Chris Ratzlaff

Frozen Bubble

Canadian photographer Chris Ratzlaff blows soap bubbles and then photographs them as they freeze.

In the wake of America’s recent snowpocalypse, it seems only fitting to remind you that some truly wondrous things can come out of bad weather. For photographer Chris Ratzlaff, it’s the opportunity to freeze soap bubbles. While it takes some practice, anyone can recreate the jaw-dropping effect at home—so long as “home” happens to be somewhere very, very cold.

A storm chaser by trade, Ratzlaff has been perfecting the art of bubble freezing for years. “Bubbles are such ephemeral things,” he says. “To be able to literally freeze them in time is such a rare experience.”

There’s some interesting science at play here. Every bubble is made up of three individual layers: a thin layer of water molecules squished between two layers of soap. It might look like the entire surface of the bubble is freezing, but what you’re actually seeing is the innermost layer of water—which freezes at warmer temperatures than soapy water—turning to ice within the film.

Chris Ratzlaff

Frozen Bubble As Ice Forms

You can see ice forming at the top and bottom of this bubble.

Unfortunately, the frozen bubbles don’t last long. As ice crystals form in the bubble’s surface, something else forms along with them: cracks. This means that any air trapped inside the sphere suddenly has an escape route. As air molecules diffuse through the tiny cracks between ice crystals, the sudden drop in internal pressure causes the bubble to implode, crushed by the force of the atmosphere.

Before the bubbles pop, Ratzlaff takes photos and videos of the freezing process. “Watching the ice crystals dance across the surface of the bubble as they freeze is mesmerizing,” he says. “When you photograph them, they look like tiny little planets. It fires the imagination.”

Chris Ratzlaff

Frozen Bubble With Prism Effect

As light hits this partially-frozen bubble, the ice refracts the light, producing colors.

You can replicate Ratzlaff’s work by following the instructions below. (If you do, please send photos and videos to manual@popsci.com). But before you run out to buy materials, check the outdoor temperature: Because soap is a great insulator, this trick will only work if it’s colder than -13 degrees Fahrenheit (-25 degrees Celsius). We weren’t kidding when we said “very cold”!

Stats:

• Time: 2 hours
• Cost: $10.00
• Difficulty: Easy to medium

Tools + Materials:

• Bowl and spoon
• 200 milliliters warm water (for freezing)
• 35 ml corn syrup (for thickness)
• 35 ml dish soap (for bubble formation)
• 2 tablespoons sugar (for crystallization)
• 1 plastic straw
• Squeezable bottle (optional)

Chris Ratzlaff

DIY Bubble Blower

Ratzlaff's "ambient air bubble inflation device," which he uses to blow his soap bubbles, consists of a straw in a squeezable bottle.

Instructions:

1. Mix liquids and sugar in a small bowl, and store in the freezer. Lowering the mixture’s temperature will help your bubbles freeze faster when they land. After 30 minutes, take the bowl out and give its contents another stir.
2. Find a cold, textured surface to stick your bubbles. Ready, aim, and fire! Blowing bubbles with a straw rather than a store-bought dipstick will create less sticky, frozen mess.
3. If you really want to go for it, you can rig the straw to a squeezable bottle (see Ratzlaff's version above). The breath you exhale will be much warmer than the ambient air inside the bottle. So this method can help keep your bubble mix cold as it floats to its final resting place.
4. Be patient! “Even with the perfect formula, many bubbles will pop before you’ll have one that freezes for you,” says Ratzlaff. “The slightest breeze can pop them.”

Wyss Institute at Harvard University

Researchers have created flower-shaped objects that change shape in response to their environment. This structure was modeled after an orchid.

With the help of a special ink, researchers have created 3D printed flowers that change shape when they're immersed in water, mimicking a plant's ability to respond to its environment.

They call the method 4D printing, due to the addition of the fourth dimension of time. Although researchers have achieved 4D printing in the past, this team is unique in printing objects in one step using a single material.

Watch the process of printing the flower-shaped objects:

“We were inspired by plants,” Sydney Gladman, co-lead author of the study, told Popular Science.“Pinecones, when they are wet, they’re closed up, protecting the seed, but when they fall off the tree, they dry out and open up, exposing the seed... all we had to do was design an ink that could express this behavior.”

They did so by creating an ink made from hydrogel and cellulose, a major component of the cell walls in many plants. The hydrogel swells when submerged in water, which allows the printed flowers to move and change shape. The researchers also developed a mathematical model that predicts the way the printed flowers will move once submerged. This allows them to control the shape the object takes on by manipulating the pattern of cellulose fibers within the gel.

"Just by changing the code that we use to print the structures, that will change what types of geometry we achieve once it swells in water," says Gladman.

Eventually, it could be possible to 3D print a material that responds not only to water, but also to light and temperature, Gladman says. This research could eventually be of use in the development of biomedical devices, smart textiles, and transformable tissue engineering.

Mahadevan Lab/Harvard SEAS

Miura-ori folds

Shapes created by the Harvard Algorithm

A simple origami fold could change not only how we pack away furniture, but also how we perform surgeries and use robotics, according to a new Nature Materialsstudy. The Miura-ori fold, which creates a pattern of mountains and valleys on a flat sheet of paper can easily be folded and unfolded, making it perfect for applications where an object needs to be flat until used, like a folding table, or even a heart stent.

