Doodle of Amir Aczel circa 2011

I'm saddened to hear about the death of science writer and mathematician Amir Aczel. From 2011 to 2013 I worked for the World Science Festival in New York City. During this time, I had to pleasure of seeing Aczel talk about the Birthday Problem on stage. For those that don't know it, I'll embed it below, but the gist is that it's not that uncommon for two people in a room to share a birthday.

Seeing him on stage demonstrate the commonality of what is normally perceived in social occasions as a miraculous coincidence was one of those mind-opening experiences for me. He showed me that math is everywhere, and that it's fun. I was able to talk to him a bit during WSF's webcast of the panel. I showed him the doodle above, which I had drawn for the occasion, and I remember how amused he was by it.

The Birthday Problem was a major inspiration for Sufficiently Remarkable, which is thematically about how common seemingly impossible events actually are.

Amir Aczel, Author of Scientific Cliffhanger, Dies at 65 - The New York Times

Thanks to Jennifer Ouellette for bringing this to my attention.

Side note: Aczel and science communicator Simon Singh both have books titled Fermat's Last Theorem. Which confused me at first.

Now that Go Pro owns the world of action sports, and any shredder with a selfie stick or a mouth-held Hero 4 can be an online action star, why bother hiring helicopters and cameramen to shoot an old-fashioned surf movie?

View From a Blue Moon is why.

The newly released surf epic follows rising surf star John John Florence as he cuts his way across 50-foot swells off remote shores in Africa, Brazil, and Tahiti. The 23-year-old Hawaii native starred in the roughly $2 million film, which was a partnership with Brain Farm, a production company that is the Lucas Films of action sports filmmaking. Florence and his crew spent three years, broke about 70 surfboards, and employed as many as three high-tech 4K RED cameras (cost: $50,000 each) in a day.

It’s those cameras, along with Florence’s daring, that give the film its power and raw beauty—and will make any amateur YouTuber shudder with envy.

“We wanted to make it more cinematic than any other action film you’ve seen,” Florence told Pop Sci. For that, his shooters used a RED Dragon camera, the crew's workhorse, for underwater and aerial footage.

How good is this flick and its technical innovations? This week, it won best movie in The Surfer Poll Awards, the Oscars of surfing. Florence swept the rest of the ballot for best male surfer, best maneuver, and best performance.

John John Florence in West Australia

Image from View From a Blue Moon

Chris Gurney

View From a Blue Moon also finished its first week as the top grossing action sports film in history. Available on iTunes and Vimeo, it has grossed more than any surf film in history—including Florence’s favorite, Endless Summer II.

Blake Vincent Kueny, the film's director, was also obsessed, a man charged with making that final edit. "I've turned down so much work over the past three years," he says. "Anything that came to me, I said no." But that obstinacy paid off: "People who screened the film told us to make sure we had written a speech before the awards," he says.

View From a Blue Moon’s Invoice

• Three Red Dragon cameras: $50,000 each
• One Phantom Flex 4K: $150,000
• One Shotover F1: $500,000
• One Movi: $15,000
• Two Helicopters: $2,000 to $3,000 an hour
• Total Budget: $1.5 to $2 million

To catch the action up close, Florence’s crew shot in remote spots with little oversight. That allowed them to get creative and take risks. “You can’t use a helicopter in Hawaii at 7 AM,” says Florence. “People would complain of the noise. But when you’re shooting in Africa, there are no limits.”

Also in Hawaii, a helicopter must hover at least 500 feet above anything it’s shooting. But on West Africa’s deserted shore, Florence’s shooter came as close as a volley ball, using a Phantom 4K with digital zoom to capture specks of spray and seabirds photo-bombing his shots.

John John Florence in Africa

From View From a Blue Moon

Sacha Specker

In one scene, a Bell A350 helicopter hovers just 20 feet from the water’s surface. “Its wash kept blowing me off my board,” he says. “Blake sent me a clip where I do an aerial and disappear in a cloud of spray from the heli.”

In another, a heli is flying 200 miles per hour just a few feet off a dirt road. “You can do that because no one is around,” says Florence. Some mornings the 12-person crew would wake up in the “and the helicopter is flying overhead at first light,” he says. “It was like holy shit. This is a war movie!”

