Our friends over at Popular Photography have an interview with director John Downer, whose project Winged Planet premieres tomorrow on the Discovery Channel. It's an amazing avian photography special that gets photos from angles never before seen--because Downer set up his shots in technologically innovative ways. One was mounted on a wooden replica of a vulture and launched into the air, others were mounted on living birds. Check out the full interview here.

Toys are a serious business, we learn in the PopSci archives.

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Be thankful your parents didn't buy you a toy switchboard because they read that you have to buy toys that help kids prepare for their future careers, or a depressingly realistic set of radiation tools to help you "learn the principles of atomic energy." And good thing the war's over, so we can make toys out of metal again.

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The United States has an estimated 1 million homebrewers, according to the American Homebrewers Association. That's just slightly under the estimated number of nutjobs in the U.S. who have run a marathon. No word on what the Venn diagram of those two looks like, but I know that there's at least one intersection between the two datasets because I live and brew with him: my spouse Doug. He and I have been homebrewing for a couple of years, and we're about to get on a plane so Doug can run his second marathon.

Even though the two activities seem pretty unlike each other--the payoff for one is a 26.2-mile slog while people scream at you; the payoff for the other is being able to sit in front of the TV in your underwear while you scream at people--they have similarities. Both can be intimidating and incomprehensible to the uninitiated. (You want me to run how far? What the hell is trub, and why should I care?) Both require planning, time, and a hefty investment in equipment. And both can sometimes make you want to cry. (If you've ever done a 22-mile training run in the middle of July or infected a batch of beer such that the finished product smelled like fruity paint thinner, you know what I mean.) But, ultimately, both bring a sense of accomplishment: "Hey, I just ran 15 miles at 7m30s per" has the same sweet ring as, "Hey, my IPA tastes better than most of the ones I can buy at the store."

The reason for this PopSci.com column is twofold. First, I want to help demystify and exalt beer. There has never been a better time to be a beer fanatic. But there's also a lot of B.S. out there--confusing terms, newfangled names and styles, and some truly regrettable beers. I have personally brewed at least one myself.

Second, I want to sweet-talk more suckers intrepid souls into trying homebrewing for themselves. I'll be posting about beer, because that's what I like to drink, but once you have the basics, you can ferment whatever you want to: honey, fruit juice, the squeezings of twigs and berries. As long as there's fermentable sugars in the mix, Saccharomyces will turn them into ethanol and carbon dioxide. I'll post recipes and pictures (sometimes of my cats) and, occasionally, interviews with people I can cajole into talking to me on the phone. I'll talk grains. I'll talk hops: varietals and alpha-acid isomerization and the crazy experimental stuff they're growing in Oregon. And I will, of course, talk about the science of brewing. I may or may not be drinking a homebrew when I do all of this. Hopefully, by the sixth or seventh week, some of you will be drinking your own homebrew while reading it. I'll leave the running advice to someone else.

Next week: a recipe for Marathon Ale

Want to win this magnified Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the T-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

• Amazing Video: Timelapse View Of The Australian Outback's Giant Radio Dishes
• What It Would Cost To Launch Your House Into Space [Infographic]
• Experiment: Look At Pictures Of Cute Baby Animals To Improve Your Concentration
• The World's Steadiest Binoculars

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

• BeerSci: What Running Marathons Can Teach You About Beer
• What Absolutely Cannot Go Wrong When Felix Baumgartner Attempts The Longest Free Fall In History
• How I Survived A Trip Inside A Military Aviation-Testing Plant To Film 'Top Secret'
• The Art And Science Of Nobel Prize Prediction
• Most Retracted Scientific Papers Are Pulled Due To Fraud
• FYI: Is It Legal To 3-D Print A Handgun?
• Mohamed El-Naggar Hot-Wires Bacteria To Build Semiconductors
• 7 Ways We Thought The Radio Would Transform Presidential Debates
• Amazon Kindle Paperwhite Review: Read Books, At Night
• FYI: Does Watching A Debate In HDTV Influence How You Vote?
• A New View Of The Solar System
• The Goods: October 2012's Hottest Gadgets
• FYI: Could "Smiles," The Psychedelic Drug Implicated In An Actor's Death, Cause Violent Behavior?
• Video: 3 Crazy Maker Faire Projects
• After The LHC: The Next Really Big Experiments In Particle Physics

While browsing a bookstore near his home in Seattle last year, Rob Flickenger came across a graphic novel titled The Five Fists of Science. The story portrays inventor Nikola Tesla as a crime fighter who battles his enemies with a pair of handheld Tesla coils-transformers that discharge spectacular streams of electricity into the air. To Flickenger, 37, the guns were beautiful, hilarious, and inspiring. "I started thinking, How would I do it?" he says.

