Michael Nunez / Popular Science

Withings Thermo

This smart thermometer costs $100 and ships in March.

Thermometers can be pretty invasive: You stick them in your ears, your mouth, and occasionally in other places. Not this one. The Withings Thermos reads your temperature when you place one end on your forehead—that's it.

The Withings Thermo takes about two seconds to read your temperature once it's pressed against your forehead. Your body temperature reads out in a dotted LED display. A small light on the front will blink green if your temp is registered as a healthy rate. If you have a fever, a red light flashes notifying that you’re in poor health.

The companion app keeps track of your temperature over time, which can come in handy especially when you’re sick. You can also keep a log of any medication that you’re taking in a chronological view, so you know whether your temperature is cooling after taking any health products. The app stores profiles of several people, lasts on 2 AAA batteries for about two years. The Termo retails for $100 and will be available in March.

Michael Nunez / Popular Science

Withings Thermo

This is the companion app to the Withings Thermo.

Sam Ward

In August, Stewart Russell, a computer scientist at University of California at Berkeley, authored an open letter calling for the ban of “lethal autonomous weapons.” To those outside the military-industrial complex, this could seem a bit premature, sort of like calling for a ban on Star Trek phasers or the Death Star. Reality says otherwise.

Humans have a venerable tradition of automating warfare. Land mines are a kind of robot, though a very dumb one. Heat-seeking missiles are smarter, albeit not by a lot. “There’s a continuum,” Russell says, and we’re further along it than we realize. “If you wanted to produce something very effective, pretty reliable, and if it became a military priority—in 18 months you could mass-produce some kind of intelligent weapon.” Indeed autonomous killing machines already exist: The Super aEgis II, a South Korean-made weapons platform, can recognize humans and target them. (It will request permission from a living operator before making a shot with its .50 caliber gun, but that’s more a courtesy than a requirement.)

Russell writes that “autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow”—cheap and abundant. And that shifts the rules of war. “AI weapons could change the scale in which small groups of people can affect the rest of the world,” he says. “They can do the damage of nuclear weapons with less money and infrastructure.”

Proponents of AI weapons point to some upsides: Robots going to war would mean fewer human casualties. But to the 20,000 people (the majority of whom are scientists) who signed the letter, the costs far outweigh the benefits. Later this year, Russell and others will push for legislative stopgaps and a change in international law, similar to those that prohibit biological weapons. Meetings are set at the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. Once killer AI is here, there’s no going back.

This article was originally published in the January/February 2016 issue of Popular Science, as part of our Big Ideas Of 2016 feature.

China Daily

PY132A

The PY132, seen at a December 2015 police expo, uses its powerful laser to blind enemy sensors and cameras. It even has a telescopic sight to aim directly at say, the thermal/night imaging sight of a tank (but never the eyes of enemy infantry!).

The official PLA Daily December 9th 2015 edition announced that Chinese soldiers are now in possession of laser guns. This was not a counter to the success of Star Wars: Force Awakens, but rather the revelation of new responses to the spread of new technology like unmanned systems.

CNTV

Low Altitude Guard II

The LAG II is now being evaluated by the PLA for anti-drone missions. This laser is powerful enough so that when linked to a fire control radar, it could potentially also shoot down enemy artillery shells, rockets and missiles.

International conventions like the 1998 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons ban the use of lasers and blinding weapons used against people; however the optical and thermal sensors on vehicles, aircraft and robots are still fair game. For example, the PY132A laser is one of the systems displayed at a domestic Chinese police expo, presumably for usage against rogue and terrorist drones. Chinese defense contractors are also marketing the Low Altitude Guard laser turret for shooting down small UAVs as a police and law enforcement tool (though it also has a more powerful military counterpart). This framing of laser weapons and armed robots in law enforcement situations suggests that in addition to traditional arms transfers, Chinese influence in these realms could also come in the form of paramilitary high tech weapons.

China Daily

WJG-2002

Chinese special forces are likely to be the current users of Chinese blinding lasers. This WJG-2002, seen here at an arms expo, is an older model that may have not been fielded.

In combat, laser rifles would be useful for a wide variety of situations; soldiers in urban combat could use the PY132A, WJG-202 and BBQ-905 laser rifles to destroy the sensitive thermal imagers of enemy tanks or blind slow flying UAVs. Special forces could use them to knock out enemy security cameras and sabotage sensors. Such uses meet the international protocols in definition, but there are still concerns. When used against the sensors of manned aircraft such as attack helicopters, the beam scattering effect of all lasers, blinding ones included, means that pilots' eyeballs could become "collateral" damage.

China Daily

BBQ-905

The BBQ-905 is another Chinese laser rifle that could eventually be offered for export, perhaps to foreign police forces (China is looking to sell other direct energy weapons for 'law enforcement and counter-terrorist missions'.

