A Canadian study probing the modern feasibility of a relatively old idea (we've discussed it previously at length here) has come to a somewhat unexpected conclusion: most people really don't have a problem with paying for human organs. Dr. Braden Manns of the Libin Cardiovascular Institute of Alberta and Institute for Public Health sent a questionnaire around to more than 2.500 public health workers and people affected with kidney disease. The results: people seem to think it's okay to pay for body parts.

The results of the study found that 70 percent of those surveyed think financial incentives are acceptable in cases where the donor is deceased. That number drops to 40 percent for a living donor (still a pretty high number, considering). Further studies are being done--and we're not quite clear on the methodology here--to determine if financial incentives might actually translate into more available organs for those in need of a transplant.

Paying for organs is, naturally, a controversial idea. In fact, it's highly illegal in most countries. And Manns' proposal certainly has its critics, who say such schemes encourage donation for the wrong reasons and over time will erode the quality of those organs that do get donated (never mind the fact that including those suffering from kidney disease in the survey might bias the results somewhat). Then again, 285 Canadians (and roughly 6,700 Americans) died while awaiting a donor organ last year. So there's that to consider. Feel free to leave your thoughts on this in the comments below.

[660 News]

While the rest of us enjoyed an extra hour of sleep as daylight saving time ended Sunday, the scientists and engineers working with the Mars rover Curiosity were just glad to be back on Earth time. The rover team has finally stopped working on Mars time, just as they planned.

The Mars day, which is called a sol, is about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day, so a Mars rover driver's schedule shifts by 40 minutes each day. After a few days of jumping ahead by 40 minutes, they would be working in the middle of the night. Life on Mars time totally disrupts their biological clocks, not to mention their personal routines. People hate it.

They do it because they can stay awake when the rover is asleep, so the team can assess its performance on the previous day and plan its next moves. But three months into the mission, the team is comfortable enough with the rover and with each other to plan farther ahead.

Researchers have studied how blue light and strict routines can help people adjust to the diurnal cycle of another planet, but it's definitely easier to just live on this one. Starting this week, the rover team will work between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. Pacific time, according to NASA.

The line between man and machine--or at least mammal and machine--grows blurrier still. It's not exactly the Singularity, but a collaboration between researchers at MIT and Harvard Medical School have tapped into the electrochemical gradient that exists naturally in the inner ear of mammals and used it to power electronics for the first time--like the Matrix, but with guinea pigs.

The endocochlear potential, which resides in the inner ear, is the only anatomical structure in the mammalian body that maintains electrochemical potential across such a large region. It's not a lot of power--something like ten times less than what you can capture with the most efficient non-biological circuitry in existence today--but it's enough that it could one day be used as a power source for new drug delivery systems or implanted sensors or other devices that function inside a living body.

Using an anesthetized guinea pig as their power source, the researchers were able to attach electrodes to the cochlea and extract enough power to run a small wireless radio transmitter. That's just a single nanowatt, but small electronics (and they get smaller all the time) don't require much power to function. It's an interesting idea, if a somewhat bizarre one. Tiny nanomachines in the future could be powered not by synthetic nano-batteries but by bio-batteries produced by living mammals.

A paper on this research will be published in the upcoming issue of Nature.

Your camera--whether it's a DSLR, an interchangeable-lens camera, or an advanced compact--doesn't need to stay as it was when you bought it. You can make your camera suit you, to do what you want it to do and exactly how you want to do it. These hacks, gathered by our friends at Pop Photo, range from super simple, no-cost hacks (change what the buttons do!) to more advanced hardware tweaks (swap out the screen, add GPS/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth). See the whole list here.

The remote island chain of Tokelau, positioned between New Zealand and Hawaii in the Pacific, suddenly has a significant claim to fame. Tokelau has become the first territory able to meet all of its electricity needs with solar power, officials say, completely weaning the string of atolls off of the diesel generators it has relied on for decades.

Tokelau--which is made up of the Atafu, Nukunonu, and Fakaofo atolls--is administered by New Zealand, and it was New Zealand that made the $7 million investment in the territory's energy future. With solar stations on all three atolls (the last of which was completed this week) the three main atolls now have the renewable energy capacity to meet the electricity needs of all of Tokelau's 1,500 inhabitants.

That doesn't necessarily make Tokelau a model for the future, but it is significant for a few reasons. It's true that a remote, sunny island chain with 1,500 inhabitants is not a fair analog for the world's densest cities, or even its less dense regions that are more developed. But remote regions of the world need energy too, and they often get it through running dirty, inefficient diesel or gasoline generators that suck up economic resources while adversely impacting the environment. Plus there are high transit costs--financial and environmental--associated with the transport of liquid fuels to remote areas (like the middle of the Pacific Ocean).

