Facebook

Facebook Messenger x Uber

The ride-sharing app has joined forces with Facebook to allow users to hail rides within Messenger

Many took issue with Facebook spinning Facebook Messenger off into its own separate mobile app, but today’s inclusion might ease the transition. The social network king announced today Uber integration directly within Messenger. Simply share an address, tap on it and select Request a Ride.

Riders get their first Uber free when ordering via Messenger (up to $20), for new Uber users and existing. Uber newbies can register within Messenger.

Many apps in 2015 continue to look for ways to prevent users from leaving the app, in hopes of being the one-stop-shop for any and all needs. Snapchat's Discover section, for example, offers news and video clips so users remain updated on the world while staying within Snapchat's borders. We've seen Facebook's Messenger platform used to handle purchases previously with Everlane and customer service with Hyatt.

Facebook's decision to include third-party application functionality may not stop at Uber. We could see this functionality expanded to Lyft, Gett and other car-summoning apps. Facebook could also perhaps expand Messenger to include mobile apps that allow users to order items, buy tickets or check on their smart home devices. Programs like WeChat in China have shown the power of natural language apps within a messaging app.

While crowning one mobile application as the one to rule them all may take a while, there is something to be said for only having to master one interface. And having that interface work for you instead of jumping through hoops--getting an address, switching apps, and pasting it into Uber, for instance.

For now, the capability is limited to American users, but we expect it to expand worldwide wherever Facebook and Uber operate, eventually. As Facebook said in a press statement: "This service is currently in testing and will be available to select users in the locations where Uber operates in the United States. More countries and other transportation partners will be available soon."

With companies like Google looking to provide competition in the taxi space with their autonomous vehicles, having Uber being everywhere and easy to use will continue to be a priority for the company. The ability to quickly convert shared addresses to hailed cabs will only give smartphone owners more reasons to use the service. Along with Facebook expanding this service, we may see Uber look to be part of more services as well.

Aerodrome

Drone Image From Aerodrome

When the new airport in Boulder City, Nevada opens, it will be missing a key component: passengers. Construction just started on the facility, which hopes to attract hobbyists, government officials, rescue workers, and private businesses, who are all eager to find a spot where they can fly and test their unmanned aerial vehicles. The site, which drone industry enabler Aerodrome is developing, bills itself as the world’s first drone airport.

The company has teaching facilities in Detroit, Michigan and Henderson, Nevada. Its stated mission is to “provide education and FAA certification for flying and maintenance, job/career placement, advisory services, outsourced aviation services and repair services.” If the drone industry is to take off, it will need pilots with more training than that gained by just flying a quadcopter into a tree after Christmas. Fast Company reports:

”The Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) industry envisions an unprecedented $82.1 billion growth between 2015 and 2025," an Aerodrome document claims, "generating at least 103,000 new, high-paying jobs. But the industry faces a crippling talent gap between the number of new jobs that will need to be filled and an undeveloped pool of trained individuals and groups needed to command this bold new skyscape...Aerodrome exists to fill the gap between need and opportunity. We are uniquely prepared to help meet the increasing demand for an unmanned systems workforce.

There are already military droneairports, which are great for military pilots and understandbly off-limits for anyone else. A facility like this could help the commercial drone sector out a lot, and will further cement Nevada’s position as a modern transportation research hub.

[Fast Company]

Yasmina Choueiri/FlickrCC by 2.0

Fog in San Fransisco

Fog is a hazard to ships, but it might also be a problem for the food web.

Today at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting, researchers discussed new evidence that the amount of coastal fog is not only increasing, but in some areas of California at least, it contains a surprising amount of a form of mercury called monomethylmercury. Although monomethylmercury can be hazardous to human health, there's not enough of it in the fog to be dangerous.

Marine fog typically arrives in the summer months in areas where ocean surface temperatures are cold, but the air above is warmer. Clive Dorman of San Diego State University said that by analyzing the records of ships in the coastal areas in northern California and Oregon, he was able to show that between 1960 and 2007 the number of days with fog on the coast went up by 7.4 percent, a finding that mirrors other high-fog areas around the world, like the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, which also have a considerable amount of fog that has likewise been increasing.