While we probably won't see PLA troops carrying blasters or phasers on the battlefield any time soon, such advances in Chinese military technology point to another area where science fiction will become battlefield reality in the 21st century. Combined with an evident willingness to envision the use of use of laser weapons in tactical situations, the availability of such new weaponry makes it probable that Chinese soldiers, systems and vehicles could carry lasers for a wide range of missions in the future.

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NOAA

Shipwreck remains

An anchor and other artifacts from the 1871 shipwrecks lie on the ocean floor.

Life on a whaling ship during the 19th century was full of risk. There were long months at sea in perilous conditions, hunting animals many times your size. If your ship wasn't destroyed by an angry sperm whale it might get caught in Arctic pack ice, destroying your livelihood, if not your life.

One of the biggest whaling disasters happened in 1871 (less than a year before Popular Science was founded). That year, 33 ships were caught in pack ice off the coast of Alaska, trapping the fleet and the 1,219 people on board. Now, NOAA researchers think that they've found the wrecks of two of those ships, thanks to warming temperatures which left the sea ice a mere fraction of what it would have been like in 1871.

Previously the only evidence of the wrecks had been in historical records, and artifacts salvaged from the wrecks by local Inuit tribes.

“Earlier research by a number of scholars suggested that some of the ships that were crushed and sunk might still be on the seabed,” Brad Barr, NOAA archaeologist and project co-director said. “But until now, no one had found definitive proof of any of the lost fleet beneath the water. This exploration provides an opportunity to write the last chapter of this important story of American maritime heritage and also bear witness to some of the impacts of a warming climate on the region’s environmental and cultural landscape, including diminishing sea ice and melting permafrost.”

NOAA

Map of the area surveyed

Unlike many shipwrecks, these ships aren't a watery grave. The ice that trapped the ships didn't immediately crush them, giving all 1,219 people a chance to escape with enough provisions to trek south to safety. They didn't have to go too far to get help (though 70 miles across the Arctic is still a significant journey). Luckily, seven nearby whaling ships escaped the crushing ice, and were able to pick up the hapless whalers, dumping their valuable cargo to make way for the passengers.

Robert Schwemmer Maritime Library/NOAA

Shipwreck

An illustration of the shipwreck that originally ran in Harper's Weekly.

While the melting ice and warming Arctic allowed NOAA scientists to make this really interesting archaeological discovery, in other areas of the Arctic, warming temperatures are threatening archaeological sites. The damage is most severe in Greenland, where archeologists are racing to document more than 6,000 archeological sites before they are erased by the changing climate.

Xavier Harding

3D-printed Stormtrooper

Could it be Finn?

If you’re looking for 3D printed objects at CES, you’ll never have to look far. But 3D Systems may have the coolest printout of all—an entire Stormtrooper.

Xavier Harding

3D Systems Stormtrooper

3D Systems at CES 2016 may have the coolest print of all

The company Anovos used 3D Systems scanners and printers to bring to life the classic villain of the Star Wars universe.

"We’re the Star Wars 3D-printing company of choice,” Karl Meyer tells us, Vice President of Entertainment with 3D Systems. “We’re the first group to take 3D scanning and 3D printing on set to create visual effects, models and consumer products.” Meyer goes on further to say they’re involvement with Star Wars latest film, The Force Awakens, “There’s a lot that goes into making the stormtrooper outfits seen in the movie. The parts that were 3D-printed were done using our products."

The model seen at CES 2016 is merely a statue. But the level of detail brings plenty of life to the 3D-printed unit on its own. We fully believe it won’t be long until it removes its helmet and joins the rebellion.

Lida Xing and Yujiang Han/University of Colorado Denver

Dinosaur Dance

An artist's conception of a dinosaur mating dance.

From feathers to flight, researchers keep finding more and more ways that dinosaurs were similar to modern birds. Modern birds are technically living dinosaurs, but a lot could have changed in the 65 million years since the other dinosaurs went extinct.

Now, there's another similarity to add to the mix: foreplay. In a paper published today in Scientific Reports, researchers found evidence that dinosaurs had mating rituals much like modern birds.

Some male birds today use displays to attract a mate, such as digging or furnishing nests to show how they would provide a safe and impressive home for their offspring. Researchers found evidence in Colorado that dinosaurs did the same thing, scraping the ground to create nest displays, hoping to attract a female to mate with. The 'scrapes' are the first of their kind to be found anywhere in the world, and some are as large as bathtubs.

University of Colorado Denver

Scrape

Paleontologist Martin Lockley (left) and Ken Cart pose with dinosaur scrapes.

The researchers are pretty sure that the scrapes aren't the remains of actual nests; they aren't quite the right shape, there aren't any eggs, eggshells, or evidence of hatching, and they aren't spaced out as well as other known nest sites.

