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Glyph’s VR-Like Headphones Let You Wear Video

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Competition in the virtual reality space is heating up. Oculus Rift has announced its plans for consumer release and HTC Vive isn’t too far behind. Playstation VR is coming this year and who knows what the Nintendo NX will bring.

Xavier Harding

Glyph

The headset lets you watch video and play games in a virtual movie theatre. But the actual content is relatively small

Startup company Avegant doesn’t bill its Glyph device as a virtual reality headset. Think of it more as an entertainment center on your ears and face. The Glyph headset is available to buy now for $600 and ships in 6-8 weeks. The company plans on increasing the price to $700 after January 15.

Putting on the Glyph headset is simple—as it’s reminiscent of simply donning a pair of headphones—and entering your virtual movie theatre requires you to rotate the ear-cups 90 degrees forward. With the built-in lenses, users can watch video or play a game from within the Glyph.

Using an HDMI port on the unit, any video can be pumped into the Glyph via almost any compatible source. But it’s important to mention that video does not take up the entire screen. Unlike VR headsets from Oculus or the HTC Vive, video does not fill your entire view—making this headset much less immersive than competitors. The area with actual video even felt a bit small. You can pan around 360-degree video by moving your head, and while not entirely immersive, it's Glyph’s most useful feature.

Glyph

Rotating the headphones 90 degrees lets you watch video or play games

In addition, Glyph allows you to consistently watch a video while looking in any direction. If you’re on a plane and want to relax by tipping your seat back and tray table up, or if you're watching a video in bed, the Glyph headset can allow you to do so without worrying about another screen in front of you, and lets you keep your hands free and your head in any position.

But having the video letterboxed on the top, bottom and sides led to the actual video being smaller than I initially expected. Glyph is nearly perfect for using with 360-degree video. But if you’re watching a video or playing a game, the Glyph’s small viewing area is a problem. We hope it sees a fix in an update, or in version 2.0.


The Sound of Safety in the 2016 Mercedes E-Class

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Pink noise protects ears in a crash

Mercedes-Benz

Pink noise protects hearing in a crash

CES 2016 wrapped up last week, so there’s a lot of tech getting a lot of attention. Cars can talk to each other, cars can talk to street signs, cars can drive themselves -- or they’re getting there, anyway. Much of this new technology is in the service of safety. If we can eliminate human error, we could save thousands of lives and who knows how many dollars.

But for now, drivers are still driving, and for the near future, we’re going to be required to sit in the driver’s seat, ready to take control back from our partially autonomous systems. And that means there’s still going to be human error, and we’re still going to have car crashes.

Mercedes-Benz has been a pioneer in much of the safety technology we now take for granted, and the company’s Pre-Safe system in the latest version of the E-Class takes safety to a very specific level: inside your ear.

When a loud sound happens – not just “My cat is hungry and crying about it” loud, but “My car just hit another car” loud – a reflex causes the tiny muscles of the middle ear to contract. They pull in to protect the delicate anatomy that allows us to hear and minimize any damage, such as hearing loss or tinnitus.

The 2016 E-Class with Pre-Safe will take advantage of that reflex for more protection. If the car’s sensors determine that a crash is imminent and unavoidable, it will emit “pink noise” just before the actual, and likely very loud, crash. The pink noise is described as being similar to a waterfall or the rush of traffic. A short burst of pink noise is enough to trigger the stapedius reflex, as it’s known, and cause the middle ear to contract. Then when the crash occurs milliseconds later, there’s ideally less damage done to your hearing.

How Pranking An Online Calendar Almost Sent This Student To Prison

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Cyberspace

Torley, via Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0

Cyberspace

It began, as these stories tend to, with an enthusiastic prankster and a little knowledge of the internet. It ended, fortunately, with a modest legal battle and a lenient judge. In the middle, it put a kid in jail on Christmas eve, 2014. Ryan Pickren, the Georgia Tech student at the heart of this saga, shared his story today on Facebook, and it’s as much a cautionary tale about overzealous reactions to online attacks as it is about the danger of pranks.

The setting is a friendly rivalry between the University of Georgia and the Georgia Institute of Technology. The rivalry even as a name: “Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate”, and a weirdly extensive entry on Wikipedia. Pickren, a Georgia Tech student whose grandfather also attended the school, was poking around the University of Georgia website the week before Thanksgiving when he made a striking discovery.

The UGA master calendar was unsecured, and with a simple POST command, he was able to add an event that read “Get Ass Kicked By GT” at the time of the rivalry football game. A couple weeks passed, seemingly without incident.

Here’s what happened next, in Pickren’s words

Little did I realize the firestorm that I had started. The University of Georgia launched a full investigation to find the culprit. A few weeks later, I was contacted by a detective from the UGA police department asking to meet with him over coffee. I was in shock. I didn’t even know this could be considered illegal. I didn’t steal anyone’s password, install malware, or take any personal data. I just found a bug in their site that allowed my seemingly harmless prank. A few more nervous weeks went by, then I received another phone call. This time it was informing me that there was a warrant out for my arrest. Computer Trespass is a felony in the state of Georgia that carries a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison. At that moment everything became very real. My family stopped our holiday celebrations, and my dad drove me to Athens so I could turn myself in. On Christmas Eve, I sat in a jail cell trying to figure out what happened. A few hours later I was out on bail, still in shock.

