Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Arcaboard In Flight

This was the year of the hoverboard, and sneaking in just under the wire is another brand new design, by Arca Space Corporation. The Arcaboard, as they’ve dubbed it, creates a levitating platform through the simplest possible means: a ton of electric fans, 36 to be exact. It might not be pretty, and it may only fly for six minutes, but it is for sure a board that hovers.

This may be the first hoverboard built by Arca Space Corporation, but as their name suggests, they've had some success getting other vehicles airborne. In 2004 they competed for the Space XPrize, and while they didn't win, they did successfully launch a rocket. Since then, they've moved from Europe to Las Cruces in New Mexico, and launched balloons and rockets, and built a drone. It's a varied resume, with a common thrust of aerodynamic expertise.

We’ve been burned by hoverboards before, and not just because the popular motorized non-hovering scooters known as hoverboards have a tendency to catch fire and explode. Other, hovering hoverboards look really cool but come with hidden limitations, like this Lexus-built magnetic levitation hoverboard that only works in one specific skate park with a hidden rail. Or this other magnetic levitation hoverboard, built with advice from Tony Hawk that only works on a specially built course. Even the hoverboards that fly freely, like this record-setting bladed monstrosity, aren’t exactly something kids could ride to school. Making a hoverboard that actually hovers and hovers anywhere is hard work. Arca’s hoverboard appears to be free of those constraints, which might be enough to get people past the $20,000 price tag and let this hoverboard really take off.

Watch a short video about it below:

[via Toyland]

We’d like to share our condolences with all of the university laser research departments around the world who might have been trying to build a self-contained lightsaber for the first time — you’re already too late.

On the eve of the release of Star Wars Episode VII Youtube user and perennial prop recreator"Sufficiently Advanced," a.k.a. Allen Pan posted a video of his homemade saber lighting a cigarette and burning through balloons and paper with its fiery, sputtering, Kylo-Ren-like blade.

The entire thing was built and modified from existing components, using a replica Skywalker lightsaber shell, a section from a turkey marinade injector, and several 3D printed parts to make it all work together. The result is a finished product by a Youtube craftsman that is neither as clumsy or random as a blaster.

To be fair to the PhDs out there, this isn’t officially a laser sword. The extremely dangerous-looking creation runs on gas, and doesn’t seem to have any crystals or lenses to speak of.

It uses a concoction of methanol and acetone injected into the canister via syringe. Afterwards, butane is added as the “propellant.” As a result, we suspect that, when burning, this mixture has a much more pungent odor than the “scent of ozone” often described in association with the fictional weapon of true Jedi.

We suspect that, as with those fictional weapons, there’s a lot that can go terribly wrong here, and encourage you to enjoy the video without trying it at home.

After all, this blade needs careful handling, and is both susceptible to wind and, sadly, not going to be cutting through steel anytime soon. Think about one of those torch lighters turned to the absolute maximum length setting; it’s more flamethrower than sword. An elegant lighter, for a more civilized blaze.

Still, when holding it steady our Jedi master gets a solid blue “blade” several feet long--enough to snap himself what might be the most badass profile photo of all time.

Correction: this article originally stated that the lightsaber used a butane lighter tank in place of the turkey marinade injector. The inventor contacted us to correct the record, which we have done after publication. We regret the error!

Mikael Häggström via Wikimedia Commons

Twins

Identical twins, shown at 15 weeks old in an ultrasound.

In 2014, 33.9 sets of twins were born per 1,000 births in the United States, according to a new report on birth data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s a very slight increase from 2013, which saw a rate of 33.7 sets of twins per 1,000 births. But, more importantly, it’s the culmination of three decades’ worth of rising twin birth rates—in 1980, only 18.9 sets of twins were born per 1,000 births, according to the CDC. What’s causing the dramatic rise—and why doesn't the same hold true for births of three or more, the rates for which are down 5 percent between 2013 and 2014?

One reason for the increased twinning rates seems to be the increase in assistive reproductive technologies. These include fertility-boosting medications and artificial insemination, but in-vitro fertilization (IVF) is the most popular. As the average age of a first-time mother has risen in recent years—in 2014 it was 26.3, compared to 22.7 in 1980)—older moms with reduced fertility have a greater need for fertility-boosting technologies in order to conceive.

Because of how IVF is done, multiple births, like twins or triplets, become more likely. If a couple is having trouble conceiving naturally, scientists can combine the parents’ extracted egg and sperm in the lab, then implant a fertilized embryo in the mother’s uterus. (More often than not, these embryos won’t take, so hopeful parents have to endure multiple rounds of expensive and emotionally exhausting procedures—the authors of a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that women were increasingly likely to conceive with each successive round of IVF, up until the ninth round.)

In each cycle, doctors commonly implant more than one embryo in the hope that at least one will be viable. That has caused a huge spike in multiple births—in 2011, 36 percent of all twins in the U.S. were born as a result of fertility treatments including IVF, as the Washington Post notes. And though doctors are now encouraged to implant no more than two embryos at a time to avoid problematic multiple births (remember Octomom?), and the rate of triplet births has dropped as a result, twins are still more likely to be born as a result of fertility treatments than from natural conception. In 2013, 1.5 percent of all children in the U.S. were born as a result of IVF.

