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This Mud Could Revolutionize How Scientists Study The Past

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Lake Suigetsu The pristine lake was never covered by glaciers, and is not interrupted by the turbulent inflow of a major river, giving it easily visible (and measurable) annual sediment layers. Courtesy of Christopher Bronk Ramsey
New radiocarbon measurements from the silty bottom of a Japanese lake could help scientists pinpoint when Neanderthals died out.

New radiocarbon measurements from the silty bottom of a Japanese lake could be one of the most helpful tools for natural historians in decades. With this new record, archaeologists could nail down the precise timing of the demise of the Neanderthal. Or anthropologists could determine exactly when humans spread into Europe. Or climate scientists could better understand the last ice age, and what climatological conditions led to the glaciers' retreat.

Core samples from largely unperturbed Lake Suigetsu, which scientists have been trying to obtain and study for almost 20 years, refine one of our best tools for understanding the past 50,000 years on Earth, in other words. "It it is no exaggeration to say that without that ability, fields like anthropology, archaeology and paleoclimatology would not exist as we know them," said Jesse Smith, senior editor at the journal Science, which publishes the paper today.

To understand why, it helps to understand how radiocarbon dating works.

Carbon dating uses the predictable, unchanging decay of a radioactive isotope of carbon known as carbon-14. It forms in the atmosphere in the presence of cosmic rays, which break down nitrogen into this unstable form of carbon. But as far as life is concerned, it's just more carbon, meaning it's fixed in plants. Animals that eat these plants also have C-14 in their bodies.

C-14's half-life is 5,730 years, give or take about 40 years. Using this known rate of decay, scientists can calculate how old a relic is by determining how much C-14 it still contains, relative to its stable cousin C-12. This can be used to determine the age of organic material in archaeological sites, for instance--human remains, wooden artifacts, and so on. This technique was invented in 1949, suggested by Enrico Fermi, and has been used since.

The problem is that cosmic rays and the atmosphere itself are variable, unpredictable things. This means the amount of C-14 in the atmosphere changes, so the amount incorporated into plants and animals changes, too. Calibrating this carbon record requires matching up radiocarbon data with items of a known age--like tree rings, for instance, or lakebed sediments.

"One must know how the C-14 content of the atmosphere changed in the past in order to know where to start the stop watch for any particular sample," Smith told reporters. This new lakebed core does just that.

Until now, the oldest calibration sample came from 12,593-year-old tree rings. The sediment sample dates back 52,800 years.

Once you have something older than 12,000 years ago, it's much harder to accurately pinpoint an age, explained Christopher Bronk Ramsey, lead author of the paper and a professor at the University of Oxford. This is largely because of major climate changes after the end of the last ice age. Scientists have some samples, from marine records and cave deposits that can be cross-checked with uranium measurements, but these don't give atmospheric C-14 levels.

The new paper, which involves teams from several countries, studies core samples that contain yearly layers of algae. These diatoms cover the lakebed every year, and are followed by a sediment layer. It's so clear you can see it with your naked eye, as seen below.


The lake is very still and its bottom is anoxic, so it's very stable, the scientists say. It was never covered by glaciers, so even during the last ice age, leaves fell from trees around the lake. Fossil remnants of these leaves helped the team refine its carbon dates.

Takeshi Nakagawa, a professor at the University of Newcastle, was first involved in sediment sampling at this lake in 1993, he told reporters in a news conference. The first scientific paper from that core sample published in 1998. But the 1993 core was not a continuous sample, with gaps between different layers--so just like other calibration techniques, it was unclear exactly how the years matched up, making it an incomplete record. After obtaining funding from the UK's Natural Environmental Research Council, Nakagawa took another core in 2006. It's fully continuous, with overlapping layers, dating to 52,800 years ago.

In some cases, the layers were very thin and impossible to discern with the naked eye, so Nakagawa sought help from scientists in Germany and the UK. Teams of researchers took studied the samples with a particle accelerator based at Oxford and with a hand-made core scanner made by Swedish physicists. Using X-ray fluorescence, the team identified the spectral signature of chemicals in the core and how their makeup changed, explained Henry Lamb, a professor at the University of Wales in Aberystwyth, UK. The team was able to identify seasonal layers deposited by snowmelt, volcanic ash, and more. It took several months to scan more than 40 meters of core, Lamb said.

"I always tell my students that chronology is crucial in studies of climate change, archeology, and human evolution. Now, I can tell them that Suigetsu provides a chronology that we can count on," Lamb said.

The record won't upend archaeology--there won't be millenial-scale revisions in the measured ages of objects. But a swing of several hundred years, which is significant, is certainly possible. Those changes can be important when studying human responses to climate, for instance, Bronk Ramsey said. "A more accurate calibrated time-scale will allow us to answer questions in archaeology, which previously we have not had the resolution to address."




Science Confirms The Obvious: Rejection Can Make You More Creative

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It's Lonely At The Top U.S. Library of Congress
There's a reason genius and solitude seem to go hand in hand, a new study says. Social rejection leads to creative problem solving.

Don't let rejection get you down--it might be the ticket to creativity, science says. That's right: If regular rejection doesn't cause you to lose all self-confidence and withdraw from the world entirely, it just might boost your ability to think outside of the mainstream and draw upon a unique worldview, suggesting that the kind of people society considers "geniuses" might tend to have a go-it-alone, loner mentality.

Research conducted by Cornell and Johns Hopkins University researchers has shown that people who are able to handle rejection in the proper manner--by shrugging it off and blazing their own, independent trails--can experience heightened creativity and even commercial success through an ability to eschew mainstream thought and groupthink and instead pursue their own creative solutions to problems. They tested their hypothesis through a series of experiments in which they manipulated the experience of social rejection; subjects in the study were led to believe that everyone in a group exercise could choose whom to work with on a team project, only to be told later that no one had selected them for a team.

For people with an independent mindset, this rejection inspired them to go on and complete the exercise in a way that was deemed more creative (we're not exactly sure how "creativity" was measured). For people without an independent mindset--well, we're not really sure what kind of impact this exclusion had on them (hopefully someone later told them it was just an experiment, it was all in good fun, and really, everyone here thinks you're great).

The researchers acknowledge that for some, the consequences of rejection can be quite negative. Their research is only intended to show that for those of a certain mindset, social rejection can have a silver lining, driving home something that we more or less already knew: it's not easy being a genius.

[Cornell]



Today On Mars: Curiosity Arrives At 'The Promised Land'

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Martian 'Schmutz' Curiosity has been exposing some bright flecks of material when it scoops the Martian soil. NASA engineers have taken to calling it "schmutz." NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Now parked in the Glenelg region on Mars, Curiosity swallows its first dirt sample intended for science.

The Mars rover Curiosity has arrived at its long-sought destination: Glenelg, a region where three types of geologic formations converge into a potential bonanza for scientists.

