming light from the stars, allowing astronomers to calculate how far away an object is.
Adaptive optics will help to make the telescope's images sharper. The atmosphere is full of air pockets of various temperatures and densities that can distort incoming light. Some of GMT's mirrors will be adjustable to compensate for this effect, helping to increase resolution and sensitivity.
But GMT will only be the best ground-based optical telescope for a little while. A year or so after GMT is scheduled to begin operating, the Thirty Meter Telescope will come online with its 98-foot mirror, as well as the European Extremely Large Telescope. The EELT will live up to its name, thanks to its 129-foot mirror.
Nevertheless, GMT should help to answer some pretty interesting questions. Its makers say it will be able to measure the composition of exoplanet atmospheres, find out how the first galaxies formed, as well as shed light on the nature of dark matter and the fate of the universe. So, you know, no big deal.
There are times when a gun shouldn’t fire. In the hands of a toddler, say, or really in the hands of anyone except its legal owner, or those entrusted by the owner. Guns are so easy to operate that even a toddler can accidentally fire one and injure or kill someone, as happened at least 43 times already in 2015. Veri-Fire’s Guardian fingerprint-reading gun safety accessory wants to change that, by keeping the gun locked for everyone but the gun’s owner. Here’s what the Guardian looks like in action:
Over the past year, Popular Science met with members of the Veri-Fire team several times to examine the safety accessory,in the last stages of its development. On November 16th, the team’s crowdfunding campaign goes live on Indiegogo.
Founded by Skylar Gerrond and Matt Barido, both U.S. Air Force veterans, Veri-Fire intends the Guardian to be a value-neutral tool for reducing harm.
It is, first and foremost, a safety accessory. The Guardian works in conjunction with safeties in the firearm itself, and doesn’t preclude a gun owner from storing their weapon in a gun safe or lock box.
How it works
The 13-ounce mechanism prototype attaches to most pistol trigger guards (though not revolvers), and once installed, locks shut when the user pulls the slide to the trigger itself. A fingerprint scanner is placed where a trigger finger naturally falls. The gun can store up to five distinct fingerprints, inputted by a second button press and 7 seconds to authorize each new fingerprint.
Once Guardian knows a fingerprint, it unlocks in less than a second, allowing the user to fire without hesitation. Once enrolled, Guardian remembers a fingerprint, so the user doesn’t have to re-enter it every time they want to unlock the weapon.
The unlocking mechanism is battery powered, and re-locking the gun is done with a simple pull on the slide. If the battery dies, it stays locked until the user manually opens up the Guardian and replaces the battery. The mechanism uses an ordinary 6-volt battery -- the kind often found in digital cameras -- and can last up to a year with typical use. If replaced as infrequently as twice a year, it should maintain the lock indefinitely.
While demonstrating the safety on a bright orange replica Glock in a bar, Gerrond and Barido openly admitted that the Guardian isn't impenetrable: it can be removed by determined youth with power tools, or with a special tool shipped with the lock itself. But that's true of all locks, and mostly true of gun safes as well. As with all security measures, the Guardian is a further obstacle to misuse, not a guarantee of perfect protection.
While all the prototypes I saw were right-handed, the Guardian can be built mirrored, so lefties like myself can use it just as easily.
Smart, but not creepy
While Veri-Fire itself was formally founded in 2013, the Guardian safety accessory is the result of six years of tinkering and development. It’s explicitly built as an attempt to reconcile the need to mitigate harm from guns while allowing gun owners to still have a weapon they can trust for self defense. As such, there is not remote updating of the locks’ software once it’s shipped. The team debated including a way for the gun to sends its coordinates by GPS, but decided against it so users wouldn’t worry about being tracked. The fingerprint data in the lock is stored locally, not transmitted anywhere.
Guardian is also, very explicitly, not a gun itself. Last month, less than 24 hours after it went live, Indiegogo took down the crowdfunding campaign for SALT, a less-lethal home defense weapon. In a statement, Indiegogo said that it took down the campaign because its “terms prohibit the offering of 'any weapons, ammunition and related accessories" as perks”.