"The scrape evidence has significant implications," said Martin Lockley, lead author of the paper. "This is physical evidence of pre-historic foreplay that is very similar to birds today. Modern birds using scrape ceremony courtship usually do so near their final nesting sites. So the fossil scrape evidence offers a tantalizing clue that dinosaurs in 'heat' may have gathered here millions of years ago to breed and then nest nearby."

The scrapes found by Lockley are a kind of trace fossil--fossilized evidence that an organism was there, but not a fossil of the organism itself. Other trace fossils might include burrows, nests, poop, even impressions of urine. Trace fossils like these can give paleontologists insight into dinosaur behavior, like the footprints discovered last year that showed that sauropods liked shallow water.

Cory Doctorow, via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Brain in cocktail robot, Roboexotica, Electric Avenue, Museums Quartier, Vienna, Austria

On Monday, while most of us were groggily returning to work from a second long weekend in a row, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) was looking for brains. Specifically, robot brains. Their “Request for Information for Neurally Inspired Computing Principles,” posted online at FedBizOpps, asks computer scientists and neuroscientists to answer at least one of four questions about learning, memory, timing, and coordination. The goal: anticipate next-generation computers.

IARPA is the far-future research projects arm of America’s intelligence agencies, much like DARPA is for the Pentagon. The immediate applications of the tech aren’t always clear, so the agencies try and fund a bunch of blue-sky research to figure out where the technology is going to go. For example, here’s one of the four questions IARPA is asking people to answer:

Brains employ plasticity mechanisms that operate continuously and over multiple time scales to support online learning. Remarkably, brains continue to operate stably during ongoing plasticity.

For neuroscientists: *What practical benefits could our current understanding of the brain's use of online learning over short and long time scales offer for next-generation computers? What gaps in understanding or challenges must first be overcome? *Have there been simulations or demonstrations of how online learning over short and long time scales can be used to perform real-world tasks?

For computer scientists: *What is the current state of research in the use of online learning over short and long time scales for digital or analog systems? *Are there existing hardware systems that utilize online learning over short and long time scales? If so, in which application areas and use cases have these been deployed, and what are their performance characteristics?

Looking at both brains and computers is a pretty good way to anticipate the future, and IARPA’s hardly the first to do it. Previous research in neural networks for machines have found that, in learning new skills, machines experience“catastrophic forgetting,” in which robots can’t learn more than one skill at a time without un-learning another.”

Figuring out a way for machines to learn without unlearning seems like a pretty big bet for the future. It’s definitely one that America’s intelligence agencies want to have on hand and understand first. IARPA is accepting responses to their request for information until January 29th.

Justin Henry/Flickr

Wax Seal

Wax seals have largely fallen out of favor today, but in Medieval times, they were everywhere, used as an official signature on all kinds of important documents.

But in addition to an impression of the seal itself, the warm wax also recorded something else--the fingerprints of people applying the seal to the document. Now, researchers at the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom are taking a closer look at these old fingerprints using modern forensics.

Over the next three years, researchers will examine the fingerprints left on the seals of hundreds of documents from the Medieval period in a project called Imprint. While not all seals contained fingerprints, an earlier study found that 37 percent of the seals examined had usable fingerprints.

University of Lincoln

Medieval Seal

The fingerprints they find will be put into a database and matched against each other, but they will also be compared to modern fingerprint databases in an effort to see how unique our fingerprints really are.

“These wax seals have the potential to give us so much information about medieval people, but they are often set aside as less important than the document itself," Phillippa Hoskin, lead researcher of the project said. “This will be the first time that the information from the handprints found on those seals will be examined, and it could really offer historians new understanding of the period."

The fingerprint could also potentially uncover medieval crime. Hoskin and others plan to look at suspected forgeries and see if the fingerprints on those wax seals match those of authenticated documents. If there's a mismatch, they might be able to definitively prove that something fishy was going on.

Eventually, all the prints will be put into an online archive available to the public.

Craig Taylor

Roman Latrines In Lybia

The Romans have done a lot for modern civilization. Roads, a calendar, an alphabet, and so much more. But it turns out some of the so-called improvements they gave us weren't so great after all.

In a study published today in the journal Parasitology, researchers found that the Roman fondness for baths, toilets, and indoor plumbing didn't keep them any cleaner than the barbarians at their gates.

Researchers looked at the archeological record, examining coprolites (fossilized poop), combs, and other hygiene artifacts for traces of parasites, evidence of dysentery, and lice. They found that after the Romans conquered entered an area, bringing along their baths and toilets, the number of parasites didn't fall. Instead, they grew.

"This latest research on the prevalence of ancient parasites suggests that Roman toilets, sewers and sanitation laws had no clear benefit to public health," Piers Mitchell, author of the study, said in a statement. "The widespread nature of both intestinal parasites and ectoparasites such as lice also suggests that Roman public baths surprisingly gave no clear health benefit either."

Not only did their baths and toilets encourage disease instead of curing it, but their favorite condiment, a fish sauce called garum probably helped spread parasites as well.