So the investment in solar, should the maintenance costs remain below a certain threshold, will not only pay environmental/ecological benefits but will also free up economic resources for social and economic development on Tokelau. It's not a cure-all or a model for the rest of the world, but a demonstration that in the right situation renewables like solar can make perfect sense.

[BBC]

On July 19, a dozen teams gathered in hackerspaces around the country to await the rules of a 72-hour build competition. Red Bull, the energy drink brand and sponsor, announced the challenge at shortly after 6 p.m. Pacific time: Construct a game of games. It must be physical, not virtual; weigh less than 2,000 pounds; and have a clear winner. Inside the Mill, an industrial-arts shop in Minneapolis, Nathan Knutson, leader of the 1.21 Jigawatts team, and the rest of his 23-member squad began whiteboarding ideas. It had been a blazing hot summer, and by 2:30 a.m. all they'd settled on was making something with water.

The following morning, Knutson and four others met again. The founder of the Mill, Brian Boyle, suggested, "What about a submarine?" Within two hours, they'd drawn up the basic plans for a walk-through submarine disaster simulation game. They envisioned a player standing inside an open-ended replica of a sub's control room, where he would extinguish threats by turning different valves or levers. Any delays would trigger a hull breach, spraying the player with water piped in from a nearby sink.

Knutson, an orthopedics implant engineer, drew up a rough list of materials. Then the team went shopping for electronically operated lawn sprinklers to douse the player, cast-iron valves to make the game look as nautical as possible, devices to rock the structure, plus sirens, buzzers, and red automotive tail lights for the emergency ambience. "We wanted it to tilt and move around and have sound effects," Knutson says. "We wanted it to be an environment rather than something you looked at."

The full team reconvened later that day and split up the tasks. One group used a CNC router to cut plywood into mock steel beams that would extend up and over the player's head. Knutson wanted the wall, roof, and steel floor to shake, so he found an industrial DC motor to attach to the frame. When activated, it would cause the sub to rumble like an old car. Next, he hotwired an actuator that had once been used to lift and lower a hospital bed and affixed it to both the game's frame and its base. Apivot sits between the two, so when the actuator extends or contracts, the whole sub tilts.

Brothers and electronics experts Tyler and Justin Cooper, meanwhile, began writing the software that governed gameplay. They programmed an Arduino to monitor Twitter for threats such as #firetorpedo. When enough people tweet the same threat, a warning sounds through the loudspeaker. If the player doesn't react quickly enough, the Arduino opens the sprinkler valves and the sub shakes and sways.

Red Bull live-streamed each team's build and asked viewers to vote for their favorite. Team 1.21 Jigawatts placed second behind a labyrinth game (right), but they hardly felt disappointed. "When you're playing, it feels like you're in the bulkhead of a sub," Knutson says.

(See the details and two more projects on the next page)/>

!--break-->

BUILDING A SIM SUBMARINE

Time:72 hours
Cost: $2,500

TWO MORE GAMES

Dueling Labyrinths
Time: 72 hours
Cost: $1,000

Hack a Day website chief Caleb Kraft and his Springfield, Missouri, team built a pair of giant teetering tabletop mazes. In the game, two players per table compete to race a steel ball through their maze first. The wooden labyrinths proved easy to build, but mild panic set in as the 72-hour mark approached. The builders worked frantically to wire buttons and magnets so that competitors could temporarily trap their opponent's steel ball. "We finished the electronics within the last half-hour," Kraft says.

Thumb Wars
Time: 72 hours
Cost: $700

Twin brothers Pat and Mike Murray engaged in more than a few thumb wars as kids, so building a mechanized version of the classic game seemed like a no-brainer. As part of the Maker Twins, an eight-person team based in Scottsdale, Arizona, the duo built steel-and-plywood frames, covered them in foam, and wrapped the units in duct tape. When a player yanks a joystick, their faux thumb moves in the opposite direction. The first to pin an opponent for two seconds sets off a victory buzzer.

WARNING: We review all our projects before publishing them, but ultimately safety is your responsibility. Always wear protective gear, take proper safety precautions, and follow all laws and regulations.

Dear President Obama,

What a relief, many of us thought this morning. We re-elected a president who supports public funding for research (truthfully, public funding for anything). We re-elected a president who acknowledges the reality of climate change (at least you did in your victory speech if not during the campaign). We re-elected a president who so eloquently describes occupations like doctors, scientists and engineers as the definition of American aspiration.