With apologies to Arthur C. Clarke, to anyone sufficiently ignorant of technology, all actions on computers are indistinguishable from hacking.

The arrest made local news, and Pickren’s sister set up a page to collect funds for legal fees. Pickren was fortunate, and was sent into a “pretrial diversion program,” where he did a year of community service helping a non-profit with cybersecurity. Good, clean, cybersecurity.

The entire tale, which shifts tragically from lighthearted to legal disaster, is available in a public post on Pickren’s Facebook page. Read it in full. It fortunately has a happy ending for Pickren, but if the consequences are so high and the ease of triggering them is so low, perhaps Georgia and other jurisdictions could reconsider computer laws and penalties as currently written.

In which our hero meets his first wastelander

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Maybe just a bit too coincidental. In today's installment of Fall(out) Guy, we meet health physicist Phil Broughton. Stay tuned as he schools out hapless hero in the knowledge of DEADLY RADIATION. (His words, not mine!)

Fall(out) Guy Page 1

NASA May Be Cutting Corners On Safety Of Mars Rocket And Capsule, Report Finds

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NASA/MSFC

Artist's concept of NASA's Space Launch System

Space has always been a risky endeavor. But according to the latest report from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), which makes safety recommendations to NASA, the space agency is not being careful enough. The latest report criticizes several aspects of the Orion capsule and the Space Launch System (SLS) that NASA is designing to bring astronauts to Mars in the 2030s.

The report blames the safety concerns on budget pressures and a lack of accountability.

"Funding remains a challenge for NASA as it strives to do so much with so relatively little," ASAP writes. "NASA’s budget is insufficient to deliver all current undertakings with acceptable programmatic risk."

In other words, cutting corners to stay on schedule and under budget could put astronauts at risk. The report points out several safety concerns.

Some critical components won't be thoroughly tested before crewed missions

Heat shields

After a test flight in December 2014, the Orion team found cracks in some of the seams of the spacecraft's heat shield. That's not good, since spacecraft face temperatures of up to 3,000 degrees when they're reentering the Earth's atmosphere from space. As a result, Orion engineers have had to make changes to the heat shield design.

NASA hasn't really explained how it plans to test the new heat shield design. Under the current plans, the report notes, the only opportunity to flight-test the new heat shield will be on the Space Launch System's first flight in 2018--and the next one after that will be a crewed launch in 2021 or 2023. That thought probably won't be terribly comforting to the astronauts who'll be flying on that mission.

"In our opinion," ASAP writes, "the test of the new Orion heat shield has become one of the most important mission objectives."

Sarah Fecht/Popular Science

A mock-up of the Orion capsule

NASA is developing this 16-foot spacecraft to carry humans to Mars. In space, it will dock with a larger module to provide living space for the 6- to 9-month journey.

Life support

Under the current schedule, the first crewed launch of the Orion capsule will also be the first to try out the spacecraft's "environmental control and life support system." This mission is currently scheduled as a sortie to lunar space--a trip that could take up to 11 days.

"This system will not have had an end-to-end flight test to build confidence that it will function safely during a [lunar orbit] mission," says the report. "This plan appears to incur an increased risk without a clearly articulated rationale."

A better idea, the report suggests, would be to first test the life support system in low Earth orbit, where astronauts could return to Earth in as little as one to two hours using an emergency de-orbit procedure.

Launch abort system

To save money, the report says, NASA has had to whittle down its testing. The first SLS flight in 2018 will be the first to test the heat shield, a functional (uncrewed) Orion module, and the SLS itself. During this test, ASAP says the launch abort system motor will be deactivated.

The launch abort system is the system that, if the rocket explodes during launch, ejects the Orion capsule and carries the humans inside to safety.

ASAP would prefer to see a more realistic, activated abort system tested on the 2018 flight. This "is the only opportunity to flight test the LAS and its interactions with many other Orion systems in the challenging transonic flight environment," the panel notes.

The abort system will be flown on every mission for the next 40 years, and is "the last hope for the crew if something goes wrong during the early phase of ascent."

Questions about the rocket's upper stage

The upper stage of the SLS--the part of the rocket that will propel Orion toward the moon in its 2018 mission--is not rated to be flown with humans onboard. That means NASA will either have to modify that stage to make it safe for a crewed mission, or come up with a new one.

In an email to Popular Science, NASA press officer Kathryn Hambleton said NASA is currently planning to fly the SLS's first crewed mission with a brand new upper stage. There is no guarantee that upper stage will be flight-tested before it carries humans toward the moon in SLS's second mission.

"There is no requirement for a validation flight before flying crew with [the new upper rocket stage]," Hambleton wrote.

NASA/MSFC

The Space Launch System

An artistic rendering of NASA's SLS

What's the rush?

Many of the safety concerns listed here--particularly the ones regarding adequate safety testing--exist because the agency is doing its best to launch the first crewed mission of Orion and SLS by 2023. The original goal was to achieve that flight in 2021, and NASA has said that although 2023 is more realistic, they are still working toward a 2021 goal.

"What is the compelling reason to adopt these measures to maintain a 2021 schedule that appears to be unrealistic by NASA’s own analysis?" the panel asks. "Why is it important to fly crew on [the second SLS flight]?"