There are, of course, other factors that have led to more twins in the U.S. One may be the sheer fact that mothers are older overall; hormonal changes may make older women more likely to release more than one egg at a time. The social and biological factors that have caused the rising twin rates don’t seem likely to change anytime soon, so, chances are, the trend will continue.

o5com via Flickr, CC by 2.0

Walking for weight loss

Walking has helped these women lose weight, but other weight loss methods might work better for others.

More than two thirds of the U.S. population qualifies as obese, a fact that has caused serious alarm among doctors and public health officials. Even people who successfully lose weight with diet, exercise, or medication only have a five-percent chance of keeping it off in the long term. But people looking to lose weight may soon be given regimens tailored to their unique genetic makeup, according to a study by an NIH working group published in the January 2016 issue of Obesity. The report authors are calling it precision weight loss.

Over the past few years, researchers have been decrypting the link between genes and obesity. There’s not just one obesity gene. A mutation in one gene makes energy from food more likely to be stored as fat instead of burned; another affects the levels of the hormone leptin, which could make a person more likely to overeat.

Understanding those genes, combined with technologies that allow for constant monitoring of disease and nutrition, may make cookie-cutter diets a thing of the past. Patients could submit a cheek swab or saliva sample to a lab that sequences their DNA. The lab would feed the patient’s DNA, along with levels of activity, stress, and diet, gathered by FitBit-like sensors, into an algorithm. The program would then spit out recommendations for how patients can best reach their target weight. Though the report isn’t specific on what exactly those recommendations would look like (and how they would differ from typical diet-and-exercise regimens uninformed by a patient’s genetic makeup), a recent experiment found that patients who learned about their obesity-related mutations lost more weight in the course of a month than did those who just received advice. By shifting the cause of a patient’s obesity to something out of her control—like her genes—she may feel more empowered and motivated to stick to a weight loss regimen.

The researchers anticipate that, with more efforts to crunch data and develop these algorithms, genetically tailored diets could be available within five years, according to a press release from the University of Texas at Austin.

Genes, however, are one of several factors that influence obesity. Epigenetics, genetic changes that result from a person’s environment, and the microbiome, the complex colonies of bacteria that live in and on our bodies, both play big roles in how an individual gains or loses weight, roles that scientists are only now starting to understand. And while diets informed by genetic mutations may make it easier for patients to lose weight and keep it off, they likely won’t be able to incorporate the many complex mechanisms that affect obesity.

NIAID/Flickr

Bacteria is proving resistant to the last-resort antibiotic--used to treat infections from E. coli (pictured) and other gram-negative bacteria.

I know, I know: Another end-of-the-year list. But what can I say—it’s tradition. Here are the top plague stories from 2015, in no particular order:

1) Scientists discovered new drug-resistant bacteria in China that can withstand colistin—the last antibiotic that could fight dangerous resistant bacterial strains. For great reporting on the findings and their implications, check out this piece by Mary McKenna at National Geographic and this one by Helen Branswell at Stat.

2) New biotechnologies that allow for gene editing and gene drives—a precise way to alter an organism’s DNA and a method to spread genes quickly through a population, respectively—are poised to make unprecedented changes to infectious disease control, agriculture, and more. Check out Amy Harmon’s New York Times piece on gene-edited livestock; Kat McGowan on the same at Mother Jones; Nicholas Wade’s NYT overview on applying gene drives to disease and pest insects; and Ewen Callaway’s piece at Nature on using gene drives in malaria mosquitoes.

3) Ebola fell and then flared up again—sometimes within the same country. Here’s Sarah Zhang at Wired on what went wrong with the global response to the 2014 outbreak and an insightful interview on how to prevent the next one by Julia Belluz at Vox.

4) Meanwhile, the World Health Organization put together a list of the viruses that are most likely to inflict the next global-scale outbreak. Read more from Erika Check Hayden at Nature.

5) While not as deadly a threat as Ebola or the viruses on the WHO list, other diseases popped up in new places, like dengue fever in Hawaii, and we learned new things about Zika and Chikungunya.

6) Several scientists were awarded Nobel Prizes for their contributions to anti-parasitic drugs. Read more at Nature and here at Our Modern Plagues. (And here is good context on how we might cure some of these diseases in other ways, from Ed Yong at the Atlantic.)

7) Nigeria hit a key milestone in the global effort to eradicate polio: the country is more than a year free of wild strains. Many challenges stand in the way of ridding the two remaining countries—Afghanistan and Pakistan—of the virus, according to Maureen Taylor at Quartz.

8) The FDA approved the first GMO animal for human consumption. Read more at the New York Times, NPR, and here at Our Modern Plagues.

And that’s that. Happy New Year.

Yossifoon, via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

Hunter RQ-5

Before the General Atomics Predator and Reaper drones defined the skies of the War on Terror, the modern drone age began, modestly and without fanfare, in the early 1990s. Designed by Israel Aircraft Industries and in the United States maintained by Northrop Grumman, the MQ-5 Hunter was canceled in 1996. But soon enough war called it back. Flown in support of American forces in Kosovo in 1999, the Hunter remained active ever since. After 22 years in military use, it’s finally retiring from service.

The Hunter, known as RQ-5 when unarmed and MQ-5B when equipped with small Viper Strike guided bombs, could fly for over 12 hours at over 15,000 feet. It’s short range made it a good fit for the army, who could send one on a scouting mission 80 miles away.

The Hunter could also relay controls to a second Hunter flying further ahead, giving it an effective range of 160 miles. It could fly for between 12 and 18 hours at a time. With a puller propeller in the front and a pusher propeller in the front, the drone was a simple, rugged workhouse scout. When Russian forces captured Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, they even claimed it was a Hunter that they shot down (The Pentagon denied this claim).