Still, we have some things to discuss. During the next four years, you will have a monumental opportunity to change how this country lives: How we produce electricity, get around, communicate, share and protect our ideas, explore new places, and tend to this planet. We have some suggestions.

You can use the bully pulpit to change our tax code, like you said last night, but also our patent laws. You can ensure all Americans have access to high-speed communications--in rural areas and in cities--and that we can do what we want with it, no matter our service provider. You can do something about the way we consume fossil fuels, not only to free us from foreign oil but to stanch the flow of carbon dioxide and other pollutants into the atmosphere.

Maybe most importantly, you can remind the public to honor the intellectual courage and curiosity of our heritage. You can fund basic science research and exploration, on this planet and on others. You should not let the rantings of a vocal minority dictate the terms of our conversation on medical research, climate change and science education. Mr. President, you can be the president of the future we all seek, if you are as bold in your actions as you are in your words. Following are some of our suggestions.

Sincerely,
The writers and editors of Popular Science

Climate Change
The utter lack of discussion about climate change was a disappointment throughout the campaign. Debates and rallies came and went without a mention of rising temperatures or greenhouse gas emissions--until Hurricane Sandy, when the impact of a changing global climate came home in force. In your victory speech, you said we don't want our children to live in an America that is "threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet." We're heartened that you're finally acknowledging this reality, but you must confront it. You can set ambitious goals for reducing carbon emissions, as this country already promised to do by 2020, and you can invest more federal funds in alternative energies. But first, ring the klaxons, repeatedly, that this is real and happening now.
Rebecca Boyle, contributing writer

Another suggestion: Revive the discussion about cap and trade. Putting a price on carbon pollution is a matter of extreme urgency. To have any hope of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change we must immediately begin reducing our use of fossil fuels. Over the past four years, your administration has provided unprecedented support for clean energy and automotive fuel efficiency. But it's not enough. Until polluters are forced to pay a fair price on carbon emissions, it will be difficult if not impossible for a clean energy economy to take hold. I urge you to push for a cap-and-trade legislation in your second term.
Seth Fletcher, senior editor

Drones
From a technology perspective, unmanned aircraft--especially the self-piloted kind--are indisputably awesome. Moreover, they have a lot to give us. From military intelligence and surveillance aircraft to the Global Hawks that fly science missions through hurricanes, our drones have the potential to make life better. That potential will soar in 2015, when the Federal Aviation Administration is expected to open up America's civilian airspace to unmanned systems.

Unmanned aircraft are going to be a huge part of the future of aviation, but with great technology comes great ethical responsibility. We want to see this technology grow and proliferate. We want to see investment in robotics research, and we want to see that investment translate into a safer, more efficient way of living. What we don't want to see is the human factor so removed from warfare that it becomes easier to tackle problems with a drone strike rather than with statesmanship, diplomacy, and the art of compromise.

We want more drones, but we want fewer shadow wars. Let's develop a legal, ethical framework for ensuring that the precedents you set in your second term put us on a path for responsible use of unmanned systems technology. The rest of the world isn't terribly far behind the U.S. in drone capabilities, and others are going to look at the example you set for how best to deploy it.
Clay Dillow, contributing writer

Net Neutrality
The Internet may be huge, but it still needs protection. The ability to do what we wish with our connections--circumvent traditional TV and phone service, for instance--is under attack. It's not Verizon or Comcast's Internet, it's our Internet. Let's keep it that way. Body block anything that tries to flip net neutrality, and keep the service providers and their despicable tiered-based-on-content pay plans at bay. This isn't just about preserving our right to cable-cut: it's about protecting small businesses in the new millenium. If the IP overlords have their way, they could have any and every startup and small competitor in a choke-hold. Don't let that happen. 
Corinne Iozzio, senior associate editor

Scientific Research
Please keep U.S. science strong. Funding for basic research has dropped almost 10 percent in the past nine years, and with the Budget Control Act set to take effect in January, it will fall even more sharply in the next five. If discretionary spending cuts come to pass, please try to shield science, which is hurting already. Facilities like the Large Hadron Collider and the ITER fusion reactor are being built overseas--taking their grant money abroad, too--and we need labs and research jobs in the U.S. I want kids like Taylor Wilson and Easton LaChappelle to be able to work here as scientists someday.
Katie Peek, Ph.D., information graphics designer (and an astrophysicist)

