Researchers in the UK have found that the shape of a man's urine stream can be analyzed for specific patterns that can be used to predict the maximum flow rate, a value that in turn can be used to diagnose developing urinary problems--including those associated with the prostate. This shape is caused by the surface tension in the urine and the urethra's elliptical shape, the researchers say, and in their tests men were able to self-evaluate their arcs to determine whether their flow rates were indicative of some kind of urinary problem. Considering the majority of men in their 60s and 70s tend to experience some kind of urinary symptom that may be caused by an enlarged prostate, a non-invasive, self-evaluation could go a long way toward catching potentially life-threatening prostate problems early.

[Queen Mary, University of London]

George Takei--an actor some of you may recognize from the original Star Trek series, has a knack for posting viral photos on Facebook. Recently, the social media giant asked Stamen, a San Francisco design firm, to create a visualization showing how Takei's photos spread.

Here's the result:

And here's Stamen's description of what you're seeing:

Click here to see the "Marvin the Martian" photo behind the visualization above (and to peruse Takei's whole library of viral-grade pics.)

You can check out Stamen's other photo visualizations here.

Click here to enter the gallery

Two things need to be said about these images of data centers--the server storage areas for tech giants--just released from Google: a) They're breathtakingly beautiful, and b) They're a breathtakingly beautiful PR push.

It's not a coincidence that these images are being released after a report from The New York Times about the wastefulness of data centers. Only a fraction--6 to 12 percent--of the energy used in such centers, The Times reported, went to computational services. Facebook was slammed by the investigation, but so was Google: The search company uses almost 300 million watts to power its centers, and it doesn't always go to good use. "[D]ata centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid," they wrote.

So it's not surprising that so many of the images released by Google would highlight efficiency and environmental friendliness--water vapor means "our cooling towers are at their most efficient," while several photos show the tech that goes into keeping the servers cool.

But they're still a lovely look at the rarely-seen centers, even if the glasses you're looking at them through aren't so rose-colored.

[New York Times]

Sixty percent of infection diseases are zoonotic, meaning they spread from animals to people. Among the deadliest, and most difficult to eradicate, among these are viruses, which is why they're so often in the news. This summer, an Ebola outbreak claimed dozens of lives in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the U.S., nine people camping in Yosemite National Park were infected with hantavirus and three died. We're also experiencing the nation's worst-ever outbreak of West Nile Virus: so far 4,249 cases have been reported.

Tonight at the New York Academy of Sciences, David Quammen-the author of Spillover and PopSci's "Out of the Wild" November feature story-will probe how such diseases spill over from animals to people and why most emerging infections are viral. He'll ask an expert panel composed of Ian Lipkin and Dan Jernigan, two of America's top disease scientists, and Maryn McKenna, one of its top disease journalists, what the next big outbreak will look like-and what scientists are doing to try to stop it.

"Wrath Goes Viral" is open to the public. Details here. Come join us!

Pacemakers could be infiltrated to deliver deadly shocks, according to a security expert. It wouldn't be simple, but it offers the very James Bond-like possibility of anonymous digital assassination.

IOActive researcher Barnaby Jack demonstrated this capability at a security conference in Melbourne, according to Australia's SC Magazine. He used a laptop to send a series of 830-volt shocks to a remote pacemaker, and used some sort of unclear "secret function" the pacemakers possess, which could be used to activate all pacemakers and implantable defibrillators within a 30-foot radius. The devices would give up their serial numbers, which would allow the would-be assassin to breach their firmware and upload nefarious malware that could spread to other pacemakers like a virus. The devices could also give up personal data, and even supposedly secure data from the manufacturer.

"The worst case scenario that I can think of, which is 100 percent possible with these devices, would be to load a compromised firmware update onto a programmer and … the compromised programmer would then infect the next pacemaker or [defibrillator] and then each would subsequently infect all others in range," he reportedly said.

It wouldn't be the first time a security expert showcased the vulnerability of these lifesaving devices. In one study four years ago, researchers from the University of Washington and University of Massachusetts figured out how to assume control of implanted pacemakers and obtain personal data. Other groups are working on ways to encrypt artificial organs and limbs.