“The collapsibility, transportability, and deployability of Miura-ori folded objects makes it a potentially attractive design for everything from space-bound payloads to small-space living to laparoscopic surgery and soft robotics,” said Levi Dudte, one of the authors of the paper.

Dudte and his Harvard colleagues are far from the first people to come up with the idea of using a Miura-ori fold in a scientific context, but they did manage to create an algorithm that lets them input a desired shape, and have the computer calculate a folding pattern that can be laid out on a flat material, essentially creating a blueprint for complicated shapes like vases.

“The really exciting thing about this fold is it is completely scalable,” said lead author L. Mahadevan. “You can do this with graphene, which is one atom thick, or you can do it on the architectural scale.”

Previous research involving Miura-ori folds has focused on programable materials that could one day alter their stiffness on command, solar panels that can expand in space, and, on a much smaller scale, folding maps conveniently.

Origami-like folds are also inspiring all sorts of other inventions, from robots to retinas and everything in between. As it turns out, origami is just as valuable to science as it is to art.

SpaceX is one of two companies vying to become the first to carry astronauts to the International Space Station in 2017 (…or maybe a little later).

But the Dragon 2 (a.k.a. the "Crew Dragon") — the gumdrop-shaped capsule that will carry up to seven astronauts inside — will have to come back down to Earth sometime. After reentering the atmosphere, the capsule will deploy several parachutes and then splash down in the ocean, and NASA just posted a video of the parachute tests (above).

The test didn't include a real version of the Dragon 2, instead relying on a weight that presumably costs a lot less than a capsule mockup. It also didn't include all of the chutes a full landing system could use, according to a NASA blog. Baby steps!

The weight was dropped from an airplane and the four parachutes deployed successfully, proving the hardware is reliable.

SpaceX performed similar tests on the original Dragon capsule, which the company currently uses to ferry cargo to and from the ISS.

Eventually, SpaceX wants to achieve more controlled landings using thrusters, and last week, it posted a new video of a successful test of those thrusters.

The tests have showed SpaceX's crew systems operating well so far, which is great news not only for the future of human spaceflight, but especially for the four astronauts who have already committed to being the first human volunteers for such a mission.

To most of us, watching a chess game is about as fun as sitting through a lecture on quantum mechanics. So you might think a video about "quantum chess" would be pretty boring. Unless, perhaps, the players are famed physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking and...actor Paul Rudd?

That's right, this short, called Anyone Can Quantum, has everything. Footage from Ant-Man. An immortal Keanu Reeves from 700 years in the future. Cat videos. Trash talk. Fake Twitter commentary from celebrities and the Pope. Anchorman references. Bill and Ted references. The participation of both Bill and Ted (Alex Winter directs and has a brief cameo while Reeves voices his future and present selves). And, of course, quantum weirdness.

Why does this video even exist? Caltech's Institute for Quantum Information and Matter collaborated with Trouper Productions to create the short in celebration of its Quantum Summit, an event where experts discuss the future of various quantum technologies. So the short film serves as advertising and entertainment—but it's also an introduction to the basics of quantum mechanics, which you learn as Paul Rudd does.

"Seven hundred years ago," future-Reeves intones at the beginning of the video, "Paul Rudd changed the course of history by showing the world that anyone could grapple with the concepts of quantum mechanics." Rudd achieves this goal through the clever game of quantum chess, where the pieces must obey both the rules of chess and the laws of quantum mechanics. To understand what's going on in this game, you have to master two quantum principles: superposition and entanglement.

Superposition

Quantum objects, unlike regular, familiar objects, have the counterintuitive ability to be in multiple states at once. If you flip a normal coin, you know it will land either heads-up or tails-up. But if you flip a quantum coin, and immediately cover it up without checking its status, it will exist in a "superposition" of the heads-up and tails-up positions, a combination of the two states. Until you observe the coin, you can't know its true state, but you can know its "wavefunction," which describes the probability that it's in any given state. Once you peek at the coin, its wavefunction collapses into just one of the possible states, either heads or tails. The most famous example of this phenomenon is "Schrödinger's cat".

So how does this apply to quantum chess? In any given turn, each piece—for example, the queen—has the opportunity to make several different moves. If it's a quantum piece, then it can make multiple moves at once, existing in a superposition of places on the board. Your opponent won't know which move the queen made (and thus where it is) until he or she attempts to intercept it. By doing so, the opponent is "observing" the queen, forcing the piece to appear in just one of its potential positions.

Confused yet? It gets more complicated.

Entanglement

Spoiler alert: After a training montage (of course there's a training montage), Paul Rudd and Stephen Hawking face off in a heated quantum chess battle. Rudd is down to just two pieces, so he tries a risky gambit: He entangles his king and his bishop.

Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon where two particles become linked together and act like a single system. Take the quantum coins from the previous example. If you entangle the coins, then instead of describing each one with a wavefunction, you'd have a single wavefunction for the pair. This means that checking just one of the entangled objects tells you something about its partner's state. In the coin example, let's say the wavefunction tells us that our pair of coins contains one heads-up and one tails-up. If you observe just one of the coins and see that it's heads-up, you will immediately know that the second coin is tails-up EVEN THOUGH you haven't checked its status.

In the chess scenario, Hawking attacks one of the potential positions of Rudd's king. He is thus observing the king...which reveals the position of Rudd's bishop as well. The observation finds that Rudd's king is not in the square the Hawking attacked, but Rudd's bishop is perfectly placed to take Hawking's king and win the game.