Flickenger wanted his homemade lightning machine to look as cool as the one in The Five Fists of Science, so he chose his model carefully: a huge motorized Nerf gun. With the help of Rusty Oliver at the HazardFactory, an industrial arts studio, he made an aluminum version of the plastic toy. He gathered cans, scrap metal, and even a bicycle fender and melted it all down. Then he and Oliver created a cast of the Nerf gun out of sand and clay and poured in the molten aluminum. After it hardened, Flickenger milled excess metal from the interior using a CNC machine and cleaned up the edges with a rotary tool.

Flickenger, who designs wireless infrastructure for developing countries, had previously taught himself the physics of high-voltage electricity through free online courses from MIT, and he had experimented with Tesla coils in the past. But the smaller size of a handheld model posed new challenges. It also gave Flickenger one big advantage over Tesla, he says: "We have really cheap Chinese power tools." An 18-volt lithium-ion drill battery would be more than enough to power the gun.

The real hurdle was engineering the gun's circuitry to safely generate high voltages. At one point, Flickenger wound conductive copper wire around a piece of acrylic tubing 1,100 times only to realize that the tubing was too fragile and would break apart easily. His early tests had mixed results. "I'd switch it on, and nothing would happen, so I'd switch it off. Then I'd switch it on again and set something on fire," he says, half-joking. In fact, safety was a major priority-at first, he activated the gun via a remote switch only. Later, he added a toggle with an arm-the-missile-type plastic hood to prevent shooting the gun accidentally. Right now, the gun's either on or off, but Flickenger plans to make it more like the cartoon version by adding a trigger.

When he finally got the gun working safely, Flickenger showed it off at his wedding reception, held on a friend's property. The guests were delighted. "There's a corona discharge that comes off the front that's just beautiful," he says. "It's almost like a fluid." Although the gun's not suited for fighting crime, it's extremely popular at parties.

(Get the specifics of the project and a video on the next page)/>

BUILDING A TESLA GUN

Cost: $800
Time: 9 months

POWER

The current flows into what Flickenger calls the "hockey puck of doom"-an end cap of PVC pipe filled with silicone. Inside the gun, a transformer from an old television and additional circuitry repeatedly doubles the current and then pumps it to a capacitor bank. When the six capacitors hold 20,000 volts, the gun starts firing. All that electricity still blew a few pucks, so Flickenger recently tested a mixture of silicone and hexagonal boron nitride that draws away the heat, preserving electrical components.

SPARKS

Once the electric current reaches 20,000 volts, it's powerful enough to jump the gap between two tungsten wires inside the aluminum gun. Flickenger couldn't find a housing strong enough to handle such a powerful spark, so he built his own out of heat-resistant porcelain. He also affixed a fan from an old computer server at one end to help cool the spark gap.

LIGHTNING

After jumping the gap, the current runs into the primary coil, eight loops of high-voltage insulated wire at the gun's nose. The coil induces a current in the secondary coil, a piece of plumbing pipe wrapped in copper wire. The current flooding the wire creates a magnetic field, which induces an electrical field inside the doughnut-shaped aluminum ring at the gun's nose. This field generates streaks of blue lightning. For the most part, Flickenger operates the gun in his lab with the lights off. It can go for about 30 minutes before it needs to cool down. "When it's running, it makes the whole room smell like a thunderstorm," he says.

SAFETY

The gun generates a lethal amount of current, so Flickenger typically sets it on his workbench instead of holding it himself. He grounds the device by clipping insulated high-voltage wire to the aluminum shell at one end, then to a nearby pipe or, if he's outside, a metal stake planted in the soil. This ensures the current won't run through the aluminum shell and into the inventor. "You don't want to be the fuse in that circuit," he says.