Johannes Kepler

via ESA

For most of us, the name “Kepler” brings to mind the Kepler Space Telescope, NASA’s eyes into deep space. So far, it has found 4,696 candidate exoplanets, 1,031 of which have been confirmed, and since losing a second reaction wheel, it’s been repurposed into the K2 mission. The Kepler telescope is amazing, but so was it’s namesake, Johannes Kepler. David K. Love, a member of the Royal Astronomical Society, has brilliantly chronicled Kepler’s life and principle discoveries in his new book Kepler and the Universe: How One Man Revolutionized Astronomy.

The sixteenth century was an interesting one for astronomy. For centuries the Aristotelean geocentric cosmology prevailed. The idea that all the heavenly bodies orbited the Earth in perfect circles moved by prime mover firmly kept man at the centre of the universe. But the observations didn’t support this view, an inconsistency that prompted Nicolaus Copernicus to suggest in his 1543 De revolutionibus orbium coelestium— On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres— the heliocentric model wherein the Sun was central.

Copernicus’ view wasn’t an easy one to swallow, nor was it a safe one to believe in; decentering the Earth suggested that man wasn’t the centre of the Universe and therefore not the chosen species made in God’s image. The heliocentric model was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church as heretical, and promoting the ideas was deemed similarly criminal. And the idea was only 28 years old when Johannes Kepler was born on December 27, 1571, in Weil der Stadt, Württemberg, a town in modern-day Germany.

He developed a love of astronomy early on; he observed the Great Comet of 1577 when he was just six years old and watched a lunar eclipse in 1580. These events doubtlessly sparked his curiosity for science, but he chose instead to follow a religions path. Raised Lutheran, he studied theology at the University of Tübingen. It was here that he was introduced to Copernicus’ ideas, undeterred by their controversial nature, and ended up moving away from theology to teach math and astronomy in Graz, Austria.

In 1600 he moved to Prague to work under Tycho Brahe, an astronomer known, in part, for pioneering the geoheliocentric model wherein the Sun orbits the Earth but all the other planets orbit the Sun. Before his death in 1601, Brahe tasked Kepler with analyzing his as-of-yet unexplored observations. In pouring over his deceased colleague’s data, Kepler discovered that Mars’ orbit is elliptical, not circular. This discovery was published in his 1609 work Astronomia Nova, and it fed into what is now know as his first law of planetary motion: the path of the planets about the sun is an ellipse with the Sun as one of two foci. A second law also appeared in the work, stating that an imaginary line drawn from the center of the Sun to the center of the planet will sweep out equal areas in equal time.

Kepler and the Universe

Prometheus Books

In 1612, Kepler moved on to Linz, and seven years later published Harmonices Mundi. This later work gives us Kepler’s third law of planetary motion: the square of the orbital period of a planet is proportional to the cube of the semi-major axis of its orbit.

The three laws of planetary motion are Kepler’s most well-known but far from his only contributions to astronomy. His 1604 Astronomia Pars Optica is credited with founding modern optics, describing the process of refraction inside the human eye and the means by which two eyes gives us depth perception. His 1615 work Stereometrica Doliorum was the basis of integral calculus. He was also the first to suggest that the Sun orbits around its own axis.

Kepler life and the conditions that led to each of his major discoveries are chronicled in impressive detail by Love, who focuses on the science without downplaying the religions and personal elements that impacted Kepler’s life. Kepler and the Universe is an accessible work that will probably appeal most to astronomy, history, and space fans, but it also won't alienate neophytes with a strong interest in the cosmos. And at just over 200 pages, it’s fairly short, which makes it a great book for those long cross-country holiday flights!

Buy David K. Love's Kepler and the Universe: How One Man Revolutionized Astronomy on Amazon.

Three-dimensional video games could make your memory better right there (the hippocampus).

UC Irvine

Video games and science have a sordid past. They make you smarter, dumber, fat, skinny, relaxed, aggressive, and now, new research adds improved memory to that list.

A study appearing in the Journal of Neuroscience suggests that specifically three-dimensional video games can boost performance on memory tests by up to 12 percent. Researchers note that this is typically the percentage of memory function lost between the ages of 45 and 75.