Now that you know the basics, you're ready to play quantum chess! Don't you feel ready?

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

New Mexico State Representative Larry A. Larrañaga In First Person Googles

In New Mexico, to encourage state funding of robotics programs, a group recently flew their own quadcopter inside the State Capitol (known as "The Roundhouse"). One lawmaker was even given first-person-vision goggles (FPV) to see what the drone saw.

Aside from being one of many bizarre moments in the Land of Enchantment's long history of them, the drone flight may be the first time in American history that such a craft has been piloted through a hall of government. Captured by official cameras, the video quality isn’t great — but the flight itself is pretty remarkable

The presentation is in support of House Bill 64, introduced by James E. Smith, a teacher whose district covers a swath of New Mexico’s eastern mountains. Wearing the goggles is Albuquerque Representative Larry A. Larrañaga, whose district includes the the Albuquerque Academy, a distinguished private school.

The bill calls for $400,000 to be spent by the board of regents of Eastern New Mexico University to support robotics programs for youth from third through twelfth grade, culminating in a robotics competition. (New Mexico, as you may recall, is fond of robot competitions.)

Watch the full clip below. It’s cut from the much longer official House video, with robotics starting at right about minute 41 and drones taking off around minute 48.

Courtesy CalFoto and UCLA

TNS patch

Ron Ramirez, a retired Army sergeant, wears the patch as part of an experiment to treat PTSD.

For some people who experience traumatic events like robberies, war, or abuse, the emotional effects continue for decades after the episode has ended. Sufferers of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are susceptible to anxiety, flashbacks, and nightmares, which isn’t always ameliorated by treatments like therapy and medication. Now researchers from the University of California Los Angeles have developed a non-invasive patch that stimulates the brain to treat symptoms of PTSD, according to a study published today in the journal Neuromodulation: Technology at the Neural Interface.

The patch uses a technique called trigeminal nerve stimulation (TNS). It’s hooked up to a 9-volt battery with which it generates small electrical currents that move through the forehead to parts of the trigeminal nerve, the largest nerve in the brain. The nerve is connected to many different parts of the brain, including the nucleus tractus solitarius, a structure found in the brainstem that is thought to integrate information from several disparate parts of the brain, including those in which patients with PTSD have abnormal activity. Targeting this nerve in particular makes TNS different from other neuromodulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), used to stimulate neuron activity in the prefrontal cortex, and transcranial direct current stimulation(tDCS), which triggers brain cells to release painkilling compounds.

A proof-of-concept study published last year showed that TNS can help treat depression in patients who didn’t respond well to drugs. The researchers suspected that TNS might work well for patients with PTSD as well.

The researchers recruited 12 participants with PTSD who were already receiving therapy, medication, or both to treat the condition. The participants used the forehead patch while they slept for eight weeks. They completed written assessments of their symptoms both before and after the eight weeks of nightly TNS treatment.

The researchers found that the study participants saw an average of 30 percent reduction in the severity of their symptoms. They were able to function more easily in their daily lives, and a quarter of the subjects found their symptoms go away completely.

Without any control subjects, such a small sample size, and with a somewhat unreliable metric for the severity of patients’ symptoms, it’s difficult to assess just how well TNS would work for the majority of patients with PTSD.

But it’s a promising proof of concept. In the next phase of their research, the scientists plan to recruit military veterans, which have a much higher incidence of PTSD than members of the general population. They’ll also compare the efficacy of the TNS patch against various controls and placebos.

LG TV EG9600

1. LG TV EG9600

If you’ve ever set eyes on an organic light-emitting diode television, the benefits are obvious: They’re thinner, brighter, and have sharper contrasts than any other TVs on the market. LG’s newest version—the EG9600—is the pinnacle of this display technology: It offers a near-perfect picture quality because OLED pixels don’t leak light, meaning blacks are blacker and colors don’t wash out. In addition, the picture holds up even when viewed from the sharpest angle, so even latecomers to the party will have a view of the on-screen action. $5,000

Marantz AV8802A and MM8077

2. Marantz AV8802A ($4,000 preamp) and MM8077 ($2,400 amplifier)

This combination Marantz preamp and amplifier can drive up to 150 watts to seven speakers at a time. It’s among the first systems to process ultra-high-definition 4K through HDMI. It also supports Dolby Atmos—theater-quality audio that places you in the middle of a three-dimensional soundscape. You can also stream your favorite Pandora, Spotify, and SiriusXM satellite radio channels directly to the units.

3. B&W 803 D3 Speakers

Bowers & Wilkins spent eight years perfecting the 803 D3 Diamond series design, and it paid off. The 803’s birch casing is specially configured to mini­mize unwanted vibration and deliver high-fidelity audio. They might appear bulky at 4 feet tall and almost 2 feet deep, but each 144-pound speaker packs a mean punch. Each one comes loaded with two 7-inch subwoofers, a 5-inch midrange driver, and a 1-inch synthetic diamond tweeter that makes every sound crystal-clear. $17,000

4. Google OnHub

The best house parties mean a lot of people posting updates to Twitter and uploading pictures. That can cause a traffic jam on your Wi-Fi. With Google OnHub, you can set one high-speed 5 GHz network for just your devices, and a 2.4 GHz password-protected network for your Instagramming friends. It’s like having two digital highways running through your living room. $200