Jack said he made the demonstration to alert device makers to insecurities.

[SC Magazine]

Memory-erasure technology is finally starting to follow Eternal Sunshine canon. In the latest breakthrough, Stanford University researchers announced at the Society for Neuroscience meeting that they are manipulating fearful rat memories. Like the University of Puerto Rico study involving injections that cause rats to forget fears, this research is chemical-based, but the magic happens while the rats sleep. The team at Stanford hopes that sleep-based therapies will expand options for treating Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

First, researchers conditioned mice to fear the scent of jasmine by administering a shock every time the mice sniffed the scent. The mice showed the characteristic sign of fear the next day when the scent was present--they froze up anticipating the shock. One group of mice got the conventional treatment of extinction therapy-- repeated exposure to to the scent without the shock. The fear dissipated, but returned when they were placed in different environments.

The experimental group received a drug treatment to block the protein synthesis of the basolateral amygdala, the part of the brain that we think stores fearful memories as they went to sleep, when they once again sniffed the jasmine scent. When they woke up, they had diminished fear even when they left the cage where they initially learned the fear. The results show that with the administration of the drug, fearful memories are less likely to resurface after therapy.

[Nature News]

New simulations of a crash between Earth and a protoplanetary sister long ago could have produced a moon that's chemically similar to our planet, according to a new analysis. It bolsters a theory that the moon is part of Earth, and it helps settle a question about how this could be physically possible.

Since around the time of the Apollo missions, lunar scientists have theorized that our moon formed after a horrendous collision between Earth and another world, which sheared off part of this planet. But all the while, there's been a major disconnect with reality and the satisfying theoretical explanation of this concept. If that's what happened, then the moon should be primarily composed of material from the collider, which would have been reincarnated as our natural satellite. Theoretical models and computer simulations of this catastrophic impact say the moon would be about 20 to 40 percent Earth parts and 60 to 80 percent non-Earth parts.

But the moon and the Earth have identical isotopes of key elements, proving the moon was made from Earth's mantle. A host of theories have tried to explain this, even one suggesting that Earth generated its own internal thermonuclear reaction and blew itself apart.

Some scientists have suggested that Earth and moon material mixed together, so the Earth also contains some foreign matter. But very recent studies cast doubt on this, too. There was another problem in that Earth-sized planets should have been spinning faster than this one did, if that model is correct. Matija Ćuk and colleagues at the SETI Institute started over, and envisioned a very fast-spinning Earth colliding with a smaller-than-Mars planet, nicknamed Theia.

In their computer simulations, which you can see in part below, it all works out. The moon can form from mostly Earth material, and a faster-spinning proto-Earth can lose some angular momentum thanks to tidal interactions with the sun, explaining its slower-than-expected speed.

In this animation, Earth and Theia are represented by the agglomerations of particles. Earth is spinning super-fast--its day is only 2.3 hours long. Theia, which has about half the mass of Mars, careens toward Earth at 44,740 MPH. It penetrates all the way to Earth's core and excavates a massive hole in our planet, throwing material out in the process. Theia is mostly vaporized, along with part of our planet, and the iron from its core merges with Earth's core.

Some material escapes Earth and forms a huge disk around it. The disk has almost no iron, but is made mostly of Earthly material. This would explain the moon's composition, which very neatly matches that of Earth.

To test this hypothesis, a separate group of researchers ran further simulations with slower-moving impactors that were a little larger. This also produces a moon with the same chemical makeup as Earth's mantle, they found. Taken together, the results suggest that our moon-formation theories may be spot on.

You probably have some of NASA's inventions lying around your house. Memory foam? Check. Water filters? Yep. Smoke detectors? Thank NASA for that, too. The space agency has perfected the science of transforming astro-tech into everyday goods. Its latest innovation? Nasal spray.

NASA is developing a nasal spray version of Scopalamine, a drug for treating motion sickness. Motion sickness occurs when the central nervous system gets conflicting messages from the other systems. Usually, the inner ear detects motion when the eye doesn't, or vice versa. The current prevailing theory is that your brain then decides you're hallucinating from the poison of your choice (or blunder) and then proceeds to purge said poison. Now imagine all of that going on--but in space.

