Weather satellites above Earth stay in perfect, geosynchronized orbit, so you can probably guess at which one is keeping an eye out for events like Sandy. New Yorkers? Probably GOES-13. Calfornians? Good ol' GOES-15.

The satellites are 22,300 miles up, which puts them higher than most satellites, but that number's key: any higher or lower and they'd move faster or slower than the Earth spins, putting them out of their carefully crafted orbit.

[NASA]

Logic and emotion tend to be considered as polar opposites. Think about the analytic CEO-his actions make sense in the science of profit, but when it means using cheap human labor or firing a couple hundred employees, there's an apparent lack of concern for the human consequences of his actions. Many choices are a struggle to compromise the two systems--and that may have to do with how our brains are wired.

A new study published in NeuroImage found that separate neural pathways are used alternately for empathetic and analytic problem solving. The study compares it to a see-saw. When you're busy empathizing, the neural network for analysis is repressed, and this switches according to the task at hand.

Anthony Jack, an assistant professor in cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University and lead author of the study, relates the idea to an optical illusion. You can see a duck or a rabbit in the image, but not both at the same time. This limitation to what you can see is called perceptual rivalry. Jack's new study takes this concept beyond visual perception, and investigates how the brain processes situations. It found separate neural networks for social/emotional processing and for logical analysis.

The study took magnetic resonance images of 45 college students as they were presented with problems involving social issues or physics. The MRIs showed that separate regions of the brain activated and deactivated according to the type of problem.

Finding a balance between the use of the two neural pathways could give insight into treatment for neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression and schizophrenia, according to Jack.

Today marks 60 years since U.S. scientists detonated the world's first thermonuclear weapon on the Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific. The hydrogen bomb, powered by nuclear fusion rather than fission, was hundreds of times more potent than the atomic bomb that devastated Hiroshima in 1945.

In August 1955, Popular Science published 10 photographs that together tell the dramatic story of "10 years of progress in harnessing the mighty atom," from the uranium rush to the first atomic hospitals. We also carefully illustrated and annotated our vision of an atomic spaceship (one day!) Check out the gallery for some of the biggest moments in atomic history.

See the gallery.

Something strange happens to spacecraft swinging past Earth for a gravity boost--they suddenly speed up, and their trajectories change in unexpected ways. It's a tiny change, but enough that physicists have started to take notice. The European Space Agency is planning a new mission that could measure this gravity anomaly and figure out if a new, unknown physics is at work.

Before heading out to far-flung destinations in the solar system, spacecraft often slingshot around the Earth, so the planet's gravity provides a boost to send them on their way. In several cases in the 1990s and early 2000s, scientists saw an unexplained change in spacecraft velocities after their closest Earth-shaves. They didn't see it in action, in part because the satellites weren't logged into the Deep Space Network when it happened and even when they were, there's a 10-second delay between data acquisitions. But they knew it did happen because the spacecraft trajectories changed.

Scientists could not trace a hyperbolic arc for the slingshot--they could only trace incoming and outgoing arcs, with a slight difference between them. This slight difference comes from a velocity boost that no one can explain. It's too much to be an error introduced by something like the solar wind, some other celestial body's influence, or Earth's own "frame-dragging" as it churns spacetime around itself.

"As a result, the yet unknown origin of the flyby anomaly could signal the presence of new or ‘exotic' physics at play, a possibility which should not be taken lightly," write the authors of a new paper, Jorge Paramos of the Technical University of Lisbon and Gerald Hechenblaikner of the European satellite maker Astrium.

It could be that our equations of gravity are wrong, which would be interesting. It could be that measurements of spacecraft trajectory are wrong, too, which would be somewhat less exciting. Either way, someone needs to determine what's happening. The ESA is developing a mission that might be able to do this, but there's not a firm commitment yet.

The Space-Time Explorer and Quantum Equivalence Principle Space Test (STE-QUEST) is one of a handful of missions seeking to explain gravity, and why it can't be reconciled with the weak, strong, and electromagnetic interactions into a comforting theory of everything. General relativity breaks down somewhere along the line between the macro and the quantum realms, but experiments so far have not been powerful enough to see where and how. STE-QUEST will complete several tests with incredible precision to nail this down. One test will measure the way atoms move in a gravitational field while in an eccentric orbit around Earth--a measurement that could shed light on the strange slingshot speed bump.

As KFC points out over on the physics arXiv blog, the Juno spacecraft will complete a flyby next year to prepare it for its mission to Jupiter. If scientists see the same anomaly, that would be strong motivation to approve this mission and figure out just what's going on.

[Tech Review]

Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte may flash a diamond-studded, patriotic grill when he smiles from the winner's podium, but artist Aisen Caro Chacin can use hers to listen to Public Enemy. Play-A-Grill, a project she developed at Parsons The New School for Design, transmits music through the wearer's teeth to the inner ear.

To create it, Chacin embedded the electronics from an MP3 player, an amplifier circuit, and a motor into a wax mold of her upper mouth. The motor drives vibrations from the MP3 player, controlled with the tongue, into the cochlea, where they're translated as sound.

Some 5,000 light years away, hovering in the constellation Canis Major, this massive 60-light-years-across bubble is lurking. Known as a Wolf-Rayet bubble (and thought by some to resembe a wolf- or dog-like head), it's a type of cosmic structure created by huge stars that generate equally colossal stellar winds. When imaged in X-ray, it gives us the shifting blues, greens, yellows, and reds seen above.