The increase matters, not only to ships, but to ecosystems on land. Kenneth Coale of Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and Peter Weiss-Penzias from UC Santa Cruz found that levels of a kind of mercury called monometylmercury were 19 times higher in fog than in rain, even in the same area.

Mercury gets into the oceans from smokestack emissions and other industrial sources. It is a public health concern because it tends to build up in the food chain, as animals with low levels of mercury in their bodies are eaten by carnivores. The carnivores, which may eat many mercury-contaminated prey, end up with a lot of mercury in their bodies. The most worrying form of mercury is monomethylmercury, a kind of mercury linked to severe health effects in humans, including kidney failure, birth defects, and neurological impairment.

Previous research by the team had found that the fog had just five times the levels of monomethylmercury as rain. Now, in addition to noticing even higher concentrations, they think they may have figured out where the monomethylmercury is coming from.

The answer is another form of mercury--dimethylmercury, a gas that is also present in ocean water, and which comes from smokestacks and mining.

It turns out that most fog is slightly acidic, and the acid is enough to convert the gaseous dimethylmercury that emerges from the oceans into the more solid monomethylmercury. The fog then carries it inland where it is deposited on various surfaces and eventually enters the food chain.

So what does that mean for us? Nothing much right now. The levels of mercury in the fog, though higher than that of the rain, don't reach a level where they are an immediate public health risk. But the results are worrying in a larger sense. Mercury has been measured in terrestrial plants and animals, and might have an impact on land-based food webs.

"I would definitely not eat any spiders from foggy areas," Coales joked at a press conference. Spiders in the area have been measured as having mercury levels above the FDA's accepted limit.

Humans generally don't eat spiders, but birds and other animals do. Coales and Weiss-Penzias plan to continue their work looking into how mercury from fog affects the food web on land, and hope to eventually be able to use drones to monitor the fog as it comes in.

Posted without comment. If you need me, I'll be in the other room cleaning up the mess.

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During George Lucas’s childhood in the 1950s, World War II was still very much a part of popular culture despite being safely in the rearview mirror. Action heroes frequented the silver screen in large numbers, and none were more glamorous than fighter pilots. It’s easy to see how the war and the action flicks it spawned inspired the galactic dogfights of the Star Wars films. Here we match up Star Wars fighters with their WWII counterparts and their modern equivalents.

Lucas Film LTD

Star Wars Dogfight

An X-Wing T-70 does battle with a TIE fighter in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Jaguar Land Rover

Jaguar Formula E Race Car

It’s been a while since Jaguars prowled race tracks. Next year, they’ll do it with more of a whirr than a growl as they enter the third season of Formula E, the all-electric racing series.

Like many manufacturers, Jaguar Land Rover wants to up its electric vehicle game, and they see the Formula E series as an old-school way to test new-school technologies. This idea isn’t new, of course. All the way back in the 1890s and early 1900s, electric car inventors and manufacturers like Andrew Riker and Camille Jenatzy built and raced electric cars to test their designs—and to rack up speed records.

Jaguar’s goals are no different. The company stated in its press release announcing its return to racing that it sees the lightweight, electric future, and it wants to “engineer and test our advanced technologies under extreme performance conditions.”

Unlike the old-time electric car racers, who hoped to earn enough prize money to keep the lights on in the lab, Jaguar has a lot of support. They’ve already got Williams Advanced Engineering on board as a technical partner—a group that knows its way around motorsport and supplies the batteries for all the teams in the series. Williams also worked with Jaguar on the C-X75 plug-in hybrid concept that made its debut in 2010.

While Jaguar’s entry is exciting news for Formula E, it’s not the only news from the series this week. The Trulli Formula E Team announced on the same day that it is exiting the series immediately. Trulli joined the series in the first season when Drayson Racing dropped out before the inaugural season had even started. Trulli landed last in the standings at the end of the season, and now it’s missed the first two races of the second season, in Beijing and Putrajaya, due to “technical and supply issues,” according to the official statement from Formula E.