“Just by playing a commercial video game and by exploring the world in it, you seem to get better in your ability to learn and remember details of other events,” Craig Stark said, in an email to Popular Science.

In the study, 69 college students (who weren’t already gamers) were split into three groups. Two groups were assigned to play either a 2D game (Angry Birds), or a 3D game (Super Mario 3D World) for 30 minutes every day over two weeks. There was also a group that didn’t play any games, to establish a baseline. Cognitive and memory tests were performed by the students before and after the two weeks. While the the control group and the participants who played the 2D game didn’t show any improvement, the scores of the 3D gamers jumped by 12 percent.

A separate group of competitive gamers were also tested on the standardized memory test. Professional 2D game competitors, who play Super Smash Bros, were compared to professional 3D competitors, who play League of Legends. In these studies, 3D games were classified as those who had a perceived depth that players could explore, rather than side-scrolling games. Results showed that League of Legends players ranked higher on average by about 10 percent, close to the non-gamer scoring.

Researchers draw their knowledge of why this might be happening from research in rats. They’ve seen before in studies that this kind of 3-dimensional, detail-rich video games stimulates the hippocampus, which controls spatial memory in the brain. Video games, in essence, can serve as practice for the brain.

“These are early days for this research,” Stark said. “But it suggests that there is something to the ‘use it or lose it’ hypothesis of cognitive function.”

The study showed promise for memory growth in college-age humans, but the team’s next step is to see if similar principles apply to fixing memory loss in older people. Stark says that he's seen this mental exercise work in rodents, and now it’s a matter of testing the principle on humans.

“If playing video games or other means of 'environmental enrichment' can serve to do the same thing,” Stark said. “We’d have a real win on our hands.”

Ever wonder what it's like to live aboard the International Space Station? What kind of research is being done there?

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko are each spending a year aboard the International Space Station, and on Wednesday December 9th, 2015, they're talking to us LIVE from the ISS at 10:05am ET.

Watch their conversation with Popular Science executive editor Jennifer Bogo in the stream embedded above. And submit your questions on social media with #AskPopSci.

Antarctica

Andreas Kambanis/FlickrCC by 2.0

It's a small world after all. Laying aside philosophical exercises of butterflies and storms, changing conditions in one area of the world can, and do, affect locations thousands of miles away. Dust from the Sahara desert fertilizes the Amazon, smog in Chinese cities increases flooding in rural areas much farther away, and rising temperatures and melting ice caps are forcing sea level rise in areas nowhere near glaciers. A new study adds another item to the list.

In a paper published in the journal Atmospheric Environment, researchers describe how they were able to trace the rise of Chile's copper industry by analyzing layers of ice in Antarctica, 4,000 miles away. Other pollutants from distant human activities have been detected in Antarctica in the past, but these deposits have an interesting story to tell.

How did the arsenic get there? Arsenic is a naturally occurring but highly toxic element, and often shows up in the same geologic formations as another valuable resource--copper. But copper mixed with arsenic doesn't sell as well as copper that's just copper. So, for years miners have had to extract arsenic from copper ore by first leaching it away with chemicals or smelting it out, and then heating it so all that remains is the desired metal. In this case, the arsenic is released into the atmosphere, where it mixes with the air and eventually falls out of the sky as precipitation--even in an area as distant from the original site as Antarctica. Many copper deposits in Chile have been dealing with arsenic for years, since the industry took off in the 20th century.

In the study, researchers examined cores of ice taken in Antarctica and measured the amount of arsenic in each layer. In each ice core taken, the layers represent a natural record that stretched from 1883 to 2008. They found that before 1900, levels of arsenic were pretty low, measuring 1.92 picograms per gram. But the researchers noticed that there was a spike in arsenic levels soon after the copper industry really took off in Chile in the 1940s. By 1950, the rate had soared to 7.94 picograms per gram. Then, in the 1990s, the Chilean government began creating detailed environmental regulations that curtailed the release of arsenic into the atmosphere. After the new guidelines came into effect, the arsenic levels in Antarctica dropped back down to pre-1900 levels.