"Glenelg was conceptually a point that represented the three areas," John Grotzinger, project scientist for MSL at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told reporters today. "As part of understanding how those interrelate, we consider ourselves now to be in the promised land."

Now the rover's Chemistry and Mineralogy (CheMin) instrument is analyzing a scooped sample of dirt from a site inside Glenelg called Rocknest. This is a major step for the rover, whose ability to X-ray sand is a crucial part of its two-year mission.

To prepare, Curiosity rinsed its instruments with some dirt to ensure any Earthly contamination was removed.

In the process of scooping those mouthfuls, it spotted some bright material. One of the pieces turned out to be a piece of the rover itself, a shard of plastic that fell off but didn't cause any harm. But the other shiny things, including the object in the image above, are native to Mars.

There are two theories about what it is, Grotzinger said. It could be a type of mineral that breaks along a cleavage point, exposing a flat surface to sunlight; or it could be the result of some process inside the soil that results in certain minerals. Scientists "very much would like to study this," he said. The rover's laser eye will zap the shiny material within the next few days to get a sense of what it contains. Then Curiosity will continue exploring the Glenelg region, probably through the end of the year.



Very Important Invention: Hot Pizza And Coffee Will No Longer Burn Your Mouth

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Piping Hot Pizza Pain Wikimedia
University of Texas at Austin researchers have designed an oral strip that relieves burns from hot foods and liquids.

Burn yourself on your favorite hot refreshments no longer! University of Texas at Austin researchers have developed an oral strip that immediately numbs the pain from that venti pumpkin spice latté you couldn't wait to try and which scalded you for your impatience. Perhaps now you'll actually be able to taste the nutmeg. Before this breakthrough, the only way to avoid burning your face on delicious food was to wait for it to cool down. And what year is this, again?

Users can apply the strips directly to the burn for a dose of benzocaine and therapeutic polymers. It essentially acts the same as a breath strip, sticking to your mouth and dissolving in your saliva. The research will be presented at the 2012 American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) Annual Meeting and Exposition. The researchers, who are now based at the University of New Mexico, are currently working on a strip to treat more severe burns that last two to three days. How do we sign up to test the product? Maybe there will be free pizza.

[American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists]



Play Backyard Football Like A Pro

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Field Advances Brian Klutch
Four new toys to take onto the field (and into the endzone)

Not everyone takes neighborhood games of touch, flag -- or tackle -- football lightly. It can be serious business, which calls for serious gear -- gear that may not be totally pro-level but is at least inspired by it.

Football
Quarterbacks will throw spirals more easily with the Baden Perfection than with other pigskins. The ball slopes at a steeper-than-normal 49.3-degree angle from the stripe to the nose, which forces the player's index finger to grip the center of the ball more tightly. That centralized pressure helps initiate stronger spins. Baden Perfection F7000L Football $60

Jersey
The fit of the new NFL uniforms, made by Nike for 2012, is as pro grade as its price tag, leaving almost no loose fabric for opponents to grab. Designers wound the exterior of the polyester jersey with high-strength Kevlar. The semirigid material conforms to a player's body as he moves to keep the shirt tight on his frame. Nike Elite Jersey $250

Padding
The 0.2-inch-thick pads on the Stealth 5 undershirt provide the thinnest protection available. Dual-density memory-foam pads cover the player's shoulders, spine, and ribs. The outer, denser layer absorbs the initial impact from an overzealous 300-pound neighbor, and the inner layer dissipates any remaining force laterally, so less of it reaches the body. Under Armour MPZ Stealth 5 Pad Impact Top $80

Digital playbook
With the PlayLocker iPad app players can create, animate, and share plays. Coaches plot out their attacks on a series of frames, which the app animates at up to four frames per second. Teammates receive the play as a notification from the app on their own iPhones or iPads-and then safely stow them on the sidelines. PlayLocker Football for IOS From $1

This article originally appeared in the October issue of Popular Science.



The Bed That Uses Robotic Arms to Make Itself

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Made In One Minute Click here to see three images of the bed making itself. Courtesy Ascensio Zubeldia

After a full day of operating mill machinery in Spain's Basque country, Ascensio Zubeldia used to fall into bed drained. Each morning he mulled over the perfect bed-one that makes itself-and then he finally built it. Sensors under the mattress detect when the sleeper rises, and three seconds later, compartments that contain robotic arms open.

The arms secure cords along each side of the duvet cover between two rollers, then move forward, pulling the duvet to the top of the bed. As this occurs, cords attached to the pillowcases straighten them. Trays holding the pillows then lift, allowing the duvet to pass beneath them. The whole process takes less than a minute.

This article originally appeared in the October 2012 issue of Popular Science.



Guess The Mystery Animal!

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Mystery Animal: Oct. 18, 2012 Mark Kostich
Guess the species (either common or Linnaean) by tweeting at us--we're @PopSci--and get your name listed right here! Plus eternal glory, obviously. Update: We've got a winner!

So, here are the rules: follow us on Twitter and tweet at us with the hashtag #mysteryanimal. For example:

@PopSci is the #mysteryanimal a baboon?

And then I might say "if you think that's a baboon, perhaps you are the baboon!" But probably not, because this is a positive environment and all guesses are welcome and also this is not a very common animal so guess whatever you want!

The first person to get it right wins! We'll retweet the answer from @PopSci, and also update this post so your amazing animal knowledge will be permanently etched onto the internet. Show your kids! Your dumb kids who thought that was a baboon!

Update: And the winner is...@lmikinberg, who correctly guessed that this is a spotted linsang. The linsangs are southeast Asian viverrids--they're related to the civets and genets, but not to cats. They did, however, evolve in similar ways, so they often look distinctly cat-like. Look at the paws on the guy above!



Video: Giant 3-D Printing Factory Opens In New York City

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Bloomberg Opens "Factory of the Future" New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and 3-D printing company Shapeways' CEO, Peter Weijmarshausen, snip a ribbon with nylon scissors to open the 25,000-square-foot "Factory of the Future" in Queens. Dave Mosher
Shapeways, an online 3-D printing company, opened an enormous "Factory of the Future" in Queens, New York that could house 50 industrial printers and churn out millions of consumer-designed products a year.

The world's biggest 3-D printing factory dedicated to consumers opened with the snipping of nylon scissors this week in New York City.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg reached into a block of dust and grabbed the shears, which lasers built layer-by-layer earlier in the day. He later cut through a commemorative ribbon to open the 25,000-square-foot "Factory of the Future" in Long Island City, Queens.

Running the new facility is Shapeways, a Netherlands-based company that lets customers upload bespoke 3-D designs, and then prints and ships the objects in the span of a few days.

Shapeways CEO Peter Weijmarshausen told a crowd in a mostly empty floor of a warehouse that many of his customers live in and around New York City, so opening a factory there makes a lot of sense.

