Photo by Tamara Evans via Flickr, licensed under CC by 2.0

Tasty potato chips

When I'm waiting for my dinner to finish cooking, I can't say I often think about how the way I fry it is changing the food's microstructure. But after sifting through a paper recently published in the Journal of Food Science that explores the microstructure of "fried potato disks", I might just.

The study was conducted by Tanjila Alam and Pawan S. Takhar from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. In it, they cut russet potatoes into tiny 45-millimeter diameter, 1.65-millimeter thick disks and then deep fried them in soybean oil. So, think of them as little crispy potato chips for science. The potato samples were fried in 190 degrees Celsius oil for 0, 20, 40, 60, or 80 seconds.

After that, the fried potatoes were subjected to X-ray micro-computed tomography, which creates a micro 3D image of the sample without destroying it. The idea here, is to see how frying the potato affects its porosity, the twistiness ("tortuosity") of the paths connecting the pores, and how much oil the chip takes in, which eventually could help us make better fried foods.

Screenshot via Microstructural Characterization of Fried Potato Disks Using X‐Ray Micro Computed Tomography

A closer look at fried potatoes

This microtomograph image shows the microstructural changes that happen when a potato is deep fried.

Because deep frying involves submerging the food in oil that's much hotter than the boiling point for water, any water that's inside the food quickly evaporates and turns to steam, creating pressure. And all of that affects the pores of the potato and how much oil it takes on.

In this study, the researchers found that the longer the potato was fried, the more the pore size and number of pores increased, which helped the potatoes to take on more oil. The chips that were fried for longer also had less twisty pathways between pores, which corresponds to having better oil uptake.

Alas, there was no official taste test so we'll never know which kind was most delicious.

Screenshot via Microstructural Characterization of Fried Potato Disks Using X‐Ray Micro Computed Tomography

A graphical representation of the porosity, tortuosity, and oil volume at different frying times

Scientists aren’t just interested in fried potatoes, the paper notes. In 2011, researchers put chicken nuggets a similar test, dying the oil blue and using a confocal microscope to trace oil and pore distribution through the deep fried delicacy. Yum!

Each lunar module cost about $149,000,000; adjusted for inflation that’s just under one billion dollars per spacecraft. For all that money, not one was brought home to put on display in a museum. Not only was the Apollo lunar module not designed to survive reentry through the Earth's atmosphere, each was abandoned or destroyed during its mission. The descent stages served as the launch pads for the ascent stages, so were all left in place on the Moon. The ascent stages, on the other hand, met a far more destructive end.

The story of the lunar module ascent stages goes hand in hand with the story of NASA doing seismic experiments on the Moon. Seismology, measuring how shock waves move across and through a planetary body, can tell scientists a lot about that body’s surface and internal structure. Seismologists do this on Earth by studying earthquakes, so NASA decided to do the same type of investigation on the Moon.

Lunar seismology experiments reached the Moon with each Apollo landing mission as part of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package or ALSEP. The ALSEPs were designed to explore the geophysical environment of the Moon, answering questions about its internal structure, geometric shape, tectonic activity if any, and shed light on the dynamic interaction between it and the Earth. The contract to build these lightweight but efficient instrument packages was awarded to the Bendix Systems Division of the Bendix Corporation in March of 1966 with a total budget of $17.3 million (about $126.5 million adjusted for inflation).

NASA

Apollo 14 astronauts practising deploying an ALSEP

The first mission to land, Apollo 11, took an early ALSEP called the Early Apollo Surface Experiment Package (EASEP). Its seismic component was a Passive Seismic Experiment Package. It was composed of four solar powered seismometers — three long-period seismometers and one short-period — designed to measure meteorite impacts and moonquakes.

Things got more sophisticated on later missions that brought full ALSEPs to the Moon. Apollos 12, 14, 15, and 16 featured a Lunar Passive Seismic Experiment designed to determine the Moon’s sub-surface properties and measure vibrations traveling through the body. Seismic motions were recorded and sent back to receiving stations on Earth where they were magnified by 10 million. The four experiments taken together allowed seismologists to pinpoint the origin of moonquakes in three dimensions and record the effects of almost daily meteorite impacts. They were even sensitive enough to record the surface effects of the Sun heating the lunar surface at the start of a new lunar day.

Apollos 14 and 16 had complementary Lunar Active Seismic Experiment in their ALSEPs. This was an experiment designed to study the local area of the Moon rather than the whole body, and being active it provided its own source of a boom for the instruments to measure. These booms were achieved with two kinds of explosives. One was series of small shotgun-like charges detonated by the astronauts at given intervals at given points relative to the ALSEP. The second explosion was far larger and used a mortar-type charge that had four grenades launch by self-contained rockets after the astronauts had left the Moon. These active experiments were designed specifically to reveal any layering nearly 1,000 feet beneath the Moon's surface.