NASA's "Journey to Mars" in the 2030s is still lacking many other critical components--such as adequate food supplies and a safe living space. Why rush, putting human lives at risk, just to put the cart before the horse, so to speak?

Each launch of the SLS is expected to cost $500 million or more, which is probably a significant factor in NASA's trying to pack as much testing into as few missions as possible. Of all the problems reported in the study, budgeting issues were listed at the top. Perhaps it's either time to rethink NASA's budget, or else rethink our expectations for America's space agency.

Mice Can Detect Alzheimer’s By Smell

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Scientists have long been looking for a biomarker for Alzheimer’s, a chemical indication of the disease that may appear before typical symptoms manifest. Now researchers might have gotten a step closer: special mice were able to distinguish between the urine from mice with Alzheimer’s genes and those without. A study outlining the findings was published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

In the study, the researchers modified the genes of more than a dozen mice so that they over-expressed three different genes known to play a role in the development of Alzheimer’s. The researchers collected their urine, which contains chemical variations that help doctors detect other disorders, and placed it in front of “sensor” mice with a strong sense of smell. They were interested to see if the sensor mice could tell the difference between the mice with Alzheimer’s mutations and those without.

The sensor mice lingered longer over the urine from the mutated mice about 84 percent of the time, much higher than mere chance. The researchers then conducted a chemical analysis of the urine and found that one compound, called 1-octen-3-ol, was presented in the urine of the mutated mice but not in the controls. In the future, the researchers hope to study this compound in greater depth to see if it’s a potential biomarker for Alzheimer’s.

Even if the researchers did discover a biomarker, there’s still lots of work to be done before it would be clinically useful—they’d have to make sure a similar compound exists in human Alzheimer’s patients, and how reliably it diagnoses the disease. If the compound is in fact a biomarker, that could help doctors diagnose earlier forms of the degenerative disease, and administer treatments when they would be most effective to slow its progression.

Could This Be The Most Powerful Supernova Ever Seen?

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Ten miles can seem like a lot if you're carrying your books uphill both ways through snowstorms. But on a celestial scale, 10 miles is nothing. It's less than the length of Manhattan. It's 538 blue whales lined up neatly. It's just over 19 Burj Khalifas stacked on top of each other. It's 1/22 of the distance between the surface of the Earth and the International Space Station. It's big to humans, but in the vast expanse of space, it becomes infinitesimally small.

But big things can come in very small packages. In a paper published today in Science researchers announced that they have observed the most luminous, and most powerful supernova ever seen, coming out of an object just 10 miles wide in a distant galaxy.

The supernova was spotted last summer by researchers working on the All Sky Automated Survey for SuperNovae (ASAS-SN). Named ASASSN-15lh, the tiny, powerful and dense object at the center of the glowing ball of gas might be the remains of a unique neutron star, called a magnetar. Like all neutron stars, magnetars are the remains of huge stars that were destroyed in supernovae. The light from the supernova ASASSN-15lh reached Earth last June, and researchers are studying it and the magnetar that is currently shining at its heart.

We don't know much about magnetars, except that they are believed to spin very fast and are incredibly dense, with the strongest magnetic fields known to exist. If you somehow managed to travel within 600 miles of a standard magnetar, its magnetic field would dissolve you.

That's a standard magnetar. But this 10-mile-wide magnetar is pushing the physical limits of what astronomers know about magnetars. The light produced from this magnetar shines 570 billion times brighter than our sun, and 20 times brighter than every star in our galaxy added together.

"If it really is a magnetar, it's as if nature took everything we know about magnetars and turned it up to 11," astronomer Krzysztof Stanek said in a statement.

The magnetar shines 20 times brighter than every star in our galaxy added together

In order to produce that light, the researchers hypothesize that this magnetar would have to spin 1,000 times per second, and convert all (100 percent) of its energy into light. That's unheard-of efficiency, and researchers still have no idea where the magnetar is getting the energy to shine so brightly.

“The honest answer is at this point that we do not know what could be the power source for ASASSN-15lh,” said Subo Dong, lead author of the Science paper.

The Hubble Space Telescope will take a look later this year to see if it might be able to solve the mystery.

Amazing Pictures Of Pluto's (Possible) Ice Volcano

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Wright Mons

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Wright Mons

A potential cryovolcano on Pluto, Wright Mons is named after the Wright Brothers

The pictures just keep coming from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft. The latest is a stunning closeup of the informally named Wright Mons, a potential cryovolcano on Pluto's surface.

Last November, NASA researchers announced that they'd spotted two potential cryovolcanos on Pluto: Wright Mons, and Piccard Mons. The image above is a closeup of Wright Mons, named after the Wright brothers.

Cryovolcanoes, or ice volcanoes, don't erupt lava like volcanoes here on Earth. Instead, they erupt an icy slush of mixed materials, including ammonia, water, nitrogen, etc.

The picture shows a relatively new surface without many impact craters, indicating that the crust in this area might have formed relatively recently. Researchers still don't know what the red streaks are, or whether Wright Mons is definitively a cryovolcano.

If it is, its huge size, at 90 miles wide and 2.5 miles tall would make it the largest cryovolcano in the outer solar system.