WARNING: We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.

In 1925, British professor A.M. Low wrote a rollicking forecast of life in the coming century. The Future, as Popular Science wrote two years later, was full of flying cars! One-piece suits! Radios everywhere! Much of which sounds downright absurd with the conveniences of hindsight. But here's the thing: Low was actually right.

Partially, anyway. No, we don't zip to work in aerial Priuses, but we've all seen enough onesies to last us until the 23rd century. Even more intriguing than the predictions that haven't come true are the ones that nearly did. Following are eight of our favorites:

1. Clock radio backrubs
"The typical man of the future will be called by a radio alarm clock in the morning to take a few moments' radio light treatment or massage."

How it's partially true: Clock radio came along in the 1940s. Sadly, massages are not yet included.

2. The monkey suit
"He will jump into his synthetic felt one-piece suit... men and women will dress almost alike."

How it's partially true: Synthetic clothes are cheap and accessible, but usually don't come in the form of onesies. Still, we all know someone who owns one. That someone might be us.

3. Bald and beautiful
"He will wear his hat almost continuously, because everyone will be bald."

How it's partially true: We're not sure why the future necessitates baldness, but we could well be on our way. Millennials of almost every crop have embraced undercuts and partial shaves. Call it Skrillex hair

4. Hands-free eats
"His breakfast may come from the communal kitchen by tubes."

How it's partially true: If Yoplait Go-Gurt and Skippy Squeeze had ever caught on, we'd probably be going to town on some semiliquid snacks right now.

5. Venture and adventure
"Most of [the businessman's] travel will be by air, and he will week-end in Asia or Africa."

How it's partially true: Private jets and eco-tourism.

6. No noise, no problems
"The world he lives in will be much quieter than today, for noise will have to be eliminated before long."

How it's partially true: Even though 21st century man hasn't eliminated noise, he can cancel it at will. Swagged out with Beats by Dr. Dre, Bose or some other pair of pricey headphones, the man of the present can cancel noise until his head aches.

7. Conference call
"Television will make long-distance business conferences possible."

How it's partially true: For some reason, many offices are still using telephones. The tech-savvy are Skyping in via computer screens. Even your grandmother knows how to do this.

8. Flying Cars
"There will be a wonderful Pegasus vehicle, an aerocar, that can fly as well as ply the roads."

How it's partially true: We'll have to hold out for this one. There's time yet.

Read the full story in our June 1927 issue: An Amazing Vision of the Future.

SpaceX's Dragon capsule launched Sunday night to bring cargo to the International Space Station, finally restoring America's capacity to send stuff to space without relying on the Russians.

Dragon lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, near where the space shuttles launched for 30 years before their retirement. The launch was the second trip for a Dragon capsule to dock with the station, but the first time it would actually carry cargo -- meaning it's the first time since the shuttles shut down that a U.S.-flagged ship has carried something to space. Dragon will rendezvous with the ISS Wednesday, and commander Suni Williams will grab it using the station's robotic arm.

Astronauts will spend the next couple days unloading 1,000 pounds of material and re-loading Dragon with another 2,000 pounds of used equipment and finished experiments. The capsule will come back to Earth in about three weeks, NASA said.

Congratulations to John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka, winners of this year's Nobel Prize in physiology/medicine for their work on adult stem cells. The two conducted groundbreaking work discovering that mature cells can be reprogrammed to become immature cells, capable of becoming any cell in the body - upending our understanding of how cells work, and providing a less-controversial avenue for research on stem cells.

Gurdon made his discovery back in 1962, working with frogs to prove that cell specialization, or differentiation, is reversible. His now-classic experiment replaced the immature cell nucleus of a frog egg with the nucleus from a mature intestinal cell. This modified egg cell developed into a normal tadpole. Yamanaka's work came later, in 2006, when he proved genetic manipulation could re-program mature cells in mice into pluripotent stem cells.