"The manufacture of fish sauce and its trade across the empire in sealed jars would have allowed the spread of the fish tapeworm parasite from endemic areas of northern Europe to all people across the empire," Mitchell said. "This appears to be a good example of the negative health consequences of conquering an empire."

Piers Mitchell

Whipworm egg

A whipworm egg from Roman times. Whipworms are intestinal parisites.

Interestingly, the study comes out just as garum is making a comeback in modern cuisine (you can have modern versions without quite so many tapeworms).

So, without public health and sanitation, what have the Romans ever done for us? Well, there were the aqueducts...

Michael Nunez / Popular Science

Polaroid Snap

This digital camera can also spit out instant prints of your photos.

Polaroid is best known for the instant-film camera it popularized during the 1970s, the SX-70. The camera made it easy for anyone to be a photographer because it only had one button, and it spit out film that instantly developed right after the photograph was snapped. It's been decades since the SX-70 was released, but Polaroid thinks that it can rely on some of the legendary appeal of the SX-70 to attract new, younger customers to the brand.

The Polaroid Snap is a beautifully designed digital camera that spits out instant-film prints just like the SX-70, and it even has the iconic rainbow stripe. Since this is a digital camera, there's a little more flexibility than the one-button SX-70 camera. A 3.5-inch touchscreen LCD on the back of the Snap lets users line up shots or even select photos to print at any time.

The Snap's bluetooth capability lets the device connect to tablets, smartphones, and other gadgets that might be storing photos they want to print on Polaroid's new instant film called Zink Zero Ink. The Snap has a 10-megapixel sensor, shoots 1080p Full HD video, and has a microSD card slot for expandable storage. The Polaroid Snap is available now on Amazon for $99.

=GT at China Defense Forum

Journey's Start

The Gaofen 4 was launched on December 28, 2015 from Xichang in central China, on a CZ-3B/Long March 3 rocket, to a geosynchronous orbit 22,000 miles above the Earth.

On December 28, 2015, a Long March 3B/G2 rocket launched from Xichang and lofted into space the 4.6 ton Gaofen-4 imaging satellite.

Nasaspaceflight.com

Gaofen 4 Orbit

The GEO orbit of Gaofen 4 means that it can maintain continuous coverage of Chinese territory and surrounding areas. It's also the most powerful GEO satellite, good enough to track aircraft carriers in near real time from space.

Billed as a disaster relief satellite, the Gaofen 4 was placed in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO). GEO satellites constantly stay above a patch of Earth, thus providing constant 24 hour surveillance of a geographic area. By contrast, low earth orbit (LEO) satellites such as the U.S. KH-11 spy satellites are closer to the Earth, so their speed exceeds that of the Earth's rotation (meaning that they cannot maintain continuous surveillance over specific locations). In the Gaofen 4's case, its range of view is a 7,000km by 7,000km box of 49 million square kilometers of Asian land and water in and around China.

CCTV 13

Gaofen 4

The 4.6 ton Gaofen 4 is the most powerful GEO spy satellite, with a imaging resolution of under 50 meters in color, and 400 meters for thermal imaging.

The Gaofen 4 is the world's most powerful GEO spy satellite. It has a color image resolution of slightly less than 50 meters (which is enough to track aircraft carriers by their wake at sea) and a thermal imaging resolution of 400m (good for spotting forest fires). It may also have a lower resolution video streaming capacity. Because of its round-the-clock coverage of Chinese territory and near aboard, Gaofen 4 can provide instant coverage of earthquake or typhoon hit areas to support humanitarian relief. It will also allow China to monitor strategic foreign sites such as WMD facilities and naval bases inside its observation box.

ChinaSpaceflight.com

The High Ground

As a high orbiting GEO satellite, the Gaofen 4 would be very difficult to attack with anti-satellite weapons.

Jilin Provincial Government

Jilin Constellation

When the Jilin satellite constellation is completed in 2030, it will have 138 small satellites that provide a snapshot of any place on Earth every ten minutes.

The satellite is part of the dual use China High-Resolution Earth Observation System (CHEOS), which already has five other satellites (Gaofen 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8). This fits within a larger program of radar, imaging, hyperspectral and atmosphere monitoring satellites that will support Chinese civilian missions like agriculture, construction, disaster relief and climate change monitoring. Of course, the Chinese Aerospace Force (a new branch of the PLA following its December 2015 reorganization) could easily make use of such satellites during Chinese military operations. Also of interest is the Jilin LEO imaging satellites (sponsored by the Jilin Provincial government); the first four Jilin satellites launched in October 2015 and already have 80cm imaging resolution. By 2030, the Jilin constellation will have 138 imaging, high-resolution small satellites that provide all weather coverage of any point on Earth, at 10 minute intervals.

xyz via China Defense Forum

GEO Spy Satellite

This scientific article by Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics and Electricity's Zhang Yue, Wang Chao, Su Yuan and Jiao Jianchao, describes temperature control on a 20+ meter diameter mirror made of optical membrane foil (a smaller satellite can unfold the optical membrane foil to create a larger lens to enable higher resolution). DARPA is also looking at similar concepts to meet American IMINT needs.

