Making better body armor doesn't have to be about adding bulk--it's about smart layering. A new composite material, made of tiny alternating layers a few nanometers thick, is lighter than other impact-resistant shielding material--and the process the materials scientists developed to study it could lead to even better versions in the future.

Researchers at MIT and in France developed a new self-assembling polymer material with a structure like a layer cake. Resilient rubber layers alternate with rigid glass layers to provide durability and strength. To test its mettle, the team developed a way to shoot tiny microballs at the structure to see how it held up. When shot edge-on, like in the image above, the material warped and caved at the point of impact. When shot head-on, it was 30 percent more effective at blocking the speeding ball. The microballs were hundreds of times larger than the nano-layers in the armor, so they were a realistic simulation of a bullet impact.

Nanostructures can be more effective than more familiar bulletproof materials like Kevlar because of how they behave. Things work differently at the smallest scales, and particles take on strange properties. Researchers in the United Kingdom are studying shear-thickening liquids, for instance, which are rigid nanoparticles suspended in a liquid that hardens on impact. In this latest case, a unique arrangement of materials lends added durability and strength.

But the real breakthrough here is in the way the team was able to measure these impacts. Viewed from an electron microscope, you can see tiny effects and changes in each layer of material. Further study of these distortions, like how deeply they penetrate and how far they spread, could lead to systematic improvements. This is a new and more effective way to study structured polymers, according to MIT News. Their ultimate goal is to watch the whole thing stretch and deform in real time in response to an impact.

The work appears in Nature Communications.

[MIT]

The lighter a structure launching into air, the better. That's one of the reasons why ostriches can't fly--because their bones are solid instead of hollow. It's also one of the reasons why researchers at HRL Laboratories created the lightest metal known to man.

The researchers collaborated with scientists at Caltech and UC Irvine to design metallic microlattice, a mesh lighter than styrofoam, for aerospace structural components. The material is so light, it can sit atop a dandelion without crushing it.

But that doesn't mean it isn't strong. The material can handle a strain exceeding 50 percent in compression tests and still resume to its original shape and 98 percent of its height once the load is removed.

Other materials that fall into the ultralight category (below 10 mg/cm³), such as silica aerogels, carbon nanotube aerogels, metallic foams and polymer foams, have very random cellular architectures. This means that while these low-density materials retain benefits such as high specific surface area (total surface area for a material per specified unit), they lack the stiffness, strength, energy absorption and conductivity of heavier materials. HRL researchers created a material that is both ultralight and structurally robust.

The key structural component is a series of hollow tubes. In a study published last November in Science, the researchers exposed a light sensitive liquid to UV light through a patterned mask, which created a three-dimensional photopolymer lattice. They then deposited a layer of nickel-phosphorous onto the polymer lattice, which was then etched. The remaining structure was a macroscopic material with hollow tubes as the base structural elements. The resulting material had a density of .9 mg/cm³. By comparison, ultralight silica aerogels are 1 mg/cm³.

Though metallic microlattice is the lightest metal developed to date, it held the title of lightest material for less than a year. Aerographite, a carbon material developed by researchers at the Technical University of Hamburg and University of Kiel (and first reported in an Advanced Materials article in June 2012), weighs in at just .2 mg/cm³.

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.

Your comfy couch. The wooden chairs in your kitchen. The paint you spent months picking out. Cleaning supplies piled under the bathroom sink, and even the sink itself. Nearly every item and surface in your home emits toxins into the air that you breathe. According to the EPA, concentrations of these airborne pollutants are up to 10 times higher indoors than out -levels high enough that they can cause short- and long-term health problems such as cancers, depression, and decreased kidney and immune function.

In the past couple of years, companies and scientists have launched several research initiatives aimed at studying and solving the problem. Johnson & Johnson, the pharmaceutical behemoth that manufactures everything from baby shampoo to glucose management systems, announced it would phase out toxins from all products by 2015. Scientists at universities and private companies are also developing new technologies that could give our clothing or smartphones the power to monitor dangerous chemical levels wherever we are.