NASA is trying to commercialize the nasal spray for astronauts, for the Department of Defense, and for general use. Intranasal Scopalamine, or Inscop, has worked faster and more reliably than the oral form of the drug in NASA's tests.

NASA's agreement (authorized by the National Aeronautics and Space Act) with Epiomed Therapeutics, Inc., a pharmaceutical company based out of Irvine, CA., will conduct clinical trials so that Intranasal Scopalamine, or Inscop, can be approved by the FDA. Researchers have looked at a nasal form of Scopalamine for more than 50 years, but it hasn't yet been formulated for FDA clinical trials.

"Nasal delivery technology is more advanced now than before--also the effectiveness of intranasal dosing is well recognized and understood now than ever--we have vaccines (that have been developed long ago) for nasal delivery now," NASA Spokesman William Jeffs said in an email. "There is more demand for more effective motion sickness drugs all around including military and baby boomer recreational travelers."

Jeffs said that NASA hopes to develop and market more drugs to the public in the future as similar commercial partnership opportunities present themselves.

"NASA scientists and engineers recognize that spinning inventions and technologies with commercial partnerships is a win-win way of business for NASA and for private sector, both in terms of intellectual and economic gains," he said.

The single best non-essential tech item--like, not a laptop or smartphone--that you can buy is a really good pair of headphones.

V-Moda's M-100 headphones, announced a few hours ago, are big and fairly expensive and kind of divisively designed. I've been using them for a week or so and they are the only new tech item I've used in the past few months that I've actually made other people use. The new iPhone and iPods are very nice, and Windows 8 tablets are ballsy and interesting, but I haven't actually grabbed coworkers and demanded they try those things. I've been reviewing digital audio gear for awhile, but the hardware has lately seemed unimportant, compared with the revolution of stuff like Rdio and Spotify. Who cares about a headphone amp, really, when you can listen to any song ever made? The exciting stuff is in software and services, I'd say. New headphones, whatever, spend a hundred bucks and you'll get something fine. It's a means to an end.

But the M-100s brought it all back, that old wonder that music could sound this good. When you can get this kind of quality for this kind of money, why are we bothering with anything else?

Cheap headphones mask the music, ruin the music, without the listener even realizing. They exaggerate screechy, tinny highs, or artificially boost the lows at the expense of balance. They muddy the mids. They are not "good enough," not when you can get legitimately great-sounding audio equipment for under a hundred bucks. You bought an iPhone, or a Galaxy S III, or a Lumia? Those are startlingly good audio devices. You're paying $300 up front and $75 a month for that phone, and it's worth it. You can get Rdio or Spotify and listen to any song ever made. You can watch music videos, TV shows, and movies in 720p. The sound output on those phones is universally excellent--not perfect, an audiophile will tell you, but what's more pressing is that what's there is being totally wasted when you use throwaway headphones.

This isn't a snob thing. Try the M-100s. You don't think, well, okay, these sound good. You feel differently. It's like you saw the world through filthy glasses, covered in hair and dust and finger grease and tomato sauce splatters, and then you cleaned them. So that's what this song sounds like, you'll think.

All consumer tech is about luxury, really. Really good audio is a cheap way to feel like your life is luxurious. A hundred bucks and your head can be filled with infinitely wonderful sounds, forever and ever. It triggers pleasure zones, releases happy neurotransmitters that make you feel good. It's a little thing that's not a little thing.

V-Moda is a small company out of Hollywood, California that is perhaps the most diligent audio accessory maker on the planet. They make one new product a year. That's it. They're well known to the biggest audio freaks on the planet, because they don't just comb through audiophile forums looking to figure out what people want--they ask. They crowdsource ideas. Their return rates are very, very low. Every component, every material is chosen after weeks or months of testing, personally, by maybe two guys. Val Kolton, the founder of the company, traveled back and forth to Japan to listen to dozens of potential drivers. They tossed aside plastic in favor of good, honest metal and leather and fabric. The M-100s spent more than three years in development. Not that Sennheiser and Shure and Audio-Technica aren't serious--they just make things in bulk, and none of them have a CEO who can discuss the strengths and weaknesses of various types of air regulation as regards noise isolation. V-Moda's brand of obsession is Apple-level crazy. Good crazy.