"We now understand that the mature cell does not have to be confined forever to its specialized state. Textbooks have been rewritten and new research fields have been established," the Nobel Prize committee said. You can go here to write your own message of congratulations.

Yamanaka's work was so groundbreaking that Nobel predictor extraordinaire David Pendlebury thought he would win back in 2010, by the way.

David Blaine is still perched on a 20-foot-high platform on Pier 54, jutting out from West 14th Street in Manhattan into the Hudson River, with seven giant Tesla coils shooting about a million volts of electricity directly at him. It has not been one of Blaine's more successful stunts, partly because it's not very dangerous. He's wearing a helmet and a "Faraday suit," which looks like (and, actually, mostly is) a suit of chain mail armor. It's made of some highly-conductive material, like steel, so the current, though scarily visible, doesn't actually touch Blaine's body--it's blocked by the suit, which directs it harmlessly away. The helmet, which looks like a steel-caged fishbowl, performs the same duty, and Blaine's actually wearing a UV-protected red plastic visor so his eyes aren't damaged by the bright light of the visible current. The Daily Mail talked to a 69-year-old physicist who said "the stunt is so safe, I'd do it." The challenge is mostly that the guy has to stand up for 72 hours straight, which is, you know, pretty tough, but not exactly death-defying.

I knew the stunt would be kind of boring. That's not why I went, last night, to stand outside in the first cold rain of fall without an umbrella. I went because somebody had the brilliant idea to hook up a piano to the Tesla coils so the notes were translated into powerful bursts of voltage--and the further brilliant idea to invite Andrew W.K. to play it, his every absurd note sending a corresponding lightning bolt at Blaine. A statement from Andrew, who, you'll note, uses an exclamation mark after every possible sentence:

At 7:30 I walked towards Pier 54 from the subway station. By the time I got to 10th Avenue, a couple of blocks from the pier, I heard it. A Tesla coil makes an unearthly noise when played melodically, like a buzzy alien trumpet. It was an oddly fitting soundtrack to that stretch of Manhattan, which in the daytime looks like an All Saints store. As I got closer to the pier, it began raining harder. I hadn't brought an umbrella; I'd packed my bag instead with a notebook (soaked, useless) and a fancy camera (soaked, probably ruined). The line moved quickly; it was not crowded there. I got in and walked past the plastic-wrap-covered Intel propaganda (one screen read "The Power of the Microprocessor"; nobody but me stopped to read it). At the end of the audience area were a few platforms. Up on the center platform, standing next to guys with modest gauges in their ears, you could look down and to your right and see Andrew, in his dirty white t-shirt and dirty white jeans, excitedly hammering away at the piano, his long black hair bouncing up and down. Directly in front of us was Blaine, looking more like a medieval scuba diver than anything else, surrounded by those seven spherical Tesla coils. Mostly Blaine seemed relaxed, sometimes giving an arm signal to those controlling the machine, though every once in awhile a particularly hard bass note actually made him jump with pain. (That's more from the force of the energy than from the amount of voltage.)

Andrew W.K. is a much better piano player than people give him credit for, but when he's given free rein to do whatever he wants, he mostly plays like a 13-year-old kid. He dicks around, playing arpeggiated major chords and scales, sometimes slamming on the keys with the heel of his hand to see what'll happen, sometimes bursting into whatever song he can remember how to play (sometimes it was one of his own, sometimes it was a ragtime of some sort, once it was the Star-Spangled Banner, and once it was "Come Sail Away" by Styx, for some reason). But the thing about Andrew W.K. is that despite his semi-metal thing, his hard-partying thing, and that whole bloody-nose-cover-art thing, his music is, for the most part, strikingly innocent, catchy in an almost 1970s power pop way, and kind of childlike. His best song, "She Is Beautiful," is almost shy; it's noisy and he's snarling, sure, but it starts off with the couplet "I never knew girls existed like you // And now that I do, I'd really like to get to know you." He just wants to have fun. That's what "party" means to him; it's not really about getting drunk or doing drugs or being destructive, it's having fun in whatever way the listener interprets fun.