5. Xbox Elite Wireless Controller

Serious gamers are known to abuse their controllers. So Microsoft built the ultra-durable Xbox Elite Controller. It uses stainless-steel thumbstick shafts that never wear out. Plus, it can be completely customized: The joysticks and directional pad can be changed for comfort, and four removable paddles on the rear can be programmed for more-efficient in-game maneuvering. Your Call of Duty enemies won’t know what hit them. $150

6. Slingbox M2

There’s the big TV in the living room, but what happens when you’re making wings in the backyard? The Slingbox M2 lets you take the game to the grill, on an iPad in the basement, another TV in the bedroom, or even on your phone in the bathroom. $200

7. Tivo Bolt

The disparate worlds of streaming and cable services are finally together in one device. The Bolt lets you search every channel and video service to find the exact show you’re looking for, and skip commercials with a press of a button. Plus, it can record live TV. From $300

This article was originally published in the January/February 2016 issue of Popular Science.

Flyship

Flyship Concept Art

When is an airplane actually a boat? That’s as much a legal question as it is a philosophical one for FlyShip, a German purveyor of low-flying boat-like seaplanes. FlyShip's decades-old AirFish series of vehicles are legally boats, but they fly like very, very low-skimming planes. And they’re working on a new version.

Taking advantage of the ground effect in aerodynamics, by which a vehicle flying fast and low generates lift under the wings and reduces drag, making the plane almost float above the surface of the sea. For decades Soviet engineers built special vehicles called Ekranoplans to take advantage of this ability over shallow water, lakes, and rivers. Boeing even looked into the design for a cargo vehicle.

In 1992, Popular Sciencecovered a much earlier version of the Airfish, noting that the low-flying planes could literally fly under the radar. Plus, “the potential efficiency of ground-effect flight might give such craft enormous range as compared with aircraft” is seen as useful as an anti-submarine weapon. Twenty-four years later, there are very few ground effect vehicles in the world, though the promise remains.

The proposed next-generation flying ship would operate like a shallow boat in harbors, a hovercraft while building speed, and then a low-flying plane on the open water. It could even hop small islands or modest obstacles in its way.

A video about the hoverwing was uploaded earlier this month. Watch it below, for both its future promises and fascinating PowerPoint-style musing on Baltic trade.

In my life as a curator, only twice have a pair of eyes in an artwork ever really mesmerized me. The first pair gazed out from a painting by German surrealist Max Ernst called Human Form. The image wasn’t ‘human’ at all. It was a chimera, a blend of plant, insect, and human, giving a friendly wave but staring with eerie orange eyes.

I met those eyes again in a photo illustration from a century later. They were the eyes of an owl, an imaginary creature genetically engineered to survive in a landscape spoiled by the Anthropocene. Bioartist Vincent Fournier had created a menagerie of these beasts in a series called Post Natural History. The similarities in form between the two works separated by a hundred years was unmistakable, and loudly hinted of other, deeper parallels between bioartists and surrealists: in their intentions, techniques, and the larger historical forces urging them to create.

Courtesy of the artist

Vincent Fournier, Great Grey Owl (Strix predatoris) with predator-resistant feathers from Post Natural History (2012-current)

The surrealists may be long gone, but it seems that they’re not through with us yet. Their project lives on in work like Fournier’s. This time though, rather than bending consciousness with melting clocks and impossible landscapes, bioartists are using living organisms, DNA, human tissues, and their representations to bend our concepts of ourselves and the living, interconnected world around us.

At the turn of the century, the European surrealists were shaped by two sweeping changes to human life—World War I and the advent of psychoanalysis. WWI had shattered trust in the Age of Reason. So-called rationality had led to a worldwide orgy of brutality, breeding death at a speed and scale previously unknown. It allowed for tragedies like the Battle of the Somme in 1916, where a staggering 70,000 casualties were suffered in a single day. Simultaneously, the Spanish flu (so named, because only neutral Spain was honest about the death rates) claimed some fifty million lives, about 3 percent of the global population.

The reality of such horror bred disillusionment with modern life. In reaction, the surrealists traded reason for theories of the subconscious introduced by Sigmund Freud. They aimed to unburden themselves of aesthetic and moral conventions; they grew fascinated with art from those ‘untainted’ by society, like mental patients and children. They sought deeper, unseen truths by materializing dreams, tapping into unconscious thought, and giving voice to suppressed desires. The artistic results were enticing, if nonsensical, as in their practice of free-form, automatic writing:

The rail stations were dead, flowing like bees stung from honeysuckle. The people hung back and watched the ocean, animals flew in and out of focus. Yet king dogs never grow old—they stay young and fit, and someday they might come to the beach and have a few drinks, a few laughs, and get on with it. But not now. The time had come; we all knew it. But who would go first?”

-André Breton, Les Champs Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), 1920

Today, we stand at another critical juncture. The mapping of the human microbiome, the emerging field of epigenetics, and other biological phenomena are shattering our understanding of identity. Biologists are discovering that non-human
life is essential to our survival. The microbiome influences our digestion, immune response, and even psychological health. It is akin to a newly discovered organ. And with epigenetics, scientists are discovering that behaviors and experiences from past generations can affect gene expression in our bodies today, putting us in a new, perhaps uncomfortable, continuum of responsibility across generations.

At the same time, bioengineers are reshaping plants, bacteria, and animals in countless ways. They’re creating chimeras, echoing Ernst’s Human Form, by mixing and matching DNA from organisms found around the globe, upending older notions of nature.