Map of Wright Mons

NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Map of Wright Mons


First Crewed Private Spaceflights May Not Fly In 2017, According To Safety Report

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Falcon 9 Rocket

SpaceX, via Wikimedia Commons

Falcon 9 Rocket

The first private spaceflight companies will carry humans to the International Space Station in 2017. Or at least that's what NASA is aiming for. The space agency has already placed orders with Boeingand SpaceX to be ready to carry human cargo by the end of next year.

That deadline might not be realistic, according to a new report from the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel (ASAP), an organization that makes safety recommendations to NASA.

The report praised NASA's Commercial Crew Program, which funds private companies to develop the rocketry and vehicles needed to ferry astronauts to and from the space station.

However, the report says "there is a high likelihood of delays to the first test flights," and raises some concerns regarding the program's riskiness.

Safety concerns

The Commercial Crew Program's "maximum acceptable loss of crew probability" has grown over time. Ideally, no more than one in 270 launches should result in a crew death. Current commercial designs fall short of that requirement, says the report, and the standards are being lowered to one in 200.

Space junk, orbiting the Earth at tens of thousands of miles per hour, is the biggest risk factor. NASA wants Boeing and SpaceX to do a better job at protecting against debris impacts.

No more than one in every 270 launches should result in a crew death.

Hazard reporting

The ASAP report also says the commercial spacecraft designs have "a lack of design maturity." That's because they're moving forward without going through hazard analyses. These analyses essentially take the spacecraft apart and look at the risks that each component opens up.

The Commercial Crew Program is behind on its hazard reporting, says the paper, which also criticizes the hazard reports that are coming in.

While the hazard reports are now flowing, there is a significant backlog, and their quality and immaturity is putting a huge workload on the NASA Program Office.

Harsh.

Without thorough hazard reporting, ASAP is concerned that it's going to be difficult to identify and fix any serious problems with the commercial spacecraft before it's too late.

Boeing CST-100

Boeing

CST-100

Boeing aims to send humans to the International Space Station in their 'Starliner' in 2017.

Paperwork delays

Boring as it may seem, Boeing and SpaceX (and any other commercial providers that might happen to pop up) need to get their spacecraft certified by NASA, and they're running behind on that too.

The Program Office has actions in place to complete the necessary documentation submittals and approvals in early 2016. This is, however, behind relative to desired timelines for meeting any 2017 launch dates, and there is a high likelihood of delays to the first test flights.

Budget concerns

The most extreme risk for NASA's Commercial Crew Program, in both likelihood and severity, is the threat of budget cuts.

Just like NASA's SLS rocket and Orion capsule, which are designed to take humans to Mars, the Commercial Crew Program may be facing budget and scheduling constraints that will lead to riskier decision-making.

For years, the Commercial Crew Program has gotten less money that it requested to help fund an American return to spaceflight. Such budget pressure could lead NASA "to accept more risk than desirable for crew and mission safety," says the report.

But the tide is about to turn. The 2016 budget finally provides the exact amount that NASA requested for the Commercial Crew Program.

With any luck, being fully funded will help the program to address the concerns raised in the report.

"If properly funded," says the report, "the Program should succeed in providing safe and effective transportation to low-Earth orbit."

Air Force Turns To SpaceX And Orbital ATK To Build New Rockets For Military Satellite Launches

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Falcon 9 Rocket

SpaceX, via Wikimedia Commons

Falcon 9 Rocket

Since the launch of the first satellite, space has been a rhetorical battleground. When the Cold War ended 25 years ago, it ushered in a bold new era of international cooperation in the heavens. One of the more remarkable results of this is that, for years, American military satellites were launched into space on the backs of converted Russian rocket engines.

However, since Russia’s annexation of Crimea and continued support for armed separatists fighting in Eastern Ukraine, reusing these old engines became somewhat politically toxic. To get American military satellites on American-made rockets, the United States Air Force just awarded contracts to Orbital ATK and SpaceX to build them.

SpaceX’s $33.6 million share of the contract is aimed at further developing the "Raptor" rocket engine, which will be six times more powerful than the engine the company will use to launch a satellite on Sunday.

Orbital's $47 million contract includes funding to develop three propulsion systems: two of its own, and one that would help complete the BE-3U engine, which is being built by Jeff Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, but may also be used on an Orbital ATK spacecraft in the future. From Defense News:

Specifically, the contract includes development of prototypes of Orbital ATK’s GEM 63XL strap-on solid rocket motor, the Common Booster Segment solid rocket motor and an Extendable Nozzle for Blue Origin’s BE-3U engine. Blue Origin, founded by Amazon.com's Jeff Bezos, has been pushing its Blue Engine (BE) class of engines as a homegrown alternative to the RD-180.

This funding has been a long time coming. In May of 2015, the Air Force announced it would let SpaceX to compete for contracts to deliver satellites for the first time. In June of 2015, the Pentagon asked Congress to ease sanctions on Russia so they could continue to launch satellites. By October, the Pentagon was asking for specific permission to buy old Russian rockets again, to fill the launch schedule until newer rockets were available.

With their new contract awards, it appears the Air Force isn’t just committed to buying American, it wants to make sure its satellites fly American, too.