And oh, man, was it worth it. The clarity of these things is unbelievable--you hear instruments you didn't know were there, subtleties in the growl of a singer's voice you'd never picked up on before. They block out sound precisely, regulating air so as not to leak audio into your surroundings. (These are noise-isolating, meaning they form a natural seal around your ears, rather than noise-cancelling, which blast another noise at you intended to drown out the outside. Noise-cancelling is good for planes, bad for sound quality.) But it's the balance that does it for me. Senior Editor Paul found them a little bassy--V-Modas are always a bit bassier than, say, Grados--but I like a slight bass boost in my music, and certainly the bass never overpowers the mids or highs. The headphones give your music a fullness and richness you may have never heard before. Music sounds downright creamy on these things. It makes you realize that gimmicks, like the Beats by Dre's absurdly bass-heavy balance, won't ever be as good as a bunch of audio obsessives sourcing the absolute best drivers and cups and materials.

A description of sound quality can only be useful up to a point. Trust me on this: they sound extraordinary. Your ears will smile. Your mouth too, probably.

The cable that goes from the M-100s to your phone or stereo or whatever is braided fabric reinforced with Kevlar, pliable but sturdy as hell. You can plug it into either earcup, and there's a little tiny plug that goes into the earcup hole you're not using, to keep dust out and eliminate the tiniest leak of noise. The cable has a built-in splitter to share music with friends--you can daisy-chain them together for silent subway dance parties. They're light, only 280g, but don't feel delicate in the least. You can bend the headband completely flat without snapping it in two, or drop the headphones repeatedly on unforgiving ground without risking breakage. The cups fold, smoothly and precisely, towards the headband, to take up less space. There's a little click when you push them into place. Val told me they'd experimented repeatedly to get the sound of that "click" just right. That's attention to detail.

The M-100s aren't for everyone. I don't much care for the look of them--they're not garish, but they are a little loud for my Puritanical East Coast taste--and they're listed at $310, which is not nothing (though they compete with those costing two or three times as much). The price will go down--audio accessory prices are notoriously fragile, so I wouldn't be surprised if in a few months Amazon is selling the M-100s for $250 or $225. And I might've preferred some of the extras, like the hard-shell case, the bonus cable, the 1/4-inch jack, were optional, to bring the price down. I'll probably never use that stuff. As is, they're fairly priced, it's just that not everyone wants to drop $300 on headphones.

Even at $310, though, there's nothing I'd recommend more. The Sennheiser Momentum costs more and doesn't fold, which makes it not very portable. The full-sized Beats by Dre costs $300 and is widely dismissed for a lack of clarity and wildly unbalanced sound. AKG and Focal and Shure all make competing headphones, but they don't fold, and some of them are open-back (meaning sound leaks out, meaning they are unusable in public). The M-100 is great for normal people, for listening to Spotify on your phone just as much as plugging into a receiver with an (included) 1/4-inch adapter. "There's no reason not to buy the M-100," Mike Berk over at Sound + Vision told me. (You can read S+V's full review here, if you want the audiophile take.)

But here's the thing: it's not even necessary to spend that much! The M-100s are great, but you can get that same feeling with a whole mess of other, sometimes cheaper, options. The M-80s, the slightly older and smaller on-ear version of the over-the-ear M-100s, are $165 at Amazon, and also bonkers good. Mike Berk at Sound + Vision told me, "I think there's no better headphone at that price point." Or go cheaper! The Wirecutter recommends these Audio Technica headphones, at $124. Or go in-ear--I use the Klipsch Image S4, which I love and have used for years, and cost sixty bucks. That's the cost of two sets of garbage SkullCandys or awful plastic Apple earbuds, which will break, and which you will hate.