Replacing the Hunter will be the Gray Eagle, a Predator-derived drone that the Army first used in Iraq in 2010. The larger drone can fly for up to 24 hours, at altitudes of 29,000 feet and with a top speed of 190 mph. Instead of guided bombs it carries four Hellfire missiles. Operating a squadron of between 9 and 12 of the Gray Eagles takes 128 people. The drone has a range of almost 250 miles, which lets it cover far more sky than even linked-up Hunters.

The Army’s retirement of the Hunter means that it is moving on to different drones, but that doesn’t mean Hunters are done with the War on Terror. As UPI notes: “The Army is transferring MQ-5 Hunters at Fort Hood to government-owned, contractor-operated units supporting U.S. operations overseas.” That means the Hunter will still be spotted in the skies above conflict zones around the world for years to come.

Xavier Harding

Helix Sleep Mattress

Helix Sleep customizes your mattress to account for how you sleep, your body type and more. Here's how it compared to our old mattress.

We spend a third of our lives sleeping. That's a truism we all accept—and neglect. The fact is, few us are geting the right kind of sleep—quality, deep sleep that repairs bone and muscle, boosts the immune system, and ensures we wake up energized.

Plenty of modern mattress-makers like Casper and Leesa offer to get us there by promising us the perfect mattress. But bed startup Helix Sleep says no such straight-from-the-factory mattress exists or will ever exist. Their counteroffer: a bed that you can customize, in your home, to fit your body and accommodate your sleeping preferences.

The Premise

Helix Sleep’s founders—Jerry Lin, Kristian von Rickenbach and Adam Tishman—started their company on a single premise: Each sleeper needs a fully tweakable mattress to account for all sorts of physiological and sleep-behavioral nuances. (Those who sleep on their stomachs, for instance, need firmer support than do back-snoozers.) By filing out an extensive questionnaire, Helix matches beds to sleepers.

“There are a number of important metrics we take," says von Rickenbach. "We tend to categorize them across physical body type, sleeping style and personal preference." Height and weight offers up your body mass index (BMI). Helix also looks at body type. "Someone with broad shoulders and an athletic build," she says, "would have a different manner of pushing into the bed than if someone who is tall and narrow."

Helix

Helix Sleep

Temperature regulation is an important part of building a better mattress

Your sleeping style (ie, the position you sleep in) dictates how your body pushes into the bed. “The personal preference category relates to feel," says von Rickenbach. How soft or firm does the bed feel for you? Temperature, too, plays a roll. Do you tend to get hot or at cold while you sleep? An underrated feature of beds, which can regulate temperature, is airflow through the mattress. Better regulation through airflow, theoretically, leads to a better night's sleep.

And then there's something called Point Elasticity.

Helix Sleep

Point Elasticity

Point Elasticity is the ability of the mattress to accept a part of you that pushes in at a specific point

"That's the ability of the mattress to accept one part of you pushing in at a specific point, and still be able to support a part of you that’s pushing in less," says von Rickenbach. So the mattress made for to the broad-shouldered athletic person would accept a shoulder pushing into the bed and still evenly support the lighter resting torso and hips.

But do all these metric really make a difference? I decided to find out.

Unboxing A Better Sleep

The Helix arrives on your doorstep in a hexagonal tube. While the tightly-packed tube makes maneuvering the box into your door and across your home fairly easy, it weighs a hefty 70 pounds—which feels even heavier when making your way along three flights of stairs. Good luck to anyone in an apartment walk-up.

Xavier Harding

Helix Sleep Unboxing

New Helix mattresses arrive rolled up in a box. Stripping the plastic allows the bed to unfurl and begin inflating

Opening the Helix box and deploying the bed is simple. Just rip open the top and slide out the plushy, rolled up goods. I’d recommend a second pair of hands for helping you though. It is still a 54-inch by 75-inch mattress. I opted for the "Full" size, which goes for $800. Mattresses start at $600 (depending on size) and those with significant others can customize each half for an extra $100.

Using an included cutter, clearly indented lines show buyers where to slide to start cutting their mattress out of the tight plastic casing. Once the plastic is cut, the mattress inflates on its own. According to co-founder Jerry Lin, "the combination of materials we use—latex, microcoils, and high quality polyfoam—allow for the mattress to quickly inflate back to its original shape." I was told it would take one to two hours for this. But it was risen and ready in about 45 minutes.

After it inflated, the mattress was ready to use!

How’d I Sleep?

Before receiving the mattress, I had filled out a profile on the company's website, entering in my height, weight, gender, body shape, and various sleep preferences. (Do I like a soft or firm mattress, for example, or do I find I get hot at night? I like firm and no, I don't overheat.) When I laid down on it that first night, I immediately felt a difference. It was plush.

Xavier Harding

Helix Sleep Customization

How i customized my Helix mattress

I tend to sleep on my stomach. So I chose a mattress that accounted for that. I have a relatively slim figure, another detail Helix takes into consideration. Age range is also an important metric. Knowing I'm a twenty-something millenial, Helix likely made a bed fit for a snake person.

If I could go back and change one metric, it would be the feel of the mattress. Helix's preferences work on a 7-point scale, from "Very Soft" to "Very Firm"—the most popular being “medium firm.”