NASA

Apollo 14's ALSEP on the Moon

But NASA wanted data from more than just natural quakes and impacts. Any impactor of a known size hitting at a known spot took variables out of the data for better results. And so the agency used what it had at its disposal to force results: spent rocket stages and spacecraft. After firing for the translunar injection burn that sent the Apollo spacecraft out of Earth orbit and to the Moon, the S-IVB upper stage of the Saturn V rocket was deliberately crashed into the Moon so the resulting vibrations could be measured by the seismometers previous missions had left on the surface.

The ascent stages of the lunar modules were also used for seismology. Once the lunar landing crew had transferred everything coming back to Earth from the lunar module and closed it out, the now useless spacecraft was jettisoned and directed by Mission Control to impact the Moon's surface at a specific point near an ALSE. One of these controlled crashes brought some stunningly strange results. When Apollo 12's lunar module Intrepid smashed into the lunar surface, the resulting shock wave vibrated through the Moon for more than 55 minutes. Scientists eventually chalked the wave's continual propagation up to the Moon being so dry; dry rocks didn't dampen the waves aw efficiently as they do on Earth.

NASA via Honeysuckle Creek

Apollo 13's LM Aquarius

The network of seismometers lefts on the Moon during Apollo recorded more than 1,700 meteoroid impacts and found that stresses from changes in lunar tides spawn monthly moonquakes totalling up to 300 each year that originate at about 100 distinct sites. These experiments also helped scientists determine that the Moon has a structure similar to the Earth: it has a crust with an average thickness of 31 miles that's rich in the mineral plagioclase, a mantle made largely of olivine and pyroxene, and a relatively small core composed mostly of iron and sulphur.

Powered by a small radioisotope thermoelectric generator, each ALSEP was designed to work in its local lunar environment for at least a year after its crew left the surface. But they lasted far longer, gathering data for eight years before NASA permanently shut them all down in September of 1977. They are, of course, still up there along with the remains of the smashed S-IVB and lunar modules for future archaeologists to explore.

Sources: Apollo Lunar Surface Journal on the ALSEP; Smithsonian Institution list on spacecraft's final resting places; Table of Lunar Module Ascent Stages impact sites; Apollo funding breakdown.

Atlantic Records

Hamilton Original Broadway Cast Recording

Hamilton fans will be the first to tell you that the hit Broadway musical’s score, with music and lyrics by MacArthur winner Lin-Manuel Miranda, and orchestrations by Alex Lacamoire, is pretty darn near perfect. And their praise doesn’t just exist in a vacuum — the Hamilton Original Broadway Cast Recording is the first Broadway cast album to ever hit #1 on the Billboard Rap Album chart.

And the magazine gave Hamilton its first five-star rating, making it the first album to ever receive a Billboard perfect score.

But those same Hamilfans might still be puzzled as to why they’ve been listening to the album non-stop since its release this past September.

If you’re a diehard, you’ve probably played the 2 hour and 22 minute-long recording more times than you can count — and you have yet to take a break.

Does this mean that Hamilton is a legitimately addictive piece of music? Can you say no to this, or will you be back, like before, popping in your earbuds because you will never be satisfied?

“If you can figure it out, let me know,” says Tim Latham, the mixing artist who worked not only on Hamilton, but also on In the Heights, Miranda’s previous Tony award and Grammy award-winning musical.

“The best way to describe my job would be to make sure that the story translates,” explains Latham. “I make sure that every note played by every instrument, every word, every syllable sung, is articulated in a way that is heard.”

It was a laborious process. The majority of cast recordings are done within a few days; Hamilton took “roughly 34 days” to complete, and with the cutoff for the 2016 Grammy awards looming, Atlantic Records had a very specific deadline the label needed to hit. The amount of extra time they were able to put into the recording is literally audible.

“It is a very dense record,” Latham said, “and it does require multiple listenings to absorb the whole thing.”

But is that why we’re spending so much time with this album? There’s no doubt one reason I’ve listened to Hamilton multiple times was to fully hear each individual aspect of the recording. Sometimes I focus on the lyrics, other sessions on the orchestration. But anyone who knows Hamilton knows there is something else involved.

“Addictiveness relies on being compelled to repeat something which creates a response,” says musicologist Thomas Peach, whose work focuses on musical theater. “We are repeating music not only for its musical value, but to re-live physical and emotional responses which accompany it.”

In other words: this is why you cry every time you listen to Eliza show her husband what she’s proudest of. It’s also why gyms have introduced Hamilton-themed workouts, using tracks like “My Shot” and “Non-Stop” to inspire people to be their best selves. If Hamilton could write 51 Federalist Papers, you can do one more tabata.

With Hamilton, we not only get to re-live these physical and emotional responses — we also get to create new ones. Hamilton is a uniquely participatory musical, inspiring countless fan videos, fan art, and online conversations — and although the social media has helped spread the Hamilton love, you can’t say that the soundtrack has become a participatory piece of culture simply because social media exists. You can, however, draw a direct connection between the musical’s social elements and the number of people hitting “play” on the cast album.