This Wolf-Rayet is known as S 308, and it was generated by a star known as HD 50896. It is one of only two known Wolf-Rayet bubbles that emits X-rays. That allowed an international team of scientists to capture it using the European Photon Imaging Camera aboard the European Space Agency's X-ray imaging XMM-Newton observatory. The green halo marks the end of the shock wave that the star is blowing out into space, while the blues and reds that round out the bubble are the result of powerful solar winds colliding with surrounding material in the region.

Like any good bubble, this one will eventually burst. S 308 will disperse its stellar material into the surrounding space, while the star will die a supernova death.

[Sci-News]

With the popular vote so close this election, eyes are on swing states even more than usual. Now what if we showed, cartographically, how outside campaign spenders pour money into a race? No surprise: the money for political ads goes to the swingiest of states. Distort the country by per capita spending and it gets even more jarring.

Just add an old song (swing, of course) and you've got this excellent video from NPR (see below) showing what the U.S. looks like to superPACs and other groups during election season.

Sans video, it's a little like this.

First, the electoral college as it actually looks.

Here the states have been resized proportionally based on their votes in the electoral college. They've also been reshaded according to how blue or red they leaned in the 2008 election. (Pure purple is a 50-50 split.)

Now it's resized again based on outside ad spending from this election. The purplest states, you can see, get the attention.

Resize again based on spending per voter and it's even more skewed.

That's the U.S. until next week. Enjoy the courting while it still lasts, swing states.

[NPR]

Last month, scientists announced a big breakthrough in barley research: They had finally sequenced the entire barley genome. In response, some media outlets ran stories declaring that this will somehow result in better beer (barley being one of beer's key ingredients). Sure, on some level, understanding the barley genome is going to yield better--or more, or cheaper--beer, especially if climate change goes down the way scientists suspect it will and crops become more difficult to grow due to substandard environmental conditions. But those media stories are missing the point: That kind of better-beer hyperbole is a bit like taking some NASA results from the Solar Dynamics Observatory and saying that the data will help you get a better tan. The implications of the research are much more complex.

Some background: Barley is a member of the tribe Triticeae along with other domesticated grains such as wheat and rye. These crops are among the earliest domesticated agricultural grain products--archeological evidence indicates that humans domesticated barley around 10,000 years ago.

What the International Barley Genome Sequencing Consortium published in the journal Nature last month was a draft--a partially complete map of all of the genes--of the barley genome. It was a remarkable feat, and it took years to overcome the technical hurdles: at 5.1 gigabases, the barley genome is 1.3 times larger than the human genome, and much of the barley genome is made up of repeating sequences, which makes it tough to figure out exactly where all of those redundant sequences go.

The purpose of the work is to, eventually, improve barley so it's more resistant to disease and adverse conditions than current cultivars (specific varieties of barley that are specifically created to have a desirable characteristic), enrich the dietary fiber content of the plant and, yes, probably tweak the kernels so they are more efficient or better for beer production.

But that's a long way off. I spoke with Nils Stein, a researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research in Germany and one of the principal investigators on the barley genome project, about the paper. Stein emphasized that what they published is only the very first draft of the genome. They have the physical map--the position of all of the individual letters--but they do not have the position of all of the genes on that map. Basically, that's like knowing where all of the letters are in a novel, but not quite knowing how all of those letters break up into words. The members of the consortium do have some data: They were able to map the positions of 24,154 genes to the physical map, about two-thirds the number of genes (30,400) that barley is suspected to have in total.

In addition to that, they compared the genomes of different cultivars of barley. The main genome sequenced, Morex, is a six-row barley. I asked Stein why they considered Morex the best "baseline," while all of the other cultivars they had examined were two-row barley. He explained that the USDA had done significant research on the Morex cultivar in the past--it is the one about which we know the most, and thus provided a good foundation for further research.

Why should aspiring homebrewers care? Because two-row and six-row barley behave slightly differently in the mash, which can have profound effects on brewing efficiency and characteristics of the finished beer (a complex phenomenon I'll get into in a future column). I figured anyone nerdulent enough to want to know about genetic differences of cultivars would be curious as to which kind of barley was used in the single-nucleotide-variation study.

When consortium scientists compared the various six-row and two-row barley cultivars, they discovered that the chromosomal regions near the centromeres 1.) had many functional genes on them and 2.) did not display a great deal of variation within and, to a certain extent, between cultivars. The upshot is that only the ends of the chromosomes recombine--swap chunks of DNA--frequently. This will be something of a hurdle for future barley scientists to overcome: you can't breed a better, more disease-resistant barley if the genes you need to transfer between cultivars during breeding just won't recombine with each other. Stein did clarify that one could use gene modification techniques to target those difficult-to-access genes near centromeres, and he was also quick to explain that not all of barley's genes reside in those areas--there are plenty of traits that traditional breeders can mess with.

Going forward, Stein wants to more clearly comprehend the position of genes on the physical map and transcriptome--gene products such as protein or regulatory RNA--of barley, which will help scientists better understand how gene expression is controlled. That, in turn, would offer clues on how plant breeders can control gene expression themselves.

Stein also says that barley will make an excellent model genome for understanding related crop plants whose genomes are even more complex: Wheat, for example, is hexaploid (it has six copies of each chromosome; barley has two) and its genome is a massive 17 gigabases large. Like barley, wheat is one of the most important staple foods in the world and the crop will encounter the same environmental pressures--droughts, disease, pests, brackish water, substandard soil--as barley in the face of climate change.