Space Exploration
Please give our space agency a true sense of purpose. As the Mars rover Curiosity continues to prove, Americans still deeply love our space program and are amazed by what it can do. People of all ages are inspired by our countrymen's ability to build rockets and robots powerful enough to explore other worlds. NASA is capable of doing great things, but it needs a clear mission--and in your first term, you were unclear at best. Choose to go to Mars, not because it is easy or inexpensive, but because it is hard, and will require immense investment from the public and private sectors. Choose to fund ambitious space telescopes and the research labs that will use them to understand our place in the universe. Or choose to spend more national time and treasure understanding our own planet from the unique vantage point of space. Whatever you do, please be clear.
Rebecca Boyle

Patent Reform
The U.S. patent system now discourages the innovators it's supposed to protect. Patent issuing has skyrocketed from about 1 million a century to 1 million every four years. The reason for that is simple: The world is eager for scientific and medical research, software and electronics development, and other layer-cakes of ideas. But too many of the recent patents cover broad, poorly scoped ideas, drowning innovation in lawsuits. Companies that own hundreds or thousands of patents they might never use spend their time taking legitimate startups to court. Life-saving drugs and medical tools are kept artificially costly-out of reach of people who need them the most. And instead of building healthy competition that benefits consumers, big businesses engage in patent-buying arms races and billion-dollar legal battles over the mere idea, for example, of fingers touching smartphone screens.

Today's patent system is bad for science, bad for the economy, and bad for innovation. The SHIELD Act is a good start but falls short. You should arrange a panel of researchers with extensive backgrounds on the costs and benefits of the U.S. patent system, then charge them with developing recommendations to end rampant patent trolling, the granting of patents over broad or obvious ideas, and out-of-scope court judgments. Should you have the chance to pick a new Supreme Court justice, consider judges whose stances enforce legal interpretations of patents that benefit the nation as a whole.
Dave Mosher, projects editor

Sleep Health
The administration has already made great strides trying to get Americans to eat right and exercise. But one basic health need still isn't getting the attention it deserves: sleep. According to the CDC, approximately 60 million Americans are not sleeping long enough or well enough. This sleep debt leads to some fairly predictable consequences (driving accidents, less work productivity, and more colds and flu). There's also mounting evidence that sleep is intertwined with health problems in some surprising ways. Several studies released this spring demonstrated that people with sleep apnea are more likely to get cancer. Others have found that decreasing a person's sleep on just a few nights can have an immediate impact on his body's metabolism and ability to process sugars. It might not just be that obesity is causing sleep problems, but poor sleep may be increasing obesity, as well.
Susannah Locke, associate editor

The Georgia Institute of Technology has plopped its robotic dragonfly drone up on Indiegogo to be crowdfunded. It's a pretty impressive device: a four-winged, superlight flier with the capability to hold a camera, plus GPS, Wi-Fi, and compatibility with smartphone apps. But one of the coolest ideas comes from the dragonfly itself: the tiny, 6-inch Robot Dragonfly can glide like an insect rather than having to constantly flap to hold itself aloft, like the Parrot AR.Drone 2, so its battery life reaches up to half an hour. (Comparatively, that's a lot.) You can snag one for as low as $100 if you fund now--apparently it'll retail for more than twice that. Check it out here.

Imagine being asked to solve a complex algebra problem that is roughly 95 percent variables and only five percent known values. This is a rough analogy perhaps, but it paints a fairly accurate picture of the task faced by modern cosmologists. The prevailing line of thinking says that the universe is mostly composed of dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities that have never been directly observed or measured even though the cosmological math insist that they are real. We can see their perceived effects, but we can't see them directly--and thus we can't seen the real structure of our own universe.

And so we make models. Sometime next month, the world's third-fastest supercomputer --known as Mira--will complete tests of its new upgraded software and begin running the largest cosmological simulations ever performed at Argonne National Laboratory. These simulations are massive, taking in huge amounts of data from the latest generation of high-fidelity sky surveys and crunching it into models of the universe that are larger, higher-resolution, and more statistically accurate than any that have come before. When it's done, scientists should have some amazing high-quality visualizations of the so-called "cosmic web" that connects the universe as we understand it. And they'll have the best statistical models of the cosmos that cosmologists have ever seen.

THAT'S COOL, BUT WHY DO WE EVEN NEED TO DO THIS?

Mostly, we do this so we can turn the latest batch of sky survey data into something meaningful. Scientists hope these models will answer some pressing questions about dark matter, dark energy, and the overall structure of the cosmos. Particularly vexing are questions about dark energy, which is purportedly driving the accelerating expansion of the universe and--actually, that's pretty much all we know about it.