"This is the future of our city," said Bloomberg, who views the factory as part of a larger strategy to make the city a mecca of technology (the mayor's administration gave Shapeways a tax break to attract the startup).

Shapeways hopes to fill the factory with 50 high-resolution industrial 3-D printers that are just hitting or have yet to hit the market. Weijmarshausen says the collection of yet-unnamed machines will print objects out of a gamut of materials ranging from acrylic, nylon, and glass to gypsum, ceramic, and sandstone -- even precious metals such as silver. To run the machines day-in and day-out, Weijmarshausen says he needs to hire about 50 skilled employees.

Shapeways spokesperson Carine Carmy told PopSci that the main factory floor -- currently a dusty concrete slab -- should be finished and filled with printers, product polishing stations, and other equipment around January 2013.

Drop in on the factory's grand opening in the video below.




3M Streaming Projector With Roku Review: What A Cool Little Thing This Is!

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3M Streaming Projector Video Dan Nosowitz
A very nearly pocket-sized projector can't replace a full-sized one yet--but it is an incredibly fun toy.

Pico projectors have been chugging along for awhile, getting better but never quite breaking that wall to become something we should all have. They seem so cool--a 120-inch picture in your pocket!--but nobody's managed to really knock it out of the park yet. The tech still isn't quite there, but the 3M Streaming Projector Powered By Roku (cool name guys) is by far the closest--it's portable, self-contained, is the first to have a built-in Roku, and the price is just right. It's not essential--it's still basically a toy--but it is a really fun and surprisingly useful toy that you might actually use.

First thing to know about the projector is that it's way, way smaller than you think it is. Like, it won't fit in a pocket, but it will fit in a cargo pocket, or a jacket pocket. It's just about the size and shape of my palm, and only two inches tall at its tallest. And it's meant to be portable; it has content built in, sort of, in the form of a Roku Stick (a tiny but full-featured Roku that needs no extra power); it has a rechargeable battery; and it has speakers. So the projector can, theoretically, provide a home theater experience anywhere. It's a really cool idea.

In the real world that's tempered a little bit. The Roku does need Wi-Fi, the battery life is about an hour and a half at most, and the speakers are pretty tinny and unimpressive. But you can get around all that. I've used it with a mobile hotspot created by a 4G LTE smartphone (speeds are faster than my home internet anyway) and with a Jawbone Jambox, which sounds great and gets loud. That stuff costs extra, but combined with the projector, you can make a pretty legit full-featured portable theater.

Oh, right, the projector. So, its major weakness (and it has several weaknesses) is resolution. It's WVGA quality, which means, roughly, 480p. DVD quality, not high-def, not Blu-ray. That's noticeable when you're used to an HDTV. The picture can expand to 120 inches--huge!--but I wouldn't recommend it; the lacking resolution gets very noticeable above maybe 50 or 55 inches. It's only a 60-lumen bulb (though it's an LED bulb, so it shouldn't need replacing), which is fine for a pico projector but means you really do need darkness. It's perfectly usable in dusk, low-light rather than pitch-blackness, but the bulb just isn't powerful enough to blast through daylight. There are minimal picture controls, too--just one little wheel for focusing.

But, I found the picture absolutely good enough for most uses. Yes, I wish it was better, but in a dark bedroom, it looks really pretty good. It has two flat sides so you can point it horizontally (at a wall) or vertically (at your ceiling), which is awesome. I wouldn't want to watch The Tree of Life or anything amazingly visual with it, but I watched about four hours of The West Wing with it last night (cool guy over here) and it was totally serviceable. And a bigger picture than my TV! Out of this tiny little thing!

The Roku Stick is a surprisingly excellent idea. Not that Roku is bad--it's a capable, if not particularly exciting, way to get Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Video, and more--but I first wondered why they didn't just build Roku software into the projector itself. This way turns out to be great: You get an included Roku Stick, which can be removed and used on any MHL-capable TV (admittedly there are about nine of those total at the moment, but they'll be more popular soon), and removing it reveals an HDMI port that can be used with any HDMI gadget (Blu-ray player, computer, game console, another media streamer, whatever) without using any extra room. The Roku Stick fits right into the back of the projector, under a little cover--very neat. And you control it by using one remote for both the Roku and the projector. The remote is small and kind of hard to use but does the job reasonably well. (The Roku Stick, by the way, has pretty much the exact same software as the regular Rokus, only the hardware is shaped like a USB flash drive.)

So the 3M Projector is a novelty, yes. You can't really replace your TV or full-sized projector with it--it just has too many compromises in the picture department. But I really, really like the thing. It's adorable and tiny and so easy to use, and the Roku gives it tons of content. And the price, $299, is so tempting; yes, pico projectors often cost around $300 or under, but this one is better than most. Major legs-up over its competitors: it includes a Roku Stick ($100 on its own) and it's battery powered, which means you've got display, content, audio, and power, all in one tiny package. I don't think it'll change my life, like the Jawbone Jambox (another tiny, wireless version of a bigger home theater element), but I think the 3M Projector is great.

Plus, it's really exciting for the future--here is a gadget that's legitimately good, at a very low price. Imagine the next one! If they can keep the price at $300 but bump the resolution and the lumen count for the next generation, it could be a must-buy.

STATS

Product: 3M Streaming Projector Powered By Roku
Category: Pico projector
Price: $299
Cool bonus: You can pop the Roku Stick out and use it in any compatible TV
Rating: Inessential, but a very fun toy



A Trampoline Bridge Design And Other Amazing Images From This Week

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Bouncy Bridge This (totally fun and probably not hazardous!) bridge was imagined by Atelier Zündel Cristea for a competition in Paris. It works the way your inner child is hoping: you trampoline across the water. Atelier Zündel Cristea via Gizmodo
Plus: A meteor soaring over California, a beautiful aerial view of Greenland's coast, an artist going fully digital, and more amazing photos and illustrations.


Click here to enter the gallery



Daily Infographic: If Everyone Lived Like An American, How Many Earths Would We Need?

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Ecological Footprints Tim De Chant, Per Square Mile
Hint: It's a good thing not everyone lives like an American.

You're probably already aware that Americans consume a disproportional amount of the world's stuff. You may even have bumped into some of the statistics: We make up 5 percent of the global population, but use 20 percent of the world's energy. We eat 15 percent of the world's meat. We produce 40 percent of the world's garbage.

While those numbers do sound impressive, it can be hard to know what to make of them. OK, so we eat 10 billion animals and throw out 16 billion disposable diapers every year. So what?

Today's infographic, by blogger and journalist Tim De Chant, gives the issue some meaningful context by asking, and then answering, the question, "what if everyone in the world lived like us?"