His music is also incredibly stupid. He has songs called "We Party (You Shout)," "Party 'Til You Puke," and "Make Sex," and he doesn't sing so much as shout the title of the song over and over again. And his music is great not despite being incredibly stupid but because it is incredibly stupid. It makes other music sound pointless; why bother messing around with subtlety and irony and volume not cranked all the way up when you can have the shameless, unadulterated joy of partying? An Andrew W.K. song forces you to empty your mind and just enjoy the loud, pretty noises. It's somehow more pure than other music. It's so stupid it almost turns around and becomes smart.

That's how this David Blaine performance was. As Andrew W.K. headbanged his way through "Party Hard," the crowd chanted along with him, and even David Blaine (who never, ever smiles) was clearly having a great time. We were soaking wet, singing along with some of the stupidest lyrics ever conceived, while a man on a pedestal was electrocuted, repeatedly. It felt like the way we'll spend our Friday nights in a hundred years, on the moon--physically uncomfortable, with big dumb grins on our faces, pointing and shouting at a man in a cage as he's (harmlessly) tortured and grinning back at us.

Andrew W.K.'s 35-minute set was bizarre and joyous. It was one of the stupidest events I've ever been to, but sometimes, when you keep adding stupid on top of stupid, you get something maybe a little bit transcendent.

We could say NASA has just discovered a never-before-seen black hole, but it might also be true to say a new black hole just threw up signal flares and shouted at us to discover it.

A rare X-ray nova--a release of X-ray energy--was first caught by NASA's Swift telescope in September. Scientists focused in on it and unraveled a story: the black hole formed a binary system with a nearby star, sucking in gas, then eventually releasing it. It's a rare event--the first one the Swift satellite has ever seen.

It's hard to tell exactly how far away the black hole is, but NASA's estimates peg it at between 20,000 and 30,000 light years away. See the full explainer on it below.

[NASA]

It seems like just the other day that a 40-plus-pound set of books called Modernist Cuisine came out of Bellevue, Wash., and loudly impacted the world of technically minded cookery. But six volumes, priced at $450 and recommending that you equip your kitchen with all manner of industrial equipment, was a little daunting to the home cook. Today, Nathan Myhrvold's Modernist Cuisine At Home arrives on shelves with a somewhat more modest impact: a mere 10 pounds for a highly reasonable $130.

The new book recapitulates a lot of the valuable material from the original, but strips out a great deal of background and theory, and makes a noble attempt to address the home cook. You can make every recipe in this book without owning a high-pressure homogenizer or a spray dryer, for instance! In practice, many of the recipes still fly over the heads of casual cooks, but not nearly as far over as the first batch did.

The signature Modernist pistachio gelato -- which is made with no dairy, just the unctuous fat of pistachios -- reappears in this book, but it no longer requires you to make your own "constructed cream" by pulverizing nuts in a colloid mill. Instead you simply buy pistachio butter from a gelato supply company. The recipe recommends PreGel brand, which is conveniently available in a minimum order of 11 pounds for $449.50. Not as far out of reach, perhaps, but still, one wonders how many batches of this gelato are actually getting made by home cooks.

Just as in the first book, though, there are plenty of dishes that actually can and will be whipped up with relative comfort. The pressure-cooked carnitas, a long-time PopSci favorite, is back, now presented in more detail. MCaH discusses practicalities of techniques like sous vide in an actually helpful way, covering the bases for people who want to invest hundreds of dollars in water-bath technology but also taking other options seriously: if you want to cook salmon in your kitchen sink or hot tub, authors Nathan Myhrvold and Maxime Bilet have your back.

There are aliens all over Roswell, New Mexico. Not the ones purportedly found crash-landed on a ranch at the edge of town in 1947, but the ones waving from every corner of main street: Lime-green and orb-eyed, they stand sentinel outside the KFC, beckon you for a good night's rest at the Comfort Inn, lounge on divans in an upholstery store window, and cheerfully play maracas on the wall of a Mexican restaurant. I suspect, like other Roswell residents, they stow their belongings at UFO space storage and eat at Galactic Sushi.