So you can see that teasing out the myriad complexities of an organism's genome and that genome's temporal, spatial and structural organization is a hell of a task--but an important one that can't be summed up in a 200-word news story.

Follow BeerSci on Twitter @BeerSci!

Click here to enter the gallery

"All I am is a contributor. I have no title, I'm just a Joe Blow," says Ken Mampel, a currently unemployed 56-year-old living in Ormond Beach, Florida. He's also largely responsible for the Wikipedia article about Hurricane Sandy. If it isn't already, that article will eventually become the single most-viewed document about the hurricane. On the entire internet.

In an unpaid but frenzied fit of news consumption, editing, correction, aggregation, and citation, Mampel has established himself as by far the most active contributor to the Wikipedia page on Hurricane Sandy, with more than twice the number of edits as the next-most-active contributor at the time this article was written.

And Mampel made sure that the Hurricane Sandy article, for four days after the hurricane made landfall in New Jersey, had no mention of "global warming" or "climate change" whatsoever.

Late in the evening of November 1st, a new section appeared at the bottom of the Wikipedia page, titled "Connection to global warming." It was the first mention of climate change the article had had, and laid out the response from climate scientists, mostly stating that climate scientists don't really know if the hurricane was caused in part or whole by climate change. I emailed Ken, who goes by the name Kennvido on Wikipedia, to get a response, and he wrote back: "thanks deleted again and told them to go discuss Sandy on the global warming page." I reloaded the page and confirmed: Ken had eliminated any discussion of climate change. A few minutes later, I reloaded and the section was back, only with a big block warning, telling me that "The neutrality of this article is disputed." By 10:23, that warning read: "An editor has expressed a concern that this Section lends undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, controversies or matters relative to the article subject as a whole. Please help to create a more balanced presentation."

By the morning of November 2nd, the section was gone again. The revision history shows an argument: "the existence of other views is solved by referencing them in RS, not deleting views one disagrees with," says one contributor. Mampel continues to fight, and he's not the only one: another user chimed in that the Hurricane Sandy page is "Not the place to push global warming when no evidence exists that this was a cause." But by early afternoon, the article had a small paragraph in the "Meteorological history" section linking to a few articles that suggest a connection to global warming. Ken had been overruled.

"I question Kennvido's own political motives in forcing this discussion out of the article," said one contributor on the article's "Talk" page, the (publicly viewable) page where contributors discuss the article's content. Another said "There is still no mention whatsoever of climate change in this article, even though there is no doubt that it's a systemic cause of hurricane Sandy. It's hard to take [Wikipedia] seriously sometimes." But mostly the argument is about "weight," one of Wikipedia's key guidelines. Here's what Wikipedia says: "Giving due weight and avoiding giving undue weight means that articles should not give minority views as much of, or as detailed, a description as more widely held views." But how do you judge what's a minority view?

Ken Mampel does not believe in climate change. (He referred to himself as a libertarian, by my count, six separate times during one phone call. I never asked about his political leanings.) Without my prompting, Ken mentioned that New York City's Mayor Mike Bloomberg had endorsed Obama for president based on his handling of the hurricane. This is true, and Mampel planned to add this to the Wikipedia entry. "But I don't believe that climate change bullcrap," he said. Bloomberg had specifically mentioned climate change in his endorsement speech, but Mampel wouldn't add that to the Wikipedia entry. That's despite dozens of articles pointing out the connection--not a causation, necessarily, but certainly a connection worth exploring. I myself spoke to a hurricane expert about three hours before I spoke to Mampel who told me that the roughly two-degree increase in the water temperature in the Atlantic could have had a major effect on Hurricane Sandy's strength in the northeast. Mampel doesn't care. He wasn't going to mention climate change.

"Someone did put it in," he told me via email on the night of November 1st. "I took it out stating not proven. They put it in again. This time someone else took it out before I even saw it...warned the person...and it never was put in again." When I mentioned that many reputable scientists and publications have pointed out the connection, he said, "It's still in debate in the world community Dan... even if EnviroGore thinks there is no need for debate."

The Wikipedia entry for Sandy was created by the user Anonymouse321 late on October 23rd. At that time, Sandy was a tropical storm over the Caribbean; NASA's Terra satellite had captured it, and the government of Jamaica had issued a hurricane warning, but nobody was really paying attention. The page was originally called "Tropical Storm Sandy." By October 25th, the storm was gaining speed and looking more dangerous, and Ken had taken notice. Ken lives on the central Florida coast, on the Atlantic side north of Daytona Beach, but he's originally from Hempstead, a town on Long Island just a bit east of Queens. The storm looked as if it would move through the Caribbean and up the east coast--past where Ken lives now, and up to his hometown. Ken took an interest.

When I talked to him, I believe he had slept for maybe 15 hours in the past five days. He spoke quickly and passionately but without any focus whatsoever, and even the simplest question could lead into a tangent from which I had significant trouble pulling him away. "Did you create the Wikipedia article originally?" I'd ask. Two sentences later, he was telling me about his son, who is about my age, who does something at George Washington University and is a veteran and received some impressive military medal and did I know that global warming is definitely not man-made?

At one point I told him I lived in Brooklyn. He paused, and then yelled "JOEY BAG-A-DONUTS!" at me in some kind of 1970s Brooklyn accent. I didn't bother mentioning that my part of Brooklyn was mostly concerned with being able to get fresh-pressed kale juice the morning after the hurricane. (We could, too.) He kept confusing Popular Science with Popular Mechanics, which, to be fair, also happens to people who haven't been sleeplessly editing Wikipedia articles. "I stayed up for 24 hours at one point, I don't remember when," he told me, "and then slept for five hours and then got up and got right back to it. I'm very much into this."