To make the graphic, De Chant started with the Global Footprint Network's 2011 estimates of the average "ecological footprint" of people from several countries. (The footprint is a calculation of how much land it takes to provide the average person with everything they consume, including food, goods, and energy, for one year. It incorporates the more familiar "carbon footprint" in the form of the amount of land needed to offset the total greenhouse gas emissions caused by the average individual.) Next, he multiplied the footprint by the total population of the world (about 7 billion) to figure out the total amount of land needed.

Assuming we were able to use all the land on the planet--with the exception of Antarctica-- here's how much of Earth(s) we would need if we all lived like people in Bangladesh (or India. Or France. Or, yes, the U.S):



Late Electronics Maverick Stanford R. Ovshinsky In The Pages Of PopSci

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Stanford R. Ovshinsky, electronics maverick, dies at 89 Joi via flickr
The "Edison of our age" invented the nickel-metal hybrid battery and helped develop solar panels, rewritable CDs, and flat-panel displays.

Stanford R. Ovshinsky, a self-taught, inventive genius who revolutionized the field of semiconductors, died of prostate cancer on Wednesday at the age of 89.

Though he never went to college, Ovshinsky invented the nickel-metal hybrid battery and helped develop solar energy panels, rewritable CDs, and flat-panel displays. The Economist once called him "the Edison of our age." He was an early advocate of alternative energy and was one of the first to champion hydrogen fuel cells as an alternative to the internal-combustion engine.

In April 1978, PopSci published a story about "Ovshinsky's strange devices": semiconductors made from glass that could overturn the rules of solid-state physics. Read on for an excerpt.

"Colorful" and "controversial" are the words usually employed to describe Ovshinsky. Neither makes him happy. He says he wants to be regarded as just another face in the scientific crowd. But Stan Ovshinsky has a way of making headlines.
Just a few weeks before I interviewed him, he announced at a press conference (in the British House of Commons, no less) that he had created a family of materials that can make solar electricity cheaper than electricity from coal, oil, or nuclear plants. The demonstration by Dave Strand, an ECD employee, was just one of a daylong series of displays of products that Ovshinsky describes as revolutionary. And before I left, Ovshinsky told me that devices based on his material have the capability of replacing everything on which today's solid-state physics is based.

Read the full story in our April 1978 issue.



BeerSci: What Beer's Key Ingredient Reveals About Our Own Genomes

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The Brewer's Best Friend High-pressure frozen, freeze-factured scanning electron microcraph of Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Prof. Dr. Gerhard Wanner, LMU Munich, Faculty of Biology / Flickr
The yeast S. cerevisiae is instrumental in brewing ale. But did you know that it's also instrumental in helping scientists better understand cells?

Meet Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the humble brewer's yeast and resident co-deity to BeerSci's brewing endeavors.

Humans have been exploiting S. cerevisiae's fermentation prowess for thousands of years. Without it we wouldn't have beer, bread or wine. In addition to its uses in food production, S. cerevisiae is also an amazing tool for molecular and cell biology, one that is helping scientists suss out the rules of how our cells work and gain clues to what happens at the molecular level when things go wrong.

Much of what we understand about eukaryotic cellular processes and eukaryotic gene expression, we learned by studying S. cerevisiae.

That's because S. cerevisiae is one of the simplest eurkaryotic cells--cells like those that make up your dog, your houseplants or your local bartender. In fact, in 1996 S. cerevisiae became the first eukaryote to have its genome sequenced. According to the Saccharomyces Genome Database, S. cerevisiae's genome has some 12,100,000 base pairs and some 6,600 open reading frames (that is, places in the genome that could possibly contain a gene).

Most of you, I am sure, remember that there are two general kinds of cells: prokaryotic and eukaryotic. That is, "no nucleus" and "has a nucleus." That's all true, but the differences between the two kinds of cells are much more profound than that. Bacteria -- prokaryotes -- organize their genetic material in a completely different (and much simpler) way than do eukaryotes. Prokaryotes usually only have a chunk of DNA for a genome -- usually circular -- and a few extra chunks, called plasmids, kicking around in the cytosol. Those plasmids are really useful in doing things like sharing genes between bacteria, and its how one antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria can pass along antibiotic resistance to a bunch of nigh-unrelated strains of bacteria in, say, your intestines. The genes in bacteria are generally read exactly as they are found in the DNA, kind of like how you're reading this sentence. No intervening clumps of letters to clutter things up.

Eukaryotes, on the other hand, bundle up all that DNA (and they have a lot of it) into a protein-DNA complex called chromatin, then wind that chromatin into individual chromosomes. Further, the genes are constructed in such a way that they must be heavily processed before they can ever "code" for a functional protein. Much of what we understand about eukaryotic cellular processes and eukaryotic gene expression, we learned by studying the molecular mechanics of S. cerevisiae.

Why am I going on about all of this? /Because when I was researching the S. cerevisiae genome to find out which gene loci or other factors are responsible for, say, the ester-producing qualities of British ale yeast or the heat-tolerance and high-attenuation profiles of saison yeasts, I found something so cool I wanted to write about it. I found an article from the 20 May 2010 issue of Nature that described how biologists and computer scientists at the University of Washington had determined how chromosomes might be arranged in a normal yeast cell and how that organization might affect gene expression. Eventually, this could have implications in how we understand human gene expression.

A bit of background: One of the most surprising findings of the last decade or so is that it's not just what's on the genes that affects an organism's physical and chemical makeup, but how those genes are packaged in chromatin that matters. For a field that thought for over a century that genes are king, that's a crazy result, and one of my favorites in recent memory.

But it also turns out that not only does the gene packaging matter, so does the chromosome placement in the nucleus. Think of it this way: if you had a Xerox machine and a certain amount of time, chances are that you'd Xerox any documents that were closest to you a lot, rather than drag that machine across the office to copy something far away. That's what chromosome organization does--it doesn't matter if two genes are somewhat near each other on a linear strand of "genome" if they end up halfway across the nucleus from each other. Instead, it's also important if areas on two totally different chromosomes get cozy next to each other in the nucleus--you get a lot of copies of gene product from chromosome regions that are adjacent to one another. The paper in question detailed how the researchers were able to look at all of the spatially adjacent chromosome loci by using a relatively new method to create DNA libraries of those interactions, then map and model how the 16 chromosomes in the S. cerevisiae nucleus interacted with each other.

I spoke with one of the paper's authors, William Noble, about the method and the results. One of the more surprising (and initially worrying) results of the work was how chromosome XII differs from the other chromosomes. The data showed that, unlike the others, XII had a huge swath that interacted with hardly anything else. Noble said that he and his colleague who ran the analysis worried that there was an artifact in the data, making chromosome XII look different when it wasn't. But further scrutiny uncovered the answer: Unlike all of the other chromosomes, XII sits partially in a large structure called the nucleolus, where ribosomal RNA is made. The nucleolus acts like a barrier so the arms of the chromosome can't get close to each other--kind of like how it's hard to give a sumo wrestler a bear hug without Inspector Gadget extendable arms.