Planets orbit their host stars, arranged as they are in the night sky. Courtesy Goldilocks.info

The number of known exoplanets now numbers in the thousands. A new explorer tool, released today, visualizes them all with an eye toward finding the most Earth-like. It’s called Goldilocks, after the idea that for a planet to be habitable, it has to be not to hot, not too cold, but just right.

The project is by data visualizer (and friend of Popular Science) Jan Willem Tulp, in consultation with experts at the European Space Agency. It’s exoplanet data sliced many ways: In one view, stars are placed as they are on the night sky [above], and a dense cloud of planets pops out where the Kepler space telescope trained its eye. In another, planets are arranged by their similarity to Earth:

Courtesy Goldilocks.info

The Earth Similarity Index

Known exoplanets are arranged by how closely they resemble Earth, with the most Earth-like at the center. A few planets come close, but so far, a true Earth twin remains elusive.

But if you’re not in the mood for a science lesson, they also just look nice:

The known exoplanets that cross their stars’ habitable zones are all visualized orbiting a single central point, scaled to a single habitable zone [in blue]. Courtesy Goldilocks.info

Library of Congress

Wright Brothers' first successful crewed flight

A photo captured by an assistant of the Wright Brothers shows the first successful, powered, human crewed flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on December 17, 1903. The flight lasted just 12 seconds and the aircraft, a glider known as The Flyer, traveled 120 feet, according to the Library of Congress. Orville is piloting the machine while Wilbur runs alongside.

It's easy to forget, as America faces the arrival of unmanned delivery drones and drone regulations, that not too long ago, the biggest technological feat in aviation was getting machines that could fly with people in them. But today's the perfect day to recall that fact, because Thursday, December 17, 1903, was the date upon which the Wright brothers (Orville and Wilbur) achieved the historic, first controlled, powered flight in recorded history — across a remote beach in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

The two bicycle-shop owning siblings achieved a total of four flights in their glider aircraft, the Flyer, and that against 21-mile-per-hour winds, according to a telegram the brothers sent, that was quoted again today by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The actual first flight took place at 10:35 a.m. local time and lasted just 12 seconds and traveled 120 feet, according to the Library of Congress. The longest of these flights lasted 57 seconds, according to the Wrights' telegram. But the brief time in the air with a craft that is almost laughably simple by modern standards enough to launch the entire era of aviation and aerospace that has unfolded since.

It's no stretch to say the entire modern world has reaped the benefits—as well as the drawbacks and dangers—of Orville and Wilbur Wright's first test flights.

And Popular Science, founded in 1872, was around to report on it all, including the many failed attempts in the ramp-up to the first successful human-piloted flight, the flight itself, and the many advances that have followed.

Check out our brief coverage of the first flight below, published in the March, 1904, edition of what was then called Popular Science Monthly. It was written by none-other than Octave Chanute, a Paris-born American engineer who was an influential figure in the early days of aviation, and whose work reportedly inspired the Wright brothers.

Popular Science

PopSci's coverage of Wright Brothers' first flight

Written by engineer Octave Chanute

With reporting by Katie Peek.

Liu et al. 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004605

Plesiosaur

Penguins can't fly, but they are master swimmers, cutting through the water with ease.

But they aren't the first animals to develop their sleek swimming technique. It turns out that plesiosaurs, marine reptiles that lived at the same time as dinosaurs (so between 200 million and 66 million years ago), used a similar method to get around in their watery environs.

In a study published in PLOS Computational Biology, researchers created a computer model of how the huge reptile moved. Plesiosaurs grew to be between 8 and 46 feet long, and all had four flippers. The researchers were surprised to find that the most efficient way of moving such a large body through the water was for the plesiosaur to use just its front two flippers, just like a penguin uses its wings.

"Plesiosaur swimming has remained a mystery for almost 200 years, so it was exciting to see the plesiosaur come alive on the computer screen," Adam Smith, a paleontologist who worked on the paper said in a statement.