Ken is, he says, between jobs, "because of this lousy economy and I hope we get a new president." But Ken has actually worked in news- and media-related jobs for most of his career. He says he started writing radio copy when he was 13 years old, which would seem to violate some sort of labor law, but that's what he says. He stayed in radio, writing copy for advertisements and doing some production work, until around 1985. Then for the next 17 years or so, he worked as a stringer for TV news stations from Jacksonville to Orlando. A stringer is a freelancer, usually for photography and video coverage, with a loose relationship to a local news station. You get paid per item, not per hour, and you have no institutional benefits. It's a tough job. Ken took the night shift, sitting in his car in a rough part of central Florida with three police scanners on the seat next to him. Whenever something would happen--natural disasters like hurricanes or tornadoes, or just general crime, he'd rush off and document it, and TV news would pay him for each find.

That's just about exactly what he did when he began editing Sandy's Wikipedia page on the afternoon of October 25th, except without the pay, and without the original reporting. Ken now follows, he says, 66 different news organizations on Twitter, and spent that day constantly adding and narrowing until he had just the balance he wanted. That included both national and local news sources, both old-school and new--the New York Times, a local New Jersey station called NJ1, the Daily Beast. He took news from all kinds of sources, and plopped them into the Wikipedia page, in proper Wikipedia style. He edited the writing of other contributors. He created new categories and new pages--the storm's effect on Vermont, for example (pretty much none).

One of the key differences between the Wikipedia page and any other news source is that Ken, and indeed all Wikipedia contributors, are specifically forbidden from doing any of their own reporting. "Wikipedia articles must not contain original research," says Wikipedia, firmly. "'No original research' (NOR) is one of three core content policies that, along with Neutral point of view and Verifiability, determines the type and quality of material acceptable in articles." Mampel knows people in the New York area, but unless those people are reporters who have published their own accounts, he's forbidden from making any reference to what he's learned from them. Wikipedia is aggressively second-hand. The other key difference is that Wikipedia has, by design, a peculiar and de-centralized editorial structure. Wikipedia pages are constructed piecemeal, by lots of contributors who theoretically have equal footing. "Wikipedia is a meritocracy," says Jay Walsh, head of communications for the Wikimedia Foundation, which runs Wikipedia, among other wiki-properties. "What's beautiful is that it's a broad, instant collaboration."

But that's not how news is typically recorded and released. "You can't look at a breaking news story in the way you look at, say, a bio of a living person," says Walsh. That rule about no original reporting? That can be bent in the interest of having a complete and up-to-date view of a news story when verification is hard to come by. "There's an understanding that in breaking news stories, information may be rough or raw," says Walsh. Instead of just deleting an un-cited fact, editors may attempt to verify it, or just leave it where it is for the time being.

Any contributor can remove, add, or change elements of the article based on any of Wikipedia's many rules, or just because they want to, like Ken and the climate-change stuff. There's healthy back-and-forth amongst the contributors in the "Talk" pages, documented on the "revision history" page. Each Wikipedia article has both: a "Talk" page is where contributors discuss what should and should not be in the article, and "revision history" gives a timeline of edits to the page. Ken may have made the most edits to the Hurricane Sandy page, but he's not a "lead editor" in the sense that he's the point person for the article, able to decide single-handedly what goes into the piece. There's nobody, really, who does that, though there are a staff of just under 1,500 "administrators" on Wikipedia--also unpaid volunteers, selected by, essentially, a survey of other Wikipedia volunteers--who have a bit more power. One of those admins put the Hurricane Sandy page under, says Jay, a semi-lock: only registered Wikipedia editors who have participated in the community before, not anonymous new folks, can edit it now. But Ken did contribute much more than any other editor--he was the most active editor, though that didn't give him any added authority. It also doesn't necessarily mean he wrote most of the article, though he certainly wrote much of it. An edit is an edit, whether it's removing a comma splice or writing 2,000 words.

Ongoing news stories on Wikipedia are created in the same way as any other page there, but with a slightly different approach. On a less-breaking page--I used the page for "cornbread" as an example--the only impulse is to create the best encyclopedia-style reference page. There are arguments, of course, over the preference of yellow cornmeal verses white, or whether hushpuppies (which are fried) belong in an article about cornbread (which is baked), but the idea is to get all of the appropriate information into the article. Not so much with Hurricane Sandy, which the contributors know will evolve over time and take on a different shape in a week than it has now. Regarding the global warming issue, one contributor wrote: "With the article being edited heavily with updates at the moment, many of whom are in the storm, my view is that it can wait for a day or two." Another said, "it sounds more like, 'We'll keep all mention of global warming out of the discussion until after nobody's interested in this storm any more.'"

This isn't so much "waiting for new information to come in." This is "waiting for majority rule to overcome the will of the few." The few are what kept global warming off that page for so long.

When I told Jay Walsh about the back-and-forth regarding climate change, he said, "It doesn't surprise me to hear that. Climate change is a bastard--it's one of those really complicated topics within Wikipedia, because the [editors] are so science-focused." But he wasn't upset that one point of view had been steamrollered on a Wikipedia page that received more than half a million hits in three days--he was intrigued about how the process went, and about how it was eventually ironed out, in a way. "The article doesn't not do its work because of that," he said. Walsh talked about a "good faith" versus "bad faith" edit: Ken Mampel really thinks he is improving that page by eliminating an unclear passage about climate change, so that's a "good faith" edit. Which, for Wikipedians, means the system is working. But what about for those 500,000 readers who didn't get the full story?