"‘Dark energy' is just a technical shorthand for saying ‘we have no idea what's going on.'""Dark energy is confusing because the universe isn't just expanding--we knew that already--but that expansion is also accelerating, which is very unexpected," says Salman Habib, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory and the principal investigator for the Multi-Petaflop Sky Simulation at Argonne. "The cause of this acceleration is what people call ‘dark energy,' but that's just a technical shorthand for saying ‘we have no idea what's going on.'"

These simulations are aimed at shedding some light on this expansion happening all around us. But just as importantly, they are aimed at defining just exactly what is not going on. There are a lot of theories about dark energy; it could be a new kind of field in the universe that we've yet to discover, or a characteristic of gravity at large scales that we don't yet understand. It could be some twist on general relativity that we haven't thought of. The latest crop of high resolution sky survey data should allow the Argonne team to model very subtle effects of dark energy on the cosmos, thus allowing for a deeper understanding of the nature of dark energy itself. That in turn should help cosmologists rule out possible explanations--or even entire classes of explanations--as they try to zero in on a more perfect theory for how the universe works.

BUT THE UNIVERSE IS INFINITE. HOW CAN YOU SIMULATE THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE?

We don't, because we can't. We can't really define the limits of the universe for these purposes, and computer models by their nature need a set of constraints. But we can simulate larger and larger chunks of the cosmos thanks to regular leaps in computing power and ever-better sky surveys, and from these increasingly larger and higher-resolution simulations we can extrapolate things about the larger universe. That's important.

Simulations like the ones being run on Mira have been run before, says Katrin Heitmann, another Argonne National Lab researcher and Habib's co-investigator on the Mira simulation project, "but we are now getting into a regime where we have to be more and more precise." The next generation of data coming back from the most sophisticated sky survey instruments astronomers have ever created--like the Dark Energy Camera, for instance, which achieved first light just last month--will contain more data (reflecting billions of observed galaxies) and fewer inherent statistical errors. So while previous simulations like the beautifully articulated Millennium Simulation Project have yielded excellent visualizations and models of the distribution of matter across the cosmos, these new and better data sets require a new and better computing architecture to deal with them.

We can build architectures to deal with these new data sets thanks largely to Moore's Law. Every three years or so, supercomputing on the whole experiences a roughly ten-fold increase in computing power. That enables supercomputing centers like Argonne to construct machines (or upgrade old ones) that can far outperform what was at the very vanguard of the field just a year or two ago. The 10-petaflop (that's ten quadrillion calculations per second) Mira system is one such example of this, and it's Mira that will enable Argonne to run the biggest dark matter simulations ever performed.

WHAT WILL THESE SIMULATIONS LOOK LIKE?

Visually, they'll look like this:

This visualization comes from some preliminary tests of the new computing architecture, known as HACC (for Hardware/Hybrid Accelerated Cosmology Code--more on this later). And what you are looking at is essentially a 3-D block of the universe and the way matter is distributed throughout it, according to the data gleaned from various sky survey sources.

"What you're looking at is the cosmic web," Habib says. "You can see clearly these big voids and these filaments and these clumps. What you're actually seeing is the matter density. The blobby parts are where the density is highest, and that's where the galaxies are." You can't actually see the galaxies here--this is a representation rather than a true optical model. In the smallest clumps there may be no galaxies at all. In the medium-sized clumps, there could be one or more. The largest clumps represent galaxy clusters where thousands of galaxies might reside.

This is a still frame of the cosmos as we currently see it, but the simulations slated for Mira will build something more like a movie of the universe going back billions of years when the universe was much denser--like a million times denser--than it is now. Astronomers can then watch this movie in extremely high detail to see how the universe developed over time, and thus observe the roles dark matter and especially dark energy had in forming our current universe. And, because it is a computer model, they can then play about with the parameters of this virtual universe to test their theories. Hopefully Mira will prove that some theories still stand up. At the very least, it should prove some theories unlikely.

SO IF EACH SIM IS BIGGER AND BETTER THAN THE LAST ONE, WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT THIS ONE?

For one, its unprecedented resolution and detail, which we've described at length above. But where the future of supercomputer modeling is concerned, the HACC architecture is extremely important as well. HACC was developed from scratch for this project, and it is optimized for Mira. But it was designed so it can be optimized for other supercomputers--and other supercomputer applications--as well, a rarity for a this kind of software.