See their computer models in the animation below:

Tesla Motors, Inc, via Wikimedia Commons

Tesla Model S

The Tesla Model S has self-driving features.

For decades, laws about cars have only had to worry about human drivers. As computers take the wheel, driverless cars present a messy new reality to road regulations.

Yesterday, the California Department of Motor Vehicles released draft rules for how the Golden State will regulate driverless cars. The first answer: with onboard human drivers. IEEE Spectrum reports:

California’s department of motor vehicles finally released a draft version of the regulations, a full year later than the deadline set by the state legislature. It requires not only that a driver sit behind an actual steering wheel—unlike the most outré Google design, which has no steering wheel at all—but also that vendors lease rather than sell the cars to consumers.

So for the first few years of autonomous car use in California, the machines will be manufacturer-owned, driver-leased. This is presumably so that liability for any mishaps will fall to the carmaker, not the person sitting behind the wheel. Under the new plan, “Manufacturers will be approved for a three-year deployment permit, which will require them to regularly report on the performance, safety, and usage of autonomous vehicles.” If manufacturers find the legislation to be too overbearing, they might test their cars next door in driverless-friendly Nevada instead.

The draft rules also say autonomous cars should only be piloted by people with driver's licenses. This deeply undercuts one of the greatest promises of autonomous vehicles: that they’d expand transportation options for people who are unable to drive. Perhaps the laws will change after years of testing, but this isn’t a promising start on that front.

California’s proposed regulations also come with cybersecurity and privacy requirements. From the announcement:

Manufacturers must disclose to the operator if information is collected, other than the information needed to safely operate the vehicle. Manufacturers will be required to obtain approval to collect this additional information. Autonomous vehicles will be equipped with self-diagnostic capabilities that detect and respond to cyber-attacks or other unauthorized intrusions, alert the operator, and allow for an operator override.

It is undeniably good that information collection is disclosed to the operator. Protections against cyber attacks make some degree of sense, and a manual override is likely the easiest fix to legislate. At the very least, it’s good that future driverless cars will alert their drivers that, maybe, they should put down their book and focus on the road.

Early next year, the DMV is hosting two public workshops for people to comment on the draft of the rules. The first will be held in Sacramento on January 28 and the second in Los Angeles on February 2.

Shifra Goldenberg

Young Female Elephants Greet

Two young females from different elephant families interact while an older relative watches nearby.

Each year, approximately 30,000 African elephants are killed illegally for their ivory. Between 2010 and 2012, a staggering 100,000 elephants were slaughtered. Driven by an insatiable demand for ivory in China and Southeast Asia to make trinkets for burgeoning middle classes, the price of ivory has skyrocketed. A single carved tusk in China can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Unfortunately, this means no there is no respite in sight for the African elephant, and this has placed lots of pressure on elephant family groups, which are highly developed and complex social networks. However, despite near constant disruption and turnover within elephant families, the integrity of their social groups has remained surprisingly intact, revealing a hopeful bit of resiliency in an otherwise dismal situation.

In Kenya’s Samburu National Reserve, researchers from Save the Elephants and Colorado State University studied female elephants and their family groups over a 16 year period. They specifically chose adult females, because elephant societies are matriarchal, and mothers serve as the nodes that hold the larger social groups together. Poachers tend to go after adult elephants because of their large fully developed tusks, so losing adult matriarchs would appear to have a collapsing effect on social networks. The researchers found this to mercifully not be the case. When mothers are killed, daughters as young as eleven years old are stepping up to fill in the role of the deceased.

Mother-daughter relationships are very strong and especially in this period of crisis have proven to be indispensable to the survival of core social groups. Daughters mimic their mothers’ social patterns and connections and forge relationships with other females. These help support them when they’re forced into a matriarchal position at a relatively young age.

Shifra Goldenberg

Elephant Matriarch

A matriarch leads her family in single file through Samburu National Reserve in Kenya.