Ken, not surprisingly, has gotten into scraps with some other editors. Despite the communal ethos, there is a distinct pecking order among Wikipedia editors, based sometimes on seniority and sometimes on sheer dickishness. Ken was chided for using "Monday" and "Tuesday" rather than "October 29th" and "October 30th." A user going by the name United States Man threatened to block him for "changing formats, changing info, and putting stuff in the wrong place." In an email to me, Ken called United States Man "one of those ahole members" and says this is "water off his back," but he apologized effusively to U.S.M. in public.

United States Man is one of several hurricane-fanatic Wikipedia contributors who contributed to the Hurricane Sandy page. Another is Cyclonebiskit, who has contributed to just about every inclement-weather-related page on Wikipedia. These guys are advanced hobbyists; they are certainly knowledgeable, if not professionally trained. Ken is neither. He was just captivated by the news story, like the rest of us, spouting off about storm surges and baroclinic pressure like we had any idea what those terms meant two weeks before. And Ken was the one taking the lead on the Wikipedia page. Not because he demanded it, but just because he wanted to do it. He was obsessed. "People just have their...interests," he said.

"Interests" are what made Ken spend five sleepless days racing to aggregate hurricane news, despite having no unusual amount of knowledge on the subject. They're what made him race against mainstream sports sites to post the results of each inning of the ALCS games on Wikipedia first. Ken has a lot of time on his hands, and a drive to join or beat the press at their own game. "I'm in between jobs, it's a lousy economy," he says. "How do you think I can be on here as much as I am?" But when I asked how he thought his speed and work compared to the professionals who were doing essentially the same thing, he glowed. "That's exactly it!" he said. "Bam! Bam! Bam! That's what I strive for, to be as fast as major media. I wanted to be there, and I wanted to be accurate." And Ken talks a lot about accuracy, about crafting a page that reflects the facts. But accuracy only goes so far on Wikipedia.

If one of the weaknesses of Wikipedia is that anyone can edit it, the solution to that problem is that, well, anyone can edit it. Mampel can't be vigilant against climate change's mention in the Hurricane Sandy article forever. In fact, he couldn't keep climate change off the page for an entire week--somebody else will keep adding that section until Mampel gives up. Mampel doesn't want to risk being banned; he's very concerned about being a good guy in the contributor community. Whenever anyone commented with any issue about his work, he immediately apologized and offered to fix it. "If you're nice, you'll get nice back," he said about the community. He wants to edit in "good faith." For posterity, this particular problem will be ironed out. But for days, the internet's most authoritative article on a major tropical storm system in 2012 was written by a man with no meteorological training who thinks climate change is unproven and fought to remove any mention of it.

If you speak any Korean--or are familiar with Season 2 of Arrested Development--you know that the word for "hello" is "annyong." Koshik, an elephant who spent much of his youth at Everland Zoo in South Korea, can actually pronounce it. A beluga whale made the news just last week for being able to imitate human sounds, but this elephant can actually say words! The animal kingdom is constantly one-upping itself.

Even our closest primate relatives cannot repeat our speech patterns despite being shown to understand language because their larynxes aren't shaped to function the way ours do. Of course, parrots don't even have lips and yet they can imitate human speech with amazing accuracy. Research from the University of Vienna says that parrots have the neuronal capacity to perceive, decode and reproduce the speech signal, overcoming the physical barrier to imitating human speech. Asian elephants evidently do as well.

Koshik outsmarted nature, which graced him with a large vocal tract, by putting his trunk in his mouth, which adjusts the shape of his vocal tract so it can produce sounds similar to human speech. According to the study, no one has recorded an elephant doing that before. Researchers found that Koshik can imitate five words: "anja"(sit down), "aniya" (no), "nuo" (lie down), "choa" (good) and "annyong." They measured the accuracy by comparing transcriptions of Koshik's speech to that of humans. His speech isn't perfect, but "annyong" is the word Koshik repeated with the most success. Aim high, young elephant.

The researchers concluded that Koshik learned to imitate human speech because he lacked social interaction with members of his species during his developmental stage. The elephant spent most of his time around humans. This research suggests that one function of vocal learning, besides communicating ideas, is to cement social bonds, even across species.

This research was published online in the journal Current Biology.

[via Sci-News]

Crews will be working for at least one to two weeks to clean up a storm-related diesel fuel spill on the New Jersey coast, according to a Coast Guard official.

The oil came from two 3.15 million gallon-capacity tanks at the Motiva petroleum storage facility, in Sewaren, N.J., damaged during Hurricane Sandy. Each contained 336,000 gallons of oil prior to the storm. The site is located on the Arthur Kill, a 10-mile-long, 600-foot wide tidal strait dividing mainland New Jersey from Staten Island, N.Y.

According to MarketWatch, Motiva has estimated that around 227,200 gallons of oil leaked from the damaged tanks. The Coast Guard has not confirmed that number. Two other nearby tanks, also holding 336,000 gallons of diesel fuel each, made it through the storm intact.

The Monday night surge from superstorm Sandy flooded a gravel-lined containment area around the tanks that was supposed to contain a spill. One tank has a visible hole, says Chief Ryan Egal of the U.S. Coast Guard, and the entire area is strewn with the kinds of debris that, carried by a hurricane wind or record-breaking storm surge, could cause a lot of damage to a fixed structure. "I'm seeing a lot of railroad ties, docks, a lot of wood, general garbage that is basically from land," Egal says.