In light of this increasingly sophisticated tinkering, I expect our concept of evolution to shift. If we continue to shape whole ecosystems by introducing genetically modified species—as 
we have already done with agriculture—then evolution will be undermined. Reproductive success as a driving force of change will fall second to the decisions of humans wielding the ability to design life. Human need, and inevitably human whim, will become the primary driver in shaping nature—if it can still be called nature at that point.

Because the bioartists recognize these and other sweeping changes in this so-called golden age of biology, their work can do much more than conjure previously invisible forces like the unconscious (as the surrealists had done before them), or record the new realities of life and nature. Their work offers new ways to think about how our shared concepts of identify, nature, and environment are changing, and what this means for everyday life.

Driven by a gnawing need to interpret these environmental, biological, and cultural shifts, bioartists prompt us to rework our notions of beauty, rethink our politics, and realign our relationships with the living world within and around us. As such, engaging with bioart is more than just passive observation—it’s a kind of language lesson, providing vocabulary to illuminate the ideas, possibilities, and crises of the coming biotech age.

As was the case with Ernst’s human and now Fournier’s owl, the eyes stare back at us because they dare us to take the next step into a strange, threatening—but maybe also exhilarating—future.

A longer version of this essay appears in Bio Art: Altered Realities, by William Myers, published by Thames and Hudson (October, 2015).

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Droneboarder

Hoverboards were last year’s hot item, until they started literally catching fire. Just in time for winter is a brand-new technology-and-board-based sport: droneboarding. The premise is simple: While riding a snowboard, attach a rope and a handle to a drone, and let the machine turn a level field into an X-Games wonderland. Or at least give a gentle pull.

The droneboarder in question appears to be no older than eight. The quadcopter pulling the kid doesn’t provide a lot of thrust, making it more novelty than innovation. Or, as The Verge so aptly put it, “Droneboarding needs bigger drones or smaller humans.”

As the description for the video itself identifies, this is a variant on “kiteboarding,” where riders instead catch the wind and use that to sail across the snow. While the idea of droneboarding is funny to contemplate seriously, the video author notes (translation from Russian by Google Translate) “And do not take seriously, it's just an idea.”

We’ve certainly seen worse ways for parents to bond with their kids over drones. Watch the video below:

Photo by Philip Bump on Flickr, licensed via CC by 2.0

Skeptical dog

We attribute a lot of emotions to our pets. As pet owners and animal lovers, we've devised our own methods for determining when they're feeling happy or sad, and now, research shows dogs likely can sense when we're angry, and they've seemingly evolved to respond accordingly.

Research out of the University of Helsinki in Finland has found that dogs can pinpoint threatening facial expressions in humans, and the way they look at those angry faces is quite different from how they look at neutral or pleasant faces. The researchers showed 31 domesticated dogs (who are experienced in eye tracking tests and were trained to watch a screen) pleasant, neutral, and threatening human and dog facial expressions. They then used infrared cameras to track the eye gaze of the dog for each expression, where they looked first, and where they lingered.

Figure via PLOS ONE research article

A visualization of where dogs fix their gaze

When the dogs were shown a face, they first looked at the area around the eyes, and tended to focus their gaze there the longest (similar to the way humans and other primates behave). The dogs would then determine the meaning of the expression by looking at the face as a whole, not just taking cues from a part of the face (also similar to how humans view expressions). When the dog test subjects encountered a frightening dog face, they would focus on the mouth area of the face, and stare longer. A threatening human face would elicit a much more evasive behavior, "apparently avoiding looking at them," the paper says.

"The tolerant behavior strategy of dogs toward humans may partially explain the results. Domestication may have equipped dogs with a sensitivity to detect the threat signals of humans and respond them with pronounced appeasement signals," researcher Sanni Somppi said in a press release.

[via Washington Post]

Harvard

A partial digital reconstruction of the brain previously made by Harvard.

We've talkeda lotabout makinga computer thatworks likethe mammalian brain.

The U.S. government is now betting $28 million dollars that all these projects are wrong.

A series of three grants snagged by Harvard University from Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) last week has funded a “moonshot” project to throw out all of the previous attempts at understanding the brain and start fresh. (IARPA is the sibling organization to the better-known Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. But while DARPA focuses on military projects, IARPA focuses on intelligence agency research.)

The 5-year project will try to build a virtual model of part of a rat brain, as the brain learns. From this, the lab hopes to be able to identify the way organic neurons work together to learn, so they can replicate it artificially. Ultimately, the hope is to replicate the human brain itself.

“It’s a reverse engineering expedition,” said David Cox, professor at Harvard and leader of the project. “If your competitor released a product and it was way better than your product, you might buy the product, open it up, and try to figure out how it works. Nature is the competing company in this scenario.”

The basic methodology of the project is to show live rats a series of images while examining their brains under a microscope. This information is later correlated to a virtual representation of the brain, made when the rats’ brains are cut into small sections and imaged under an electron microscope.

Harvard says the whole project will produce more than a petabyte of information, which will be made publicly available. (A petabyte is equivalent to an mp3 audio track 2000 years long.)

Having all this data will be great, but one thing we do know already is that rodent brains work differently than human brains.

Acknowledging that, Cox thinks that methods used to virtually replicate the brain in this project could be valuable in their later application to humans. Replicating rat brains is sort of like using training wheels, while replicating human brains someday would be the end goal. So in a sense, this project might be a first step to neural maps being used in regular human treatment, albeit far into the future.