It’s unlikely Indiegogo will hold the same interpretation for a gun safety, especially one that is offered only as the lock itself. Gerrond tells Popular Science that “due to indiegogo’s terms of use regarding firearms and accessories, we have been in coordination with them for the last year and have gotten explicit clearance to proceed with our campaign. They have been very accommodating and understanding with regards to the purpose of Guardian."
What it costs and who it's for
Veri-Fire’s retail price for the Guardian is $299.00. During the crowdfunding campaign, it’ll be available for $199.00, and at pre-launch, they’re offering it at $159. That puts the Guardian at roughly half to a third the cost of a regular handgun. With about six million pistols produced annually in the United States, and with about 106 million handguns already in circulation, the market for a product like this is quite large, even if only a fraction of gun owners buy one.
It can also, in part, answer a public health risk. A 1999 study estimated that 30 percent of all handguns are stored unlocked and loaded. if the numbers are still true for 2015, that means roughly 32 million handguns could benefit from a lock like the Guardian, and if even one percent of those gun owners attach a lock to their weapon, that’s 320,000 more guns that toddlers can’t fire. It’s a gun safety approach so basic, even the NRA is tentatively on board.
Watch the Veri-Fire team unlock and fire the Guardian at a gun range below:
There's a lot we know about the iconic Pyramids at Giza. We know they were built thousands of years ago to hold royal mummies and grave goods (not grain). The pyramids were likewise not the home/landing site/temples of aliens dead set on taking over humanity.
That's what we know. But despite the fact that humans have been studying the pyramids for centuries, these giant structures still have some secrets that we haven't uncovered yet. Earlier this week, Egypt's antiquities ministry announced that researchers have noticed strange thermal readings during scans of the largest of the Giza pyramids.
After scanning the pyramids with instruments designed to take the temperature of the structures' stones, researchers noticed three stones near the base of the pyramid that were slightly warmer than the surrounding facade. The scientists aren't sure why the stones are warmer, but they speculate that it could be because of different materials or space within the structure, potentially indicating a hidden room.
The finding is an exciting start to a research project that also hopes to image the pyramid with subatomic particles. The first phase ended last Sunday, but research will continue into 2016. Future phases, including drone-mounted lasers and muon scans (which work kind of like an x-ray) could give the international team a better idea of whether or not a secret tomb is present.
The pyramid of Khufu is considered to be the largest ever built. Constructed of over 2 million stones, the pyramid stands 481 feet high, and was built over 4,500 years ago as the burial chamber of the pharaoh Khufu (sometimes known as Cheops).
Since 2007, Mark Frohnmayer and his team at Arcimoto in Eugene, Oregon, have been working to create affordable personal electric-powered transportation for the masses. They knew the numbers: most trips are just one or two people in a vehicle driving an average of 33 miles a day. They also knew that globally, urban parking was the biggest problem people had.
The problem was building a vehicle that solved all these problems and was inexpensive enough for nearly everyone to afford it, especially the half of the global population that lives in urban areas. Through seven iterations, the Arcimoto team worked to create the vehicle that would solve all these problems and run on battery power alone, but it was still too heavy, too expensive, and too awkward.
“We were fighting for ounces on generation 7,” says Frohnmayer. “We kept aiming for global transportation, and we kept landing on a midlife-crisis mobile. Others are building low-volume specialty cars for rich people; that doesn’t move the needle” on reducing carbon emissions and improving the transportation landscape.
The answer came on the winter solstice in 2014 when Frohnmeyer questioned, as he puts it, “the very first thing that had never been questioned”: the steering wheel and pedals. Though the Arcimoto vehicle was always intended to be classified as a motorcycle rather than a car, his first design choice—“made when we had the least information,” he says—was to use car-style controls. Using handlebars similar to those on a motorcycle or snowmobile made all the difference.
Once the controls were changed, Arcimoto was able to add more capabilities in a smaller, lighter, more affordable vehicle, all of which benefits the electric power plant.