I chose badly for my sleep preferences. I selected “medium" assuming it was a good all-around option. Though with an athletic build I should have gone firmer. With even one preference point below the average, the bed felt...a little too plush. While my back felt better in the mornings, the first few minutes of getting in bed at night reminded me of my regretful decision.

But the feel of the bed was only part of the equation.

Crunching The Numbers

Xavier Harding

Fitbit Sleep Data For One Night

Fitbit gathers data on time awake, time slept and time you spent restless during the night. See all seven days worth of data for both beds in the slideshow below.

Fitbit's wearable fitness trackers can track sleep. So I used the company's Charge HR to do just that.

Comparing a week’s worth of sleep data (included in the slideshow at the bottom of this review) on my old 15+ year old Simmons Beauty Rest mattress bed with seven days on the Helix (also included below), I found something surprising: Not much had changed. I added up the restless moments-per-night between both sets and discovered they were nearly identical: 67 times restless on my old bed and 66 times on the Helix.

My sporadic sleep schedule probably didn’t help: i.e.: occasionally returning home late from events or random bedtimes on weekends. Which likely says more about me than it says of either of the beds, though both weeks had their own weekend nights and industry events.

After I got my data in order, Helix clued me into why I might have seen such similar results. Turns out it can take up to three weeks to notice a difference from an old mattress to a new one. "It just takes your body time to get used to the new feel and support characteristics, especially if you've been used to sleeping on a mattress that was likely non-ideal for these metrics," says Helix co-founder Adam Tishman.

Bottom line

While I initially expected Helix’s bed to be the mattress that saved my sleep once and for all, that ended up not being the case. Sleeping on one’s stomach could, over time, be detrimental on a regular bed when compared to sleeping on a Helix. My Fitbit data containing 7 days of both a standard bed and a Helix shows they average out to be around the same. Someone older may see quicker benefits than someone in their 20’s.

But this young person's experience suggests Helix simply makes a really, really comfortable bed—nothing more, nothing less.

If you're looking for a new mattress, it's definitely worth considering. And if you're sleep profile is anything like mine, just make sure you choose medium firm.

Sarah Dietz, U.S. Marine Corps, via Wikimedia Commons

LS3 Robot At RIMPAC Exercises

War is heavy. Not, just, in the deep moral implications of organized violence, but also very literally, in that fighting a war takes a lot of heavy equipment. To help lighten the load, the United States Marine Corp looked to the future: a robotic mule, capable of carrying 400 pounds of gear. After years of development and a couple high-profile trials, the Marines are abandoning the machine. Listen closely and you can hear why:

The robot is built by the Alphabet-owned Boston Dynamics. It was developed for DARPA under the name LS3, or “Legged Squad Support System”, and it can climb hills, carry weight, and follow humans into battle. It just can’t do it quietly. Rather than aiding Marines in battle, that noise turns the mechanical mule into a dead (and deadly) giveaway.

From Military.com:

[Testing] exhibited the shortcomings of the prototype, Kyle Olson, a spokesman for the Warfighting Lab, told Military.com.

"As Marines were using it, there was the challenge of seeing the potential possibility because of the limitations of the robot itself," Olson said. "They took it as it was: a loud robot that's going to give away their position."

In addition to the lawnmower-like noise of the mule's gas-powered engine, there were other challenges without clear solutions, including how to repair the hulking robot if it breaks and how to integrate it into a traditional Marine patrol.

For a military that wants to dramatically increase its robotic soldiers by 2030, this is a setback, but not an insurmountable one. Next time the military asks for a legged squad support system, it should make sure it asks for a legged silent squad support system.

Illustration by Son of Alan

In October, NASA released its plan for getting to Mars. The trip is a long way off (we’re talking decades), but the agency says it’s gearing up: “Like the Apollo Program, we embark on this journey for all humanity. Unlike Apollo, we will be going to stay.”

Easier said than done. Aside from the unbreathable atmosphere and wonky gravity, the radiation on Mars could cause brain damage, cancer, and death.

Our best bet for survival may be to hunker down in the protection of lava tubes—networks of tunnels created billions of years ago by molten rock. We can’t send rovers in for recon though. The pits can be 100 meters deep, and the thick walls (and lag time) make real-time radio communication impossible.

—William "Red" Whittaker, director of the Field Robotics Center at CMU

Carnegie Mellon University, along with a spinoff called Astrobotic Technology, has set its sights on a more effective scout: an autonomous drone. The team recently won a $125,000 contract from NASA to develop the software. Eventually, they plan to build a robot that can fly and hop through steep passages.

“Safe haven is a huge priority, right from the beginning,” says William “Red” Whittaker, founder and chief science officer of Astrobotic. “And out of that diversity of caves, there are likely to be underground spaces that are incredibly amenable to habitation.”

How It Works

High-Speed Autonomy

Programming a robot to fly itself through unexplored caverns is daunting enough, but Astrobotic’s navigation and perception algorithms need it to “think” at 20 mph. That requires the drone to have a largely unprecedented degree of decision-making without any human input.

Aerial Mobility

The Martian atmosphere is 100 times thinner than Earth’s, making rotors ineffective. Researchers are instead exploring CO₂-powered thrusters, which would enable a drone to make the sharp turns necessary in unmapped tunnels.

Recharging System

When the vehicle’s thrusters run out of pressurized CO₂, it could land and use an onboard isotope generator (or solar panels if it’s outside the caves) to power a compressor that pulls fuel from the atmosphere.