Why? Every supercomputer is designed a bit differently, and each has its own quirks and idiosyncrasies. Unlike programs written for desktop computers, for instance, software written for supercomputers is generally written for the specific machine it will be used on. It won't work optimally (or at all) if shifted to a different machine. So each time supercomputers leap forward a generation, an ongoing research project has to write new software for a new machine. "During a decade of code development you may have three different computing architectures come and go," Habib says. "So that's the magic of HACC."

HACC isn't so much magic as smart design. Its modular construction means part of the underlying software works the same on all machines, so it's far easier to port it from one machine (or generation of machine) to another. The other piece is a pluggable software module that can be optimized for each particular machine. This drastically reduces the amount of time researchers have to spend waiting on new code development before pushing their research forward. And when a new computer comes online, like Oak Ridge National Labs' brand-new 20-petaflop Titan, it's relatively simple for researchers to quickly apply jumps in computing power to their research.

Its customizable, optimizable nature also means HACC can be applied to many research projects rather than just the one for which it was originally designed. And it's creators want HACC to be hacked. "We're a small team, so we can't really exploit all the scientific capabilities of this code ourselves, nor do we necessarily want to," Habib says of HACC, adding "it's a kind of code that other teams need to write, not just for cosmology but for other applications." Habib, Heitmann, and their colleagues see HACC as a community resource--not only in the sense that they plan to share their cosmology results freely with the scientific community, but also in the sense that the software itself can potentially be altered and adapted to any number of modeling applications in other fields.

SO WILL THESE SIMULATIONS SOLVE THE MYSTERY OF THE DARK UNIVERSE?

No. Or at least the possibility is very, very remote. But it will influence some existing theories, send others to the discard heap, and otherwise focus the current line of thinking and future lines of questioning into these mysterious forces. And in the offing, these simulations will help researchers continue to refine the tools they use to leverage the ongoing explosion in supercomputing power into meaningful scientific gains. If Mira solves the mystery of dark energy in the coming months, we'll be surprised. We'll be equally surprised if it doesn't push the field of theoretical cosmology noticeably forward. And if HACC doesn't help accelerate the pace of supercomputer science at large, we'd be equally stunned.

Correction: An earlier version of this story inaccurately stated that Salman Habib and Katrin Heitmann are researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They are currently employed by Argonne National Laboratory. The story has ben amended to reflect this.

There's something so indescribably American about what millions of us did yesterday--standing in line at a polling place, exchanging hellos with neighbors, peacefully filling in circles or tapping touchscreens to record our future hopes. But man, does it feel great to be done!

Now comes some computational science experts who say we should draw it out even more: maybe vote on one thing at a time--president one day, the U.S. House the next, local library tax districts later that week, and so on. Theory suggests this would be effective at not only lowering costs, but increasing voter turnout.

"You can't say, ‘Today you'll come in and vote on the first issue, and then we'll announce the result, and tomorrow you'll come back again and vote on the second issue.' That's too costly," says Lirong Xia, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. "But if you can build an online voting system and make it secure enough, then people can stay at home and just log in at the right time. It would reach a better solution and reduce the cost of holding elections."

Xia spends some of his time studying computational election theory, wherein computational techniques can be used to change the way we vote, and even how we think about our election choices. These techniques could improve security, for example, so there would be less concern about electronic voting machines or casting votes via email. They could also expand the reach of third parties, allowing weighted ballots that allow voters to mark first and second choices. Algorithms could even help voters answer questions that may be more complex than an up-or-down decision. All of this would happen online, allowing people to rank their choices not just on candidates, but on issues, like whether to spend funds on a school, park or some other infrastructure.

Assuming you could work out all the kinks--access to the Internet, for instance, and security--voting online from home over the span of a few days might be a better reflection of what we all want. It takes time to get all the way through a ballot, especially one chockablock with referenda and initiatives. Maybe if voters could do it at their leisure, they'd be happier with the results. Read more about Xia's work here.

[via PhysOrg]

In its youth, the universe was a roiling soup of star ingredients, with new stars forming rapidly. But now it's much quieter, and things are not expected to get more exciting anytime soon, astronomers say. For the first time, astronomers have figured out the universe's star-birth rate, and found that today, it's 30 times lower than its likely peak some 11 billion years ago. As a result, all of the future stars may be no more than a 5 percent increase above what we've got now.

Astronomers figured this out by taking snapshots of the universe at 2, 4, 6 and 9 billion years of age. (It's 13.7 billion years old now.) The results show a clear decline in star-forming activity. A team led by David Sobral at Leiden Observatory studied the universe's hydrogen-alpha emission line, which is a reliable indicator of star formation. They used Japan's Subaru Telescope and the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, and the Very Large Telescope in Chile, covering a huge portion of the sky.