Those are pretty low numbers overall. For comparison, the World Health Organization sets the safe limit of arsenic in drinking water at 10 micrograms per liter. With one million picograms in one microgram and about 1000 grams of water in one liter (caveat: no, ice and water aren't the same density as ice tends to be less dense than water but it might help you put the numbers in perspective), even the highest levels in the 1950 layer of the Antarctic ice is considered well within the acceptable limits. But that's not the end of the story. While Antarctic ice might be ok (on this front at least) other areas might not be so lucky.

Franciele Schwanck, the lead author of the paper told Chilean newspaper La Tercera that it was likely that much more of the arsenic fell out of the sky long before it reached Antarctica, creating a potential public health hazard in areas of Chile that are closest to the copper mines.

Earlier today, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station received a welcome delivery from Earth: over 7,700 pounds of supplies, including food, science experiments, and most unusual of all, several Microsoft HoloLens headsets. Just what will the astronauts be using these crazy new headsets for?

Popular Science got the opportunity to ask this very question in a live interview earlier today with NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and his Russian counterpart Mikhail Kornienko (video above).

Both men are spending over a year aboard the station as part of a grand experiment to find out how long missions in space affect the human body. And having already spent 257 days of their year-long mission inside the relatively cramped confines up in orbit, they're probably more eager than most to try something totally new.

But beyond that, it's easy to see how Microsoft's HoloLens could be quite useful aboard the station: the experimental headset uses a type of technology known as augmented reality (or "AR" for short), which lets you see computer graphics and other digital information layered over the real world around you (unlike virtual reality, which blocks the real world and immerses you totally in a virtual one).

In the few previous demos of the HoloLens, Microsoft has shown off gamers battling hordes of virtual robots that appear to break through the walls of your living room, as well as more mundane but potentially constructive purposes like letting medical students see inside models of the human body, or letting product designers mock-up 3D designs out of thin-air.

So what will the station astronauts be doing with the HoloLens? Popular Science executive editor Jennifer Bogo asked Scott Kelly, and he responded by pointing out two possible working situations: going through a list of procedures, and interacting with space station equipment. As Kelly said:

You know I actually got the opportunity to try that out before I launched, and it seems like there are certain capabilities that would be good for us onboard the space station. One would be, you know right now we look at the computer or an iPad to look at procedures. And if you could have a procedure right in your field-of-view, something that was command-able with your voice, you know where you could scroll through the different steps, that would be helpful. It also has this capability where somebody on the ground perhaps could be looking basically at what you’re looking at, and be able to write in your field of view. So let’s say we’re working on a piece of hardware, and we’re not that familiar with it, but we have an expert on the ground, you know that person could basically see what we’re seeing and make annotations, point to things, and kind of lead us through a particular activity. You know that’s one of the many capabilities of that, or similar hardware, that we’re excited about.

The HoloLens won't be available outside of Microsoft and the space station until early 2016, and even then, the first copies will go only to registered software developers for the eye-popping price of $3,000 for each headset. So for now, we'll all have to enjoy its capabilities through the eyes of the astronauts!

First Place

A Trachelius ciliate feeding on a Campanella ciliate in a screenshot from the winning Nikon Small World in Motion video.

Nikon Small World/Wim van Egmond

It's the classic story of any nature documentary. A predator hunts down its prey. The hapless victim struggles to escape, but is overpowered and consumed. It's the (very small) circle of life.

The winners of the fifth annual Nikon Small World in Motion were announced today, and the winning video featured this classic life and death struggle played out in miniature. Winner Wim van Egmond captured the encounter between two types of ciliates (single celled organisms) by filming the hunt at a visual magnification of 250X.

“Wildlife is so close to us, yet most of us never look close enough to see it,” van Egmond said in a statement. “A pool in your garden is actually a miniature underwater jungle teeming with life. If you want to see the world, your backyard is a great place to start.”

See van Egmond's winning video here:

Wim van Egmond has participated in the Nikon Small World photography and videography contests for several years now, placing or winning numerous times. That's not to say that van Egmond didn't have some stiff competition.