I'm one of the few people passing through town not for the express purpose of rubbing shoulders with them. Rather, I'm here to report on the Red Bull Stratos mission--Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner's attempt to skydive from a record-breaking 120,000 feet--scheduled to take place here on Tuesday. Red Bull has erected a pop-up city, replete with a media center and mission control, at the Roswell International Air Center on the southern end of town. But like any good reporter, I start my investigation at the UFO Museum and Research Center.

Located in an old theater downtown, the museum has a sizeable exhibit devoted to a timeline of the 1947 "Roswell incident"--in a nutshell, strange wreckage reported by locals that newspapers reported as a flying saucer. Photo galleries serve as a guide to crop circles ("[Note] the surgical precision in the ‘wall' of a crop circle, as if created by a cosmic cookie cutter") and extraterrestrial dental implants ("Finding that this evidence is not alien in nature does not mean these individuals are not abductees"). In the rear of the museum, a flying saucer above an animatronic alien display whirs to life every few minutes.

I make my way past "X-Files" posters and a framed copy of the June 1997 Popular Science (50th anniversary "UFO Mania at Roswell" edition) to the library, where I'm informed the books are filed under the Dewey decimal system "from aliens to the paranormal-plus a couple of shelves of fiction." After flipping through boxes filled with UFO literature from around the world, I ask the librarian if she knows of any records related to dummies dropped from high-altitude balloons in the 1950s. She hands me a thick US Air Force document titled "The Roswell Report: CASE CLOSED." Between 1954 and 1959, the Air Force Aero Medical Laboratory released 67 anthropomorphic dummies from high-altitude balloons over New Mexico; another 180 fell from aircraft over New Mexico and Ohio. These dummies were the very first high-altitude skydivers and, the Air Force report contends, among the earliest alien life forms.

Before Red Bull Stratos, there was Project Excelsior-the Air Force program that launched a human, Colonel Joe Kittinger, to a record-setting 103,000 feet in 1960. And before Project Excelsior came an operation called High Dive: Its goal was to figure out whether a pilot or astronaut might parachute safely from extreme altitudes in the event of an emergency. Faux test pilots such as "Sierra Sam" were outfitted in flight suits and instrumented with data recorders, then sent as high as 98,000 feet to see how they fared on the way back down.

Answer: not well. "Damage to the dummies included loss of heads, arms, legs and fingers," according to "The Roswell Report." Prevailing winds pushed the majority outside of military reservations, some near Roswell, the author notes, and recovery crews swept in with an eyebrow-raising variety of military aircraft and vehicles. (They also used gurneys to transport the 200-pound dummies-in retrospect, an ill-considered choice). Several bodies were never recovered. What's more, accelerometers revealed the dummies entered uncontrolled spins of up to 200 revolutions per minute (RPM) as they fell.

That data is of great interest to the Red Bull Stratos medical team today. When Baumgartner steps out of a capsule on Tuesday, suspended beneath a 300-foot-wide helium balloon, it will be into the near vacuum of the stratosphere. The slightest momentum as he leaves the craft could send him into a similar uncontrolled spin, and for the first 18 to 20 seconds, there won't be enough air density for him to stabilize himself. That could be fatal, notes the mission's medicine director Jon Clark, because the spin would cause blood to pool in the head; if the blood vessels rupture, it would cause hemorrhagic stroke.

On the first of three jumps for Project Excelsior, Joe Kittinger also entered a flat spin, which built up to 120 rpm. The centrifugal force prevented him from moving his arms and he eventually blacked out. His main chute automatically deployed at 17,000 feet (and because that became tangled, his reserve chute opened at 10,000), saving his life. Baumgartner's team has designed a drogue chute that automatically opens in response to rotational acceleration rather than altitude--it's triggered if he experiences 2.5 Gs for 6 seconds (about 96 RPM).

Baumgartner will also be instrumented with a sensor system that straps to his chest and records heart rate, EKG signals, respiratory rate, and skin temperature; a three-axis accelerometer will measure three angular degrees of freedom (whether he's tumbling or spinning, for example). So few people have successfully parachuted from high altitudes that this data will help address the question first posed 60 years ago by project High Dive: Can humans safely escape a craft and fall back to earth from extreme heights? The answer, at the advent of the private space industry, will be just as timely as it was during the Mercury program.