Treat yourself, guys. Good audio is a delicious melty treat for your brain.

STATS

Product: V-Moda Crossfade M-100
Category: Over-the-ear headphones
Price: $310, at the moment
Cool bonus: Hard-shell protective case, extra cable with microphone
Rating: A clear buy, if you have the cash

The very idea of geoengineering--large-scale tampering with the planet's natural climatological or geological systems to produce a desired effect--is brazen enough, but doing so in violation of two UN conventions is flat-out ballsy. That's the word we would use to describe California businessman Russ George (we've profiled George's thwarted geoengineering efforts previously) who in July dumped more than 100 tons of iron sulfate into the Pacific in an effort to capture carbon from the air and sink it to the depths of the ocean.

Satellite images have confirmed George's claim that his efforts have created a huge plankton boom across nearly 4,000 square miles of the northern Pacific. The idea--and George is not the first to have it--is that these plankton will absorb carbon dioxide from the air and then sink to the sea bed, lowering the amount of net carbon in the atmosphere and creating valuable carbon credits for George.

Of course, in lab tests researchers have seen such "ocean fertilization" spawning algae that also pump out neurotoxins. And tampering with the natural order of things can disrupt food chains, alter ecosystems in unexpected ways, expedite ocean acidification (accelerating global warming) and otherwise invite the law of unintended consequences to run rampant, marine authorities say. That's why the United Nations' convention on biological diversity and the London convention on the dumping of wastes at sea have both prohibited this kind of for-profit ocean manipulation.

Nonetheless, George conducted the dump from a fishing boat some 200 nautical miles off the shores of Canada's Haida Gwaii (or Queen Charlotte Islands), an area known for its complex marine ecosystems. And it appears he did so without asking if anyone objected to the idea. Geoengineering is almost always controversial--some see it as the way to mitigate global warming and prevent a global climate calamity, while others see tinkering with the natural order of things as inviting disaster--but it's even more controversial when you do it without telling anyone.

[Guardian]

The facts about spontaneous combustion are easily lost. Mostly this is because spontaneous human combustion is a favorite among conspiracy-theorist types. Reports of people suddenly going up in flames tend to omit an essential detail, such as a lit cigarette. Yet as with many phony scientific concepts, the possibility is so intriguing that some people just want to believe.

The same is true of spontaneous non­human combustion. A video recently made the rounds that showed a cotton ball catching fire after having been soaked in several tubes of Super Glue. How cool is that! Of course, I had to try it-again and again-with every kind of Super Glue and cotton ball I could find. It never worked.

There's no question that Super Glue gets really hot when mixed with cotton. The high surface area of the fibers causes the glue to harden very rapidly, releasing energy in the form of heat. Manufacturers warn about burns caused when Super Glue drips onto clothes, which has happened to me personally. The hot fabric gets stuck to your skin, and any attempt to pull it off just means that it also gets stuck to your fingers.

But there's a big difference between burning skin and an actual flame. As far as I can tell, the cotton ball in the video does not catch fire; a closer look at the footage suggests that the video was edited just before the blaze starts.

The beautiful thing about science is that for every fraudulent phenomenon, there's a real one that's even more extraordinary. Take, for example, a lesser-known form of spontaneous combustion that is genuine and easy to reproduce: spontaneous enema combustion (no, really).

To demonstrate it, I made a depression in a small pile of finely ground potassium permanganate, the chemical sold for recharging iron water filters. Then I squeezed the contents of a glycerin enema dispenser into the depression. Potassium permanganate is a powerful oxidizer and reacts with the carbon-hydrogen bonds in glycerin. A few seconds later, the mixture burst violently into flame. It worked every time-no mystery, no doubt about it.

Warning: Super Glue on clothing can cause burns. Potassium permanganate and glycerin is a serious incendiary.

In 2018, NASA will launch the James Webb Space Telescope, which will boast mirrors approximately seven times larger than those on the Hubble. Once operational, the telescope will peer through interstellar dust and clearly image some of the youngest stars and galaxies in the universe.