Second place was taken by Danielle Parsons, who captured this incredible and mesmerizing look at the gut contents of a termite:

And in third place is this horrifying reboot of Alien by Gonzalo Avila featuring a parisite wasp larvae breaking out of its host caterpillar and spinning a cocoon. As awful as it might seem, these parasite wasps are actuallly helping keep down the populations of invasive moths in Australia and New Zealand.

The winners received $3000, $2000, and $1000, respectively, to be put towards Nikon products.

The contest's photography winners were announced in October.

Camera And Object Around Corner

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Vision is one of the more limited ways to perceive the world. As much as people can see within their line of sight, that line doesn’t bend around corners, unfortunately. This is frustrating at the best of times, and potentially tragic in others--for example, when a child runs behind a car and a driver can’t see them. Researchers at theHeriot-Watt University in Edinburgh created a system that, using cameras and lasers, can not only see around corners, but can tell if hidden objects have moved.

Here’s how it works: a laser beam goes forward in a straight line angled slightly downward. Light scatters from where it hits, and some of that light is reflected off of objects not seen, like one around a corner. A special camera watches the ground ahead for where the light bounces back, and then picks up signs of, say, a light bouncing off that person hidden around the corner. When the person moves, the place they reflect the laser changes, and suddenly the system can see someone lurking out of sight.

The science of it is incredibly tricky, requiring very precise timing and accurate cameras. The researchers boast that their method can “follow the movement of an object located a metre away from the camera with centimetre precision.” Or, converted away from the metric elegance of that statement, it can see things about 3 feet away from the camera with about half an inch of error.

Someday, the technology could give cars an extra way to avoid accidents, and might also help out in surveillance and law enforcement.

Watch a video about it below:

Above, the first puppies born through in vitro fertilization. The research and birth took place at Cornell University.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

Thirty-seven years after the first human baby was born via in vitro fertilization, researchers at Cornell University announced that the first set of puppies conceived using the method have been born. With this success, researchers say they plan to use this technique to try to conserve endangered species and to study and treat many genetic diseases that are common in dogs. Their results were published today in the journal, PLOS ONE.

A host female dog gave birth to seven puppies, two of which were from a beagle mother and a cocker spaniel father, and five of which were from beagle parents.

Why it took so long

For the past thirty years, researchers have been trying to use assisted reproductive treatments in dogs. Unlike in humans and other mammals, an oocyte (or unfertilized egg) in a dog requires time to mature before it can be fertilized. Finding the ideal time to remove the egg from the female dog’s oviduct (Fallopian tubes in humans) was crucial for reproductive success, and the researchers found that by leaving the egg in the oviduct for one extra day, it was much more likely to later become fertilized.

“The work reported in this new study makes a great advance by identifying the timing at which ovulated oocytes reach the ability to be fertilized,” says Pablo Ross, an assistant professor at the University of California at Davis, who studies reproductive biology in domestic animals and wasn't involved in the study.

The researchers overcame two additional challenges: They figured out how to better simulate the conditions inside a female’s oviduct that allows for fertilization to occur, and they found that freezing the embryos allowed them to insert the eggs at the right time when a female dog is in her reproductive cycle--which occurs only once or twice a year.

Treating heritable diseases

Alex Travis, a professor of reproductive biology at Cornell who led the study, says the success of this method will help not only treat diseases in dogs but humans as well. Humans and dogs share more than 350 similar heritable conditions, which is more than any other animal, including mice who are often used as a model for disease.

The ability to produce high-quality embryos with IVF will allow researchers access to the most simple of all the live stages of any individual, which is the one-cell stage, says Ross. This gives scientists the ability to perform germline editing using techniques like CRISPR more effectively, and therefore a useful way to study diseases common to both humans and dogs.

This could also help in researchers’ attempts to eliminate many heritable diseases in dogs alone. Currently, many researchers and breeders employ genetic testing to screen for these conditions, which can be very successful. However, when a certain disease affects such a high percentage of a breed, this screening process could lead to inbreeding, which can increase the chances of other heritable diseases.

By using gene-line editing techniques like CRISPR, a modification that eliminates a disease causing gene will result in not only that animal being free from disease but also its offspring and all future generations; in this way, certain heritable conditions could theoretically be eliminated.