The team's observing area encompassed the largest sky samples ever, more than 10 times larger than any previous samples. Observing the cosmos at different ages--so at different distances--with the same observational technique provides an apples-to-apples comparison.

It turns out that half the stars in existence now formed more than 9 billion years ago, and it took just 2 billion years to form all of them. The other half took almost five times as long to produce. If this trend continues, the universe will only get 5 percent more stars, even if we wait forever, the scientists say.

"We are clearly living in a universe dominated by old stars. All of the action in the universe occurred billions of years ago," Sobral said in a statement.

Better go enjoy them while we still can.

[NAOJ]

Entertainment Weekly has twice now inserted an LCD screen into its paper magazine to show video ads. That's the growing pains that come when an entire medium is going through an upheaval--you get these little half-steps, a nod that, well, this thing we've used for a long time? It probably won't be around much longer. But that new things is maybe scary, or expensive, or not quite ready yet, so let's try combining the two.

A new credit card from Mastercard, as reported by the BBC, is going through those same growing pains. The card, first rolling out in Singapore before the rest of the world sees it, has a built-in greyscale LCD screen and a number pad. Mastercard will mostly use those features for security purposes, at first, though eventually they plan to roll out bonuses like loyalty rewards and coupons.

Also today, Starbucks announced the rollout of Square Wallet to 7,000 of its shops nationwide. Square Wallet is an app for smartphones that lets you use your phone to pay--it provides a QR code, which is scanned by the point-of-service machine. Square Wallet is just as secure; you can type in a security code on a phone even more easily than on a weird hybrid credit card. And it serves the purpose of moving us towards a wallet-free future much more effectively than the Mastercard.

Square Wallet is actually also an in-between technology; I think that near-field communication, or NFC, will either be the tech or be the basis of the tech that eventually replaces our credit cards. (Our primer on NFC can be found here.) NFC payments let you simply tap your phone to a point-of-service machine rather than opening an app and scanning a visual code on the phone's screen--it's more convenient and faster than a QR code. Square Wallet is a slightly diluted vision of the future; it has about one and a half steps more than the eventual solution will have, but it at least resembles the future. Also, it's in Starbucks, and the Square Wallet app can be used by pretty much any smartphone, unlike NFC, which is only available in a select few Android and Windows phones. So people can experiment with this fairly easy, nonthreatening thing, and soon when the time comes to cut up all your credit cards and throw your wallet in a box in the basement? They'll be ready.

The Mastercard isn't the last gasp of the credit card, but it's, I don't know, a tired and defeated wheeze. It's a pretty clear sign that we've taken the plastic rectangle as far as it can go.

A couple of weeks ago, scientists from Australia and Spain published a paper in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in which they reported finding a gene (and characterized the transcribed protein) in a particular yeast strain that made the resultant beer foamier, the first time scientists have ever done so. While knowing the identity of a particular yeast gene that promotes foaming isn't going to be of much use to most homebrewers -- unless you are a dab hand at creating recombinant yeast strains, in which case, have at it -- it's of interest to the greater brewing industry because understanding the creation and retention of a head on a glass of beer is an important quality control technique. The quality of foam on a pint is one of those things that consumers notice and subsequently use to, consciously or not, judge your beer.

So, what is beer foam? At its most basic, beer foam is a thin film of liquid, stabilized by various molecules including hop-derived organic acids and glycoproteins, around a volume of gas. Those glycoproteins--proteins with attached sugar groups--come in many forms, but today we are primarily interested in those called mannoproteins. That is, each protein chain has many mannose--a six-carbon sugar very similar to glucose--molecules attached to it. The protein part of the glycoprotein is mostly hydrophobic, while the mannose side-groups with their myriad -OH groups are hydrophilic. This dissimilarity between the two parts of the molecule is key to foam stabilization: the hydrophobic parts line the interface with the carbon dioxide gas, while the hydrophilic sugar groups hold onto a bit of the water in beer and keep the walls of the foam intact.

For a long time, brewing scientists thought that the primary source of those glycooproteins was malted barley. This makes sense, because one goes through two distinct processes in brewing to try to force most of that protein out of the beer: the hot break and the cold break. The hot break is kind of like when you make egg drop soup: the uncooked egg hits the hot water, the proteins in the whites denature, and the whole thing "cooks." The cold break at the end of the boil forces other proteins to precipitate out of solution. Both sets of gunk are removed from the wort during filtering and while the beer settles in the primary and secondary fermenter. But even with all of this filtering, a lot of protein--including mannoproteins and the glutens that give celiac patients such grief--still floats in the beer. And those proteins are responsible for that froth on the top of your beer glass.