NASA’s Big Announcement: Sierra Nevada Will Begin Space Station Deliveries

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Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser Concept Image

Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser Concept Image

Concept image of the private spaceflight company Sierra Nevada's 'Dream Chaser' re-supply shuttle. On January 14, NASA announced that Sierra Nevada had been contracted to launch cargo re-supply missions to the International Space Station, joining rival firms SpaceX and Orbital ATK in a the growing private spaceflight industry.

The competition in commercial space just got a little more intense. In an highly anticipated press conference today, NASA officials announced private spaceflight company Sierra Nevada will join SpaceX and Orbital ATK and begin launching cargo resupply missions to the International Space Station.

Sierra Nevada is not expected to start flying its Space Shuttle-like Dream Chaser vehicle to the ISS until 2019, but it's expected to be a game-changer for science. Sierra Nevada's missions will include an option that will have a relatively soft landing and can be quickly and easily unloaded, like SpaceX's Falcon 9. Sierra Nevada anticipates being able to return cargo from the ISS and recover it on Earth within 3-6 hours. That would be a huge advantage to scientists who currently might have to wait days to recover samples.

Each company will have a minimum of six flights to the ISS.

This is the second round of commercial resupply contracts awarded. The first round awarded commercial contracts to SpaceX and Orbital ATK. The fact that both of the current contract holders suffered failures (read: theyexploded) played a role in the selection of a third candidate as well. Though specifics of the selection process will be released later, NASA obviously wants to make sure that they have plenty of different routes to get supplies to the space station. These new contracts will last thorough 2024.

SpaceX's next mission to the ISS is expected to occur next month or later.

Still Trying To Identify War Victims, Vietnam Upgrades DNA Testing Centers

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DNA analysis

Analyzing victims' genes could help families learn what happened to their loved ones.

Four decades after the war, Vietnam is still working to identify its dead. But so far it’s lacked the sophisticated scientific tools to do so effectively. Now the country is getting a technological upgrade in order to better process samples of victims’ DNA, as Nature News reports.

Half a million Vietnamese people are still missing as a result of the war. As victims’ families are clamoring for answers, unidentified bodies keep turning up when people dig into the earth for farming or construction. Vietnamese scientists have tried to identify the bodies using DNA tests, but it’s not easy—the bodies aren’t well preserved because of haphazard burials, often under hot and humid conditions. So even though scientists have decoded DNA from bodies buried centuries ago, much this 40-year-old DNA has broken down over the decades.

To decode the damaged DNA, Vietnamese scientists need the most current technology, which can better amplify the genetic code. The Vietnamese government has invested $25 million to improve Vietnam’s three DNA processing labs and has contracted German genetic services company Bioglobe for kits that extract, amplify, and sequence DNA, as well as training for the researchers to learn how to use them. Vietnamese researchers will also receive training from the International Commission on Missing Persons. That lab did the DNA-based identification for victims of the Bosnia and Herzegovina conflict in the 1990s, the largest such effort until this one, in Vietnam.

To identify the victims, the researchers will also need base DNA with which to compare the DNA derived from the samples. So the scientists are also launching an outreach program to collect genetic samples from victims’ family members, and to gather information about where more bodies might be buried.

This is the latest of several initiatives intended to improve scientific research in Vietnam. For example, the American Museum of Natural History has set up a lab there to focus on environmental conservation; the World Bank has committed $100 million between 2013 and 2019 to improve the country’s scientific policies.

But experts think this massive scientific undertaking will be enough to transform the country’s scientific landscape. The labs are slated to open by 2017 and are expected to identify between 8,000 and 10,000 people per year.

What Were The U.S. Boats That Iran Captured?

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Riverine Squadron 2 Sailors In Their Boat

Andre N. McIntyre, U.S. Navy, via Wikimedia Commons

Riverine Squadron 2 Sailors In Their Boat

On Tuesday afternoon, at about 4 p.m. Eastern, the American public first learned that Iran was holding 10 American sailors and two small, riverine boats. In the immediate hours after the incident, the pundit classes inside the beltway (author included) exploded Twitter into a hyperbolic mess, as it tends to do, while Tehran, eight and a half hours ahead, mostly slept.

By morning, the sailors were released. This is not a story about that incident, though it does provide somecontext. This is a story about those boats.

The sailors were on a couple of Riverine Command Boats, first introduced into the United States Navy in 2007. Unlike the Navy’s ocean-going “blue-water” vessels, these are much smaller boats built for “brown water,” or rivers and waters close to coast. For reference, they’re similar in concept to the Swift Boats used by the United States in Vietnam and popularized in the film Apocalypse Now. While Iraq is no Vietnam in terms of water, it still has over 3000 miles of sometimes-navigable rivers.

During the Iraq war, Naval riverine units patrolled the waters of Basra in southern Iraq, often in lighter craft. The squads proved their worth in the war, and after drawing down forces in 2010, the Navy decided to keep maintaining riverine troops and vessels.

The actual boats are 49 feet long, 12 feet wide, and have a top speed of almost 50 mph. They have a range of almost 370 miles. They also include six mounts for weapons: one of them remotely controlled, one controlled from the boats’ cockpit, and the others operated by crew. These are for smaller weapons — think machine guns and grenade launchers, not anti-ship cannons.

In 2007, when the Navy first ordered them, they cost about $860,000 apiece. Most remarkably, while it only needs a crew of four to operate, the vessel has room for 22 people total, making it an ideal way to transport marines or other units upstream and into unexpected shores.