Travis and his team, in conjunction with the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, also plan to use IVF for wildlife conservation. IVF allows researchers to store semen and eggs from endangered species and then bring those back into the gene pool in captive populations, says Travis. In the future, they hope to employ IVF maturation, in which researchers remove the eggs from the ovaries before they are matured and then they mature in the lab instead, and are then fertilized. This technique could especially help endangered populations where a young female dies before she has a chance to reproduce. IVF maturation could give those genes a “second chance” says Travis, and help ensure that female genes still make it to future generations.

While that technique still requires more research to perfect, researchers are hopeful that the success of IVF as well as the recent advances in gene editing will help researchers to attempt to better treat and prevent heritable diseases in dogs.

Star Trek Universal Translator

Paramount/CBS Studios/Memory Alpha

It’s hard for a military to win hearts and minds if none of its members speak the local language. Humans who grew up speaking a language and joined the military are the best solution, followed closely by interpreters recruited locally. But that’s not always possible, as there's sometimes a rarity of language speakers or a lack of safety guarantees for the interpreters. For this reason, the military wants a technology that can work as an interpreter in real time--a universal translator, if you will. Or perhaps a less-squirmy version of Douglas Adam’s Babelfish. Last week, the Air Force Research Laboratory put out a solicitation for such a device. They’re calling it, simply “Human Language Technologies.”

Their solicitation says they want to conduct research and development in automatic speech recognition, machine translation, natural language processing, information extraction, information retrieval, text-to-speech synthesis, as well as other speech and language processing technologies.

Specifically, the Air Force says that these technologies are necessary as, “much of the information needed to effectively understand, anticipate, manage, and operate in the global environment is found in foreign language speech, text, videos, and images,” especially for “lesser spoken languages that have high military interest but lack sufficient linguists and automated language processing capabilities.”

So why is it the Air Force, and not, say, the dirt-kicking Army or first-in Marines that are looking at this technology? The Air Force collects “signals intelligence,” which is information from observable relayed communication. The Air Force has done this for decades, using, among other means, satellites that spied on Soviet radio, radar, and microwave transmissions.

Today, signals intelligence can also include information sent online or over mobile networks. Because messages are often encrypted, decoding is as much a part of the task as capturing the signal, and if the people that the Air Force wants to watch are communicating not just in code but in a language they don’t know, a universal translator might help decipher the message.

The announcement posted last week is just within the first stage of an acquisition program. The Air Force Research Lab says they’ll release more details of the project in January 2016. They expect the contract to award $10 million over 5 years, or about 8 percent the cost of an F-35.

Venus

An image of Venus taken by Akatsuki on its approach to Venus.

JAXA

Usually when you miss an exit, it doesn't take you five years to return to your highlighted route. But that's what happened to Japanese spacecraft Akatsuki, which left Earth headed for Venus in May 2010. Unfortunately, it didn't make it.

In December 2010 Akatsuki missed Venus and got pulled towards the sun. The failure was a blow to the Japanese space program, JAXA. But they persevered, programming a detour that would have the probe circling the sun for five years until it got a good chance to try again. Today they announced that Akatasuki has been successfully inserted into the planet's orbit.

NASA congratulated JAXA on their accomplishment.

Now that Akatsuki has made it to Venus, it's time for the probe to get to work. The probe will study the planet's climate. Venus has a much thicker atmosphere than Earth, with a very different composition. Learning more about the differences between the two could give scientists here more insight into our own atmosphere.

DJI Phantom With Hat

Drone by Clément Bucco-Lechat via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0, Santa Hat by Author

How is a drone supposed to celebrate the holidays? While the unmanned flying machines lack belief systems or even the capability to comprehend belief, that’s no reason to leave them out of annual traditions.

Drones, it turns out, can add a festive air to any event. For example, they’re great at playing catch ... unless the thing they’re supposed to catch is a pumpkin as it's fired out of a cannon:

The video by YouTube user Ugly Tutorials says that the pumpkin was fired at up to 200 mph. It destroyed the drone and gimbal, but the GoPro recording the video survived.