Ground Game

The drone could catapult through Mars’ low gravity (about 38 percent of Earth’s) using a spring-loaded strut. Hopping would allow it to cover terrain too rough for wheels or treads, without consuming as much fuel as flight.

Roving Base Camp

Astrobotic plans to have rovers that act as rolling motherships for planetary drones—storing them during long treks, launching them at the mouth of promising caves, and transmitting the data they collect back to NASA.

This article was originally published in the December 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title, "Drones To Scope Out Martian Real Estate."

ifeng

J-16D

Using the J-16/Su-30 airframe, the J-16D deletes some air to air combat gear for cramming in electronic attack equipment that includes electronic intelligence pods.

While China's Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) operations rely on heavy air defenses, Chinese air force planners may also have to account for enemy surface to air missiles, all the more with Taiwan and Japan embarking on a new buildup of missile shields. In December, one of the responses was revealed: the Shenyang J-16D.

Wingtips

The J-16D's wingtips have built in electronic intelligence pods, which intercept enemy electronic signals like radar transmissions, for processing in the fighter's computers, which then tell the J-16D's jammers how to scramble, confuse and block enemy usage of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The J-16D is a J-16/Su-30 multi-role fighter optimized for "Wild Weasel" missions. Starting in the Vietnam War, Wild Weasels are fighters designed to take on surface-to-air missile batteries in a SEAD (Supression of Enemy Air Defense) role. Armed with anti-radiation missiles (which lock on and target radars by their electronic emissions) and electronic intelligence and electronic warfare jammers, they are designed to engage and suppress defenses, opening the way for traditional air attacks.

Andreas Rupprecht

Electronic Flanker

This comparision of the J-16D to the baseline J-16, done by noted aviation journalist Andreas Rupprecht, shows that the J-16D has removed its IRST sensor and 30mm cannon, as well as installing addition antennas.

Compared to the baseline J-16, the J-16D has removed its Infrared Search Tracking sensor and 30mm cannon to accommodate more electronics inside its fuselage. It also has several antennas mounted around its fuselage. The J-16D also two large ELINT pods on its wingtips, similar to those on the E/A-18 Growler, to collect enemy radar and electronic activity. Additionally, the J-16D has smaller radome, likely to include an active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar optimized for electronic warfare, including signals collection and jamming. The J-16D will be fitted with large AESA jamming pods, a development of current jammers on JH-7A attack aircraft; its attack ability will come from YJ-91, LD-10 and other anti-radiation missiles.

Chinese Military Aviation

EW JH-7

The Xian JH-7 is China's first generation twin seat strike fighter (a role now being taken over by the J-16). The JH-7 and JH-7A can carry two large electronic warfare jamming pods under their wings to jam enemy missiles and radar. The more capable J-16D will also carry such large pods (though upgraded with technology like AESA elements) as it flies alongside J-16 and other Chinese fighters.

The J-16D provides Chinese aerial operations with a fast, maneuverable and long range EW and Wild Weasel platform that can protect Chinese fighters and bombers like the J-10, J-11, J-15, J-20, J-31 and H-6K bomber. This will be an important requirement in combat operations in increasingly militarized areas like the Taiwan Straits and South China Seas. In combat operations, the J-16 would first use its jammers to disrupt the target and fire control of enemy air defenses, before firing its long range anti-radiation missiles, which are equally deadly against both mobile and fixed air defenses. As a fighter, it can still take part in aerial combat in self defense and to protect other aircraft against enemy fighters.

Sinodefence Forum

CM-102

The CM-102 anti-radiation missile, first seen here at the 2014 Zhuhai Air Show, is a supersonic, 100km range air launched missile with an anti-radiation warhead that homes in on the electronic activity of enemy transmitters like radars. The CM-102 is one of the many attack options for the J-16 to destroy enemy radars and other electronic equipment as part of its Wild Weasel mission.

China's increasing ability to protect its power projection capabilities shows that its advances in military technology are just as much focused on taking action aboard to advance its interests, as opposed to the A2AD narrative of hunkering down against enemy threats. And, much as the US plans for F-35/22, Chinese Wild Weasel capabilities can be expected to migrate to fifth-generation stealth fighters, carrier aircraft, and drones large and small.

You may also be interested in:

The J-11D Surprise: China upgrades Russian Flanker Fighters on Its Own

The Missiles of Zhuhai: China Displays New Strike Arsenal

Chinese Air Force Takes Delivery of New J-16 Strike Fighters

A New Chinese Spy Plane for all Seasons

New Chinese Spy Ship, Coming soon to a U.S. Naval Exercise?

Inspiration Mars

Mars capsule concept

The nonprofit Inspiration Mars envisions sending humans to Mars in a modified SpaceX Dragon capsule fitted with an inflatable element.

NASA may dream of sending humans to Mars in the coming decades, but the fact remains that nobody's really sure how we'll survive the journey or set up camp on the red planet.

The Orion spacecraft that will drive astronauts to Mars has a diameter that's about the length of a pickup truck. That's not a lot of space when you consider the astronauts' journey to Mars will take at least 6 months.

In order to not go totally bonkers, Mars-bound astronauts will need a larger place to live, complete with private quarters and exercise equipment. NASA envisions the Orion capsule could link up to a habitation module in space, but right now they have no idea what that module could look like. And who knows what the astronauts will live in once they get to Mars.