Poaching events are scarring and some elephants are believed to suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Because of this, some daughters are probably not always capable of stepping up to the task, but overall, despite a 70 percent turnover of adults in the herds observed in Kenya, the core social groups remained strong. “Females were individualistic in what they did following poaching, but in general daughters tended to replicate the social behavior of their mothers,” says Shifra Goldenberg, of Colorado State University and lead author of the study. Their findings are published today in the journal Current Biology.

Although young females have been rising to the occasion, they must still be mature to be able to fill any kind of key social role. “If a calf is still dependent on its mother's milk when she dies, the calf is unlikely to survive,” says Goldenberg. Older juveniles will stick with siblings or insert themselves into new families. Even so, some elephant orphans still end up alone, or if they’re lucky, in an elephant orphanage.

George Wittemyer

Elephant Calf

A young calf mock charging researchers as his cousin and mother feed nearby.

As for males, “they have a very different social system,” notes Goldenberg. They adopt a fluid, roaming existence, moving between core social groups. They do develop bonds with other male companions, but none as strong as those found among females. Goldenberg points out, however, that very large old bulls are often the preferred mates of females, and as they are frequently targeted for their immense tusks, “there are important repercussions of poaching in bull society as well.” These remain to be documented.

All in all, the resiliency of elephant social networks is a welcome bit of good news in an arena usually full of bad news. Young female elephants’ ability to maintain some semblance of normalcy within their social networks in spite of extreme outside pressure offers some hope that they could recover—if we can only find a way to stem the killings.

Raphael Kudela

Map of 2015 Algal Bloom

An individual alga is a very small thing, but when it gets together with its buddies to form a massive algae bloom, those little organisms can become a big problem.

In research presented today at the American Geophysical Union's (AGU) Fall Meeting, Raphael Kudela of the University of California, Santa Cruz, announced that unusual conditions in the Pacific Ocean caused the surprising and incredibly toxic algal bloom along the West Coast this summer.

A strange area of warm water in the Pacific, known as the Blob, combined with the nutrient-rich waters on the Pacific coast created the perfect conditions for an algal bloom, a phenomenon seen more often in warmer waters, like the Persian Gulf or areas with a lot of nutrient runoff, such as Lake Erie. California does have algal blooms, but they are usually small and only occur for very short periods of time.

This year's algal bloom was a huge problem, though, as these particular algae, of the Pseudo-nitzschia genus, tend to produce a deadly neurotoxin called domoic acid that builds up in nearby sediments and sea life.

From NOAA:

Amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP) produces gastrointestinal and neurological effects. Mild cases arise within 24 hours of consumption of contaminated shellfish. Symptoms include nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and abdominal cramps. In more severe cases neurological symptoms occur which include headaches, hallucinations, confusion, short-term memory loss, respiratory difficulty, seizures, coma, and in extreme cases, death.

"The duration of the bloom and the intensity of the toxicity were unprecedented, and that led to record levels of the toxin in species such as anchovies, razor clams, and crabs," Kudela said. "We also saw the toxin in organisms and parts of organisms where we thought it was not supposed to be, like the filets of fish."

Regulations and food monitoring in the United States prevented the algal bloom from becoming a public heath problem this summer, but health departments have issued warnings asking consumers not to eat Dungeness crab, which was found to have unusually high levels of domoic acid. Crab season, as a result, has been postponed in some areas, and health departments in some parts of Washington have asked people not to go clamming until the toxin returns to safe levels.

But it wasn't just the seafood industry that was affected. In a study published in Science this week, researchers found that sea lions that were exposed to the toxin suffered brain damage, leading to memory issues. As a result, an increased number of sea lions have been seen stranded along beaches or have ventured far from their typical hunting territory.

Unfortunately, the fishing industry (and the sea lions) might be in for more trouble ahead.

"The predictions are for this El Niño to be as strong as the one in 1997-98, when the warm water lasted through 1998. So we could be looking at a big bloom again next year," Kudela said.