Generation 8, which will make its world debut in Eugene November 14, is 700 pounds lighter than generation 7. It’s easier for both occupants to get in and out via a unique Eagle Wing door, and the safety structure is improved. The new design is just short enough to park nose-in in a parallel parking space. Arcimoto calls it the rock-star parking feature and notes that it comes standard on every vehicle.
“The lighter you make it, the more fun it becomes,” Frohnmeyer says. “Less is more has created a much better product.”
That extends to the price as well. Arcimoto is targeting an $11,900 base price for a 70-mile range, though there will be extended range options when the cars go into production at the end of 2016.
You've heard of holy water, but what about hole-y water?
In a paper published this week in Nature, researchers announced that they have developed a liquid with its molecules structured in such a way that they have 'holes' within the liquid. Picture a sponge that can flow like water, and you'll have a general idea of what they've managed to create.
“Materials which contain permanent holes, or pores, are technologically important. They are used for manufacturing a range of products from plastic bottles to petrol. However, until recently, these porous materials have been solids. What we have done is to design a special liquid from the ‘bottom up’ – we designed the shapes of the molecules which make up the liquid so that the liquid could not fill up all the space. Because of the empty holes we then had in the liquid, we found that it was able to dissolve unusually large amounts of gas." Stuart James, a co-author of the study said in a statement.
In an audio interview posted by Nature, James describes building the molecule, a cage-like structure made of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen with a an empty space or pore inside. Those "cages" were then dissolved into another liquid, a solvent. The solvent's molecules were much larger than the cages, and couldn't fit inside the "bars" so the cage-like molecules were able to keep their pores empty, ready and waiting to trap a smaller particle like a gas.
A liquid able to soak up gas could be a huge step forward in carbon-capture technology, a whole suite of technological innovations that seek to keep carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, out of the Earth's atmosphere. James says that "a few" more years of research are needed before the liquid can be tested in chemical processes like carbon capture (or capturing methane, another greenhouse gas), but having a porous liquid is an incredible first step.
It’s been a weird year for skateboards. As foretold, hoverboards are here, but they’re either really limited in what they can do or they’re not actually hovering. Fortunately, Peru’s Otto the Skateboarding Bulldog is here to set us straight: What matters isn’t how the board moves, it’s how cool it looks when a dog is the one riding it.
Yesterday, Otto skateboarded through a human tunnel 30 people long, setting the “longest human tunnel travelled through by a skateboarding dog” record, a very important feat. The event was part of Guinness World Record Day 2015, when a bunch of people (and animals, I guess) do weird unique things more so than other people (or animals) have ever done them before. We live in a strange and beautiful world that encourages and praises this behavior.
With a Final Fantasy character in Nintendo's fighting game, the sky's the limit
New characters for Super Smash Bros 4 are some of the most hotly anticipated downloadable content on Nintendo's otherwise underperforming Wii U home console. The multiplayer fighting game known for taking characters across Nintendo games and putting them in one arena for a no-holds-barred brawl has taken up a new hobby as of late. Along with Mario, Link, Pikachu and more of Nintendo’s recognizable roster, the Super Smash Bros team is throwing non-Nintendo fighters into the combat mix at an alarming rate (Capcom's Mega Man and Street Fighter's Ryu most recently among them).
But yesterday, Nintendo went even further to introduce one of the most iconic characters in gaming to the Smash Bros ring: the dark hero Cloud from Final Fantasy VII will be on his way to Super Smash Bros 4 in December, and likely some other characters outside the Nintendo universe as well. That's great news not only for Nintendo fans, but all gamers, who will now have the chance to play these characters in fresh and unusual settings, against all new opponents.
Towards the end of the company's semiregular Nintendo Direct announcement yesterday, the introduction of Cloud Strife to Smash Bros also told fans to look out for more news regarding the game in December.