The researchers also discovered that most interactions between chromosomes happened at sites adjacent to the centromeres. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the sites known to code for tRNA, no matter where they were found on a chromosome, tended to associate into clusters, and that one such cluster localized to the nucleolus. It makes sense that tRNA genes would cluster in an area where active translation and protein synthesis happens.

After we chatted about the findings of the paper, Noble and I talked about the possible implications. Other studies have suggested (and this one reinforces them) that nuclear ordering--how chromosomes organize themselves in the nucleus--actually does affect how genes are expressed in an organism's day-to-day existence. The story behind "are you a product of your genes" is becoming murkier by the month. Similar studies have been done for other genomes, including human, but because those genomes are large and complex, it's not possible to get the same resolution the University of Washington group got with budding yeast.

None of this has anything to do with brewing, I know. But just like falling down the wiki hole sometimes leads to interesting discoveries, digging through dozens of scientific papers on the yeast genome leads to some other interesting discoveries.

To bring this back to brewing again, here's a recipe similar to one for an ale brewed around the same time that European scientists rediscovered Gregor Mendel's work on "discrete units of inheritance." We modeled it after the November 15, 1901 KK by Pretty Things Ale Project, itself based on a recipe for a beer brewed in London on its namesake day. It's a partial mash recipe because Team BeerSci doesn't have the equipment to hit a target gravity of 1.079 in a 5-gallon all-grain batch.

INGREDIENTS
4 pounds Maris Otter
1 pound brown malt
10 oz Crystal 120
6 oz Crystal 80
1 oz chocolate malt
4 pounds extra light DME
2 pounds invert no. 3

Add 2.5 pounds of the DME at flameout to keep boil gravity down and increase hop utilization.
1.5 oz East Kent Golding and 0.15 oz Centennial -- 90 minutes
1.5 oz East Kent Golding and 0.5 oz Bramling Cross -- 60 minutes
1.5 oz East Kent Golding and 1.5 oz Bramling Cross -- 30 minutes
Wyeast London III (1318)

INSTRUCTIONS
Rack after 2 weeks and dry-hop in the secondary with 1 oz. of EKG and Bramling Cross apiece.

The beer ended up lighter than the November 15, 1901 KK ale that served as inspiration for this one (more of a chocolate brown than dark brown), but it was still a nice winter ale at 8.1% ABV.

Next week: Barley genome decoded!
Follow BeerSci on Twitter! @BeerSci



Will The City Of The Future Look As Insane As This?

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Under Tomorrows Sky Hovig Alahaidoyan imagines the island city's coastline. Hovig Alahaidoyan
An all-star team of speculators--scientists, futurists, artists, and more--is premiering an exhibit on the city of the future at Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven. Here's a look.


Click here to enter the gallery

To create the exhibit "Under Tomorrows Sky" (yes, it's apostrophe-free), speculative architect Liam Young brought together a batch of like-minded folks to imagine a city of the future. The contributors include futurist and sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling, graphic novelist Warren Ellis, scientist Rachel Armstrong, and a lot more.

Somehow that vision ends up resembling a collision between nature and urban blight; think of it as a sort of post-apocalyptic Walden Pond. It's gorgeous--you can see that in the gallery--but the project is a multimedia endeavor, too. Videos inspired by it are at the exhibit's site, and there's even a fly-on-the-wall camera for you to sit in on the think tank discussions. Here are sci-novelists Bruce Sterling and Simon Ings chatting with Young about the city of the future.

It'll be showing at Dutch Design Week tomorrow if you happen to be in the Netherlands. Or you can just wait until it's the future and hope they guessed right.

[Under Tomorrows Sky]



This Week In The Future: Vote By Smelling The Candidates' Baked Goods

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This Week In The Future, October 15-19, 2012 Baarbarian
In the future, we'll watch leaked footage of the unreleased Baked Goods Battle section of the 2012 presidential debates. Smell-o-vision available.

Want to win this fragrant Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the T-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:




Cancer and Genetic Science: [Sponsored Post]

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The field of genomics may revolutionize how we understand and treat cancer. One research scientist explains why.

Charles AdvertisementSwanton - T. Rowe Price Connections contributor Charles Swanton is the head of Translational Cancer Therapeutics at the London Research Institute of Cancer Research UK. He specializes in "translational research"-focused on using discoveries in drug resistance to develop new ways to treat cancer. His current research involves chromosomal instability in breast cancer tumors.

Over the past two decades, dramatic progress has been made in many areas of medicine where hope once seemed out of reach. An infectious disease like HIV, considered intractable in the 1990s, is now controllable with anti-retroviral therapy; and the right combination of antibiotics can similarly control many difficult bacterial infections.

When it comes to cancer, however, progress in managing solid tumors that have spread beyond their primary site (metastatic disease) has been rather limited. Survival gains from new therapies are often measured in weeks or months, rather than years, and this oncological care comes with a disproportionate rise in costs.

Cancer has justifiably been referred to as the "Emperor of All Maladies." And indeed, cures at the metastatic stage of disease-despite some notable exceptions, like testicular cancer-are still rare, with tumors inevitably acquiring resistance to multiple drugs over the course of the disease. But today, the science of genomics is showing great promise for cancer research and treatment. New genomic sequencing technologies, which allow us to look at the genetic makeup of tumors, are shining a bright light on the way cancers grow and spread, helping oncologists to better understand why progress in metastatic disease has been so slow; how tumors manage to evade drugs and develop resistance to therapies so rapidly; and ultimately, how we might best treat them.

Understanding the Genetic Complexity of Tumors
Current genomic sequencing technologies enable us to decipher the genetic code of human cancers at an unprecedented rate: overnight in one laboratory, compared to the several years it took in the late 1990s. Genome sequencing reveals that every tumor is distinct from patient to patient, with limited but important genetic changes shared between patients who have the same pathological tumor type.

Large-scale cancer sequencing efforts conducted by organizations like The Cancer Genome Atlas (colorectal cancers) and the Wellcome Trust's Cancer Genome Project (breast cancer) have already led to breakthroughs in our understanding of human cancers. For example, Dr. Andy Futreal, professor of genomic medicine at the University of Texas's MD Anderson Cancer Center, together with his colleagues, identified a cancer mutation in a gene called BRAF that has led to one of the most exciting and effective treatments "targeted" against this mutation in melanoma, a disease against which chemotherapy was almost always ineffective. (Mutations of the BRAF gene are often found in melanoma. Approximately 160,000 new cases are diagnosed worldwide each year, and the disease is responsible for 75 percent of all skin cancer-related deaths.)

Genomic sequencing is revealing unexpected complexities in tumor development. Cancer is a clonal disease, meaning that one precursor cell spawns daughter progeny that grow in an uncontrolled manner, and resist destruction by the body thanks to multiple gene mutations (or other modifications). Sequencing is revealing that these "subclone" cells may, in some cases, dominate the metastatic site of disease, and resist treatment through ways we have yet to understand.