Perhaps, after the pumpkin-shaped onslaught of Halloween and Thanksgiving, drone pilots are looking for a little help figuring out their vehicles. In Massachusetts, they’re in luck. Dronemaker DroneDart is offering a “Santa Certified” training course. The two-hour courses don’t teach flying, but they do cover the rules of drone flying, so that Christmas-morning drone pilots don’t break the law. For instance, BetaBoston reports:

[R]ecreational drones are not to be flown higher than 400 feet and always within sight of the pilot; they must stay at least five miles from airports, and not come near power stations, prisons, government offices, or other sensitive sites; they shouldn’t be flown over people or moving vehicles; and, of course, they’re not to be operated under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Once certified, why not break out the drone and use it to help decorate the house? In this short video, remote-control toy company Hobbico uses a quadcopter to put the finishing touches on a gingerbread house:

Cute, but that face is creeping us out.

Motobot was created to surpass you

Yamaha

Manufacturers often bring celebrities from motor sports to auto shows to glam up the booth and offer photo ops. Yamaha brought a racer to the 2015 Tokyo Motor Show this fall, one who had the audacity to challenge one of the winningest motorcycle racers in the world, Valentino Rossi. “I was created to surpass you,” said this cheeky racer in a video.

The thing is, the racer is a blue plastic humanoid robot with actuators instead of muscles and tendons. Yamaha engineers want to first get Motobot, as they call the rider, to hit 100 km/h (62 mph) in a straight line on a regular motorcycle—throttle, clutch, and all. Then they’ll teach him to corner and run a slalom. Then, they’ll turn him loose on a racetrack, where Motobot’s machine learning systems will allow him to incorporate data acquired on each lap of the track to improve his times.

The goal is for Motobot to exceed 200 km/h (124 mph)—and do it better than fellow Yamaha racer Rossi.

Barely a month after Motobot issued his challenge, Formula E announced that its electric racing series would add a support race where the cars are all autonomous. Roborace will run before the human-piloted race in the 2016–2017 season on the same circuits the main event will be using. The Roborace teams will use two electric cars to run a one-hour race, just like the Formula E teams, and the cars will be identical to each other. The difference in Roborace events will be the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities of the driverless vehicles.

The end goal of both Motobot and Roborace is to improve the safety and viability of autonomous vehicles of the future. If a driverless car can complete a race lap or 40 at speed, it can probably drive you to work while you answer emails.

Sometimes to confront a huge problem, you need to step back and get a better perspective. When it comes to global issues like climate change, there's really only one place to go to get a worldwide perspective. Space.

Today, Popular Science executive editor Jennifer Bogo interviewed two astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Speaking about the atmosphere, Commander Scott Kelly comments that from his perspective, 249 miles up, the atmosphere is "something that we need to protect, because it's the only thing that's protecting us from space."

Watch his entire response to the climate change question above.

What's life like on the International Space Station? Earlier this morning, Popular Science had the opportunity to ask two of the people best equipped to answer that question in the entire universe: NASA astronaut Scott Kelly and Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, both of whom are currently living on the station for over a year! (So far, they've spent over 257 days in orbit.)

In a video interview streamed live on NASA TV, Popular Science executive editor Jennifer Bogo asked Kelly and Kornienko a variety of questions on several subjects, including some fielded by you, the readers. These touched upon everything from how astronauts will use their newly arrived Microsoft HoloLens headsets to growing vegetables in space to their view of climate change and the Paris Climate Talks to times they've had to hack the space station itself. All of the answers the astronauts provided were fascinating.

Watch the full interview for yourself above. And be sure to join us for more #AskPopSci events in the near future!

NOAA/FlickrCC by 2.0

NOAA Vessel

Everyone wants to read other people's emails now. From the Sony Hack to the Clinton emails, there is huge interest in the words pouring between people electronically.

Tussles over political or entertainment emails make headlines, but another email battle over more scientific subject matter has been going on for several months.

Essentially, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Kathryn Sullivan, is refusing to turn over internal emails between NOAA scientists to House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, who has subpoenaed communication (including emails) relating to a study published earlier this year.

The subpoena came after NOAA scientists published a paper in Science which showed that global warming had not, in fact, slowed down in the years since 1998. Smith, who has been outspoken in his opposition to mainstream climate science asked for the emails two months ago, but Sullivan refused to hand them over.