Nothing about the Swedish-designed boats screams sensitive technology, though it’s technically possible something important was on board. In terms of technology loss, this makes it much less of a disaster when an American spyplane was captured and picked apart for study by China after a collision with a Chinese jet fighter in 2001.

More Cases of Sexual Harassment In Astronomy Come to Light

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Keith Vanderlinde, National Science Foundation

The BICEP and South Pole Telescopes, 2008

The field of astronomy has been rocked with three prominent cases of sexual harassment since October.

This week, two separate cases of sexual harassment within the field of astronomy were brought to public attention, making for a total of three high-profile cases since October.

Congresswoman Jackie Speier of California brought one of the cases to attention on the House floor Tuesday. The University of Wyoming's Timothy Slater, endowed chair of science education, was found to have violated sexual harassment policies while teaching at the University of Arizona in 2004, allegedly holding meetings in strip clubs and telling a female graduate student that she would teach better if she did not wear underwear, among other things. He underwent sexual harassment training and stayed at the school for another four years. He then got the job at UW, although the university did not receive or review the investigation against him, according to Mashable.

The same day, Buzzfeed reported that Christian Ott, an astrophysics professor at the California Institute of Technology, violated the school's harassment policies with two different graduate students. The university responded by placing Ott on unpaid leave for one year, according to a statement from the president and provost.

And in October, Buzzfeed broke another such story, reporting that the University of California, Berkeley found astronomy Professor Geoffrey Marcy guilty of violating the school's sexual harassment policy with four separate students. He was let off with a warning.

Speier wrote in a letter to the U.S. Department of Education, “In some ways, the situation is reminiscent of the Catholic church’s coddling of child-molesting priests. As in the church, universities protect perpetrators with slap-on-the-wrist punishment and secrecy, while victims are left alone to try to put their academic careers and lives back together.”

People within the field of astronomy and other STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) fields have taken to Twitter to share stories, offer support and discuss the issue with the hashtag #AstroSH ("SH" for sexual harassment).

Some questioned the punishments issued by universities:

Others noted that many stories of sexual harassment likely remain untold, as the price women pay for coming forward may be too high to bear:

Still others called on bystanders within the field to do their part to fight the issue:

A NASA scientist weighed in, as did the division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy at Caltech:

And some simply thanked victims for coming forward or commended the women in the field:

Speier encouraged anyone who has experienced sexual harassment in the STEM fields to call her office. As she put it, “It’s time to stop pretending sexual harassment in science happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.”

A Furry Diving Suit Could Keep You Warm

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Felice Frankel

Forget sleek wetsuits — fur coats might one day help keep divers warm under water.

Whereas dolphins and whales rely on thick blubber to help keep warm in cold water, fur seals and sea otters depend on dense fur to trap a layer of air against their bodies. Since air does not conduct heat as well as water, air layers can insulate against heat loss.

Now mechanical engineer Alice Nasto at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created artificial mimics of such fur to see how these hairs protect these seafaring creatures.

"Our research group studies a lot of biologically inspired fluid mechanics problems, such as how snails use slime for locomotion, or how water striders walk on water," Nasto says.

The researchers used laser-cut acrylic molds to fabricate hairy surfaces made of silicone rubber. They next experimented with the effects that hair properties such as hair length and hair spacing had when these materials were plunged at precise speeds into liquids such as silicone oil, which comes in a variety of viscosities.

Nasto and her colleagues found that the arrangement of the hairs played a significant role in how much they resisted getting wet. Specifically, the longer and more closely spaced hairs were, the better that surfaces were at trapping air and staying dry.

In essence, rows of hairs can act like rows of tubes. The closer that hairs are together, the better such "tubes" are at holding air; the longer the hairs are, the more air these "tubes" can trap. "If the tubes are short, they get wet immediately when submerged — fill with liquid," Nasto says. "If the tubes are long, they can resist liquid from penetrating in, thereby trapping air."

Most previous research on water-repellant surfaces relied on structures on those materials that are nanometers to micrometers in size, the scale of molecules and cells. Water droplets can rest on top of these structures much like mystics on beds of nails.

For the first time, Nasto and her colleagues have found that larger-scale structures millimeters to centimeters in size, such as fur, can have similar water-repellant properties. Moreover, such materials will probably be easier to fabricate than ones with tinier structures, the researchers said.

Nasto and her colleagues experimented with short, stiff, smooth hairs of uniform lengths rising straight up from materials. Future research can investigate how well a variety of different kinds of hairs perform, such as long hairs, flexible hairs, bristly hairs, slanted hairs, or mats of hairs of both long and short lengths. "Oil from the skin could also play a role in how water-repellant hairs are," Nasto says.

By trapping air, hair could make diving suits more buoyant, Nasto says. She is uncertain how the hairy suits would affect drag.

Moreover, the researchers only looked at how air gets trapped when hairy textures get submerged from air to liquid. "We also need to look at what happens when hairy textures get pulled out of liquid; in this scenario, liquid will get trapped on the hairy material. Bats have hairy tongues and use this mechanism for drinking nectar," Nasto says. "And there needs to be work to not only understand how you can stay dry not only while diving into the water, but when you are submerged and at a stand-still. This kind of understanding can useful for materials for wet suits."