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

NASA Safeguard

Losing a drone can get a person in a lot of trouble. Just ask Shawn Usman, who was flying a drone from his downtown DC apartment on January 26th, when suddenly the drone took off and crashed onto the White House lawn. While in Usman’s case, the Secret Service chose not to press charges, not everyone who loses their drone is so lucky. To stop errant machines, NASA’s created a tool that could help future pilots keep their drones nearby. It’s a special box that plugs into the drone, and when it works, the drones crash.

Dubbed Safeguard, it’s a virtual safety net. Users set parameters for a drone, and the machine checks those parameters to make sure it’s flying where it should be. If it ventures to the edge of the boundary, it’s supposed to fly back, and if it doesn’t do that, the safety net sends the drone crashing to the ground before it crosses into a “no-fly-zone”.

Other boundary limitation tools for drones, like geofencing, rely on GPS signals hooked up to the drone’s autopilot. They work fine most of the time, so long as the GPS signal is strong and the autopilot doesn’t act up. When it does, a system that relies on both to keep the drone from wandering away is in trouble, so Safeguard instead doesn’t rely on them. Instead, NASA vaguely says it relies on “rigorous mathematics and works independently of the onboard autopilot.” So even if the GPS or the autopilot on the drone fails, the Safeguard can stop the robot from wandering, saving it (and its pilot) the embarrassment of crashing on the White House lawn.

Watch the video below:

Eli Dourado, Director, Technology Policy Program Mercatus Center, George Mason University

Reported US Collisions By Object

On Monday, citing a congressional mandate and reports of drones near airplanes, the FAA announced that any unmanned flying vehicle heavier than half a pound would have to be registered with the government by February 19th, 2016. This is a huge change for the hobby, and one the FAA says it’s implementing out of an overriding concern with safety. There’s just one catch: if the FAA really wanted to protect planes from small, autonomous, unmanned objects — they’d ban turtles first.

At least, that’s the argument of Eli Dourado, an economist and technologist at the libertarian Mercatus Center. Using data pulled from the FAA’s own database of wildlife strikes, he created the chart above and posted it on Twitter earlier today. Since 1990, the FAA recorded 198 airplane-and-turtle collisions, and exactly zero drone-and-airplane collisions. Even when the FAA warned about an increase in drone and airplane “encounters” earlier this year, the encounters were limited to drone sightings, not actual collisions.

“To investigate the risk that small drones pose to the airspace,” Dourado said over email, “my collaborator Sam Hammond and I downloaded the full dataset to run some analysis on it. We found not only reports of bird strikes, but strikes of all kinds of mammals and reptiles as well. We thought this evidence was very revealing—planes hit objects all the time. Meanwhile, there still have been no confirmed collisions with drones in the United States.

So why turtles? “I picked turtles because turtles are funny,” Dourado said, “You don’t think of turtles as posing much of a threat to planes, and they don’t. If we’ve hit turtles 198 times and drones 0 times, then maybe we are worrying too much about collisions with drones.”

Earlier studies have shown that drones under three pounds show no more risk to airplanes than small birds, especially if flown below 400 feet and more than 5 miles away from airports, as the law already requires. Registering drones smaller than that means flying toys are now more controlled than ducks, but no deadlier.

This fits into a larger portrait of how bad people are at assessing risk, whether that of plane crashes, cyberterrorist attacks, or even the liklihood of rain. Drones are new and easy to fear, while turtles are ancient and an accepted part of life. If a turtle on a runway isn’t that scary, maybe a drone flown five miles away from an airport shouldn’t be, either

Virgin Galactic

Stephen Hawking With Team From Virgin Galactic

What’s a billionaire to do when his private spaceflight dreams tragically and literally crash? Richard Branson, founder of private space tourism and satellite launch company Virgin Galactic, is looking to regain lost momentum, and fulfill the company's promise to move forward. To that end, they’re enlisting the help of Professor Stephen Hawking. In February, if Hawking is feeling well enough, he’ll unveil Virgin Galactic’s new spaceship.

From Branson:

Professor Stephen Hawking is one of the people I admire most in the world, an undisputed genius who has opened our eyes to the wonders of the universe, while also happening to be a kind and delightful man. He is the only person I have given a free ticket with Virgin Galactic, and he is signed up to fly as a Future Astronaut with us if his health permits it.