With a lifespan of 8 years, the Gaofen 4 will likely be superseded by future GEO observation satellites with higher resolution imaging capabilities. One intriguing possibility is revealed in a study from a Chinese engineering journal. Enterprising scientists propose that a future GEO spy satellite could deploy a foldable telescope lens of over 20 meters diameter, which could be powerful enough provide sub 1-meter resolution (similar to Ball Aerospace and DARPA's Membrane Optics program). Such a futuristic GEO spy satellite wouldn't just be able to find interesting targets like aircraft carriers and missile launcher trucks, it could beam back real time video streams of enemy forces underway.

You may also be interested in:

China Tests its Largest Airship

China's Largest Ever Space Rocket Takes Another Big Step Forward

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New, Better Chinese Satellite Hits Orbit

CHEOS- China's New Eye in Space?

Photograph by Will Styer

Cotton-Candy Machine

You don’t need to wait for a carnival to satisfy your craving for cotton candy. Instead, build this portable, pocket-size machine to turn granulated sugar into an airy treat.

A DIY cotton-candy machine consists of a small metal container, repurposed lighter parts to provide heat, and a switch-controlled motor to set everything spinning. Slowly pour granulated sugar into the container, and flames from the lighters will melt it. As the motor spins, the liquid sugar will fly out through little holes in the container’s sides, forming thin strands. A paper cylinder placed around the machine will capture them. Once they’ve built up, simply swirl a chopstick around the perimeter to gather the candy and taste your sweet success.

This article originally appeared in the September 2015 issue of Popular Science, under the title "Build Your Own Cotton-Candy Machine."

Stats

• Time: 2 hours
• Cost: $26
• Difficulty: Medium

Tools

• Push pin
• Power drill
• Soldering iron

Materials

• Long-nosed lighter
• Torch lighter
• Wire
• Two-part epoxy
• Superglue
• Metal stand-off with a screw, washer, and nuts
• A small cosmetic aluminum container (found in drugstores) or a metal drink cap
• Small project box
• DC motor
• AA-battery holder
• Clay epoxy
• Paper, tape, rubber band, and a chopstick

Instructions

1. To build a system for heating the sugar, first open both lighters. Harvest the large fuel tank, igniter, and hose from the long-nosed lighter and the torch head from the torch lighter.
2. Use the long fuel hose to connect the fuel tank to the torch head.
3. For an ignition line, wrap a short length of wire around the metal base of the long- nosed lighter’s igniter and seal it with epoxy.
4. Push the igniter’s new wire through the torch head— where the torch lighter’s wire previously was. This is the main ignition line.
5. Connect the main ignition line to the brass part of the torch head. Seal with superglue.
6. Next, set up the spinning chamber. Epoxy the metal standoff to the shaft of the motor. (When joining two parts together with epoxy, sanding both sides will yield a stronger bond.)
7. With the push pin, punch holes all the way around the sides of the aluminum container, or drill tiny holes in the metal drink cap. Find the center of the container and drill through it. Add the screws, washers, and bolts to it, and screw it in place on the motor’s standoff.
8. Solder the battery pack’s terminals to the motor. Since the screw tightens clockwise, make the motor spin counterclockwise to prevent it from unscrewing.
9. To prepare the project box, plan where you will be placing the fuel valve, igniter, torch head, and spinning chamber. Mark each spot with a marker, and then drill the holes. You can use the photos as a guide.

   Sophie Bushwick

   Inside The Cotton-Candy Machine

10. Epoxy the motor in place in the box. Glue the battery pack to the outer side of the box. Seal the igniter in place—the end should stick out of the box—with clay epoxy.
11. Before sealing the torch system in place with the clay epoxy, measure the torch head and aim it at an angle so the flame will touch the near edge of the metal container.
12. To operate the cotton-candy machine, tape paper into a cylinder that fits around it. Then switch on the motor, squeeze the fuel valve (and hold it in position with a rubber band), and spark the igniter. Let the machine heat for 10 seconds, then place the paper cylinder around it and slowly add the sugar. Collect the candy with a chopstick.

Warning: Take care handling lighters and fuel. The sugar is molten when it comes out, so keep your hands out of the way of hot flying sugar. Also keep hands and paper clear of the open flame—or you might end up making jerky instead of candy.

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Closeup of Pluto's Sputnik Planum, a plain that makes up part of Pluto's "heart"

The latest batch of images beamed back from the New Horizons spacecraft shows the dappled surface of Pluto's Sputnik Planum in extraordinary detail.