Third-party characters like Sega's Sonic The Hedgehog in a Nintendo game used to be a rarity. But Super Smash Bros 4 has not been shy about letting many other fighters from completely different gaming universes into the fray. In addition to the previous inclusions of Sonic, Mega Man, Pac-Man, Ryu and Cloud, we’ll likely see even more mascots from other consoles—thanks to the recently created "Fighter Ballot," which turns the decision of which additional characters to add over to the players.
Creating the "Fighter Ballot" back in April, Smash Bros game director Masahiro Sakurai and his team decided to put the selection of future fighters to a vote. The only stipulation is the character must be from a video game, but other than that, pretty much anyone is potential contender, which means we could see a whole host of new Smash Bros characters coming soon.
After voting in the ballot ended on October 3, the ballot page was taken down. But judging by the vote, it is pretty clear what we can look forward to in December: more third-party characters.
Super Smash Bros 4 Characters
Nintendo
Mario, Sonic, Mega Man and Pac-Man. All in one game
The December Super Smash Bros 4 announcements will be big news—not just for Nintendo fanboys, but fan-people of every denomination. The introduction of Cloud yesterday made no mention of the FF7 fighter being a ballot winner—meaning there are still many third-party additions to possibly come.
No dates have been offered in the way of when in December or even when we can expect Cloud Strife to face off against Mario, Yoshi and more. Though with the chance that your favorite video game character could make it into Nintendo’s wildly popular “what-if” scenario, gaming fans should eagerly await the next challenger approaching.
If you’ve ever wondered why the sound you hear through your laptop’s headphone jack is wildly different from the sound that comes through your stereo system, the short answer is that your laptop is missing one of the key steps to make sound out of numbers: digital to analog conversion.
Better home audio is a nebulous world of micro-advances in technology that are tedious enough to make your head spin like a record. It’s a frustrating, seemingly endless struggle to improve what we hear. And as more and more of what we listen to comes from our hard drives and cloud services, we’re less dependent on the medium itself and more dependent on the technology that turns data to drum beats.
But the audio company, Schiit, which started back in 2010, argues that the best way to maximize the sound that comes into your headphones is to connect the headphones via USB to an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC). The idea is that, whether you have lossless, uncompressed files (which, unlike stripped down MP3s, hold more information and more accurately represent the original sound), iTunes, or a streaming service like Spotify, you’re not getting the full potential without a middleman.
Though you may not realize it, DACs are ubiquitous. Your TV, phone, gaming systems, and even your parents’ CD player all have them. Anything that uses an electronic signal for source (audio or video) has to convert information into its display medium, so while the audio side of things appeared as a way to improve mp3 quality, TVs have actually had to unpack digital signals for longer. Companies like Schiit, which is not the only maker out there, are essentially offering an upgraded alternative: Think of it like switching out a graphics card on a gaming computer, or adding a soundbar to your TV. It’s about adding a more powerful, dedicated component to the equation, for people who want a little more from a device. Those people may include music lovers, video and audio editors, or just individuals with very picky ears.
Believing that everyone was truly lacking in audio sufficiency without this product, Schiit built one of each at just under $100 each and started selling them almost a year ago, in January of this year. The company lent both pieces out for a field test in the research for this story.
How Does Music Actually Get To Your Headphones
You’re probably wondering what an amp and a DAC do that your headphones can’t, and that’s logical. To understand this, though, it's important to know exactly how your music gets to your headphones. Though Dre and other companies that sell street-ready headphones may have you believe otherwise, achieving the perfect digital audio is about more than the two speakers on either side of your head.
Good audio is all about preserving as much of the true, natural sound as possible between the studio and your ear. And that’s hard with the number of transformations it goes through. Sound waves from a guitar are transcribed the first time as electrical impulses from, say, a microphone. That’s one change, and the better the microphone, the more sensitive it is to things like fingers sliding along the strings between chords. Those impulses have to be recorded, and the more information you want (depth of sound) the larger the files have to be.
When you want to listen to that recording, the digital file has to be transcribed back to electronic impulses, which then are transmitted through speakers (like those in your headphones).