The scientists detailed their findings November 23 at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society's Division of Fluid Dynamics in Boston.


Watch The ATLAS Robot Do Simple Chores Slowly

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ATLAS Robot Vacuums

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

ATLAS Robot Vacuums

With an electronic tether descending from the ceiling above, the ATLAS robot at the the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition (IHMC) in Florida looks like a cybernautic riff on an old deep sea diver. Initially developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is one of the most advanced humanoid robots in the world, recently placing second in the DARPA Robotics Challenge. And yet, it still can’t figure out how to hold a broom quite right.

In a video released by the IHMC this week, ATLAS demonstrates a variety of “whole-body coordinated motions." Specifically, a bunch of household cleaning tasks, like vacuuming the square of carpet, sweeping up the Nerf darts, and putting trash into a trashcan and then putting that trashcan on a table. The video shows them at 20 times their normal speed, which highlights just how awkward and inefficient the movements are.

With every task It looks like a human in a giant clumsy suit struggling to complete basic tasks. The Jetson’s robotic maid Rosie this certainly isn’t. ATLAS isn’t built to be a robot housekeeper, which is a job the disk-shaped Roomba robot family does much better anyway. But performing the tasks is still a way to test to see if ATLAS’s code is working.

IEEE Spectrum reports:

Our first question was why the heck IHMC is teaching ATLAS to clean house, and sadly, the answer is not “because we’re about to announce the availability of that robot butler you’ve always wanted.” Rather, it’s because ATLAS needs to be run often to make sure that code updates don’t break anything, and running the same tasks (like DRC tasks) over and over again gets boring. So, IHMC just came up with a bunch of fun ideas, and tried to get ATLAS to do them, and this is something that they hope to continue to do (yay!).

So not the future of chores, but a pretty cool demonstration anyway. Watch the full video below:

Dynamic Touchscreen Could Display In Braille

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Concept Art For Braille Tablet

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Concept Art For Braille Tablet

One of the weaknesses of screen-based media is how inaccessible it can be for people with impaired vision, who must instead rely on screen readers and other specialized tools to speak aloud the words in an online article. A special touchscreen tablet, made by a team at the University of Michigan, aims to bring braille into the future, by creating a readably tactile surface.

Developed in the 19th century in France by the code’s eponymous Louis Braille, the system was inspired by a military system that used raised dots to create a text soldiers could read with their fingers in the dark of night without using any light that could give away their position to the enemy. Braille’s codified system created words, letters, and characters out of a six-dot grid: two parallel rows each with three raised dots form a single Braille “cell.” Like any system of writing, it’s adapted to usage and time and often includes contractions and other shortcuts.

In print and writing, braille is raised dots on paper, placed their by a machine or by a person using a slate and stylus. Translating that to machines has meant, for the most part, creating special braille readers that use a pin in place of each dot, which is raised or depressed to match the word it’s displaying. Think of pixels on a monochrome computer monitor, only a lot more cumbersome to create. There are braille devices that can turn text on a screen into readable braille, but they’re expensive and usually only show a single line of text at a time. That’s great for a 4-digit tool like this South Korean watch that displays in braille, but not so great if someone wants to read a book or even just an article.

It also limits the kinds of information that people can read. Graphs, spreadsheets, charts of all kinds, or anything on a page showing a spatial relationship simply can’t be done in a single line reader. So University of Michigan Professor Sile O’Modhrain, together with associate professor Brent Gillespie and doctoral candidate Alexander Russomanno, are working on a pneumatic system that they hope will show a full page of braille. Instead of a pin system, it uses microfluidics, or the careful management of tiny amounts of a liquid or gas, to fill or leave bubbles on a planned tablet-like screen.

This isn’t the first device to create a tactile experience on touchscreens. The Phorm touch screen by Tactus is a touch-screen add-on that creates physical buttons using microfluidics, though it doesn’t specifically advertise itself as a tool for braille. Still, doing more with the technology is always good, and the Michigan team expects that, in a couple years when their devices is ready for commercialization, it will have a market beyond just those who need it to help with vision impairments.

Watch and listen to a video about it below:

Researchers Propose Method For Teleporting Creatures' Memories

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Time Magazine

Beam Us Up

Teleportation doesn't work for humans — yet.

Teleportation is one of those future technologies I wish for almost every day--and never more longingly as when I wait for the delayed crowded subway to arrive. And while we're not being beamed around like Star Trek promises, scientists have been working on the problem. In a recent paper from Tongcang Li at Purdue University and Zhang-qi Yin at Tsinghua University, the physicists describe a method for teleporting the memories (that is, the internal quantum state) of a living microorganism (like bacteria). The researchers write that mycoplasma are a particularly good candidate, since they are small, abundant, and have been preserved at extremely low temperatures before.

The researchers propose putting the bacteria onto the tiny membrane of an electromechanical oscillator and cooling them both down to a cryogenic temperature in order to put the bacteria into a state of quantum superposition. Previous research has shown that it's possible to put this oscillator membrane into superposition, and doing so, the researchers say, will also put the bacteria into a quantum superposition state. Then, a superconducting circuit enables the bacteria's internal spin state to be teleported to another microorganism. In the future, the researchers say that testing this method with a photosynthetic bacteria could help physicists better understand how biochemical reactions affect quantum wave function.