“The music fuels the addiction to the community and the community fuels the addiction to the music,” says Peach. Those of us who tag ourselves as #hamilfans or #hamiltrash spend as much time talking about Hamilton and making Hamilton-related art as we do listening to the music.

“I’ve seen Vines of people being the entire cast,” says Latham. “All of the vocals. It’s just amazing.”

I asked Latham if he thought there were any technical aspects of the recording that made it particularly addictive. He cited two factors that might go unnoticed by even the most obsessive of listeners: dynamics and tempo.

“My job was to make sure the emotional impact of the story got translated, and a big part of that was the dynamics,” says the mixer. Many albums don’t have a lot of dynamic variation, but Hamilton’s dynamic range is one more reason why it continuously holds our interest. “If everything was the same volume from the beginning of the song to the end of the song, I’d find it tiresome to listen to,” he says. “It’d be like watching an action movie where the action scene was edited at the same pace as the prelude to the action.”

Hamilton also uses tempo in a way that we don’t hear much anymore. According to Latham, “A lot of popular music is one tempo from the beginning of the song to the end of the song, and it doesn’t vary by a fraction of a second. Everything is on a grid.” Every Hamilton song has subtle variations. If this surprises you, load up a metronome app on your smartphone and test it for yourself.

Hamilton has turned the music world upside down, and for good reason.

“Musically, Hamilton fuses a base of rap and hip-hop with traditional musical theatre conventions and musical styles to create a new American songbook, diverse and rich,” claims Peach. “I think that particularly for American listeners, listening to the story of Alexander Hamilton unfold with familiar dialects and musical sounds is a powerful tool for reconnecting with heritage and one which people feel compelled to repeat.”

If you worry that you’re going to eventually hear everything there is to hear on the Hamilton Original Cast Album, just you wait— there’s a possible karaoke version coming soon, as well as an annotated libretto. What comes next? New casts, new cities, new interpretations of songs and characters, and many more reasons to keep listening.

Go to the beginning of the series here!

Fall(out) Guy Part 2

Fall(out) Guy Part 3

Fall(out) Guy Part 4

Fall(out) Guy: Isotopes

Fall(out) Guy Part 5 (That's this one!)

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Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine

3D printed synthetic tissue

Synthetic cartilage printed in the form of an ear by the Integrated Tissue-Organ Printing System at Wake Forest University

Because the demand for donors’ organs and tissues is so high, researchers have spent years engineering synthetic tissues that could be transplanted into humans. But that’s not very easy to do—many of the gel-like tissues have been too mushy to be moved into a living organism, and without the intricate pathways in the tissue through which oxygen and other nutrients can travel, the living cells inside don’t survive long.

Now a team of researchers from Wake Forest University has created a 3D bioprinting tool that creates large synthetic bone, cartilage, and muscle tissue that is viable for weeks or months at a time when implanted in animals. With a bit more work, the researchers believe these 3D printed tissues could be transplanted into humans, according to a study published today in Nature Biotechology.

The tool, called the Integrated Tissue-Organ Printing System, creates synthetic tissues out of a biodegradable polymer that contains living cells. This mixture is dabbed into the desired shape through nozzles that are fractions of an inch wide. The printer simultaneously creates an outer mold that dissolves once the tissue has hardened, leaving behind a tissue lattice that is structurally sound but also contains tiny channels through which oxygen can reach the living cells. With CT scans taken before the printing begins, the tissue can be printed into the exact shape needed in the patient’s body.

The researchers printed a human-size piece of jawbone, the cartilage of an ear (complete with complex folds), and soft muscle tissue. They then took small samples of these synthetic tissues and implanted them: the bone and muscle went in rats, and the cartilage in mice. When they checked on the implants after a number of weeks, they found that each of the synthetic tissues had been integrated with the rat’s own tissues. The synthetic ones were healthy and working well.

While the 3D printed method takes longer than other techniques that make viable synthetic tissues, the tissues it produces are larger. To work around the structural challenge presented by larger synthetic tissues, researchers had previously been working on the tiniest scales.

The researchers haven’t yet tested these tissues on humans. Before doing that, they intend to make synthetic tissues with different types of cells from the body. If they can do that, they would want to extract some of the human’s own cells to put into the synthetic tissue. That would help the tissue integrate better, making the body less like to reject the transplant.

Flowers have a fleeting beauty, fading shortly after they are plucked. Pressing or preserving them can extend their beauty briefly, but a chance encounter with tree sap can stretch that time out by millions of years.

In a paper published in today in Nature Plants researchers described a new species of flower found in two pieces of amber excavated from a mine in the Dominican Republic.