The polygonal pores shown here measure about 10 to 25 miles wide and may be 100 yards deep. Scientists think the pattern forms as Pluto's lukewarm interior melts the nitrogen ice deep down. The warmer material floats upward, then cools again at the surface and sinks back down. “This part of Pluto is acting like a lava lamp,” said New Horizons' William McKinnon in a statement.

The darker patch near the center of the image shows what scientists believe is an iceberg composed of dirty water.

Below, the New Horizons team has stitched together several images to show a 400-mile-long swath of Sputnik Planum in Pluto's "heart". The image has a resolution of about 265 feet per pixel.

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Long swath of Pluto's Sputnik Planum

To the west of Sputnik Planum, we also get a new view of the informally named Viking Terra region, shown below. The scene shows various crater rims and flow areas coated in a red dust. The red coloring comes from tholins--molecules that form as sunlight reacts with methane and nitrogen in Pluto's atmosphere.

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Zooming in on Pluto's Viking Terra

Fernando Soto, Aida Martin, Stuart Ibsen, Mukanth Vaidyanathan, Victor Garcia-Gradilla, Yair Levin, Alberto Escarpa, Sadik C. Esener, and Joseph Wang

Microcannon

Pills are a clumsy way to deliver drugs. Digestion is a messy process, and making sure the right drug enters the body the right way in enough amounts to matter after digestion is at best inefficient. What if, instead, the drugs could be delivered directly to the part of the body that needs them? Think “topical anesthetic”, only instead of a cotton swab numbing part of a mouth, it’s tiny cannons that use sonic force to fire drugs into organs.

Let me back up a bit. A paper entitled “Acoustic Microcannons: Toward Advanced Microballistics,” published late last month in the journal ACSNano, details the creation of tiny powerful cannons that could some day deliver targeted dosages of medicine into tissues in the body.

The cannon’s barrel itself is 5 micrometers long. To make it, researchers first punctured a membrane (such as pores on skin), and then spraycoated the holes with graphene before adding a coating of gold to further reinforce the tiny boomstick. Gizmodo then describes the tiny cannon firing like this:

Then they had to “load” the cannon with 1-micrometer nanobullets (about the size of the HIV virus) made of silica and encased in a liquid gel. That gel also contained a perfluorocarbon (PFC) as a propellant — because without a propellant, how do you shoot the cannon? PFC starts to vaporize when you blast it with an ultrasonic pulse, and this produces teensy gas bubbles that expand rapidly. It’s that rapid expansion that “fires’ the nanobullets out of the microcannon. Without the PFC, the microcannon just won’t fire.

The cannons haven’t delivered medicine yet, but they did fire deep into tissue, proving themselves as a possible mechanism for drug delivery in the future. As Gizmodo notes, ultrasound has become increasingly attractive for drug delivery as it's pretty non-invasive and can be easily targeted to very specific areas on the body.

It wouldn’t be the first time researchers looked to putting tiny cannons inside people. Last summer, researchers tested small, water-borne railguns, designed to someday travel the bloodstream and, with the aid of an MRI machine, precisely administer drugs.

[Gizmodo]

The International Geophysical Year opened the door for American scientists to launch Earth-orbiting satellites with the goal of exploring solar and geophysical phenomenon. But the Soviet Union got there first with Sputnik’s launch on October 4, 1957, and America’s response on December 6 failed spectacularly. Luckily, Wernher von Braun and the US Army had kept a satellite-ready rocket in storage, one they pulled out to help America recover from the sting of Vanguard’s failure.

NASA

Vanguard's spectacular failure

The United States announced its intention to launch a satellite as part of the IGY with an announcement from the White House on July 29, 1955. But Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket scientists now working for the US Army, had already proposed a satellite program to the Assistant Secretary of Defense six months earlier. Called Project Orbiter, it wasn’t the long-term program of von Braun’s dreams. It would be a quick way to put a small satellite into orbit, as much a scientific endeavour as a psychological one; he knew the first nation into space would have an advantage in the space age he saw just over the horizon.

The Orbiter satellite would launch on a four-stage rocket, the first stage would be one of von Braun’s Redstone missiles and the upper three stages would be clusters of solid Loki II-A rockets developed by Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. With each stage firing as the one below it cut out, the satellite would enough momentum to leave the Earth’s atmosphere.

But the Army wasn't the only military service keen on bringing America into the space age. Another strong contender was the US Navy whose Project Vanguard proposed using a two-stage launch vehicle based on the Viking sounding rocket to put a modest satellite into orbit. The US Air Force submitted two proposals similar proposals using intercontinental ballistic missile topped with sounding rockets as upper stages to launch small payloads.

Selecting America’s first satellite program fell to Donald Quarles, a member of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics who was also the Assistant Secretary of Defense for research and development and Secretary of the Air Force. Quarles in turn appointed an eight-man committee. Chaired by JPL's Homer Joe Stewart, the so-called Stewart Committee was composed of two representatives from each military branch and two men from Quarles’ offices.