Professor Hawking has often spoken of his admiration for what Virgin Galactic is doing to democratise space, previously sharing his “respect for enabling more of humanity to experience the true wonder of space”. He wrote on Facebook last year: “I have said in the past ‘Look up at the stars and not down at your feet’, but I believe that ‘looking up’ will no longer be a requirement to see the universe in all its glory.”

It is, at least, an optimistic path forward. Let’s hope the technology rises to the challenge.

Listen to Hawking talk to Virgin Galactic’s future astronauts below:

NASA/ESA

Cosmic Lightsaber

Jets of superheated material are sent into space by a newborn star in an area called the Orion B molecular cloud complex.

NASA officially has Star Wars fever too. The space agency released an image from the Hubble telescope today that they swear looks just like a lightsaber.

OK, we can see it too.

The "cosmic lightsaber" as they're calling it, is indeed far, far, away (1,350 light years to be precise), but it's firmly inside our own galaxy. The 'lightsaber' parts are two jets of incredibly hot material getting shot out of a newborn star. The jets are located along the rotation axis of the star. Along each of the jets are knots of nebulous gas, called Herbig-Haro objects, which form as the jets collide with the surrounding gas in the Orion B molecular cloud complex, a place where many new stars are being born.

It's no coincidence that NASA is calling it a lightsaber, and releasing images on the eve of the Star Wars premiere.

“Science fiction has been an inspiration to generations of scientists and engineers, and the film series Star Wars is no exception,” John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for the NASA Science Mission directorate said in a statement. “There is no stronger case for the motivational power of real science than the discoveries that come from the Hubble Space Telescope as it unravels the mysteries of the universe."

Researchers hope to continue unravelling this particular mystery. The NASA press release described the star and its jets as "ideal targets" for the James Webb Space Telescope, which will be able to see further inside the clouds surrounding the star.

See a video showing the location of the stellar jets below.

NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University

2015 Earthrise composite image

NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is orbiting the moon, and as such gets a particularly nice view of the glowing blue dot we call home. And now, we get to ogle it as well, thanks to a new high-res image released by NASA. The composite image was taken on October 12 using two different cameras: a black and white high-res Narrow Angle Camera (NAC), and a lower-resolution color Wide Angle Camera (WAC). The NAC gets the nice detail, and of course the WAC offers the vibrant colors.

But it isn't just as simple as snapping two photos. NASA says the LRO spacecraft first has to be rolled to the side, and then turned to get the widest lunar horizon for the NAC. Add to that the fact that LRO is traveling 3,580 miles per hour. Then, the images are processed to adjust for the motion of the Earth and the moon.

In this particular shot, you can see the moon's crater Compton in the foreground and the continent of Africa prominently displayed. NASA likens this new image to one taken by Apollo Astronaut Harrison Schmitt. He took the image known as Blue Marble on December 7, 1972.

You can reminisce over previous "Earthrise" photos from NASA, with the first taken in 1966, and check out some vintage artist interpretations of the image. Though, it is important to note, the Earth is not actually rising and setting from the moon's vantage point. As Mark Robinson of Arizona State University in Tempe, principal investigator for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera, says in NASA's announcement post, "the Earth may not move across the 'sky', but the view is not static. Future astronauts will see the continents rotate in and out of view and the ever-changing pattern of clouds will always catch one's eye, at least on the nearside."

Photo Credit: NASA via Wikimedia Commons

If you're getting someone on your Christmas list a mobile device with a camera, why not also tell them how they can use it to do Earth science research? This week, I cover three projects you can join if you know how to take decent digital pictures.

S'COOL: If you're a fan of clouds, this project is for you. S'COOL is designed to provide "ground truth" observations of clouds and cloud formations. The data is correlated with overhead satellite imagery from the CERES instrument. CERES stands for Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy Sytem. It is now orbiting the Earth as part of NASA's Earth Science Enterprise to study the ways in which clouds may affect the Earth's climate. Sign up as a school, a classroom, or as an individual citizen scientist.