Both projects High Dive and Excelsior operated under a lot of secrecy. "The Roswell Report" points out that one of Kittinger's flights probably also contributed to alien lore: A low-altitude, gas-balloon in which he was training other pilots crash-landed near Roswell; the injured pilots, including one with massive head trauma, were taken to a local hospital. After they'd received medical attention, Kittinger, worried about receiving unwanted publicity, rushed them back out in the chase helicopter. "The legend grew from there," Kittinger recalls in his memoir. A display at the museum includes a hospital employee describing a very similar scenario: a red-headed captain taking away "a creature with a huge, grotesque head."

The Red Bull Stratos launches seem to be flying under the radar too--at least in Roswell, where residents are most likely to spot a gossamer craft hovering over the horizon in the pre-dawn hours. I informally survey everyone I meet, from Denny's waitresses to gift shop staff, and by all accounts the only action in town is at the state fair and farmers market. The greeters at the visitor's center only learned about the Stratos dive this weekend, when a Belgian camera crew wandered in and asked for directions. As I leave there, I walk by an arts festival and admire the sidewalk-chalk portraits. A 5-year-old named Soren drew a very good likeness of a lime-green alien with orb eyes.

It has become awfully easy to discover woolly mammoth remains in northern Russia as the permafrost thaws--so easy a child could do it. (Thanks, climate change!) Still, we have to give some credit to the 11-year-old who stumbled upon an exquisitely preserved adult mammoth recently.

Yegevny Salinder was walking his dogs alongside the Yenisei river bank, when he smelled the mammoth's heels. That's right, smelled 'em. The "unpleasant" odor led him to a 30,000-year-old giant fossil that had a skeleton, ears, a tusk, some facial features and even a 1.5-meter long penis intact.

Mammoth experts from Moscow's Zoology Institute dug up the mammoth, which is now on his way to Moscow for further study. Alexei Tikhonov, director of the Institute's Zoological Museum, suggests that geneticists might try to clone him.

[BBC News and The Telegraph]

Sick of letting their mastery of calculus and classical mechanics go to waste, physicists in Australia and Hong Kong have figured out how to overcome the odds in roulette. You just have to know all the inputs -- preferably by tracking them with a digital camera -- and some differential equations.

The key is to know the ball's precise location, and the relative speed of the ball and the wheel, at the instant the croupier starts the game. If you know where the ball starts and how fast it and the wheel are rotating, you can make a much more educated guess about where it might land. Book your next trip to Vegas and read all about it in the AIP journal Chaos.

[Inside Science News Service]

The Americans, Chinese, and Turkish have the world's sharpest sense of impending doom, according to a new international survey: roughly one in five adults in Turkey and the U.S. believes that the world will end in this lifetime; in China, one in five believes Armageddon will arrive in 2012. Worldwide, one in 10 fears the world will end in 2012.

Not everyone is so morose--only 6 percent of French people think they'll live to see the end of the world, and just 4 percent of Germans and Indonesians believe in the 2012 doomsday predicted (at least ostensibly) by the Mayan calendar.

Check out GOOD Magazine's full infographic on the poll's results here.

The Mars rover Curiosity has been doing a variety of things to rocks since it landed, like zapping them with its laser eye, touching them to sniff their innards, and so on. On Sunday, a new first: The rover scooped up grains of Martian sand then shoveled them into its maw.

Curiosity is equipped with several internal instruments that will bake and X-ray rocks to determine their histories. This virgin scoop will be used to season some of the rover's guts. The sand, taken from a site called Rocknest, will be held and vibrated inside each chamber of Curiosity's sampling mechanism. In the image above, the gash in the soft Martian soil shows where Curiosity collected its sample.

Eventually, Curiosity will drill into rocks to pulverize them, and tuck the dust inside its instruments for further study. The Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) and Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instruments will help scientists determine if Curiosity's exploration zone in Gale Crater could have ever played host to life.

You probably know someone who has had bed bugs--or you've had them yourself. If not, chances are you will: since the late 1990s, bed bugs have spread across the U.S. and other parts of the world, making their way from coastal cities and travel hubs to inlands and smaller towns.