At every step in the process, inferior technology means loss of fidelity. Bad mic? Bad sound. Bad tech? Bad recording. Bad headphones? Bad representation. And while the studios invest in the best equipment, and you can buy the best file types and amazing headphones, you’re still doing yourself a disservice if you’re neglecting the bridge between the file and the headphone.
Schiit’s Modi 2 DAC and Magni 2 amp work together in a perfect little team, unpacking the sound at a higher quality. Unlike your laptop headphone jack, it’s powered for extra voltage, so the digital signals become more detailed electrical impulses, which creates better transcription.
The Schiit devices are small, too and unobtrusive, which is a plus. The two stacked on top of one another are a little bigger than a box of business cards.
While they performed well in my home test, that doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone who tries this product will come to the same conclusion. Hearing is very subjective as we all appreciate different qualities, and it’s likely that you and I have different musical tastes. Keeping those differences in mind, here’s how I ran my tests.
I established controls by listening to my headphones (a studio pair of Sony MDR-7506) through the headphone jack on my desktop Chromebox, and then by playing the sound straight through my monitor.
I listened to a few different things: movies on Netflix, a few select YouTube videos and live streams, and finally music on Spotify and then Tidal, a lossless Spotify competitor.
Across the board, boy was the sound crisp. Movie soundtracks took on new depths. I heard subtleties in the dialogue of Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs” and picked up on previously unheard parts of tracks off a favorite Weezer album. (The distortion was a good challenge, alright?)
Schiit cofounder, Jason Stoddard, says the novelty of the new sound will surprise you. “Modi 2 will improve the quality of all digital sources.” Similarly, he explains, “Magni 2 is dramatically better than the headphone output of a phone, laptop, or tablet—having 10 to 100 times the output power, and a low output impedance that is ideal for any headphone.”
Should We All Convert?
However, where this novel device fits on the scale of real world value is still up for debate. Stoddard says that often, there is only so much data to improve upon, and importantly not all sound is streamed equally. “Spotify, like Apple Music, is a compressed source—the music has been reduced to 320kbps in order to make it more streaming-friendly. Fully, 80 percent of the original music content has been eliminated.” That’s a lot of information gone. If you compare this to dilution, it would be like drinking a beverage that is two ounces soda and eight ounces water.
“Perceptual encoding,” Stoddard says, “means that it doesn’t sound as bad as it is, but it doesn’t sound as good as, say, Tidal (which is lossless) or lossless rips of CDs from iTunes. Netflix is a whole different ball of wax, but it typically uses compressed audio as well.” That means that, no matter how good your tech is, at some point Spotify (or Netflix, which can be worse) is not going to sound any better.
Case in point, it still sounds much better with the Magni 2 and Modi 2 grouping than straight through my Chromebook or Macbook headphone jack. And that made me curious about the varying quality of what I was listening to. I signed up for Tidal’s lossless service, and compared several tracks from different genres. If you’ve ever heard the song “Killer Queen”, you’ll remember the finger-snapping intro, and the distorted vocals from the chorus. Both were crisper, with more fullness on lossless playback, adding an extra dimension to the whole package.
Stoddard actually had some cautions on music services worth sharing. He says you need to be careful about what service you use, and how they deliver data. “The 320k rate of Spotify and Apple Music is really pretty good, but there are also a lot of streaming stations out there running 192k and even 96k bit-rates. In addition, some services are dynamic, in that they will reduce the bit rate if the connection is slow or if there’s network congestion.”
The Verdict
But back to my test results. After a few minutes, I found an old pair of earbuds for which I paid under $30. The sound was comparably tinny and distant, like it was coming down a hallway, or from a passing car. The base was present but muddy, and sort of sloshing about over things that had been crisp and distinct minutes before.
I did find that not everything has the capacity to sound great. Better equipment can actually make bad audio sound worse, and in my experience it happened worst with Netflix. Some movies sounded good, but some sounded only okay. “The Last Waltz” was not great. It’s a documentary about a concert and it sounds flat and a bit hollow. I’m sorry, Scorsese, they’re not doing you justice.