Genetic sequencing is also challenging traditional concepts of tumor growth and evolution. We now know that tumors evolve and change over time, and that different subclones of tumor cells, with shared genetic mutations but distinct genetic makeups, may reside in different parts of the same primary tumor. In fact, these distinctions between subclones may result in more differences in cancer DNA sequences than similarities.

What's more, sequencing of single cancer cells is beginning to reveal that no two cancer cells share identical genetic codes. Even a small cancer mass measuring 1 to 2 cubic centimeters may contain billions of cells. The potential for genomic diversity is therefore extraordinary. We don't yet understand exactly how this diversity affects drug resistance and treatment outcome, but advanced sequencing technologies hold the key to these critical questions.

Cancer as Evolutionary Process
Why is this relevant? From a reductionist standpoint-the approach or belief that the complex mechanisms of life can be understood by simple chemistry-the internationally renowned cancer biologists Peter Nowell, Carlo Maley, and Mel Greaves have proposed that cancer growth follows the laws of evolution and selection. These scientists reference the "I think" branched tree diagram that Charles Darwin drew in 1837, in which the genetic diversity of species is represented by branches that grow off a shared evolutionary trunk.

The thinking goes that genetic diversity-with cancer subclones following a branched evolutionary path that creates distinctions between them-helps cancer survive, providing the necessary substrate for its evolutionary fitness. While many cancer subclones will be eliminated during therapy, only a few need to survive to result in the rapid acquisition of drug resistance over weeks or months that oncologists witness in clinical practice. Indeed, genetic diversity within glioblastoma, the most common and insidious malignant brain tumor, has been shown to result in distinct populations of cells in the same tumor, with sensitivities to different drugs. This may begin to reveal why treating solid tumors can be so difficult, and why resistance to treatment in metastatic disease seems so inevitable.

In the near term, it may not be possible to cure most advanced metastatic tumors using traditional targeted therapy approaches, because of both the genetic distinctions between patients (intertumor heterogeneity) and within individual tumors (intratumor heterogeneity). The range of targeted drugs needed to treat the multitude of genetic dependencies in many advanced tumors simply does not exist-and even if it did, combining these targeted drugs at a safe and effective dose would be extremely challenging.

Using Evolutionary Principles to Achieve Results
So, new approaches are required. One such approach harnesses the body's own immune system to recognize tumor diversity, targeting the genetic abnormalities in cancer cells. Tumors appear to dampen the body's own immune system by "stealth," preventing the body from recognizing the abnormal protein signals cancer cells display on their surface, and therefore identifying them as rogue cells. New cancer treatments are increasing the sensitivity of the body's own immune system so it can detect these rogue cells. Such developments are already showing impressive benefits in clinical trials, with tantalizing evidence of long-term disease control, something we rarely see with traditional chemotherapy or targeted drugs.

Another logical goal is preventing tumor diversity. One way to achieve this will be by improving traditional modern oncology through early diagnosis, tumor screening, and prompt and aggressive surgery and adjuvant (chemotherapy or radiotherapy) treatments following surgery. The mantra: hit the tumor hard and early before it has grown, spread, and diversified. Genome sequencing reveals a scientific basis for why this approach-which has been so beneficial to patients over the last three decades-is resulting in many more cancer cures than ever before.

Finding New Targets for Drugs
By harnessing the laws of evolution-and thinking of tumors like the tree of Darwin's "I think" diagram, with a shared genetic trunk and differing branches-oncologists may be able to develop better drugs for patients with metastatic disease. Genomic sequencing can give us a more intricate understanding of the clonal origins of cancer cells, and help us to define the primary drivers of cancer growth-particularly the core genetic dependencies of cancer cells, and the early genetic events that will be present in every tumor subclone at every site of disease. These shared drivers from the "trunk" may be better drug targets to control disease everywhere. Indeed, from sequencing we may learn that the highly effective drug targets identified over the last decade are targeting early "trunk" events in the tumor, as in the cases of Her2, the targeted gene of herceptin in breast cancer, and the BRAF mutation in melanoma.

In this regard, genomics is already being implemented in cancer treatments, through the sequencing of specific mutations in the cancer-signaling proteins of some sarcomas (c-KIT and gastrointestinal stromal tumor), melanoma (BRAF), and lung cancer (epidermal growth factor receptor). In clinical trials, Next-Generation Sequencing technologies are looking at tumors before treatment and after the tumors acquire drug resistance, helping us to understand not only how drugs work, but also why they stop working.

Understanding the "branches"-analogous to the differences between cancer cells-will give oncologists a better idea of how cancer drug resistance may occur and how we can prevent it. For example, we already know, in lung cancer and other solid and haematological (blood, and blood-forming tissue) tumors, that drug treatment can select out a resistant subclone that may exist as a small subpopulation of genetically distinct cells in the tumor before therapy. This is akin to pruning the tree branches, leaving one or two branches of the tumor tree left to grow and dominate the disease bulk.

What is now emerging through sequencing studies is just how complex this process can be, and how many branches the tumor tree may have. In one tumor, the data reveals multiple drug resistance mechanisms existing in minor but distinct cancer subclones that emerge during therapy. Clearly, understanding how such diversity develops is critical in order to try to limit its emergence in the first place. Continuing the tree analogy, we must understand processes within the cancer cell that initiate the branching of the tree, and the number of branches the tree bears.

Diversity could theoretically be the result of mutations that occur every day in normal cells. However, many cancers may generate diversity through elevated gene mutation rates or by failing to accurately separate the genes contained within chromosomes every time a cancer cell divides, termed chromosomal instability. Genomic research is already giving scientists a better understanding of these processes. And once they are clarified, we may actually be able to exploit and harness the very mechanisms that tumors depend upon for survival-in order to find new targets for drugs to limit tumor evolution, stop them in their tracks, and destroy them.

To learn more about how genomics is revolutionizing industries, click here for our full issue in T. Rowe Price Connections, an ongoing series about finding opportunity in the global economy.

T. Rowe Price and Charles Swanton are not affiliated.

They Said It Couldn't Be Done!

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Human Powered Flight Click here to see this amazing image even larger. Ollie Bland
The quest for human-powered flight

Da Vinci sketched the oldest known plans for a human-powered aircraft in 1485. Yet it wasn't until 1977 that the first one truly flew. Flight requires lift, when the net air pressure pushing upward counteracts the craft's weight. For years, many assumed that flight required more lift and more power than the human body alone could provide (although the admonitions did little to stop myriad failed attempts). But inventors persisted. Aircraft fly using three basic configurations: fixed wing, flapping wing, and rotors. In the last 50 years, inventors have conquered fixed-wing and flapping flight. Now they are on the verge of overcoming the greatest challenge yet: vertical takeoff.