With electron microscopy, the Harvard teams will be able to reconstruct the “wiring diagrams” of the brain, Cox says. They’ll be able to see in realtime which neurons are working with others, and how the connections are shaped.

Understanding the brain is a huge step in neuroscience, but this project’s main thrust is actually aimed at computer science. Modeling the brain is only the first step. After (and potentially during) creating that model, researchers are tasked with creating algorithms that replicate the way that the brain processes information. That is the task that artificial intelligence researchers have been grappling with for more than 50 years. Right now, most A.I. research heavily relies on statistics, rather than biology.

“We know that brains are really good at things like learning and inference, we don’t yet have algorithms that can match those abilities,” Cox said. “But we’re not completely on a limb without an idea. We know the shape of the book, but we need to know the words inside.”

However, Cox says that most researchers, like those working with DARPA’s SyNapse project and Europe’s Human Brain Project, are plunging into creating models of the brain without first understanding how they work. The SyNapse project, which is largely pioneered by IBM, has already created chips based on previous knowledge of the brain, and the Human Brain Project is also building models on “existing data,” according to their research goals.

Meanwhile, the IARPA project will span five years, over three stages. Each stage will study a larger portion of the brain, with the largest being just a one millimeter cube.

Screenshot by author, from YouTube

Still From "Pre Vis Action"

In the woods, a warrior runs, carrying an item of great importance. A moment later, she is beset by two armed men, opposed to her actions and armed to the teeth. Weapons drawn, the combatants perform a delicate and deadly ballet, artful movements with deadly aim. The subject matter is as old as film-making itself, but the craft betrays a modern hand. “Pre Vis Action” is a short film from Welsh writer/director Gareth Evans, best known for his kinetic action film The Raid and its sequel. Without warning, Evans released the 5-minute film on YouTube for free, in full, likely just because he could.

The wordless short film has a plot (a messenger with an important treaty facing assassins) but it’s really a craftsman’s showcase. Its instrumental soundtrack features Japanese and Indonesian instruments, and the aesthetic is full Kurosawa, even if the pacing is more Daredevil and the set itself is in Wales.

Yet for all the fancy footwork and artful swordplay, there was a straightforwardly commercial aim to the project. From the video’s description:

The following is a test action sequence designed by Yayan Ruhian, Cecep Arif Rahman and Gareth Evans. It was designed in a bid to create choreography that maintains the style and rhythm set out in their prior work (The Raid 1&2) while staying within the parameters of a PG-13/12A audience friendly certification.

That’s right, the real aim of this is to disarm the MPAA, and bring flashy choreographed fighting to the most profitable audience block. That’s almost as ruthlessly commercial as the assassins in the film.

Watch the short in full on YouTube.

James Gathany/CDC via flickr CC

The Aedes Aegypti mosquito, which transmits the Zika virus.

As the Zika virus continues to infect people worldwide, health officials in the United States and abroad agree that a vaccine is clearly needed. Unfortunately the rarity of the virus and the fact that a vaccine has never been in development has left researchers scrambling to come up with something safe and effective. However, while vaccines typically take between seven and 15 years to develop, Canadian researchers working on a Zika vaccine told Reuters today that one could be ready for emergency use before the end of 2016.

Canadian researcher Gary Kobinger, who led the development of the Ebola drug called ZMapp, and who is now part of a group of scientists working on developing a Zika vaccine, told Reuters that human testing of this vaccine could begin in August, and if everything goes well, that could allow the vaccine to be used in the event of a public health emergency in October or November. The WHO is meeting on Monday in Geneva to decide whether the Zika outbreak--which is believed to be linked to neurological conditions and developmental issues in newborns--should be considered a public health emergency.

According to the Reuters report, the United States also has two potential candidates for a vaccine, however neither will likely be ready for several years.

As Stat points out, the rapid search for a Zika vaccine is eerily similar to the recent quest for an Ebola vaccine. However, given the devastating effects of an Ebola infection and the fact that there had been outbreaks in the past, scientists had some knowledge and research to build on. This isn’t quite the case with Zika, which causes mild symptoms in only about 20 percent of those infected, and until recently the virus was relatively benign. Now with links to microcephaly and possibly Guillain-Barre syndrome, the need for a vaccine is much greater.

Luckily, though, the Zika virus shares similar characteristics to the chikungunya virus, which researchers have been trying to find a vaccine for, and that has given them a jump-start.

While a vaccine is clearly needed, scientists also say that an understanding of how the Zika virus is causing microcephaly and Guillain-Barre is important, too, to ensure the vaccine is safe for those who need it most.

NASA/Crew of STS-132

International Space Station

250 miles up into outer space, the International Space Station (ISS) hurtles silently around Earth at about 5 miles per second. Inside, scientific experiments are constantly underway, from harvesting lettuce to studying what living a year in space does to the human body. One particular study, conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA) and concluded last month, has found that two species of tiny fungi originally from Antarctica have survived living in Mars-like conditions for a period of 18 months. These results could prove critical in the efforts to find an answer to the question immortalized by David Bowie: Is there life on Mars? The findings were published in the journal Astrobiology.

The barren, windswept McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica are widely considered the most inhospitable environments on Earth. Powerful winds scrape clean the snow and ice and leave bare rock in a landscape cold, dry, and desolate. Yet even there life persists. Tucked in the rocky crags live particularly hardy creatures known as cryptoendolithic microorganisms. Among them are the two species of black fungi that rode on the ISS.