Maybe the only downside of upgraded sound is that upgrading makes it hard to go back to the way things were, like when you’re on the move and can’t stay plugged in. That’s a compliment to Schiit’s technology, but a problem you’ll have to reconcile on your own if you decide to upgrade.
Researchers at MSU engineered arabidopsis to better withstand both insect and pathogen attacks simultaneously. Next up, perhaps: Tomatoes and soy.
[free photos/Flickr]
Plants have to deal with a lot of threats, from insects that want to munch them to bacteria that would like to infect them. It’s tough to put up a defense to multiple attacks at once, all while maintaining the energy to grow.
But researchers at Michigan State University may have figured out a way to help plants withstand attacks by both insects and certain pathogens simultaneously. The work published earlier this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
One of the major defense mechanisms in plants is jasmonate, a stress hormone. When an insect bites the plant, it triggers the jasmonate pathway, which causes the plant to release compounds that discourage the insect from eating more. These compounds are called protease inhibitors, and they make it so that the insect can’t digest the plant material.
When jasmonate is active in the plant, it tends to inhibit a separate hormone called salicylic acid, which protects against pathogens.
The trouble is, some pathogens can hijack this system to make the plant more vulnerable to infection. For example, strains of the bacteria Pseudomonas syringae produce a toxin called coronatine that mimics jasmonate—it’s similar in size and shape, and can attach to the same receptor that causes the jasmonate cascade. In other words, the bacteria trick the plant into reacting to a phantom insect, so that the plant lowers its defense against the pathogen. The bacteria can then sneak in. And boom: Infection.
The goal for the new research was to stop this from happening. “We were always thinking: how can we separate the cytotoxin from the salicylic acid pathway and maintain the jasmonate pathway?” says Li Zhang, a graduate student in plant biology at MSU and first author on the paper.
The MSU team first tried to manipulate the structure of the receptor so that it couldn’t attach to the toxin but, says Zhang, it didn’t work. Next, they looked at related receptors in two mosses, which are less complex than their target plants and didn’t evolve the same jasmonate pathways. Ultimately, the researchers figured out that by swapping a single amino acid from a moss into the more complex laboratory model Arabidopsis, they could get the desired result.
“Basically, now the plant is able to defend not only insects, because that hormone pathway is normal, but also against bacteria, which evolved to overcome the defense system,” says Shen-Yang He, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute–Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigator at MSU, who led the study.
For this paper, the scientists used older genetic engineering techniques to alter the jasmonate pathways. But they hope to move to newer gene editing methods such as CRISPR for future projects, which will allow them to swap out the amino acid with relative ease. “Because it’s a single nucleotide change, it’s perfect for CRISPR,” says He. The next step, he adds, is to move the research to soy and tomato. If it works, it could provide a new way to engineer resistant crops.
“I think it’s a nice paper that establishes a potential route to not only make this change—perhaps it could be feasible in other situations as well,” says Paul Staswick, a plant molecular biologist and jasmonic signaling expert at the University of Nebraska (Staswick was not involved with PNAS paper).
“Potentially, if it holds up in the environment, it could be useful out in the field in crop species and a variety of different plant species,” he adds. “That of course is the big question.”
According to He, another future step is to see if the technique could also be used to make plants resistant to other environmental obstacles such as drought.
“Can you produce a dream plant that can function in any condition? That would be super,” he says. “But that would need a lot of people’s work. That is one of the grand challenges in agriculture—with climate change, with fertile soil being gone, with population increasing, we need a very clever way to grow plants to be resistant to everything.”
Carvana started as a way to buy cars online. Ernie Garcia, Carvana's CEO, wanted to take the hassle out of haggling prices and signing paperwork. And he also hoped to shave a little off the cars' prices as well. So, like any good entrepreneur, he looked toward the Internet and automation, which led to them creating a car vending machine. The facility opened on Thursday in Nashville, Tennessee.
Selling cars out of a giant robotic vending machine might sound like a fun gimmick, but doing something radically different from other dealerships, according to Garcia, makes a lot of economic sense.