After it reaches its destination, 930,000 miles from Earth, its components will chill down to -400°F. To make sure that the telescope's scientific instrumentation can handle the cold, engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland put the components through rigorous environmental testing in the Space Environment Simulator. As temperatures within the chamber drop to -400°, the engineers monitor the components and scientific instrumentation to determine whether they will function properly.

In L.A. Noire, you play a detective cracking cases on the mean streets of 1940s Los Angeles. One of the most heralded parts of the game was its historical accuracy: The landscapes and buildings are modeled on how they really were in the '40s. But what would someone who was actually there think of the game? In Eurogamer, Christian Donlan tackles that question. His father grew up in the '40s and, even better, his grandfather was a beat cop. Read what both Donlan and his dad think of the experience here.

It's generally no big deal these days when a print publication closes shop for lack of readers and revenue, but this is fairly huge: longtime general interest news magazine Newsweek is going all-digital, ending its nearly eight-decade run as one of the world's biggest (maybe the biggest?) and most prominent news-weeklies. The new digital publication will take on a slightly adjusted title, Newsweek Global, and be available as a subscription-based online magazine for browsers and tablets.

For a print publication as storied as Newsweek this shift to digital is a huge move, not only because it has to be one of the largest (if not the largest) print publications to do so but because online-only, all-digital news-weeklies and dailies haven't fared particularly well thus far--for instance, The Daily is reportedly on its last legs, and its tablet-optimized, all-digital format certainly isn't horrible, nor is its content. But Newsweek also isn't alone in determining that the best path forward is digital. Just yesterday (roundly unconfirmed) rumors emerged over on media watchdog Poynter that the UK's Guardian may soon make a similar move.

Newsweek's final print edition will drop December 31.

[The Verge]

The LittleBigPlanet series has always prided itself on creativity; the motto was, in short, build the game you want. So when I heard the newest game in the series would be called LittleBigPlanet Karting, I was wary. Karting, where you take a bunch of cute characters, put them in easy-to-control go-karts, and race them around colorful tracks with obstacles and weapons, is one of the most formulaic of genres. It's the kind of genre that's perfect for a lazy, soulless adaptation of a kids' movie--fill in the blanks with your characters and your weapons and your track themes, and done. What I didn't consider is how those boundaries can set you free.

LittleBigPlanet, up until now, has been difficult to shoehorn into a genre. The first entry was, mostly, a platformer: Your little anthropomorphic sack character jumped its way through surreal, exotic, imaginative locales, solving puzzles to move forward. LBP 2 was another step ahead, and spun not as a "platform game" but as a "platform for games." (I'd think that was too-clever PR if the game wasn't so fun.) Its level-creation tools became not just a fun bonus, but the real enduring value of the game itself. A cultish community built itself up around it, using the level creation tools to forge their own interpretations of the game and let other fans play them. That became LBP 2's triumph: The game was handed over to the players, and they brought it forward more than a single creative team ever could. It was a game that didn't fit snugly into a genre; it was whatever the contributors wanted to contribute and whatever the players wanted to play. And key to that is that the platformer is also a formulaic genre, also, oddly, well-suited to licensing from Dreamworks Studios for their newest awful Shrek movie. Jump from thing to thing. Don't let a bad guy touch you. Present game as gift to child at holiday.

LBP isn't the first game to toy with a level-creation idea, and it won't be the last. In the PC gaming days of yore, level creation meant building something--your coaster in Roller Coaster Tycoon, your character in The Sims--then watching what you make unfold. Now we have something more interesting: What we make we can share with other people, then have them explore it themselves by actually being a moving part (a playable character) in a level. In modern games, Minecraft and LBP are two of the best-known examples. But here's the difference: In Minecraft, you're given completely free reign; you get the tools and get to build what you want. That's an amazing thing, but there's a reason a competitor like LBP gets the full weight of Sony thrown behind it for releases. You get all the tools you need from the start, of course, but it's built around something you know. The platformer (or in this case karting) really is a platform to create a level, or even a whole game, that's unique.