Since then, Sullivan has held her ground, a stand that has garnered her much acclaim in the scientific community. In two new letters sent to Sullivan this week, hundreds of scientists reiterated their support for her.

Why such furor over emails? In part, it's because the scientists have already turned over reams of data and correspondence related to the paper to the committee already. But it's also because Sullivan and her peers view the request as unreasonable, and fear the chilling repercussions to research if scientists were forced to conduct all future communications as though someone was reading over their shoulder.

In a letter, 587 scientists thanked Sullivan for standing up for scientific integrity.

As you know, these actions can create a chilling effect on both federal scientists and any other scientist with whom they collaborate or correspond. We urge you to continue to stand firm against these bullying tactics in order to protect NOAA scientists' ability to pursue research and publish data and results regardless of how contentious the issue may be. Please continue to resist this dangerous abuse of congressional oversight power.

Former NOAA employees voiced their support as well, cautioning that turning over the emails would result in damage to NOAA's ability to conduct research.

We know firsthand that scientists need intellectual space to debate new ideas and give each other confidential feedback without worrying that an individual comment will be subject to public scrutiny at a later date. Turning over scientists’ correspondence and other information to the committee would significantly damage NOAA’s ability to conduct science by putting NOAA’s scientific independence at risk, and making it more difficult for NOAA scientists to collaborate with peers in academia and the private sector.

Smith backed off of his request for the scientists' emails earlier this month, limiting his request to non-scientific NOAA personnel ... for now.

Earlier this month, the New York Times published two stories extremely critical of Smith's actions; an editorial describing his demands as "The Latest Attack on Climate Science", and another op-ed written by climate scientist Michael Mann titled "The Assault on Climate Science." In response, Smith wrote a letter to the New York Times published on Wednesday:

Alarmists like Mr. Mann seek to promote a political agenda, then claim to feel intimidated when anyone asks questions. But claiming that the debate is settled is the opposite of the scientific method. If NOAA has nothing to hide, why not provide the evidence to support the agency’s claims?

They did. In Science, seven months ago.

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Police Drone With Practice Targe

The future is clumsy as heck. Yesterday, Tokyo Police launched their first anti-drone squad, a team designed to enforce new rules banning drones from dense urban areas. To stop bad guys with drones, they have big net-wielding drones of their own, built to catch the offending craft in the act. If that sounds like it’d be sleek, that’s exactly wrong. Here’s what a police drone catching a quadcopter with a net actually looks like:

That’s a big police drone taking off, unfurling a net, and pursuing a standard-sized quadcopter across a parking lot. Here’s the attack from another angle:

The police drone has all the grace of a mechanical jellyfish trying to snag a crab. After catching the quadcopter, the arresting drone sets it down gently. One fewer hostile drone in the sky, with minimal damage to the machine itself.

It's not the first drone to catch drones with a net, but it might be the first police drone to go into service explicitly for that purpose.

Watch the full process below:

[Via The Verge]

As the Curiosity rover slowly ascends Mount Sharp, it's getting its first up-close look at Mars's sand dunes -- the first time we've investigated active dunes on another planet.

The “Bagnold Dunes” surround the mountain's northwestern edge. Some are as tall as a two-story house, and they're very active. Satellite imagery shows the Martian winds shift the dunes by as much as 3 feet per year.

Curiosity's arrival at the dunes is not only a first for a Martian spacecraft, but for all of space exploration. “No active dunes have been visited anywhere in the solar system besides Earth,” says a NASA press release.

The rover will scoop up a sample of the dune material to analyze in its onboard laboratory. It'll look for clues about the dunes' composition and how the wind shapes the dunes. For example, "These dunes have a different texture from dunes on Earth," says Nathan Bridges from the Curiosity team. "The ripples on them are much larger than ripples on top of dunes on Earth, and we don't know why. We have models based on the lower air pressure. It takes a higher wind speed to get a particle moving. But now we'll have the first opportunity to make detailed observations."

Curiosity's primary objective right now is to explore Mount Sharp, a layered, 18,000-foot mountain that rises up out of Gale Crater. The rover's goal is to check out as many of those rock layers as possible. Just as layered sediments on Earth provide a window into the past, scientists are hoping the layers of Mount Sharp will provide some insight into Mars' geological history.