The storm surge both overtopped and breached the protective berm around the tanks, carrying spilled oil into surrounding waterways. Responders have seen "a lot of [oil] sheen" around Motiva's dock on the Arthur Kill, and in the waterway's main navigation channel, says Egal, as well as in nearby Woodbridge and Smith's creeks. Responders have deployed 13,600 feet of containment boom so far around Motiva's dock and at the creek mouths to contain the spill. No sheen has been sighted on the New York side of the waterway, Egal states.

By the numbers, around 150 personnel are using 14 skimmers, 9 vacuum trucks, and 3 shallow water barges with built-in skimmers, along with absorbent pads and booms, to collect spilled oil at Motiva. It will be impossible to recover and reuse any of it, Egal says. He describes working conditions that sound, to understate things, extremely challenging: Workers have trying to sop up oil and collect fuel-soaked trash in brisk winds, around several severely damaged marinas in Smith's Creek-"boats stacked on other boats," wrecked docks, Egal says. "They are working about 18 hours a day in the bermed-off area," he says, running equipment off generators because there's no power at the site. Night work isn't possible until they can get sufficient power for lights.

"Also, a lot of the responders are local," he says. "They come here and do this and then have issues at home." More than 1.4 million homes and businesses in New Jersey were still without power on Friday, according to Reuters.

On the up side, regular air testing by the Coast Guard's Atlantic Strike Team has turned up no problems so far for both clean up workers or the nearby residential community, says Egal, one of the team's hazardous materials specialists. Oxygen levels are normal; there are no detected levels of carbon monoxide or hydrogen sulfide; and volatile organic compound levels are consistent with what might be created by regular street traffic.

Motiva has hired three oil spill response contractors in response to the spill, according to Coast Guard Petty Officer Stephen Lehmann: Atlantic Response Incorporated, Moran Environmental Recovery, and MSRC-Marine Spill Response Corp. The Coast Guard is advising and overseeing the effort, along with state and local officials.

The Arthur Kill flows along a largely industrialized section of the New Jersey coast, just a few miles south of Newark International Airport. But it's got a gentler side as well: the New York bank is mostly saltwater marsh, and in New Jersey, conservation groups have counted around 90 species of wild birds breeding in the greater Arthur Kill watershed. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lists several dozen "species of special emphasis" that call the Arthur Kill area home: plants and animals that aren't considered threatened or endangered, but who depend heavily upon this environment to survive and thrive.

"The marsh areas are definitely a long term issue," says Chief Egal. "We can't go in there and clean up."

Want to win this heroic 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:

• In Robotic Reality Experiment, Rat-Sized Humans Meet Human-Sized Rats
• Monsters Are People Too, Says Dungeons And Dragons Study
• New York After The Hurricane
• Video: Steve Jobs's Yacht Unveiled At Last

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

• Meet The Climate Change Denier Who Became The Voice Of Hurricane Sandy On Wikipedia
• BeerSci: Uncovering the Secrets Of Barley
• The Jersey Shore, Before and After Sandy
• From Hiroshima To The H-Bomb, 10 Earth-Shaking Moments In Atomic Science
• FYI: Why Does Salt Water Make Hurricane Damage So Much Worse?
• PopSci Teardown: Black & Decker Matrix Quick Connect System
• The Goods: November 2012's Hottest Gadgets
• Reasons To Celebrate The Beautiful Bat
• Lebbeus Woods, Futuristic Architect, Dies
• The Fastest Science Machine In The World
• 5 Things Hurricane Sandy Reveals About Global Warming
• FYI: How Much Caffeine Would It Take To Kill You?
• How The PopSci Staff Prepares For A Hurricane

1. SOCIAL ROBOTS

Through Twitter, Curiosity has found its voice. The NASA-issued @MarsCuriosity tweets provide a play-by-play of the rover's exploits on Mars. They've also inspired parody accounts. Case in point: the following exchange between Curiosity, a Martian rock, and Curiosity's sarcastic alter ego.

Yes, I've got a laser beam attached to my head. I'm not ill tempered; I zapped a rock for science: 1.usa.gov/P7IXF1#MSL#PewPew

— Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) August 19, 2012

Um, @marscuriosity, what are you.... hey! ... HEY!

— N165 aka Coronation (@N165Mars) August 19, 2012

You laser one stupid rock in the face and suddenly people say you have anger issues. Like the rock wasn't asking for it!

— SarcasticRover (@SarcasticRover) August 20, 2012

2. COUCH PILOTS

In Mars Rover Landing, a free downloadable game for the Xbox 360, Curiosity's fate rests in the hands of players. Wannabe pilots control the craft's speed and angle of descent by moving their bodies in front of Kinect's motion sensor. Guiding the rover through its "seven minutes of terror" landing sequence is fun and, not surprisingly, tricky.

3. TIMEKEEPER

Oliver Blake, a flight operations engineer for the British-led Beagle 2 Mars probe, wanted to watch the sun rise over Mars right along with the Curiosity rover. So using topographic data from NASA's Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, Blake created Curiosity Clock, an Android app ($1.99) that shows the terrain on Mars in Local True Solar Time. A finger drag will pan the landscape 360 degrees at five locations on Curiosity's 687-Earth-day mission plan. Users can also scroll through time to watch the sun cast shadows over the Red Planet or gaze at the stars accurately positioned above it.