Amber, which is solidified tree resin, preserved the flowers for either 15 million-25 million or 30 million-45 million years. The wide discrepancy between the two numbers is because amber is extremely difficult to accurately date. The first age range was reached by dating tiny single-celled animals called foraminifera, whose shells ended up near the resin between 15 million and 25 million years ago. The latter age range was proposed based on the age of cocolithophores, shelled phytoplankton that also ended up near the Dominican amber at a much earlier time.

But either way, the flowers are incredibly old. They are also very small, clocking in at just under a centimeter long.

The new species is named Strychnos electri and represents the oldest specimen of a plant group called asterids here in the Americas.

You've probably seen the modern relatives of Strychnos electri in a garden or on a menu--the asterids include mints, sunflowers, peppers and coffee. Yum.

System Era Softworks

Astroneer screenshot

Promotional screenshot from the indie game that seeks to put players in the role of an astronaut exploring alien worlds.

Ever since it was first previewed last fall, we have been pretty excited to get our hands on Astroneer, a still-in-development indie game whose initial screenshots and premise make it seem like it will be a sort of interplanetary version of Minecraft. Unfortunately, it seems like we are going to have to wait a little bit longer than originally expected.

Astroneer's creators, System Era Softworks, today posted an update on the game's official website explaining that they are pushing the release of the "early access" edition of the game from its initially planned timeframe of "late March or early April" 2016 to "the end of summer, beginning of fall."

However, there's some good news along with the delay: System Era says it has received outside funding allowing "the entire team to come on to the project full time," instead of working on it part-time and funding it entirely independently. The hope is that it will result in a higher quality early access edition and a better final game for all.

Delays in game development are pretty common, especially for indie titles, so the news is not exactly a huge shock. We just hope it's not a sign of further delays to come. Either way, we're onboard whenever it launches.

[System Era]

Source: AJC ajcann.wordpress.com

Wolbachia May Be The Answer To The Zika Epidemic

Preventing infections is a primary goal for any human. Thankfully, this is relatively simple with adherence to basic hygiene, personal distancing, and the use of barrier methods. But when the pathogen comes from an insect, rather than an animal or another human, the means of prevention can be a challenge.

In the case of Zika virus, the major route of spread is mosquitoes. The Aedes species carry the virus and then can infect anyone with a simple bite. This means prevention requires control actions beyond the usual methods. Long clothing and insect repellents are good for the individual while fogging is a common practice to protect the population. Yet they may not be sufficient to stop the spread of this virus, which is now considered to be a public health emergency.

There may be another, more natural option. Instead of using chemicals, the introduction of a bacterium into the population may help to curb mosquito populations. There is one particular genus, known as Wolbachia, that carries the potential to decimate mosquito populations by reducing their rate of reproduction.

To learn more about the bacterium and how it may be able to help in the fight against Zika (and other mosquito-borne diseases), I reached out to Dr. Gordana Rasic. She is a Research Fellow at the Pest and Environmental Adaptation Research Group located at the University of Melbourne’s Bio21 Institute in Australia. In her opinion, the bacteria may represent one of the best options to control mosquitoes.

"Wolbachia are promoted as a natural control method because these bacteria are already widespread in mosquito populations," she says. "They manipulate their hosts’ biology and we can use these effects to reduce mosquito numbers in several ways."

According to some estimates, the bacterium can be found in more than three-quarters of the insect species on Earth, representing one the most successful and abundant bacterial symbionts in nature. As Rasic explains, the bacterium also can be used as a pathogen thanks to its specialized mechanism to control mosquito reproduction.

“Wolbachia modify mosquito sperm and prevent normal embryonic development unless the same bacteria are also found in eggs. This phenomenon is called cytoplasmic incompatibility (CI). If you release large numbers of Wolbachia-infected males to mate with wild females that don’t carry this infection, CI will cause their offspring to die. Repeated male releases indirectly sterilize most females and lead to a population collapse.”

Cytoplasmic incompatibility has been known since the 1960s. However, when a similar version of this technique was attempted in the 1970s, the results were only partially successful. But for Rasic, this consequence of microbial infection is only one possible route to mosquito control.

“Another approach uses Wolbachia strains that replicate uncontrollably within insect tissues and eventually kill their host. One such strain known as popcorn was transferred from the vinegar fly to the most potent vector of Zika and dengue, the mosquito Aedes aegypti. This was done in order to reduce the mosquito lifespan and eliminate older females that are the biggest transmitters of viruses. Another useful feature of the popcorn strain is that it makes the mosquito resting eggs very sensitive to drought, which can be used to crash local populations during dry months.”

This two-pronged approach makes Wolbachia quite promising in terms of controlling mosquito populations particularly in fast-spreading epidemics like Zika virus. As for the process for introducing the species into a place like the Caribbean and Pacific Islands, Rasic envisions a straightforward protocol that could be initiated almost immediately.