"The lack of differentiation locked everyone into the exact same cost structure that forced them to attract customers with a low-priced car, and then put them in a back room and try to sell them thousands of dollars of things they don't really need, in order to make up for their undifferentiated cost structure," Garcia told Popular Science.
So, drawing up the paperwork, selling cars online, and delivering them via vending machine means Carvana doesn't need to have a robustly staffed car lot with enough space for a test drive, and maintain a stock of various models--all of which add to the costs of running a dealership. Instead, Carvana's vending machine holds 20 cars at a time, in a robotic tower. When the customer decides to make a purchase through Carvana's website, they have the choice of picking up the car, or having it delivered. If the customer decides to pick the car up, the company sends the purchased car from the distribution center (they have one in Atlanta and one in Dallas) to the tower.
Upon arrival at the shiny glass facility, customers will type in their information on a tablet. They'll receive a commemorative three-inch coin that they insert into the machine--to keep with the theme. Robotic platforms retrieve the purchased car, and automated parking technology delivers it to the customer.
Garcia says test drives are on the decline, but for customers who still like to try before they buy, Carvana has a seven-day trial period. You can drive it around, and if after a week, you're not sold, you can return the car.
Right now, this is the only option for car vending machine enthusiasts in the U.S., but the company plans to expand to more cities in the future. For those abroad, Volkswagon's car theme park Autostadt in Germany has a similar (though much larger) facility that delivers new cars to customers. And in China, a company called Kandi Technologies has been renting electric cars out of a vending machine-like facility.
You can watch a preview of Carvana's vending machine below:
EVE Online is what's known as a MMORPG ... a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game. In progress now for more than a decade, the game is science fiction's answer to World of Warcraft. Set some 21,000 years into the future, the game backstory suggests that humans have branched out to colonize space, and being humans, immediately started competing with each other for resources. You can play as an explorer, skirmisher, industrialist, or colonizer.
In an exciting development that brings real life and art together, EVE Online has announced that it is working with a Swiss startup called Massively Multiplayer Online Science (MMOS), and students of Reykjavik University to bring a real science project into the game. Inserted as a mini-game that pays out in the game's internal currencies, players will be asked to help categorize and classify beautiful images from the Human Protein Atlas. The latter is a project to map out protein distribution in the human body, to give us a better idea of how our bodies work, and what happens when they stop working properly, leading to diseases like cancer.
"This new feature brings the opportunity for EVE players to help solve real world science problems through their in-game activity," say organizers.
For more information on the project, check out the presentation at EVE Vegas 2015, just last week.
Photo by Steve Depolo via Flickr, licensed under CC 2.0
A lot of people aren't able to perceive micro expressions. They're the tiny facial ticks that reveal what we're feeling when we're trying not to let it show. So, understanding those micro expressions could allow you to look deeper into peoples' faces and know what what's really going on inside.
But even people who can perceive micro expressions aren't always accurate. In 2012, researchers in Finland described what they claimed to be the first system that used a computer to detect micro expressions. In the paper, they write that computers are particularly attractive in this field, since humans are only correct about 47 percent of the time.
And computers have only gotten better at their craft. In a paper submitted to arXiv, Xiaobai Li and a team of researchers (also in Finland), share their new machine vision algorithm. And they say it's better at reading human faces than humans themselves. To test it, they first needed a database of what all of these micro expressions look like. To create the database, they asked 20 study participants to watch videos designed to elicit an emotional response. But, they were told, if they did demonstrate a response, they would have to complete a long questionnaire explaining those emotions (a brilliant deterrent). Turns out, it worked and the researchers were able to gather 164 micro expressions using a high speed camera.
Then, the algorithm needed to learn how to recognize and interpret those expressions. The algorithm gets its super powers by being able to "magnify" the micro expressions by isolating the parts of the face that are moving, and distorting that area to move further. The algorithm then learned which emotion is attached to those particular movements.