If you were born post-World War II in the U.S. or any other industrialized country, the news reports about bed bugs have likely left you scratching more than your heads. What are these things? Why haven't they bothered us before?

Turns out they have. 3,300-year-old preserved bed bugs have been found in tomb builders' sleeping quarters in an Egyptian archaeological site. The ancient Greeks even ate them. The most popular theory suggests early hominids lived with the bugs in bat-infested caves tens of thousands of years ago, and that the pest has been following us, its main food source, across the world ever since.

So why did bed bug numbers crash after WWII in some parts of the world and why did they swell again sixty years later? Now that the bug is back in our beds, what is it doing to us psychologically, socially and economically?

I try to answer these questions and more in the book I'm writing (University of Chicago Press ~2014). But I need your help. I have a Kickstarter page going to help raise extra travel funds to go to bed bug labs at universities, to public housing hit hard by the pest and maybe even to Ebola-tainted caves. Rewards include signed copies of the book, original bed bug artwork and more.

Brooke Borel is a contributing editor at Popular Science and is writing a book about bedbugs for the University of Chicago Press. Follow her on Twitter @brookeborel.

This is usually one of the best weeks of the year for me: Nobel week, when a select group of scientists are publicly lauded for their research and awarded a medal, some bragging rights for the faculty lounge, and a chunk of change. Some years have fantastic choices -- my recent favorite was the beautiful scientific narrative behind the discovery, implementation and fine-tuning of green fluorescent protein and its use as a reporter molecule in cell research. Others provide drama in the way of glaring snubs, like when the committee ignored Robert Gallo's work in HIV research. This year has provided neither. We have thus far gotten two entirely pedestrian awards.

This isn't to say that any of the work was bad -- it's not. But awards should either show some creative flair on the part of the granting committee (the aforementioned GFP award), or else showcase research so jaw-droppingly, pants-crappingly awesome (RNAi, Bose-Einstein condensates, scanning tunneling microscopy, and ribosome structure and function) that you can just imagine the heads exploding after publication.

The 2012 Physiology or Medicine award felt cobbled together under the loosest of pretenses: "reprogramming cells 2.0." ("Reprogramming cells 1.0" went to embryonic stem cells in 2007.) Sure, the work with enucleated Xenopus eggs was incredibly important, but the tacking on of the induced pluripotency discovery from a few years ago just felt like the committee was looking for justification to award the Xenopus research. So, not necessarily a safe choice, but not especially inspiring.

My pick for Physiology or Medicine? Histone modification all the way. That histones regulate certain kinds of gene expression is one of those pants-crapping results which seems obvious in hindsight, but is so pure and beautiful when one first reads the paper about it.

I don't have strong feelings on which groups I would have picked for physics -- quantum entanglement would have been nifty, or the postulation and eventual manufacture of metamaterials. This year it was just a snoozefest, exactly the kind of stuff you expect to be awarded and are vaguely surprised to discover it hadn't yet been.

Those are the ones where you suspect that one of two things happened during negotiations: either everyone agreed that It Was Time for a particular avenue to research to be given the official nod, or there was so much infighting over who merited the prize that this was the only compromise that everyone could equally tolerate.

I still hold out hope that the chemistry prize will yield something noteworthy. At this point, I don't care if it's a howler. I just want it to display some verve.

Martha Harbison is a senior editor at Popular Science and a former physical chemist.

The first of two new shows starring Popular Science Editor-in-chief Jacob Ward premieres tonight on the National Geographic Channel.

In "Top Secret," Ward goes behind the scenes at Plant 42, an aviation-testing site near Los Angeles, where private companies build jaw-dropping prototypes under military contract. Read our preview here, then tune in at 8 p.m. ET/ PT for the full episode.

Viewers who can answer a question based on the show have the chance to win this amazing book about the universe from Smithsonian/ DK Publishing. How? Follow us on Twitter (Twitter.com/PopSci). Then tweet your response at us with the hashtag #TopSecretAnswer. Tomorrow at 3 p.m., we'll pick a random winner from the pool of people who answered correctly.

Got it? Now for the question:

What was the name of the secret, triangle-shaped plane, the stuff of rumor, thought to have been invented during the cold war?

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