Click here to see a history of flight in the page of PopSci

To fly a human-powered helicopter, a pilot would likely have to produce 500 watts of power. Even the fittest pilot could not sustain that output, says Antonio Filippone, an aeronautical engineer at the University of Manchester in England who has published two papers analyzing theoretical human-powered helicopters. "You can lift off," he says, "But for more than a few seconds, it is not possible." We've heard that sort of thing before.

AIRPLANE

Fixed-wing flight

The Challenge: Fixed-wing flight requires an efficient airfoil, such as a wing that's curved on top and flat on the bottom. As the airfoil moves forward, air streams faster over its top than underneath it, creating a difference in pressure. When the pressure below the craft overcomes the pressure above it, there is a net upward force. Most planes use engines to get enough forward motion, but people can't propel a vehicle nearly as fast.

The Solution: In general, the longer the wings, the more lift. In the early '60s, Southampton University undergraduates built a 130-pound craft with an 80-foot-wingspan and a bicycle-style transmission connected to a propeller. It flew a third of a mile but had significant steering problems. In 1977, engineer Paul MacCready designed the Gossamer Condor, a 70-pound aluminum and plastic craft with a canard-an airfoil on a boom in front of the fuselage. It was more maneuverable than its predecessors and flew in a figure eight around markers a half-mile apart, winning the Royal Aeronautical Society's prize for the first controlled and sustained human-powered flight. There's still room for improvement. For example, engineers have refurbished the '90s Airglow (seen here) with bent wingtips and curvier wings-improvements that stabilize it during turns.

ORNITHOPTER

Flapping-wing flight

The Challenge: Small animals such as hummingbirds beat their wings fast enough to stay aloft entirely from flapping, pushing more air down than they do up and creating a net upward pressure. But at large scales, it's difficult to beat quickly enough to remain in the air. Bigger flappers, therefore, require a boost from forward thrust. Think of an engine pushing forward a flapping-wing plane, or ornithopter.

The Solution: Larger birds' wings flap, but they also twist forward and back as if jiggling a doorknob, which generates extra forward thrust. So as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, aeronautical engineer Todd Reichert and fellow students designed their craft, named Snowbird, with wings that both flap up and down and twist 10 degrees. They used computer simulations to fine-tune their design. And they gave Snowbird a wide, 105-foot wingspan and employed carbon fiber and Kevlar to keep it light. A person generates power in the 94-pound craft using a leg press similar to those found in gyms.

On August 2, 2010, on a field in Ontario, a car towed the craft forward until it glided into the air. Then the car stopped towing. As Reichert worked the leg press, the Snowbird flapped its wings and flew on its own at a height of 11 feet for 19.3 seconds, traveling 475 feet.

HELICOPTER

Rotor-based flight

The Challenge: A helicopter flies when its spinning rotors force air down, which decreases air pressure above the craft and increases it below. Unlike planes and ornithopters, helicopters cannot rely on forward motion, making flight much more challenging. Helicopters also generate turbulence that can cause serious stability problems. Several teams are trying to prove that they can conquer vertical flight by winning the American Helicopter Society's Sikorsky prize, a standing $250,000 award for a human-powered helicopter that hovers for one minute and hits a minimum altitude of three meters (9.8 feet), while staying within a 10-meter (33-foot) square.

The Contenders: The University of Maryland team's Gamera II helicopter is a quadcopter, a craft with four 42.6-foot-wide rotors connected to a bicycle-like transmission. Several smaller rotors near the ground can lift off more easily than a single large one. They also balance one another for better stability. Each tweak to their design has yielded better results-in June, a pilot sat and pedaled with his hands and feet to raise the Gamera II about a foot off the ground for 49.9 seconds, and then in August, a pilot topped out at eight feet.

Aeronautical engineer Neal Saiki, who designed the first human-powered helicopter to lift off in 1989, is back with a new craft: the Upturn. A pilot pedals to spin its single, 85-foot-wide rotor with four blades, two of which have propellers at their ends, which help with stability. Each blade also has an adjustable flap and a sensor to detect vibration and balance, and Saiki's software tweaks the flaps' angles in real time to compensate for wobbles. In June, a pilot lifted the Upturn two feet for about 10 seconds.

The competition is still heating up. Snowbird co-designer Todd Reichert officially registered for the helicopter prize this July with a new group, but it hasn't yet released a full design of its quadcopter. Maryland continues to improve its craft. Saiki aims to use a stronger pilot. And team gravity will be fighting all of them every step of the way.



Turn An Android Device Into A Pocket-Size Media Center

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Home Away From Home Greg Maxson

The notion that a home entertainment center must be in your actual home is antiquated. With an off-the-shelf adapter and a few apps loaded onto an Android phone or tablet, users can stream movies, TV shows, and videogames from remote computers or media services to a television. That means you can fully re-create the experience of being at home when you're at a friend's house, in a hotel room, or anywhere else with a good flat-screen.

ADD OTHER MEDIA SOURCES

If you subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, or other streaming services, add their mobile apps to the phone or tablet for more movie and music choices.

ADD A WIRELESS GAME CONTROLLER

A Wiimote or Sixaxis controller can serve as a remote for watching movies, viewing photos, or listening to music from the Android device (as well as playing games). The device must have Bluetooth, and it must be rooted. Rooting instructions are available at Lifehacker or on the XDA-Developers forum. Once rooted, go to Google Play and install Wii Controller IME ($3) or Sixaxis Controller ($2), and then pair the controller with the device and assign functions to each button.

[dme:image side="center" size="large" index2 />

GET AN HDMI ADAPTER

One end of the adapter plugs into the Android device's port, while the other connects to an HDMI cable that plugs into a television. For most Android phones and tablets with micro USB connectors, a generic adapter will work; certain models require a custom adapter.

GET MEDIA CENTER SOFTWARE

Plex allows users to stream most video and music files from a home computer. To set it up, purchase the Android app ($5) for your phone or tablet. Next download the Plex Media Server software (free) to your computer. Run the software, and tell it where you keep your media files when prompted. Go to Plex Media Server's settings, click on myPlex, and create an account. Then open the Plex app on the Android device and log in. In a few seconds, your computer's media files will appear.

ADD RETRO GAMES

To play games on a TV, download programs called emulators (versions of old arcade and console platforms) to the Android device from the SlideME store or Google Play. Then find compatible game files (called ROMs) at coolrom.com or by searching the Web.

Warning: Downloading certain videogame ROM files may violate copyright regulations.



iPod Nano And iPod Touch Review: Hey Guys, Remember iPods?

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iPods Nano and Touch Dan Nosowitz
Remember the Postal Service? Remember when The Office was great? Remember the early-to-mid 2000s? Ahhh, iPod. Takes me back.