It seems hard to respin something into an open-source gaming platform when it has a well-established genre latched onto the end of the title like an oversized caboose. (Up next: LittleBigPlanet: Cyberpunk.) At a PlayStation event last week, I ran through the opening level of LBP Karting to get a feel for the controls. It felt like a lot every other racing game in its style, more in line with the Mario Kart series--in aesthetics and controls--than the LittleBigPlanet I'd remembered. You race through a track, picking up weapons to slow down your opponents or speed yourself up on your way to the finish line. It was fun, sure, but felt like a step back. What were the developers, United Front Games, thinking? Did Media Molecule, the original LBP team that signed on to help, think this was a good move?

So I talked with Jenny Timms, a producer, and Mark Riddell, a game designer who worked on LBP Karting, about the best way to cede control over to the players. They explained how expectations that seem like a door end up being a window.

The way Timms explained it, it's tough to create a truly open experience without some grounding. LBP Karting is easier to stomach than LBP Whatever You Want We're Not Your Mother. "First and foremost it is for making karting adventures," Riddell says, but if someone wants to make a lunar lander adventure (someone did), that's cool, too. In other words, Timms says, the barrier to entry needs to be low, then the people who make truly creative, unexpected things will come out--make "their masterpiece," as Riddell puts it. There are certain things you expect when playing a racing game (if you don't expect those things, you'll pick them up quickly) and that creates a framework. Understanding the rules of the game is important to throwing out the rules of the game, and everyone understands karting.

One of the first steps to enabling new level-creators, Riddell says, was to build a level playing field. The developers made the tools, then everything they created in the game, including the single-player story, was made with those tools. Not just the tracks, mind you--even the cinematic sequences can be constructed using the tools. That means the players can do everything the developers do, whether constructing a brief mini-game or a full narrative with camera transitions and animation. A player could, if they were so inclined, remake the developer-built single-player mode of LBP Karting--then tweak it to suit their needs. The developers were in the exact same position as gamers will be, creating with tools they've never used before. The developers found that that grounding set them up to create unexpected, imaginative things.

The tools start off simple, but grow more complex. If you start off with a framework like karting that everyone understands, it encourages players to mess around. Then as they grow more advanced, they'll reach for the more complex tools and start disrupting the whole system. Sure, it could've been a completely open experience, but basing the game on something familiar and waiting for someone to create a first-person shooter version of it is more effective--and, so much weirder and more satisfying. (Someone did that, too.)

The crew saw that idea in action when they passed it onto to players for testing and watched the results unfold. At first, they needed to adjust to creating the world, but after a while they got the hang of it. By the end, Timms says, the developers would sometimes think, "We didn't even know we could do that in this game." In that sense, it's a game that isn't shipped "finished"; it ends when contributions stop being made to it. What is shipped in it is something the player (the potential creator) already understands.

For a lot of people playing, this is just going to be a pretty good kart game. But, if you want, it doesn't have to be: the restrictions of a karting game can be the "stepping stones" (Timm's words) that lead you to something else that you might not have anticipated. You don't have to look far to see that idea in action, even past the videogame world. You can see it in the punk-blues of the two-piece The White Stripes, who give themselves crazy restrictions when recording an album, or in the stanza requirements for a sonnet, or even in Twitter's 140-character limit.

If I hadn't seen the karting levels before it, I wouldn't have suspected the other levels had anything to do with racing.The results of this idea shined through in some of the developer examples I saw, which is where my assumptions popped like the sack-y heads of so many LBP protagonists. By tying themselves into a genre, the creators were eventually able to break themselves out of that genre. Case in point: Some of the developer-created levels had nothing to do with racing. For the most part, they didn't have anything to do with weapons, either. One used the level-creation tools to build a Plinko-style game: A player drops a ball down past a series of pegs and racks up points as they go. No rocket launchers; no competitors speeding by; no end in sight except the satisfaction of your score. Another developer created a tower defense-style game. A stream of enemies makes its way through a door, and by setting up a series of automatic, turret-type weapons, you halt their progress for as long as you can. If I hadn't seen the karting levels before it, I wouldn't have suspected the other levels had anything to do with racing. They started those levels with the same tools everyone gets in the game--tools used for building racetracks.