S. Onofri et al.

Extreme fungi

Section of rock colonized by cryptoendolithic microorganisms and the Cryomyces fungi in quartz crystals under an electron microscope.

The species, known as Cryomyces antarcticus and Cryomyces minteri, were collected from the windy valleys by particularly enterprising individuals for the ESA and, once blasted into space, were carefully inserted into the EXPOSE-E platform. The EXPOSE-E is an experimental platform designed by the European Space Agency (ESA) to simulate extreme conditions. And extreme it was for the little fungi.

The cells in which the cultures lived contained Martian atmospheric conditions, with approximately 95 percent carbon and a mere 3 percent nitrogen and 0.15 percent oxygen. Earth’s atmospheric makeup is mostly nitrogen and oxygen (78 percent, 21 percent, respectively) by comparison. And yet, even after existing in this extremely low pressure environment, with constant blasts of ultraviolet radiation for 18 months, 60 percent of the fungi managed to survive with their DNA perfectly intact. "The results help to assess the survival ability and long-term stability of microorganisms and bioindicators on the surface of Mars” Rosa de la Torre Noetzel, of Spain's National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA), and co-researcher on the project, explained in a statement.

ESA

EXPOSE-E

An astronaut fixes the EXPOSE-E platform onto the International Space Station.

The fungi were a part of a larger ongoing experiment involving lichens titled, creatively, Lichens and Fungi Experiment (LIFE) where the two types of organisms are exposed to the harsh environments of space in order to aid in the search for life outside of Earth. And as we continue to find various life forms on Earth that can survive the seemingly inhospitable environments of space, perhaps we can glean information relevant to our own future on the red planet.

Popular Science

The 32-bit Macintosh computer from Popular Science Magazine in 1984.

Since the Oculus Rift first appeared on Kickstarter in 2012, the world has slowly been getting more interested in what virtual reality could hold. In early 2016, we stand at a cliff above murky waters, hoping virtual reality software and hardware capabilities will be deep enough to accommodate the leap.

As tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Sony eye the water, Apple stands well behind, the diver reluctant to make the plunge. Apple, known for its practice of releasing refined ideas once others bring them to market, has slowly been amassing the means to build a virtual reality device, as shown by reports and recent acquisitions.

Most recently, Apple has acquired Flyby, an augmented reality company that looks to give smartphones and tablets the ability to be “aware” of their surroundings, according to the Financial Times (the company had previously been working with Google, one of Apple's chief rivals, on augmented reality devices in Google's "Project Tango" family). But the Financial Times also reports that Apple has amassed hundreds of researchers in both augmented and virtual reality.

Apple’s policy is to not disclose their plans with the companies they buy, but after multiple acquisitions of augmented and virtual reality companies like Metaio, Faceshift, and Primesense, it’s difficult not to start connecting the dots.

When asked about virtual reality in an earnings call earlier this week, Apple CEO Tim Cook seemed to be caught off-guard, giving a vague, yet telling response to what he thought about whether the product was viable.

“I don't think it's a niche. It's really cool and has some interesting applications,” Cook said.

Apple has also hired virtual reality researcher Doug Bowman, who previously had worked at the University of Virginia.

Apple is notoriously secretive, so we probably won’t see any kind of a device until VR either establishes itself or flops miserably. But it’s nonetheless important to stay abreast of the company that entered the mobile market in 2007 and made $51 billion on iPhones in just Q1 2016.

Meanwhile, the Oculus Rift has plans to ship this March, with the HTC Vive and Sony’s Playstation VR expected not far behind. Microsoft's augmented reality lens headset HoloLens should also soon be made available to software developers.

[via the Financial Times]

Pivot

Truth and Power

Incumbent cable channel Pivot launched in 2013 with the express goal of connecting with millennials through good, old fashioned, pay TV.

Though reaching just 47 million households, the channel, which is backed by Participant Media, has launched some interesting programming, including Fortitude, a murder mystery on a fictional Arctic island, and now Truth and Power, a multi-part docuseries hosted by Maggie Gyllenhaal and executive produced by Brian Knappenberger, who directed The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz and We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists.

Episode two explores malware and premieres on Pivot tonight at 10 p.m. ET, while episode three, which explores the origins of private companies selling spyware to regimes, airs next Friday. We spoke to Knappenberger about the show and the need to have a serious conversation about cryptography and encryption without fear-mongering.

Was it through the Aaron Swartz documentary that you became interested in online privacy and security?

I had been interested for quite a while, and a lot of my work has had to do with technology and how it intersects with civil liberties. I did We are Legion before Aaron's documentary, and it is a more robust look at the hacking community, the chaos of it, and also the issues ... people taking up arms in various ways online and hacking. I was in the middle of that. I was talking about that film at a panel within a week or so after Aaron died, and I was surrounded by lots of people who knew him, so I was in that community. I was already fired up about these issues.

This seems like great timing to air an episode about online privacy.

We have been fired up about this for a while. And have been following the encryption debate for a long time. It is a vibrant relevant conversation right now.

Encryption has been around for a while, but it seems like just now it is reaching the mainstream conscious.

It is fascinating. It's been alleged ever since the crypto wars of the 1980s and 90s that somehow encryption is a dangerous thing. That really does kind of strike at the heart of this balance, between civil liberties and technology, and how does the more traditional notions of being able to search or privacy, protection from the fourth amendment, how does that work in the digital world.