Picture Post: Here's one for the woodworker/photographer on your list. Picture Post is a part of the Digital Earth Watch (DEW) network. DEW conducts environmental monitoring through digital photography and satellite imagery. In this project you use an 8-sided platform for taking overlapping photographs of the entire landscape around you and an “up” picture of the sky. To participate, you'll need to build a special, but simple octagon-shaped post, and to upload photos.

SatCam: SatCam is another project where you capture observations of sky and ground conditions when an Earth observation satellite is overhead. The apps works with the Terra, Aqua, and Suomi NPP satellites; whenever you make an observation, you get an image from the satellite above!

Chandra Clarke is a Webby Honoree-winning blogger, a successful entrepreneur, and an author. Her book Be the Change: Saving the World with Citizen Science is available at Amazon. You can connect with her on Twitter @chandraclarke.

Screenshot via NBC.com

Bear Grylls and President Barack Obama take a selfie

This week, President Barack Obama appeared on "Running Wild with Bear Grylls." The president joined the TV star and survivalist Grylls in Alaska to chat about his presidency, his life, and of course, the importance of addressing our contributions to climate change.

Throughout the show, President Obama follows Grylls around through trees and craggy rocks, and at one point they end up looking out over the Harding Ice Field. The glacier (or as Grylls calls it, the glassier) has receded a shocking amount since 2008, and it offers a poetic take on how swiftly our presence can change the environment. President Obama hopes that the show allows people to see and feel the effects of climate change, not just read the numbers.

Of course, President Obama ends up eating some bear leftovers, drinks tea that helps flatulence (he claims he has no problem with that), teaches Grylls his daughter Sasha's s'mores technique, and struggles to take a selfie. He would not, however, drink his own pee (he would do it if the alternative was death, though he wouldn't do it regularly). President Obama called the day one of his best, since he didn't have to wear a suit or be in an office. And armed with a bevy of quips, he delivers convincingly awkward, but endearing, confessional interviews to the camera.

Be sure to watch to the end to see President Obama deliver the wonderful line about his own state of fitness, "I'm fairly cut."

Fisher et al

Kestrel Inspired Foam Drone

Humans don’t need to reinvent the wing to make a better flying machine. Instead, they can just copy a design from nature. Falcon evolution has had millenniums to perfect wing design, while humans have been flying for barely more than a century. So to find an efficient flying design for small drones, researchers at RMIT University in Australia borrowed from the wings of a kestrel.

Their study, published today in the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, is about using air currents to save energy while in flight. Kestrels are small falcons, weighing on average less than half a pound. (If they were drones, they’d be so light the FAA wouldn’t register them.) Kestrels were chosen as the inspiration partly for their small size, and partly because, according to lead author Alex Fisher, "they’ve got a unique way of hunting – hovering over a location without flapping their wings. This allows them to keep their heads still with incredible precision, helping them spot prey on the ground."

The researchers built a small, foam drone that uses a program that sends the drone into updrafts, to take advantage of kestrel-like flight. They flew it at a hill and near a building, collecting data on the aerodynamics of the flight as it happened. Flights near the hill were very successful, with the plane staying airborne a full 15 minutes until its batteries drained. Flights near the building were shorter, less than a minute even when remotely controlled by a skilled pilot. Gusty wind proved to be the biggest obstacle.

From the paper’s conclusion:

The authors believe this to be a useful strategy for fixed-wing MAVs, both to assist in conserving power by staying within a confined orographic updraft, and to provide a stable platform for surveillance.

Flying near buildings remains the greatest challenge, but the researchers think they can overcome them that by modeling updrafts in cities and by flying near buildings outside of city centers, which are less of an obstacle.

This is hardly the first time researchers have turned to birds for inspiration with drones. Other attempts have tried to capture flapping and body shape. This study looks more at behavior and environment. Future work could lead to drones that learn to fly like birds, to occupy the same parts of the sky.

Read the full study.