“The first step is to spread a deleterious strain like popcorn throughout an entire mosquito population while a rainy season lasts. This is done by releasing both males and females with the popcorn infection. Infected males mate with local females and indirectly sterilize them through CI, while infected females pass on Wolbachia to their offspring regardless of whom they mate with. This creates a powerful drive that enables Wolbachia to invade a population.

“In the following dry season, adults die but their eggs remain resting in dry pots, barrels and other breeding containers, waiting for the next big rain. Normally, eggs would easily survive several months of drought, but the popcorn infection weakens their shell and the eggs die within weeks.”

Although this hasn’t been yet conducted in a large scale, Rasic's colleagues have already performed field cage experiments to prove this method works. In a study from last year, they showed this technique can crash a population in regions with a pronounced dry season, leaving little chance for troubles in the human realm. In places like Brazil with significant precipitation throughout the year, population crash with male-only Wolbachia releases is a better option.

The use of natural pathogenic capabilities of Wolbachia may seem like the perfect choice for control. Yet, as with any ecological introduction, there is a concern for unintended consequences. For Rasic, this is not a significant issue primarily due to the fact the bacterium is widespread and more importantly, the pathogenic strain is not likely to spread outside of the target zone.

“Because of their detrimental effects to hosts, Wolbachia strains like popcorn cannot easily invade mosquito populations. You need to release large numbers of mosquitoes for about three months, and during this time you almost double the number of adults. Even though this increase is only temporary, it can be too unpleasant for people living in regions with already large mosquito populations. This is not an issue for the strategy that relies on male-only releases because male mosquitoes do not bite.”

The temporary nature of the introduction significantly helps to reduce the chances for ecological shifts other than the crashing of the mosquito population. The only drawback is the necessity for repetition. Yet, Rasic sees this as a good balance between immediate needs for public safety and long-term ecological sustainability.

“After you crash local mosquito populations, immigration of new mosquitoes into the area will determine how quickly the process needs to be repeated. Even though Aedes mosquitoes don’t fly more than a few hundreds of meters over their lifetime, they can be dispersed thousands of kilometers via airplanes, ships and other transportation means. Therefore, the Wolbachia-based eradication campaigns would have to be more frequent in areas that are not isolated or don’t have tight quarantine control.”

The promise of Wolbachia is great, yet in terms of the current epidemic of Zika, time is a significant priority. "Suitable Wolbachia strains for eradicating the main Zika vectors are already available,” says Rasic. But as she points out, there are other factors that could delay their use. “For field releases, we require local regulatory approval, time and resources to organize and execute the campaigns.”

Although this may mean the Zika wave in the Americas might not be halted by Wolbachia, Rasic does suggest the work may help to prevent the virus from becoming a pandemic. “The current Zika wave is spreading but it might be suppressed in certain parts of Australia, Indonesia and Vietnam, because previous Wolbachia releases immunized local Aedes aegypti mosquitoes against dengue viruses and their close relatives like Zika.”

Oregon State University

Bleached Coral

Bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef

Getting infected with a virus is almost always a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad time, even if you're a coral reef in Australia.

The world is in the middle of the third global coral bleaching event, and almost 4,633 square miles of reef could be dead by the time it's over. Bleaching causes the symbiotic algae that live on corals to flee, leaving the corals a pale white color. Coral bleaching is tied to warmer ocean temperatures, caused by climate change or cyclic environmental changes like El Nino. And, as if coral reefs didn't have enough to worry about already, a new study published in Frontiers in Microbiology suggests those same factors could also usher in an explosion of viral activity on the reef.

Using part of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia as a natural laboratory, researchers took samples of coral from the reef just before it went through a bleaching event.

The researchers examined the corals in nature and also put some samples through stresses, simulating higher temperatures, more UV light, and high rainfall, all environmental factors known to strain corals. The experimental corals not only went through a bleaching event, but they also contained large amounts of viruses--amounts 2 to 4 times higher than had ever been recorded in corals before. Viruses are common in nature, but the surprising outbreak of the virus on the already-stressed reefs were worrying to researchers.

“People all over the world are concerned about long-term coral survival,” Rebecca Vega-Thurber, an author on the study said. “This research suggests that viral infection could be an important part of the problem that until now has been undocumented, and has received very little attention.”

Among the viruses found in the coral were herpes-like viruses that seemed particularly prevalent. They aren't the same as herpes viruses that infect humans, but people are concerned that the additional stress of a viral outbreak on already stressed reefs aren't doing any favors for the health of coral reefs around the world. In the future, the researchers hope to examine other stressed-out reefs and see if they are suffering from similar virus outbreaks.

U.S. Army via Wikimedia Commons

JLENS in 2012, tethered

Making sure $3 billion doesn't get up and walk away is harder than it sounds. Last October, the Army lost control of a $2.7 billion blimp and watched helplessly as it drifted from Maryland to rural Pennsylvania. On a particularly windy day, the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (or JLENS, for short) escaped its tether and went on a wild chase.