Correction: The original Curiosity Clock image showed a screenshot of the wrong app and has been updated.

Not all computers are made of silicon. By definition, a computer is anything that processes data, performs calculations, or uses so-called logic gates to turn inputs (for example, 1s and 0s in binary code) into outputs. And now, a small international community of scientists is working to expand the realm of computers to include cells, animals, and other living organisms. Some of their experiments are highly theoretical; others represent the first steps toward usable biological computers. All are attempts to make life perform work now done by chips and circuit boards.

Last year, for example, a computer scientist at the University of the West of England named Andy Adam­atzky and a team of Japanese researchers built logic gates that ran on soldier crabs. First they constructed mazes that replicated the shape of the wires in a computer's logic gates.

Then they chased two swarms of crabs (inputs) from one end of the gate to the other. When the swarms collided, they combined to form a new swarm (output), which often headed in the direction of the sum of their vectors, demonstrating that a living, somewhat random system can produce useful order.

If crabs are good at clustering together, a single-celled organism that resides in rotting trees-Physarum polycephalum, or slime mold-is surprisingly adept at making maps. Adamatzky and Selim Akl, a computer scientist at Queens University in Ontario, have spent the past few years using slime mold to map networks.

Slime mold "will lead the revolution in the bioelectronics and computer industry."

In one experiment, they took a map of Canada, dropped oat flakes (slime-mold food) on the nation's major cities, and placed the mold on Toronto. It oozed forth to form the most efficient paths to the cities, creating networks of "roads" that almost perfectly mimicked the actual Canadian highway system.

Last April, biocomputers got even more impressive. Swiss bioengineers announced that they had programmed human cells to do binary addition or subtraction, which is how a computer does arithmetic. They genetically engineered the cells with an elaborate circuit of genes that turn one another on or off. The cells can process two inputs added to their dish (the molecules erythromycin and phloretin) and display an answer by producing red or green fluorescent proteins.

What's the point of all of this? Adamatzky says that slime mold's mapping abilities could design roads, wireless networks, and information-processing circuits better than today's computers. Combining slime mold with electronics could also yield benefits. Adamatzky is already making a computer chip that marries the speed of electrical communication with the learning capabilities of slime mold.

The hybrid technology would process information less like a computer and more like a brain, learning and growing through experiences and trial and error, making it possible to solve problems in both neuroscience and computer science. "We envisage that the Physarum-based computing research will lead to a revolution in the bioelectronics and computer industry," he says.

His colleague Akl says one advantage of biocomputers may be that they can function in places that conventional electronics can't. "Think about computing in harsh environments like the bottom of the ocean, the human body, or on another planet where our computers may not survive," he says. Life forms could thrive in settings where silicon chips might melt, freeze, or disintegrate.

But the biggest benefits could be in medicine, because cells are adept at interacting with other cells. Martin Fussenegger, a bioengineer at ETH Zurich and the lead researcher on the cell-calculator project, says cells could be programmed into "smart cell implants" that sense health problems in the human body and administer tailored therapies.

For example, a patient with a high risk of breast cancer could receive an implant that would recognize cancer-indicating molecules and produce proteins to kill the cells making them. "A diseased cell is a program with a bug," Akl says. "Computer scientists are good at finding bugs and fixing them. I leave the rest to your imagination."

Roger Johnston is the head of the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory. Not long ago, he and his colleagues launched security attacks on electronic voting machines to demonstrate the startling ease with which one can steal votes. Even more startling: Versions of those machines will appear in polling places all over America on Tuesday. The touchscreen Diebold Accuvote-TSX will be used by more than 26 million voters in 20 states; the push-button Sequoia AVC Voting Machine will be used by almost 9 million voters in four states, Harper's magazine reported recently (subscription required). Here, Johnston reveals how he hacked the machines--and why anyone, from a high-school kid to an 80-year-old grandmother, could do the same.--Ed

The Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory looks at a wide variety of security devices-- locks, seals, tags, access control, biometrics, cargo security, nuclear safeguards--to try to find vulnerabilities and locate potential fixes. Unfortunately, there's not much funding available in this country to study election security. So we did this as a Saturday afternoon type of project.

It's called a man-in-the-middle attack. It's a classic attack on security devices. You implant a microprocessor or some other electronic device into the voting machine, and that lets you control the voting and turn cheating on and off. We're basically interfering with transmitting the voter's intent.

We used a logic analyzer. Digital communication is a series of zeros and ones. The voltage goes higher, the voltage goes lower. A logic analyzer collects the oscillating voltages between high and low and then will display for you the digital data in a variety of formats. But there all kinds of way to do it. You can use a logic analyzer, you can use a microprocessor, you can use a computer--basically, anything that lets you see the information that's being exchanged and then lets you know what to do to mimic the information.

I've been to high school science fairs where the kids had more sophisticated microprocessor projects.So we listened to the communications going on between the voter, who in the case of one machine is pushing buttons (it's a push-button voting machine) and in the other is touching things on a touchscreen. Then we listened to the communication going on between the smarts of the machine and the voter. Let's say I'm trying to make Jones win the election, and you might vote for Smith. Then my microprocessor is going to tell the smarts of the machine to vote for Jones if you try to vote for Smith. But if you're voting for Jones anyway, I'm not going to tamper with the communications. Sometimes you block communications, sometimes you tamper with information, sometimes you just look at it and let it pass on through. That's essentially the idea. Figure out the communications going on, then tamper as needed, including with the information being sent back to the voter.