Now SpaceNews says that a report attached to the recent omnibus spending bill has allocated funds for NASA to figure it out. The bill orders NASA to spend at least $55 million to develop a habitation module for deep space exploration, and to have a prototype ready by 2018.

That would be great timing, since NASA wants to test out its new space habitat around the moon in the 2020s before sending it to Mars in the 2030s.

NASA

Deep Space Habitat

The not so creatively named Deep Space Habitat is one of many concepts that NASA is looking into.

However, whether NASA could have something ready by 2018 seems debatable. At this point, the agency pretty much has a blank slate as to what the habitat would look like and how it would function. Shielding astronauts from space radiation while also maintaining a light weight will be one of the major challenges.

Thus far Bigelow Aerospace's inflatable habitat stands out as a frontrunner--a test version of the habitat will soon be deployed on the International Space Station. SpaceNews reports that NASA has also awarded funds to Boeing, Lockheed, Martin, Orbital ATK, and other companies to look into potential habitat designs.

It looks like NASA will have to step up its game, and fast. The report requires NASA to come back with a status update about how it has distributed funds within 180 days of the bill becoming law, which happened on December 18.

[Via SpaceNews]

Artist: Diego Rivera; Source: Wikipedia; Modifications: Jason Tetro

Improving Our Lives With Viruses

Viruses are more than pathogens and 2015 showed us their potential for good.

It’s been a banner year for microbes, but most of the spotlight has been given to bacteria. They have continually made news over the last 52 weeks with headline topics ranging from antibiotic resistance to foodborne outbreaks to the continuously expanding reach of the bacterial branch of the human microbiome.

But while the bacteria have been getting most of the attention, 2015 has also been a respectable year for viruses. Granted, not all the news has been good. Viruses are, after all, parasitic organisms requiring a host to survive and thrive. When that host happens to be human, the result can be illness, morbidity, and possible death. But as a result of some very intriguing studies, the role of viruses in our lives is much more valuable to us than simply cell invaders and killers.

While we may think of viruses as occasional infectious agents, we are continually occupied by them. They make up part of our overall microbiome, yet because of the continuing focus of microbiome research on bacteria, researchers developed their own term, the virome. The search for viruses in the human body, particularly the gut, has been ongoing for over a decade, but not until this year have we begun to understand their importance.

The reason stems from a change in focus from presence to interaction. The work has unveiled viruses make up the majority of microbes in the gut and may have a role in a variety of conditions such as Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The involvement of viruses in other locations such as the lungs, skin, and the oral cavity suggest 2016 will be an excellent year for understanding the role of these microscopic organisms in our everyday lives.

Apart from the contribution to our bodies, viruses have also demonstrated their value in other areas of health and medicine. Viral therapeutics have come a long way over the years and 2015 bore witness to some excellent results. For example, bacteriophages – viruses of bacteria – can be used as therapeutics to help control bacterial infections.

Phage therapy, as it is known, may offer assistance to cystic fibrosis patients by controlling the various species causing infection and pneumonia. Phages also may be used either to complement or replace antibiotics. In light of the rampant spread of antibiotic resistance, phage therapy has shown the potential to kill these drug-resisting bacteria and save lives.

While the potential for saving lives through viral treatments of bacterial infections is just hitting the road, viruses may have proven to be a possible highway to a cure for cancer. All across the world, companies have been working to develop virus-based therapeutics against this potentially deadly disease. The efforts have always held promise but now thanks to a recent decision by the FDA, the dreams may finally come to fruition.

In October, the FDA approved the first virus-based cancer therapy for melanoma. This milestone was long coming but it won’t be the first of its kind. Other therapies based on herpes simplex virus, vesicular stomatitis virus, and adenovirus produced great results over the year.

Moving forward, gene editing techniques could alter viruses such that they will be able to deliver a plethora of treatments ranging from drugs to vaccines. These could be made individually or in cocktails containing several virus types.

Of course, the positives of viruses should never take away from the pathogenic potential of certain species. Though we may look to viruses for improvement of health and medicine, we still have to remain diligent to avoid the types that cause illness and disease. While colds and flu continue to rage on in the United States, other potential troubles such as the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (MERS-CoV) and Ebola still pose a significant threat in other areas of the world. Then there’s HIV. Over 1.2 million people are infected and there are about 50,000 new cases every year.

As we head to 2016, expect to hear more about the importance of viruses. Whether the focus will be their diversity, their applications, or their impact on health particularly in clinical trials, the vast scope of research will continue to unravel mysteries and fill in the blanks regarding their place on Earth and us. Regardless of what is to come, we will no doubt gain a greater appreciation for these microscopic organisms as both friend and foe.

Thierry Ehrmann, via Flickr CC BY 2.0

Graffiti Of Chinese President Xi Jinping

Citizens of China can now find their credit scores in a mobile app called Sesame Credit. It's linked to their friends, shareable online, and either “a concept straight out of a cyberpunk dystopia,” according to The Independent, or, according to Quartz, more like a benign credit-card loyalty program that “operates independently from" the social credit system the government called for earlier this year.

In its January directive, the Chinese government described the social credit system as “an important component part of the Socialist market economy system and the social governance system”. In particular, it “uses encouragement to keep trust and constraints against breaking trust as incentive mechanisms, and its objective is raising the honest mentality and credit levels of the entire society.”