So sure, it's not going to make my commute go away anytime soon, but I'll take it.

Watch A Polar Bear Cub Attempt To Walk

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Screenshot via YoutTube video

Baby polar bear on wobbly legs

Friday's got you down? Keep trying to put one foot in front of the other but it isn't quite working? Well, take solace in the fact that the same goes for this little two-month old polar bear cub at the Toronto Zoo. While they may be powerful carnivores as adults, they don't quite start out that way. This little female cub was born to a polar bear named Aurora. Originally, there were two cubs, but sadly, one didn't make through the first day. After that, the zoo staff took this little cub, nicknamed Juno, to an intensive care unit and have been nursing her since her mother Aurora didn't produce milk.

And while she may not be an expert at walking yet, she's a pro at rolling over.

And if you need a few more baby bear videos to get you through the day, Toronto Zoo has a pair of baby giant pandas that they document with YouTube videos as well.

Why Is There A Hurricane In January?

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Hurricane Alex

NASA Goddard MODIS Rapid Response

Hurricane Alex

Hurricane Alex on Thursday, January 14

It's starting off as a wild, wet, and windy year. Alex, the first named tropical storm of 2016 made landfall on the Azores islands in the North Atlantic at 9:15 AM local time on Friday, January 15. Luckily, Alex had been downgraded from its peak status as a hurricane by the time it hit land, though it was expected to deliver waves of up to 60 feet high and gusts up 100 mph.

A storm like this hasn't happened in the Atlantic—not in January—in decades. That's prompted a lot of scientific debate, including speculation that this weird weather is related to El Niño, or maybe climate change, or maybe both.

But hold on to your hats and your Weather Channel panic. In reality, Alex is just one of those weather flukes. While warmer waters, triggered by climate change, may have aided in Alex's formation, a single out-of-season storm does not foretell our future Januaries. Nor is it even a harbinger for the 2016 hurricane season, which isn't expected to start until June.

"It's extremely unusual," NOAA spokesperson Dennis Feltgen told Popular Science, "but not unprecedented."

How did Hurricane Alex form?

A cold front swept through the southeastern United States last week and stalled out over the Atlantic. An area of low pressure developed along that front, growing into a tropical storm, and then—powered by the difference between the temperature in the air and the temperature of the water—into a hurricane. "Nobody’s used to that in January," Feltgen says. That's because the waters are usually too cold, and the wind shear (that's the difference in wind speed between different layers of the atmosphere) is too strong for hurricanes to develop at this time of year. As it is, sea surface temperatures around Alex are only marginally able to support it, and it is quickly losing intensity.

Has this happened before?

Yes, says Feltgen: "Hurricanes can form outside of the season. They have in the past and they will continue to do so."

But the last time it happened in January, Franklin Roosevelt was president and Orson Wells was scaring the heck out of America with his War of the Worlds. That was 1938, way before researchers had satellites, high-tech hurricane chasing planes, or even a naming system. 'Hurricane 1', as it was named, formed as a storm on New Year's Day, working its way up to a full-blown hurricane by January 5. Sailors on ships caught in the storm took windspeed, temperature, and pressure measurements. One ship noted wind speeds of 50 knots, or 57 miles per hour. Based on that and other measurements, the storm's peak intensity was later estimated to be 80 miles per hour, which helped scientists later classify this storm as a hurricane.

While Hurricane 1 was the only hurricane prior to Alex, to start in January, other storms have overflowed into this month from December. Hurricane Alice formed on December 30, 1954 and raged into January. Tropical storm Zeta perplexed forecasters in December 2005, strengthening into January, and defying all predictions of when it would weaken and disappear. Other January tropical storms have taken place in 1951 and 1978 as well.

But all of these are exceptions to a pretty robust rule. Since meteorologists began keeping records in 1851, Feltgen says 97 percent of all tropical storms and hurricanes have formed within the typical six-month hurricane season: June 1 to November 30th.

What does this mean for 2016's Hurricane Season?

Just because Alex made an early appearance doesn't mean we can draw any conclusions about this year's hurricane season. It will still start on June 1, just like Hurricane season always does.. Researchers probably won't even make predictions about the severity of this year's season until at least May. That's because forecasters won't have the information they need to make them. They'll need to know what the temperature of the Atlantic ocean will be in different places and whether the El Niño pattern will remain strong into 2016.

El Niño is currently drenching California with rain. During the 2015 hurricane season El Niño is believed to be responsible for an unusually small number of hurricanes in the Atlantic, as well as an unusually large number of hurricanes in the Pacific. If it remains strong going into this upcoming hurricane season, there's a chance the Atlantic will stay quiet. But no one can predict that with certainty.

What about the future of hurricanes in general?

While Alex hasn't been linked to climate change (yet--future analysis might show that it is), that doesn't mean climate change won't affect storms in the future.

It's very difficult to predict how increased temperatures—in both air and sea—will affect future storm formation. Currently, some scientists think we may see fewer tropical storms, but those storms may be more intense. In addition, sea level rise is making coastal cities more vulnerable to storm surges. Researchers are continuing to look into links between hurricanes and climate, using all kinds of new technology including a facility that can actually make hurricanes in a lab.

And the beauty is, they can make them any month they want—just like Mother Nature.

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