US Navy/NRL

A Viking sounding rocket launch

The Committee recognised that Project Orbiter had the likeliest chance of success, in large part because it was the only proposal with actual hardware to back it up. But the committee also couldn’t ignore its ties to both Nazi weaponry and the American military. The Redstone was an offensive intermediate-range ballistic missile based on Nazi V-2 technology and backed by a former Nazi.

The Air Force proposals were in a similarly poor position. Not only were proposed launch systems based on offensive missiles, those missiles only existed on paper for the moment. It seemed somewhat unlikely that these rockets would be ready to launch a satellite within the timeframe of the IGY. A third strike against the Air Force was its ongoing reconnaissance programs that would do well without resources and personnel reassigned to yet another project.

Vanguard was different. Though it too existed mostly on paper at the time, the Viking first stage was an American-made sounding rocket that had no use as an offensive weapon. The Navy’s proposal alone promoted the idealistic notion that science was a peaceful undertaking with relatively few military connections.

Stewart put the decision to a vote on August 3, 1955. There were three votes for Vanguard, two for Orbiter, one absent member who forcibly abstained from voting, and two members whose lack of familiarity with missiles led them to side with the majority. Vanguard would be America's first satellite program.

NASA/MSFC

A US Army Redstone missile

When von Braun heard the decision, he was shocked, and his ire only increased when he learned that the absent member, Professor Francis Charles McMath from the University of Michigan Observatory, was partial to Project Orbiter. The engineer couldn't help but wonder whether McMath’s attendance would have swayed the undecided voters to favour the Army's proposal. Von Braun set about revising the Orbiter proposal in the hopes of changing the Stewart Committee’s collective mind, but they remained steadfast in their decision.

But von Braun did find a sympathetic ear in Stewart himself. The two men shared a conviction that the unproven Navy system would ultimately fail and the burden of a satellite launch would eventually fall to the Army. Army Ordnance agreed. And so the pair conspired to retain Project Orbiter’s capabilities though under a different name, putting their faith in the convoluted bureaucratic labelling system to camouflage their secret.

Orbiter was revised to use scaled-down Sergeant rockets rather Lokis for the three upper stages with an elongated Redstone as the first stage. It was a configuration that could put a satellite in orbit, or with a dummy fourth stage it would be a perfect system to test different reentry materials. Five missiles were diverted to this “reentry test program,” including Redstone missiles RS-27 and RS-29. If the Navy failed and the Army was called on to launch a satellite, these rockets could be reconfigured for the job in less than three months.

NASA

Explorer 1's 1958 launch

In September of 1956, RS-27 was redesignated Jupiter C, Jupiter to imbue it with the priority of the Army-Navy rocket program as the same name and C denoting the launch as a composite reentry test flight. Early in the morning of the 20th, the rocket rose from the launch pad, reached a top speed of 13,000 miles per hour, and covered a distance of 3,350 miles on its short flight. The dummy fourth stage was lofted to a peak altitude of 682 miles. It was clear that had the fourth stage been active it could have put a satellite into orbit. Von Braun's system worked.

RS-29 stayed in storage for more than a year. On October 5, 1957, the day after Sputnik reached orbit, General Bruce Medaris, commander of von Braun's Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Hunstville, Alabama, told the German engineer to quietly start getting the rocket ready for launch. Vanguard was on deck, and still certain the Navy would fail, Medaris wanted to Army to be ready to step in an save the day.

NASA

JPL's William Pickering, James van Allen, and von Braun hold a model Explorer 1

And fail it did. On December 6, 1957, The Navy's Vanguard rocket with the small TV-3 satellite ensconced in its nose cone rose a few feet from the launch pad before losing thrust and settling back down. In the process, it fell against the launch structure, which ruptured its body and the tanks inside it, setting the whole area ablaze.

The failure gave the Army a tiny launch window, just three days beginning on January 29, 1958; in the meantime the Navy retained control over the Cape Canaveral launch site. The Army moved RS-29 to Florida and started preparing for its mission, and when the launch window opened the rocket was erected on the launch pad. Late on the evening of January 31, the rocket, renamed Jupiter C like its mate, rose off the launch pad and sent the diminutive Explorer 1 satellite into orbit.

The story of the interservice rivalry and America's first satellite launch is expanded in my book, Breaking the Chains of Gravity. Out in the US January 12. Order it on Amazon! Sources: This article was edited from work that appears in my book, Breaking the Chains of Gravity.

HERE

What the world looks like to HERE Live HD maps

The autonomous vehicles of the future and the assisted-driving vehicles of today both rely on a host of sensors and cameras to figure out where they are in the world – and where everybody else is. But while adaptive headlights can move to provide better visibility and sensors can detect objects in all directions, they can’t see what’s around the next corner.