The ACLU was not subtle in its warning about the coercive power of such a system. In a post titled “China’s Nightmarish Citizen Scores Are a Warning For Americans,” senior policy analyst Jay Stanley wrote “China appears to be leveraging all the tools of the information age—electronic purchasing data, social networks, algorithmic sorting—to construct the ultimate tool of social control.”

Quartz spells out how Sesame Credit works and makes the point that -- thus far -- it is not linked to the government system.

Sesame Credit’s origins lie in China’s once-barren consumer finance industry. Compared to the United States, China’s financial institutions have done little to serve consumers and small businesses. The People’s Bank of China— the central bank—runs the country’s only official credit rating system, and as of 2014 it serves only about 300 million people. That’s less than 25% of the total population. In the US, by contrast, 89% of the adult population has a credit score. As a result, many Chinese consumers have been saving rather than borrowing or investing. That in turn stunts domestic consumption, a worrying factor amid China’s slowing economy.

Right before the holidays, game-design-centric channel Extra Credits took that critique a step further, looking at the way games and social networks can modify behavior, and fearing the worst for consumers in China. They have a seven minute video about it below:

The reality, so far, appears more benign, but the authoritarian potential is there. Sesame Credit, for now, seems to just track volume of personal purchases, bill payments, credit card payments, location, and friends on the network. According to The Independent, Sesame Credit will be mandatory for all citizens by 2020. There’s definitely potential for abuse, especially if credit scores can sink based on poorly ranked friends, but there isn’t anything yet that clearly links credit to government preferred behavior. At best, that leaves us with this hauntingly weak conclusion: the system isn’t explicitly dystopian yet, but it has all the pieces to be dystopian at a moment’s notice. Download it today, citizen!

Anyway, don't worry about that. Check out this brand-new rap track featuring President Xi Jinping, produced by the Communist party itself and entitled "The Reform Group is Two Years Old":

Japan, known for its famous fictional monsters, was paid a visit on Christmas Eve by a real-life sea monster. In Toyama Bay in Central Japan, visitors idling on a pier overlooking the water were greeted by a 12-foot-long red-and-white giant squid. Despite its massive size, this squid was believed to be a juvenile. Dead specimens have been measured as long as 43 feet.

Architeuthis dux, otherwise known as the giant squid spends its life in the abyssal depths of the open ocean. These gigantic, solitary predators feast upon other deep sea fish or squid and are themselves hunted by sperm whales in what must unfold into epic battles of giants in the blackness of the deep ocean.

They have been found dead washed up ashore or tangled in fishermen’s nets for centuries, but have only been captured on film alive twice before. In 2004, Japanese researchers snapped the first images of live giant squids that they had managed to lure up to their camera. In 2012, using the same technique, an expedition off the coast of Japan filmed live giant squid for the first time ever, wrangling with their iridescent lures thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean.

But the video of the Toyama Bay visitor is the most detailed and up-close viewing of a live giant squid yet. And certainly the first time a human being has ever been in the water with one of these creatures of the deep. CNN reports that the animal was filmed with a submersible camera, and joined in the water by Akinobu Kimura, a diver and owner of Diving Shop Kaiyu—an either bold or foolish move considering there was no way of knowing how a large predator unaccustomed to human interaction would react to his presence.

Kimura told CNN that "My curiosity was way bigger than fear, so I jumped into the water and got close to it." He further described his experience by saying that the “squid was not damaged and looked lively, spurting ink and trying to entangle his tentacles around me. I guided the squid toward to the ocean, several hundred meters from the area it was found in, and it disappeared into the deep sea."

The juvenile giant squid apparently moseyed around in the bay for a couple of hours before receding back into the deep.

DARPA

TERN Concept Art

Note the missiles under the wings. Friendly!

Aircraft carriers revolutionized naval war. Before carriers, giant battleships defined naval battles, their powerful cannons threatening other vessels and coastal cities alike. Then came the aircraft carrier, a floating runway and hangar that could launch planes far away from land, at targets well beyond the range of a ship's cannons, sinking enemy vessels far beyond the line of sight.

It took a few decades to realize this impact, but once naval planners took it in, battleships were sunk for good. Now, DARPA wants to expand the aircraft carrier revolution by developing a small drone that can take off and land even on small ships. This would give reach and power not just to dedicated giant naval vessels, but smaller escorts too.

Dubbed TERN, for “Tactically Exploited Reconnaissance Node,” the drone is a tail-sitter on land or decks, meaning the body takes off and lands like a helicopter, but turns 90 degrees once airborne to fly like a plane. It’s a medium-altitude long endurance vehicle, helpfully acronymed as MALE, just in case their were any doubts about this robot’s gender. Two counter-rotating propellers on the nose provide first lift then thrust, and the body would be a flying wing. When not in use, the TERN would nest securely inside the ship.

DARPA just awarded Phase III funding to Northrop Grumman for this project, with the aim of building a full-size demonstrator that can takeoff at sea, transition to and from horizontal flight, and land from a small platform, like that available on a destroyer or other small combat ship (but not, yet, from a submarine). This makes it markedly different from the last naval drone to make big waves, the X-47B unmanned combat aerial vehicle, which took off from an aircraft carrier’s runway.

We don’t yet know if the TERN program will work, but future ships are already incorporating it into their designs. The Navy’s high-tech Zumwalt destroyer, which went to sea for the first time this month, has a rear landing pad for either two helicopters or several smaller drones. The T2050, a British concept for the ship of the future, features a large drone landing pad and lots of small drones.