Over the last few years, a series of papers has reported that some of the mannoproteins responsible for foam stability don't come from the barley at all. They come from the yeast. Basically, as the beer ages and the yeast start to die, some of them autolyze (self-digest), and components of their cell walls--the mannoproteins--end up free-floating in the beer. Most of the studies were carried out on Saccharomyces cerevisiae ale yeast. But Blasco et al. found the gene and protein for a similarly functional mannoprotein in lager yeast, Saccharomyces pastorianus, which helps cement the claims that yeast proteins are crucial to beer foaming characteristics in all types of beer. The gene, called CFG1 (Carlbergensis foaming gene 1), codes for Cfg1p, a 105 kiloDalton protein found in S. pastorianus cell walls that is very similar to those already found in S. cerevisiae. When the researchers deleted the CFG1 gene, the foam on the resultant beer looked pretty sorry--great news for beer drinkers who view a big foam head as a waste of space in the glass where beer could go.

But if you like lots of foam--maybe because you think it helps concentrate the hop aromas or it just feels right on the palate--you could probably replicate their results. The strain that the scientists say they used was Weihenstephan 34/70--a strain of yeast from Weihenstephan Abbey brewery, which at 972 years old claims to be the oldest continuously operating brewery in the world. You can get the Weihenstephan 34/70 in dry form from Safale as Saflager, or from Wyeast as 2124 (Bohemian lager) or White Labs as WLP830 (German lager). Happy foaming!

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In an interesting example of prenatal learning, a species of tiny Australian songbirds teach their embryonic young a special password, which the baby birds must chirp in order to get food after they're born. The password is a single unique note the mother wren teaches them from outside the egg, according to biologists.

The nestlings incorporate the note into their begging calls, and the mother recognizes the tone as her own: Password accepted. If the mother wren doesn't recognize it, the parents abandon the nest.

This is an evolutionary adaptation to survive brood parasites, which in the case of the fairy wren are Australian cuckoos. Cuckoos and other brood parasitic birds lay their eggs in another bird's nest, pawning off parenting onto an unsuspecting mother. The cuckoo often removes the real mother's eggs so she raises the cuckoos as her own. Recognizing a special password would prevent this--or at least prevent the wren from doing all the hard work of parenting someone else's offspring. Just to be safe, females also teach the password to their mates and any helper birds. In case any parasitic cuckoos might be listening, the wrens sing their passwords somewhere away from the nest.

Sonia Kleindorfer of Flinders University in Australia stumbled onto this when they noticed some odd behavior amid bird call studies. They noticed superb fairy wren mothers (a species variant) were calling to their unhatched eggs, and they heard that wren nestling's begging calls were different from one nest to another. They eventually realized the unique element in each mother's incubation call, which you can hear here, was the basis of her hatchling's begging call. A password!

Kleindorfer and colleagues baby-swapped some clutches, and noticed the hatched birds produced the same calls as their foster mothers, not their biological mothers, which shows this is a learned behavior. They also put speakers under wren nests and played the wrong password, and watched the parents decline to feed their nestlings.

Kleindorfer said in a statement this shows that mothers can pass on more than just genes--they can pass on memes. The paper appears in the new issue of Current Biology.

When Skyfall hits theaters on Friday November 9, it will be the cinematic franchise's 50th year in production.

That's a lot of cultural history right there. Sure, Bond's world is fictional, but it provides a curious lens into history -- especially the colossal threats posed by supervillains whom Bond is, of course, licensed to kill.

Here are five James Bond movies that twist technological threats from the zeitgeist -- and from the near future.

See the gallery.

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

Hey @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...@Aerocles, who correctly guessed the Japanese dwarf flying squirrel, otherwise known as the momonga. "Momonga" in Japanese can actually refer to any flying squirrel, but often refers to this, the most adorable.

A new study from The Miriam Hospital's Centers for Behavioral and Preventive Medicine takes a look at the noted alarmist old-people concept "hookup culture," which seems to mean "non-romantic sexual encounters" and which is obviously eroding the very foundation of America. The study surveyed 483 first-year female college students and found that old America's feverish imagination of wild college days is pretty much unfounded--"romantic sex with a boyfriend or relationship partner was found to be twice as common as hookup sex," says the study. For more chilly scientific descriptions of Girls Gone Not Very Wild At All, Really, click here.