But the real test is how does it stack up. Li and the team pitted the algorithm against lowly humans, having both watch videos of just micro expressions. Participants were instructed to identify which emotion went with which expression. Team human was about 72 percent accurate, and the computer's best accuracy was about 82 percent. The second task involved picking out micro expressions from a longer video. The researchers made it easier on humans (allowing them to replay the videos, and only having them note how many micro expressions they saw, not when they saw them), since they felt the task was "too difficult." Even with that advantage, humans scored an accuracy of about 50 percent, while the computer earned a comparable 42 percent.
All of this means, we're going to have to get a lot better at hiding our feelings from our computers.
When astronauts go on spacewalks, they use jetpacks. Not the fire-spewing kind, but a backpack that lets out streams of nitrogen gas, which astronauts can use to steer themselves to safety. These devices, called Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue (SAFER), are intended for emergencies only. But now a company called Draper is designing jetpacks that astronauts could potentially use to do work in space.
In preparation for a hypothetical trip to Mars, NASA wants to send astronauts to visit a nearby asteroid. The controversial proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission tentatively scheduled for sometime in the "2020s" would give astronauts an excuse to take a ride on NASA's Space Launch System and Orion capsule, which are currently in development, while also letting humans explore an asteroid for the first time.
Unlike Mars, asteroids don't have a lot of gravity, and the “asteroid” that the astronauts would visit is really just a 6-foot boulder at best. How can the astronauts explore this boulder without floating away? Tethers might me one solution, and/or installing anchor points into the rock. But jetpacks are among the more exciting ideas for how to navigate around an asteroid.
Pretend you're an astronaut and you need to take a sample of an asteroid. Perhaps you would use a shovel or a hammer and chisel. The problem is that while you're pushing that tool into the rock, there's no gravity holding you in place, and the force makes your body want to float away from the asteroid.
To counterbalance that, Draper is working with MIT to develop hardware that can sense your position is changing using control moment gyroscopes (CMGs), and then use thrusters correct for it.
Michele Carpenter, Draper's principal investigator on the project, told Popular Science in an email that “The CMGs enable a finer level of control by operating continuously. Thrusters aren’t well suited for this function because they are discrete actuators (they need to turn on and off). If an astronaut tried to use them to stay in place, they would repeatedly bounce back and forth while the thrusters turned on and off.”
The team just flew a test version on a parabolic flight that simulates microgravity. As Draper explains in a press release:
During the flight demonstration, the CMGs were mounted on free-floating Synchronized Position Hold Engage and Reorient Experimental Satellites (SPHERES) platforms. The CMGs were used to perform attitude hold, slew and pointing maneuvers. In addition, the CMGs were able to reject disturbance torques imparted by the thrusters of a docked secondary satellite.
Carpenter says they were overall pleased with the outcome. They're hoping to do more of these tests in the future, since parabolic flights can only provide a few seconds of weightlessness at time. Eventually, they'd like to try it out on the International Space Station.
Chinese researchers have developed a new aircraft skin that makes planes even harder to see on radar. Published this week, the technique makes a plane skin that can adapt to different radar frequencies and react to them, the radio wave equivalent of chameleon skin.
Current airplanes (and, weirdly, some wind turbines) hide their appearance from radar two ways: weird body geometry that reflects radio waves away from their receivers, and materials that absorb the waves, turning them into heat instead of reflecting them back. Seen primarily on modern aircraft like the B-2 Spirit bomber, the F-22 and F-35 fighters, and the experimental unmanned combat drone X-47B, the technology is used by the Pentagon to protect nuclear bombers, spyplanes, and the entire next generation of fighters. But, even after billions and billions of dollars spent on it, it has weaknesses, and one of those is ultra-high-frequency (UHF) radar, which can pick up traces of the plane that other radar misses.
So why publish the information? There are a few possibilities. Sharing the research lowers a major obstacle for other countries that may want to build their own stealth fighters. Alternatively, by publishing the research, China makes it easier for anyone trying to break stealth protection like this, as they have the technique available publicly to dissect. One of the best ways to find flaws in defenses is get a lot of eyes looking for weaknesses.