AIrcraft carriers changed war by expanding the reach of the biggest, deadliest ships. If the TERN works, it could usher in a second age of aircraft carriers, where all but the tiniest boats in the Navy can launch planes of their own, scouting places and striking targets in distances far greater than the ship’s humble bodies suggest.

In every issue of Popular Science, we round up our 10 favorite products of the month. Here''s the cream of the crop of 2015--our most favorite out of 120 items that, even months after, we're still obsessed with. We bring you: the best of Obsessed.

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

3-D Printer Onboard The Truman

Life at sea is full of improvising. Ships can only carry so much stuff, and can’t easily go to a warehouse for spare parts, so when something is broken or doesn’t quite work right, the crew has to find a solution with what they have on hand. With a 3-D printer on board, that improvisation becomes really easy, as the crew of the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman are finding out. One of two U.S. Navy ships deployed to the Middle East with 3-D printers, the utility of the device seems immediately apparent.

Thinking decades ahead, the Navy has big plans for 3-D printing, like making human tissue on demand for medical emergencies, or custom-printing drones and missiles as a mission requires. For now, though, the printer is solving much simpler tasks, like lost caps and awkward funnels.

From the Virginia Pilot

Within their first weeks of deploying in November, sailors already had created and "printed out" custom dust caps and a wrench. A sailor in the "fab lab" designed his own solution after he and others grew frustrated that an oil cup on a machine was too small for a funnel.

"It required at least two people to get all the oil in the cup, so I figured we have this technology here, why not try something that would make this task easier," Petty Officer 2nd Class Raymond Lee said. "I came up with an extension that narrows the nozzle, cuts the manpower in half, ensures there's no spilled oil all over the deck."

Parts are designed with computers in the fabrication station, and printed to order right on board. It's a pretty great solution to an ancient sailor’s problem.

Watch a short video about it below:

SCADA Strangelove

A Model Train

Train technology is so old it should be futureproof. The lumbering iron giants cover much of the world, carrying billions of tons of freight and billions of passengers. Since the first trains were introduced just over two centuries ago, trains have adapted to increased use, world wars, and natural disasters, and engineers have still made the mechanical beasts work. Now, security researchers in Germany have found a new foe with which trains must contend: hackers.

Many of the risks stem from new, internet-dependent automated systems. Motherboard reports:

The issues included lack of authentication protections, systems using very old operating systems, and hard-coded passwords for remote access.
There are also worrying design choices in the trains themselves, such as having entertainment devices for customers and engineering systems on the same network, meaning that accessing the former may lead to a compromise of the latter.

The flaws were exposed by German whitehat security researchers SCADA Strangelove, who have previously looked at security flaws in green energy systems and smartgrids. Their presentation, entitled “The Great Train Cyber Robbery,” was given at the Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg on December 27th. It details the change from simple mechanical rail-switches (think levers thrown on tracks in old-timey movies) to more automated means. One problem is that some switches require constant access to the internet, and if that signal is lost the trains stop automatically. More embarrassing, for one of the train systems they looked at there were still default passwords associated with admin accounts, leaving access to the system wide open.

Their discoveries are detailed in a 110-slide presentation, though not in so much detail that an attacker can figure out exactly the trains to traget. In their presentation abstract, SCADA Strangelove clarifies “No vendor names and vulnerabilities details will be released, for obvious reasons.” While trains can’t be commandeered and stolen like other vehicles, there is still plenty that can go wrong if a malicious attacker takes control, with delays at a minimum and train-on-train collision as the scarier risk.

Fortunately, just because it can be done doesn’t mean it’s likely. There’s no obvious profit in delaying trains, and getting into the systems to find the vulnerabilities is a time-intensive process.

Which is to say: man-machines in electric cafes will still need to do some kraftwerk in computer world to figure out how to turn radio activity into trans-europe distress. Then, and only then, does it make more sense to take the autobahn.

[Motherboard]

ORNL via Eurekalert

ORNL Bioreactor

The main image shows the device's reactor and feeder channels, as well as the membrane that separates them. Bottom left, an image of a nanopore. Bottom right, an illustration of how molecules pass from one side of the membrane to the other.

For soldiers and people in remote locations, it can be hard to get life-saving drugs they need, such as those used to treat diabetes, anemia, or infections. That’s because the proteins in these drugs often need to be kept in cold storage, which isn’t so easy to do if you don’t have a working refrigerator on hand.

Now researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have created a way to synthesize proteins with a small bioreactor so that they can be used immediately in patients most in need. A study about the new device was published recently in the journal Small.

Normally, scientists use living cells to create these proteins. But the bioreactor can pump out small batches of the same proteins without having to keep cells alive.

The device is made of silicon and consists of two parallel channels nearly 16 feet long (485 centimeters), wound in a snake-like fashion. The two are divided by a membrane punctuated with tiny pores; one side feeds the other with the chemicals, and the reaction takes place on the other. When the device is shaken, the desired proteins pass through to one side of the membrane, while the mixture of acids and cell extracts that yielded them stay on the other.

By changing the size of the pores and the length of the reactions, the researchers were able to generate protein yields that were even higher than similar-sized commercial bioreactors.

The researchers didn’t mention how much their device would cost to produce at a large scale, but they are hopeful that people without much medical expertise could purify the proteins to use them on patients who need them most. Their bioreactor could also be used to make small batches of drugs that are prohibitively expensive or in short supply, such as pharmaceuticals to treat rare diseases.