The culprit? Dead batteries in the auto-deflation device, according to a new report from the LA Times.

The failed batteries were the last in a chain of failures, from a malfunctioning air pressure sensor to the strong nearly 70mph winds that bent the JLENS’ floating, blimp-like body out of shape. Normally, when this happens, the tethered blimp is supposed to deflate so doesn’t, say, get lost in Amish country. Instead, as the LA Times reports:

The blimp was equipped with an automated device that should have caused it to deflate promptly and return to ground within two miles. The device failed to activate, because batteries had not been installed as a backup power source, according to people familiar with the investigation.

As designed, JLENS is meant to protect the Washington, DC area from attack by spotting incoming missiles. When the weather isn’t bad, and when the system works properly, it can stay aloft for 20 to 30 days in a row, with continuous protect provided by rotating in tethered blimps. The key to protecting America from assault, it seems, is simply batteries.

Naval battles of the future will be gray, wet, and lacking in humans. DARPA, the Pentagon’s far-future projects wing, mentioned last week that it plans to test its completely unmanned, 132-foot-long submarine tracker ACTUV in the waters off Portland, Oregon later this spring. Today, we got a first glimpse over the vessel itself, from DARPA’s Twitter and Instagram accounts.

Let’s take a look at ACTUV, short for “ASW Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel," throughout its development from concept to reality.

arXiv

FAST

An artist's impression of how FAST will look when completed.

Make way for astronomy. The Chinese government is asking more than 9,000 people to move from their homes to ensure that a giant radio telescope will be able to function properly.

The Five-hundred-meter-Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST) is set to start operations this year as the largest single-aperture radio telescope on the planet, and will let researchers continue to search for life in the galaxy.

FAST will be around 650 feet larger than the current record holder, the 1000-foot wide Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

But its influence will extend beyond 500 meters. The Chinese government is relocating people living within 3 miles of the telescope, seeking to prevent electromagnetic interference with the telescope. Even small electrical objects like cell phones can create interference, preventing the telescope from detecting the very faint radio waves that it's looking for. Here in the United States, astronomers took a slightly different approach. Instead of getting rid of the people, they banned wireless devices in the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000 square mile area in West Virginia surrounding the Green Bank Telescope.

Though 9,000 might seem like a large number of people to be displaced, it's small when viewed in the context of China's history. To build the world's largest hydroelectric plant, the Three Gorges Dam, China relocated more than one million people. And there has been a recent push to move 250 million people into newly-constructed towns and cities in an effort to urbanize.

“Calling all Starfleet cadets! Star Trek and NASA want you to engineer the future of food in space.”

That’s the message that NASA and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Foundation are sending to enterprising young inventors across America, as part of the new Star Trek Replicator Challenge.

The challenge, which was officially announced today at New York's Intrepid Air and Space Museum (the one on a retired aircraft carrier), asks kids in grades K-12 to create 3D models of non-edible, food-related items (i.e. knives, flatware, food storage/disposal devices, etc.) that astronauts will be able to 3D-print in the year 2050.

The grand prize winners in the "Junior" and "Teen" age categories will receive trips to New York City to visit the Intrepid Air and Space Museum's "Starfleet Academy" experience, as well as a tour of the decommissioned Space Shuttle Enterprise with a NASA astronaut as a guide, and "mystery Star Trek prize pack[s]." Meanwhile, four finalists in each age group will get a 3D-printer donated to their school. And 10 semifinalists will also get a prize pack from NASA and Made in Space.

The submission period runs from today through May 1 and the winners will be announced on July 5. Read the rules here, the design guidelines here, and create an account here.

The challenge is officially part of NASA and ASME's collaboration called "Future Engineers," and is the third challenge to be issued so far.

The first competition, the “Space Tool Challenge,” took place in the spring of 2014 and saw students design a tool that could be 3D printed by astronauts. The second competition, the “Space Container Challenge,” occurred in the fall of 2015 and had students design a container that could be 3D printed by astronauts.

According to the official press release on StarTrek.com, winning prizes include “a trip to New York for a tour – with an astronaut -- of the Space Shuttle Enterprise at the Intrepid Museum, a 3-D printer for the winners’ schools or a Star Trek prize pack.”

You can enter the Star Trek™ Replicator Challenge here.

The massive mirror on the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), is now complete. And it looks lovely.

The engineers filmed the entire assembly process of all 18 sections of ultra-lightweight beryllium in the 21-foot-wide mirror (6.5 meters), and now you can watch it too (above). The mirror was completed earlier this month on February 3, 2016 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, after a decade of research and development, according to NASA.

When the telescope is finally in place in outer space, it will be the size of an Earth tennis court. It will then allow scientists to peer deeper into the history of the universe than even the storied Hubble Space Telescope that it is meant to eventually outlast.

It's good to finally see the JWST come together, too. The giant telescope has been plagued with delays and budget overruns. It was originally supposed to launch in 2007.