I can't say if what I saw will be similar to what players will do with LBP Karting when it's released in November--what I saw were creations by the creators, and they've spent more time with the game than most any player will. Still (and LBP might not be the game to do this) it shows how we're heading in a direction where the creators, if they want to, don't matter much at all--as long as they provide a ladder for the players to climb up as high as they want. You can take that as a slightly scary outlook (what about artistic intent?!), but it's also an exciting one. LittleBigPlanet isn't the first game to toy with this idea, but it's one of the most visible, and LBP Karting could make for an especially interesting experiment: With this setup in place, could the creators alter the conversation for their game even if they wanted to? The creators have deemed it LBP Karting, but if the LBP faithful want, they could veto that idea. (I don't think most will do that, but I suspect at least some will.)

That, to me, is what makes this an interesting case study in level-creation games. Being able to create your own worlds, with only some guidance offered by the creators, is something unique to games as a medium. But, paradoxically, it seems like the way to make that an option for a mass audience is to start out with formula and structure, and trust that users will not only master the tools but use them to break that very formula. Rules to break rules. I just hope the game lives up to its potential.

Uranus looks a lot like some of our solar system's other planets in these spectacular new images from the Keck Observatory. Rather than beholding a pale bluish orb (like how Voyager viewed the planet nearly three decades ago), you can see whorls of clouds at high and low altitudes, huge hurricanes and strange features at its south pole.

Its swirling cloud layers are evocative of Jupiter, with different colors representing clouds at different altitudes--white is high-altitude, like cumulus clouds here on Earth, while the blue-green swirls represent cirrus-like layers. Winds howl at 560 MPH there, despite an utterly frigid -360°F atmosphere.

The south pole is very reminiscent of Saturn, which also has a strange and giant hurricane at its southern end. And that scalloped band near the equator? Scientists don't know what that is.

The new images are an incredible feat because Uranus is so far away. It's 30 times farther from the sun than we are, so it's almost impossible to resolve with even the best telescopes. These images were shot with the Keck II telescope in Hawaii, which used powerful adaptive optics to cancel out turbulence from Earth's atmosphere. The telescope team presented it Wednesday at an American Astronomical Society meeting.

[via Berkeley Lab]

Low-income minority fourth-graders from south L.A. improved their test scores in math and language after they got just a handful of science lessons, a new study found. College students studying science presented 10 separate one-hour lessons, and the kids rose up whole percentile ranks in other subjects.

"A lot of students say things like, 'I didn't know science was fun,'" said Samantha Gizerian, now a clinical assistant professor at Washington State University. Apparently they also showed a greater interest in taking books home to read, and a greater willingness to practice math. The lessons were simple, too--in one case, a college student just brought in some microscope slides from his lab.

Gizerian says the lessons taught science, but also acted "as a spark to ignite a child's interest in lifelong learning in all areas." She presented her findings at a recent Society for Neuroscience meeting.

The 50th anniversary of James Bond--and the upcoming release of Skyfall, the newest film--have inspired a wealth of infographics over the last couple weeks, but this interactive visualization by Ramiro Gómez is arguably the coolest.

The graphic shows the connections between 300 actors in 23 Bond films. Each actor is represented by a node on the chart--the larger the node, the more films the actor appeared in-- and the connecting lines indicate that actors appeared together in one or more movie.

Desmond Llewelyn, the Welsh actor who played Q for over three decades, holds the record for most Bond films, with 17 appearances between 1963 and 1999.

Click here to enter the gallery

From pensive black-and-white shots to detailed up-close portraits, the Veolia Environment Wildlife Photographer Of The Year Competition showcases some of the best animal photos we'll see in 2012. The winners have been chosen, and these are our favorites from the bunch. Enjoy!

[Natural History Museum]

Our friends at Pop Photo talked to Connie Zhou, who took absolutely stunning photos of what might seem horribly boring: Google's server centers. Zhou is typically an architectural photographer, and one day got an offer from Google to come take photos of places never seen before--though they have been the subject of some criticism. Check out the story here.