We can do this because most voting machines, as far as I can tell, are not encrypted. It's just open standard format communication. So it's pretty easy to figure out information being exchanged. Anyone who does digital electronics--a hobbyist or an electronics fan--could figure this out.

The device we implanted in the touchscreen machine was essentially $10 retail. If you wanted a deluxe version where you can control it remotely from a half a mile away, it'd cost $26 retail. It's not big bucks. RadioShack would have this stuff. I've been to high school science fairs where the kids had more sophisticated microprocessor projects than the ones needed to rig these machines.

Because there's no funding for this type of security-testing, we relied on people who buy used machines on eBay [in this case the touchscreen Diebold Accuvote TS Electronic Voting Machine and the push-button Sequoia AVC Advantage Voting Machine]. Both of the machines were a little out-of-date, and we didn't have user manuals and circuit diagrams. But we figured things out, in the case of the push-button machine, in under two hours. Within 2 hours we had a viable attack. The other machine took a little longer because we didn't fully understand how touchscreen displays worked. So we had learning time there. But that was just a couple days. It's like a magic trick. You've got to practice a lot. If we practiced a lot, or even better, if we got someone really good with his hands who practiced a lot for two weeks, we're looking at 15 seconds to 60 seconds go execute these attacks.

I want to move it to the point where grandma can't hack elections. We're really not there.The attacks require physical access. This is easy for insiders, who program the machines for an election or install them. And we would argue it's typically not that hard for outsiders. A lot of voting machines are sitting around in the church basement, the elementary school gymnasium or hallway, unattended for a week or two before the election. Usually they have really cheap cabinet locks anyone can pick; sometimes they don't even have locks on them. No one signs for the machines when they show up. No one's responsible for watching them. Seals on them aren't much different from the anti-tamper packaging found on food and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. Think about tampering with a food or drug product: You think that's challenging? It's really not. And a lot of our election judges are little old ladies who are retired, and God bless them, they're what makes the elections work, but they're not necessarily a fabulous workforce for detecting subtle security attacks.

Give people checking the seals a little training as to what to look for, and now they have a chance to detect a reasonably sophisticated attack. Do good background checks on insiders, and that insider threat would be much less of a concern. Overall, there's a lack of a good security culture. We can have flawed voting machines, but if we have a good security culture, we can still have good elections. On the other hand, we can have fabulous machines, but if the security culture is inadequate, it doesn't really matter. We've really got to look at a bigger picture. Our view is: It's always going to be hard to stop James Bond. But I want to move it to the point where grandma can't hack elections, and we're really not there.

Read more about elections security here.

Ready for election season to be over? Maybe it's time to curl up with a good sitcom and wait this thing out. Except new research out of Australia suggests that, sometimes, we actually find the presidential debates funnier than sitcoms. Through non-invasive procedures, such as monitoring the muscles used in smiling, researchers determined that subjects laughed more on average during popular sitcoms but that the intensity of laughter was higher in moments of the presidential debates. (Obama's zinger about Romney having a big pension rated high on the funny scale.) No word on if they'll renew the debates for another season. [PhysOrg]

A man with a mind-controlled bionic leg climbed to the top of Chicago's famous Sears Willis Tower Sunday, part of a charity stair-climbing event. Zac Vawter, 31, lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident and is the first person to climb that many floors wearing a bionic limb.

Vawter lives in Yelm, Wash., with his wife and two children, but is a patient at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, which sponsored the event. The leg is designed to respond to electrical pulses from muscles in his hamstring, according to the Associated Press. When he thinks about climbing a stair and begins to move his leg, the bionic leg synchronizes its movement to his muscles, ensuring a smooth gait. The leg weighs about 10 pounds and contains two motors, which drive a belt and chain system that swings the leg at the knee joint.

The Rehabilitation Institute is developing the leg with an $8 million grant from the Defense Department, and its partners include MIT, Vanderbilt and other universities. The AP story is a little unclear about how it works, but if it's thought-controlled, it sounds like a major advance in the world of bionic limbs.

Other bionic systems we've seen envelop a user in an exoskeleton, like the eLEGS system developed by Berkeley Bionics. Those are used by paraplegics who still have their limbs, but cannot use them. This one would help patients with above-the-knee amputations, which in many ways are more complicated. A bionic leg with a robotic knee, calf and foot has three components that must all work together, not to mention without interfering with the other functional leg.

Vawter practiced by using a stairmaster at a gym, and researchers spent months adjusting the leg so "it would respond to his thoughts," as the AP puts it. Vawter won't get to keep it, though. The experimental leg will stay behind in Chicago, where researchers will refine its steering and other components before taking it to market.

[Associated Press]

Voting is pretty simple on its face. Cast the ballots, count 'em up, tell everybody who the President is. But we who have been living through this presidential race for what seems like our entire lives know it is way more complicated than that. There are horses, bayonets, confusion about the function of a uterus and more.

Popular Science's archives reveal that yes, it has always been this agonizing. The invention of radio brought candidates an exciting new way to get their zingers to voters. We were saved from election fraud by voting machines, but then we worried electronic voting machines might bring it back. And don't even get us started on the electoral college. (Seriously, don't. We didn't write about it.)

Click here to launch the gallery.

If you've had quite enough of this election, maybe you'd care to lose yourself in the technology of elections past. If so, peruse the above archive gallery to get a look at the guts of a voting machine and a look behind the curtain at how votes are counted and how those polls actually work.