It will finally launch in October 2018 on a European rocket. In the meantime, you can keep track of the JWST construction progress on NASA's live 'WebbCams' online.

[H/T: Amber Straughn via Elizabeth Lopatto]

NASA

Columbia in orbit around the Moon

Curators with the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum are in the process of scanning the spacecraft for its digitization project with the goal of creating the most complete model possible. But they found something interesting in the process.

At some point during the flight, one of the Apollo 11 astronauts drew a calendar on a section of wall below one of the storage lockers. As each day passed, someone crossed off another dated square on the wall. Since there's no day and night when mission elapsed time is just cumulative hours, I suspect they marked the end of a day at midnight Houston time. The only day on the makeshift calendar that isn't crossed off is landing day, July 24.

Smithsonian Air and Space Museum

The calendar inside Apollo 11

Finding a calendar with the days crossed out makes it look like the astronauts were counting down the days out of frustration, boredom, or because they weren’t having fun (at least that’s why I used to cross off the days until the start of summer holidays). It’s very unlikely that’s the case. I’d wager they did it to have a sense of what day it was for the guys in mission control, but that's just my guess.

The calendar did make me think about what astronauts did during their downtime going to and coming home from the Moon, though. Because having read the transcripts from Apollo 8, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14, there was a fair bit of downtime. Most of it was filled with experiments, navigation checks, general maintenance and housekeeping, and taking some of the most stunning pictures of the Earth and the Moon. In looking through some raw and restored 16mm footage, it seemed like there was also a good amount of shenanigans and shaving on those historic lunar missions.

Xavier Harding

iPhone 4, 5s, and 5

Apple has claimed they even they can't hack iPhones running iOS 8 or 9.

A U.S. judge thinks a recovered iPhone holds information necessary to the ongoing investigation of December's San Bernardino shooting spree.

The magistrate has ordered Apple to load software into the phone that bypasses security measures, namely the feature that deletes the phone's contents after too many incorrect password attempts, according to the Associated Press. This means that Apple isn't going to crack the phone itself, just allow the FBI to attempt to enter as many passwords as they want, without the fear of deleting any data. The recovered phone is an iPhone 5c.

Federal prosecutors cannot access the alleged shooter's county-owned work phone because they don't know the password. To enter a large number of passwords with the hope of eventually guessing the right one is called a brute-force attack, a common tool in a security expert's tool belt (or a hacker's).

The FBI has been trying to crack the phone's password for two months, according to FBI director James Comey, who denounced encryption without back doors at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing last week.

Apple has claimed they themselves aren't able to crack iPhones running iOS 8 or 9 (the most current operating system). They have not commented on whether they're able to load the requested software, either.

However, security expert Nick Weaver told Wired that there are still a few ways to crack an iPhone without needing a back door, including spoofing the fingerprint reader, getting a warrant for iCloud backups, or even questioning Siri. These methods were likely not used in this case, as most of Weaver's techniques are unusable after a short period of time or if the phone is rebooted. However, it does show that iPhones are not without their own security flaws.

Apple will have five days to respond to the court order, and can deny if the task would be "unreasonably burdensome,"according to NBC.

Developing...

There’s been a lot of debate lately over about whether Twitter is a dying site. Two weeks ago the company announced it was forming a Trust And Safety Council to combat the abuse Twitter has come to be known for, and that came just one day before revealing its poor (though not as poor as predicted) Q4 earnings.

Now Twitter, which is struggling to engage and grow its user base, hopes to do just that with integrated GIF search. In a blog post, Senior Product Manager Sasank Reddy announced that users will begin seeing a GIF search button when composing tweets or direct messages as soon as today.

The button comes from a partnership among Twitter and GIF-hosting sites GIPHY and Riffsy. In separate statements, the founders of the respective sites expressed their excitement for the partnership.

In the blog post, GIPHY founder/CEO Alex Chung said, “GIPHY delivers real-time GIFs as they happen, helping to power Twitter’s live commentary and conversation. GIPHY’s users are creating GIFs for news, entertainment, sports, and expression that can enrich Tweets. We’re excited to work with Twitter to make sharing these GIFs even easier.”

Riffsy co-founder/CEO David McIntosh said in the post, “So much can be expressed with GIFs, and the key is to find just the right one in the moment that quickly and efficiently expresses your emotions,” says David McIntosh, CEO and co-founder of Riffsy. “We’re excited to explore this partnership with Twitter and watch Twitter users discover and share their favorite GIFs in their daily lives.”

Are you excited about Twitter’s GIF search?

Or is Twitter delaying the inevitable?

Tweet your feelings with a gif to @PopSci.

Seddon et al

Vegetation Sensitivity Index (VSI)

Green areas have vegetation with low sensitivity to climate change. Red areas have vegetation with high sensitivity to climate change. Grey areas are barren or covered with ice.