That’s the problem HERE Live HD maps is aiming to solve by making this mapping technology available to auto manufacturers. The system, which was introduced at CES 2016 in Las Vegas, works with on-board sensors to create a better, more accurate picture of the car’s surroundings. A live map updated in real time can work with adaptive cruise control and headlights to “see” farther ahead and around the bend.

But HERE Live HD isn’t selfish. If it picks up on new information – say, several cars' sensors detect a speed limit sign that’s different from HERE’s data – it will update the map for those cars and for every other car that has HERE Live HD technology with the correct posted speed limit. This real-time remapping could signal you to switch lanes to get around a stall on the highway, or even reroute traffic to ease congestion until the stall is cleared.

While Live HD maps are new, the technology is already being used in millions of cars, thanks to HERE’s recent acquisition by BMW, Audi, and Daimler. The connected cars from those companies that are on the road are already uploading what’s called “simple probe data” – basically the stuff you get from GPS, like the car’s speed, location, and heading. As technology and bandwidth improve, more complex data will be uploaded, like road surface type and conditions. This is the information that will lead to fully autonomous vehicles in the future, but even today it works with Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) like lane departure warnings.

HERE is currently processing 2 billion points of data per day, mostly from phones running apps using HERE’s technology (it’s not always branded as HERE, by the way; the company works with a lot of partners, including Kindle and Yahoo). But there’s never enough data when the goal is to create the freshest, most accurate map possible in real time.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is always filled to the brim with thousands and thousands of gadgets. Some of these are obviously useful, but many, many others are baffling in their inanity, audacity, and just plain weirdness. Imagine if you took the products from a Skymall in-flight catalog, amped up the oddity by a factor of eleven, and infused them with millions of dollars of venture capital and crowdfunding donations and the latest technological bells and whistles. That's CES.

And CES 2016 was full of stranger products than many gadget shows of the past few years, which is really saying something. Take a look at some of the ones that stood out to the Popular Science crew and left us reaching once again for that all-too familiar phrase: "WTF CES?"

Follow all of our coverage from CES 2016, the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, full of weird and wonderful gadgets from around the world.

Each microbiome is a snowflake. "Invisible Worlds" by MJ Richardson via geograph.org.uk.

We've been taught for decades that the microbes inside us outnumber our own cells. And we've often been told it's by a ratio of 10:1. That number was first introduced in 1972 as more of a vague estimate, without much significant factual basis, and has been perpetuated ever since. Well, sort of. In 2014, a researcher from the National Institutes of Health called this very issue into question, and now, Ron Milo and Ron Sender from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and Shai Fuchs from the Hospital for Sick Children in Canada have offered up a new estimate.

To determine the new ratio, the researchers looked at the available literature about microbe population numbers as they relate to the "reference man." The reference man is between 20 and 30 years old, weighs about 154 pounds (70 kg) and is about 5'7" (170 cm). The researchers combed through the original bacteria calculations and found that one of the larger overestimations was for microbes found in the colon. Known to house one of the largest populations of bacteria, the gut is indeed full of microbes. But, when previous studies made their estimates, they used the density of bacteria per gram of "wet content" of the colon, times the volume of the entire alimentary canal. But, these researchers argue, the bacteria density of the colon is much higher than the rest of the tract, so assuming that the entire alimentary canal is as bacteria-filled as the colon is would be overkill. (If you want to get really philosophical, you could question whether the so-called wet content's bacteria is even part of our body, since it cycles through us daily.)

The new calculation came down to about 39 trillion bacteria to about 30 trillion human cells, a roughly 1:1.3 ratio. It's important to note though, that this ratio is still an estimation, not an undisputed fact. As Ed Yong writes in The Atlantic, "my preference would be to avoid mentioning any ratio at all—you don’t need to it convey the importance of the microbiome and scientifically, it’s not all that interesting."

If you're anything like me, you've logged over 200 hours in Bethesda Game Studios' newest title, Fallout 4, and asked yourself, "How much armor can I realistically put on my dog?"

Okay, maybe you're not like me.

The story of Fallout 4 takes place 200 years after The Great War, a nuclear conflict that has turned the world (or at least the United States) into a radiation-soaked hellscape. Your character, like me in the comic, has emerged from an underground vault to find themselves thrust into this unforgiving new world. What's left standing after the bombs is in shambles, and the survivors are either murderous raiders, mutants, giant arthropods, or you.

As I immersed myself in the game, certain aspects began to stick out. At one point, while walking through a forest outside of Boston, I wondered, "Why are all the trees still dead?" I thought, surely after 200 years, life would uh... find a way.

The result of that question is the basis of this new series here on Boxplot. I've spoken to several radiation safety experts, and what they've told me will blow your mind. (That's an atomic bomb joke)

So stay tuned for the next installment. Until then, I'll see you in the wastes.

Read comics from The X-Tallographers, a series about the dark art of x-ray crystallography.

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