Why is it that community and national safety is always tied to having unfettered access to information?

I think it comes down to powerful entities wanting more power. One person we spoke with in tonight's episode says, "every political movement starts with a private conversation." And so communication is right at the heart of who we are. There is no one serious in the tech community who says that there is a safe backdoor to these things. There is no way to...even if you accept the notion the FBI should have a backdoor, there is no way that is safe so that they are only able to look at it.

We go through these periods of time in our society where we get seized with fear and anger over things like terrorism, and these things seem like a good idea to people. Or are used by entities to try to gain more power. And we have to resist that. There are bad actors, but there also needs to be protections and checks on power.

How do you as a journalist and an artist straddle that line?

It's tricky. In fact, it's gotten to the point where I stop directly recommending certain things. I feel a sense of responsibility if those things are compromised in some way. This is a serious stuff, if you are talking about protestors or journalists or sources. There are people in a vulnerable position. You have to think about what the threat model is, and what is at stake for some people. You can't go into various conversations haphazardly with sources in which there will be real retribution. You need to understand what the threat model is. You may not need full encryption for everything, but you have to be serious about it. There are different levels of openness, but there are very real stakes there.

I take it seriously, but not everything I do is encrypted at the highest levels. In terms of priority, I think as a journalist you have to be serious about someone who is in a vulnerable position. We engaged in a surveillance debate before Edward Snowden but now we need a nationwide discussion on these kinds of tools and how they align with the fourth amendment. You want to get people to understand what this new world is, and what it is at stake.

It's a strange juxtaposition, right? We experience more online freedom than ever, but not really.

It's a tension of our time right now. We started the second episode these activists who believed they were being targeted by malware, and they found out they were being tracked by the Moroccan government, which used a piece of malware by the Hacking Team. They were a shadowy business selling these kinds of malware tracking tools selling to regimes around the world. And we have arms embargos with these regimes, we consider them to be bad actors, but these companies make money selling malware that can take over your computer.

We got an interview with the Hacking Team, their PR person, and we started asking who do they sell you? They said no worries, we vet the regimes we sell to. And then the Hacking Team was hacked last year, and it happened three weeks after our interview. So we have 400 gigabytes of data in which we can fact check the interview we had just done. How often does that happen?

What is your opinion of how this online security debate plays out with the 2016 election?

If you listen to Republicans, they say we need to track and trace everybody. And the Democrats say they are going to team up with Silicon Valley. But they are both playing to fears like San Bernardino and other attacks, using that fear and that anger to gain votes for them and then enact draconian laws when it comes to the Internet.

But we have to push back because it is not that simple. What we think is most important—"American values"—they need to make it into the digital world. We need to be diligent in not going overboard with our fear.

Titan Aerospace

Titan Aerospace's Solara, a company and product acquired by Google. Google has been using these aircraft to test high-speed internet transmitted from the air.

It seems if you control a large portion of the internet, you have vested interest in getting the internet to more people. Both Facebook and Google have been testing aerial devices that would be able to provide reliable wireless internet access in remote locations. Until now, Facebook had Aquila, its solar-powered drone armed with Wi-Fi lasers, and Google had Project Loon, huge balloons with transmitters. Both are supposed to literally beam internet from the sky, but both have been confined to limited tests so far.

And now it seems Google has had other tricks up its sleeves to accomplish this goal, according to a new report by The Guardian. The search giant is reportedly testing multiple solar powered drones, and has been since last summer in a remote New Mexico airspace called the Spaceport Authority, according to the Guardian's sources. The space was originally meant to house Virgin Galactic aircraft.

The technology allegedly used in the devices is not the cell service used by everyday people — at least, not yet. Google is testing 5G wireless internet, which could transmit more than 40 times faster than our 4G LTE service. However, at the reported transmission frequency, 28 Ghz, the signal would also fall off ten times quicker than 4G LTE, so serious power is required in focusing the transmission.

These optionally-piloted aircraft called Centaur, among other drones from Titan Aerospace, which Google acquired in 2014.

It's not certain how these drones fit in with Project Loon, but the Guardian does say that they're under the same umbrella of Google's Access team, a group like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Internet.org, which looks to bring internet to the world. There's also Google's Project Wing, a play to deliver packages which has been largely overshadowed by Amazon's efforts in the same area. (However, crossover in this regard seems unlikely, because of the disparate size in drones.)

In any case, the race to provide the next generation of internet just got a little tighter.

[Source: The Guardian]

Wikimedia Commons

Gun Control

According to Reuters and The New York Times, Facebook has decided to ban all private gun sales on its site, as well as on their photo-sharing service Instagram. The ban does not, however, apply to posts by licensed gun dealers.

Though Facebook and Instagram never directly sold guns to users, it served as a medium for people to sell guns to each other in private groups, messages or pages, often without the need for a background check. In 2014, Facebook limited gun sales by preventing sales to minors. "Facebook already prohibits people from offering marijuana, pharmaceuticals and illegal drugs for sale, and is updating its policy to include guns," reports The New York Times.

"Over the last two years, more and more people have been using Facebook to discover products and to buy and sell things to one another," Monika Bickert, Facebook's head of product policy, told Reuters in a statement. She continued, "We are continuing to develop, test, and launch new products to make this experience even better for people and are updating our regulated goods policies to reflect this evolution."