Sometimes, you need to look at the whole picture, especially when it comes to the worldwide effects of climate change.

In a paper published today in Nature, researchers introduced the Vegetation Sensitivity Index, a metric for measuring how sensitive a particular ecosystem (especially its vegetation) is to climate change. The result is a map that shows which parts of the world will be most severely affected by our changing climate.

To create the map, the researchers used satellite data collected from 2000 to 2013 to look at plants on a global scale. They calculated the sensitivity index by looking at how the satellite-measured vegetation ground cover compared with three factors, air temperature, water availability, and degree of cloud cover, and how all four factors had changed over that time period. They did this for every 2-square-mile block on the Earth's land surface. Some areas, like Antarctica or the Sahara desert, were classed as barren or ice-covered, but the rest of the land was graded from most to least sensitive to the effects of changes in climate over the past 14 years.

Then the researchers took the data and mapped it out. Areas in green on the map have a lower sensitivity, and adapted well to changes in climate. Areas in red are highly sensitive to changes in climate, and didn't have an easy time of it, either due to a loss of water, rising temperatures, or more.

The researchers hope to continue to build on this work, using it to map out whether the vegetation changes seen on the current map are temporary, or part of a more widespread pattern over the years.

Fred Hutch News Service via Eurekalert

CAR-T cell immunotherapy treatment

These two PET scans show a lymphoma patient before receiving the CAR-T cell treatment, left, and afterward, right. The arrow indicates a cancerous mass on the patient's kidney that almost totally disappeared two months after receiving the treatment.

In recent years, scientists have been finding new ways to treat cancer outside of the chemotherapy and surgery combination. One technique, called immunotherapy, has showed promising results by reprogramming the patient’s immune system to attack tumors. Researchers from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle tested a version of immunotherapy on patients who had late-stage leukemia and lymphoma that had exhausted other treatment options—some weren’t expected to survive the experiment.

But the researchers were shocked to find that 27 of the 29 leukemia patients—that’s 94 percent of the study participants—went into complete remission and showed no more signs of the disease. Stanley Riddell, one of the researchers behind the trial, presented the unpublished results on Sunday at the annual AAAS meeting in Washington, D.C.

Our blood contains T cells, which are supposed to detect pathogens in the body. In this study, the researchers removed these cells from patient’s blood and tweaked their genes to recognize the cancer cells that would otherwise slip by the immune system.

The resulting T cells, called CAR-T cells because of the special receptors inserted into them, are then put back in the body. Researchers hypothesized that the CAR-T cells would give the patient a long-term immune response—indeed, a few small but promising trials have corroborated it—but in many cases the T cells end up being less effective over time, either because the cells themselves become exhausted or because the cancer cells inhibit detection.

The results of this trial were different. In addition to the stunning results from the leukemia patients, 19 of 30 lymphoma patients responded to the treatment as well, after just a single dose of CAR-T cells. Many of the patients who were not expected to live for more than a few months are still alive now, three years after the trial started. “This is unprecedented in medicine, to be honest, to get response rates in this range in these very advanced patients,” Riddell said, according to the New York Post.

To the researchers, this strengthens the evidence that CAR-T cells (and immunotherapy in general) might be a viable treatment for cancers beyond lymphoma and leukemia.

But the treatment isn’t perfect quite yet. During the trial, seven patients developed cytokine release syndrome, a life-threatening inflammation that results when too many cancer cells are killed at once, and two of the patients died as a result.

While that might be acceptable risk for a last-ditch effort for patients with terminal cancer, such dramatic side effects wouldn’t be acceptable for patients with earlier stage or less lethal cancers, as Ars Technica reports.

The researchers don’t yet know the best dose for the treatment that wouldn’t cause such a strong reaction but would still get rid of the cancer, and they don’t know how long the patients will remain in remission. But they are heartened and encouraged by the results.

The researchers have submitted a draft of their study to a journal and hope that it will be published soon so that they can continue their work with immunotherapy, according to a press release.

courtesy Modernist Cuisine

Gravitational Wave Bowl

When many of us first heard about gravitational waves and saw Robert Hurt's dramatic depiction of those undulations in the fabric of spacetime caused by the mammoth collision of a pair of black holes, we were awed. Nathan Myhrvold, the polymath behind Modernist Cuisine, was awed, but he was inspired as well. To make a soup bowl.

The twin spiral grooves formed by the waves, Myhrvold perceived, could hold two different but complementary soups in the same bowl, twined together in tasty tribute to the curvature of spacetime. Myhrvold's vast kitchen lab has a CNC milling machine (among a number of other conveniences) so it was quite simple to fire up Mathematica, model the Hurt art in 3D, carve it out of aluminum, and cast a mold which potter Wally Bivins then used to form the bowls. You can read more about the process here.

The idea for the bowls first came in 2014, when rumors about the waves were propagating around the internet, but they have never been as appetizing as now.

R. Hurt - Caltech/JPL