Let's assume, before we go any further, that you have already decided you want a non-smartphone that can play media (or apps), so we can not waste any time by discussing under which probably weird circumstances you want one of these instead of a smartphone, which is of course much more capable and which you probably already have. No more discussion! Just reviews!

iPod Touch

What's Good: The new hardware is great. The thing is super thin, and slightly more square and less tapered than previous generations. Feels a little bit retro and more substantial. The colors are nice, too, although Apple sent me some kind of horrible chartreuse color, like rancid metallic space-mustard. Don't get that one! The new, longer screen still has that stellar resolution pixel density, clarity, and color that the modern iPod Touch and iPhones have. It's super responsive, and I was pleased to find that even with my tiny hands and bad attitude, I have no trouble reaching the top of the screen and yanking down the notifications bar.

The app selection is of course top-notch. There's no major app that's not available for iOS. And camera apps, thanks to the new, upgraded sensor, are much more useful. The camera is still not quite as good as the iPhone 5 (or even the iPhone 4S), but it's plenty good enough for Instagram. Sound and video both have tons of options, from Rdio, Spotify, MOG, and a million podcast apps on the audio side to Netflix, Hulu Plus, and YouTube on the video side. The screen isn't quite big enough to make it a great video player, especially with the iPad around. But for 20 minutes at a time? Great. The game selection is great, too, from little timewasters to longer and more involved titles.

What's Bad: iTunes is still a pretty bad media manager--it's hard to do things manually ("stop syncing! Why are you so insistent on syncing?!"), it's restrictive on how many computers can be used with each device, it's slow, it's bloated, it's not very good. On the other hand, if you use something like Rdio or Spotify, and you should use something like Rdio or Spotify, that's much less important, because you're not reliant on iTunes for music management. Oh, and the earbuds are really, really bad. Like, yes, they fit better than the old ones, but they're still hard plastic, which makes no sense to me--they don't seal off the ear canal so tons of outside noise gets in, and the drivers are pretty low-quality to begin with. As always, when you buy an iPod, throw the headphones out immediately.

It's kind of expensive, at $300 for 32GB and $400 for 64GB. But it's hard to know what to even compare it to; there's the Samsung Galaxy Player 4.2, which CNET rates as pretty good. But iOS's apps are still way beyond Android's in terms of fit and finish, and CNET found the Galaxy Player a bit underpowered, which the iPod Touch certainly is not. Also the Galaxy Player is pretty ugly and the iPod Touch is very pretty. You could compare it with the smaller tablets; Google's Nexus 7, our favorite 7-inch tablet, costs $250 for 16GB of storage, but of course it has a much bigger screen, which would make it better for any kind of video, ebooks, and web browsing. The Nexus isn't pocketable though, so whether those are competing products depends mostly on what you'll be doing with them. It's also worth noting that Apple will probably announce a new, smaller iPad in about a week, though I kind of doubt anyone is really choosing between an iPod Touch and an iPad.

Otherwise I don't honestly have any complaints with the Touch--it works really well, looks great, does everything you'd expect it to.

Product: Apple iPod Touch (2012)
Category: Portable media player
Price: $299 (32GB) or $399 (64GB)
Cool bonus: Recessed lanyard peg in the back, fun bright colors
Rating: Probably the best portable media player ever made, not that that means much these days

iPod Nano

What's Good: Tiny! Super super small, while still having the biggest screen of any iPod Nano ever. Has Bluetooth, for the first time, which is great for wireless headphones (useful while running) or connecting to a little speaker like a Jambox. Has Nike+ built in for tracking your steps and timing your runs and things like that. Plays videos. Now it has a "home" button, just like its big brothers, which I like for clarity's sake--the previous generation Nano forced you to press and hold the center of the screen, which was not very intuitive. On the side there's a play/pause button in between the volume up and volume down buttons--good for no-look navigation, when the iPod's in your pocket or whatever. Sound quality is actually not bad considering how tiny the thing is.

What's Bad: The screen is only big comparatively--it's still very small, and can be hard to use sometimes. Not a lot of room for album art or track listings or navigational cues like back buttons. The screen also is pretty low-res, compared to the iPod Touch and iPhone--it's small but not very sharp. Since this doesn't have Wi-Fi or apps (it looks like it has apps, but it doesn't), you have to use iTunes a lot--and iTunes is, again, not very good. Screen is definitely too small to watch video. Like, it doesn't hurt it to have the option, but don't buy this expecting it to be a real multimedia powerhouse. Earbuds, see above for description of awfulness.

We've pretty much abandoned portable media players in the wake of smartphones, so there aren't a ton of alternatives out there, especially for a $150 16GB player with premium bonuses like video playback, Bluetooth, and a pedometer. But the video playback is not really useful, and given that the most obvious use for the Nano is as a workout device, I think I might actually recommend something a lot cheaper, something that's almost disposable, something that'll just blast your tunes at you while you sweat. For that I think SanDisk's Sansa Clip Zip might be the best option. The 8GB version (which is plenty of space) costs, at time of writing, $57. It has a built-in clip like the old iPod Nano, and it is, surprisingly, well-known in audiophile communities for its excellent sound quality. It doesn't have Apple's fantastic unibody aluminum design, but, like, who cares, if you're using it at the gym?

Product: Apple iPod Nano (2012)
Category: Portable media player
Price: $149 (16GB)
Cool bonus: Pedometer, Bluetooth
Rating: Too expensive for an app-less media player, but still works well



New Telescope To Hunt For Earth's Twin

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CHEOPS Probe University of Bern/via ESA
CHEOPS will be able to tell a planet's makeup, helping explain how supersized Earths form in other solar systems.

The Kepler space telescope (and several observatories on the ground) have pinpointed a plenitude of planets around other stars, but astronomers' knowledge of them remains fuzzy. A new European mission launching in five years will bring them into focus, figuring out their size, density and internal structure.

The new telescope is called CHEOPS, for CHaracterising ExOPlanets Satellite, although it is not shaped like a pyramid. Its targets will be nearby stars that are known to harbor planets. Like Kepler, it will use the transit method of hunting planets, looking for blips in star brightness to tell if something is orbiting around them. This will allow more accurate measurements of a given planet's radius.

Astronomers know the masses of several planets, partly through observations that measure how the planets affect the wobbling of their stars. Given a radius and a mass, you can figure out density, and this will give clues about the planet's internal makeup. This will help astronomers learn how other planets form, especially the rocky super-Earths.

Measurements like this will help characterize Earth-scale planets like the one around the Alpha Centauri system, which astronomers announced last week. CHEOPS is just one in a handful of super-precise, powerful telescopes slated to start observing in the next few years, which astronomers believe could finally pinpoint whether life exists elsewhere in the cosmos. For instance: "I think it is realistic to expect to be able to infer within a few decades whether a planet like Earth has oxygen/ozone in its atmosphere, and if it is covered with vegetation," Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal, told Reuters.

CHEOPS will orbit Earth in synch with the sun, flying around 500 miles above the planet. It's scheduled for launch in 2017.

[ESA]



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