Click the slideshow above for PopSci's breakdown of some of the chemicals to watch out for, easy low-tech ways you can mitigate dangerous levels, and innovative technologies under development that will help you reduce your overall exposure.

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Soft drinks and weight loss don't usually go hand-in-hand. But Pepsi aims to change that with a new drink the company has just launched in Japan, called Pepsi Special. The soft drink has an added ingredient, dextrin, that the distributor, Suntory, says reduces your body's ability to absorb fat. So does that mean you can finally enjoy your soda with a slice of cheesy pizza, hold the guilt?

A 2006 Japanese study indicated that rats fed dextrin and fat at the same time absorbed less fat than rats that weren't fed dextrin. The Japanese government certifies Pepsi Special and another dextrin-containing soda, Kirin Mets Cola, as "foods for specific health use." But what works for rats may not work for people, and anyway, "There's no study that shows that putting dextrin in a beverage is going to cause weight loss. After all, soda has a fair amount of calories," says Joan Salge Blake, a nutrition expert for Boston University and spokesperson for the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

Dextrin is a type of fiber. Soluble in water, and with a low viscosity, it should not negatively impact the mouthfeel of the beverage. Eating a diet rich in fiber can certainly have health benefits, says Blake. Because fiber stays in the stomach longer, keeping us feeling full, it can help decrease appetite, she says. And fiber attaches to some of the cholesterol in the digestive tract, preventing the body from digesting it and possibly helping lower blood cholesterol levels. But it isn't clear that a dose of fiber in a drink will provide those effects. That requires "a fair amount of fiber, and from multiple sources," says Blake. Suntory has not released nutritional information on Pepsi Special, nor disclosed whether it will be released in the United States.

Pepsi Special isn't the only beverage with purported health benefits on the horizon. Coca-Cola recently announced that it will partner with French company Sanofi to launch four drinks claiming to do everything from improving your skin to fighting aging.

[Suntory]

The first crop of Windows 8 laptops are here, and they're much more interesting than, say, the first laptops to run Windows 7, or Windows Vista, or really any hardware that's ever accompanied a new version of Windows. That's because Windows 8 isn't really like any other version of Windows, and we'll get to that in a bit. I've been trying out a variety of Windows 8 laptops, and the Lenovo Yoga 13 is, so far, my favorite--the one I recommended to a roommate without hesitation (despite its flaws), and the one I grabbed whenever I needed to test something on Windows 8. Here's why.

What is it?

The Yoga 13 (technically, the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13, the "IdeaPad" part meaning this is for humans and not businesspeople) is an "ultrabook." This is a garbage nonsense marketing word pushed by Intel and mostly means "kind of like a MacBook Air"--thin, light, and fast, with certain sacrifices made to keep it that way, like eliminating the optical drive and ethernet port.

The laptops aren't garbage nonsense, though. Laptops like this aren't for everyone, and possibly they're not even for most people who obsessively read laptop reviews on the internet, but I think this is what a consumer laptop should look like--it's designed to serve the most people in the best way. If I was shopping for a laptop, that category is where I'd look.

The Yoga 13 has a 13.3-inch display, and that display (or rather, what you can do with the display) is what really sets the laptop apart. It folds 360 degrees, all the way around, so the back of the screen eventually snaps into place against the underside of the keyboard, turning it into a tablet.

Oh, and some specs: my test unit came with a 1.7GHz Core i5 processor, 4GB of memory, a 128GB SSD, and integrated graphics. You can upgrade all that stuff, but it still isn't barnburner specs. And that's perfectly fine; Microsoft has gotten much better at optimizing hardware for software so the spec race is mostly irrelevant. (They did this to very good effect in Windows Phone: while Android phones were messing around with battery-draining quad-core processors, Windows Phones ran smoother and faster on hardware scarcely half as fast.) What matters isn't how big those numbers are, it's how it performs. And the Yoga 13 is very fast and fluid indeed.

Windows 8

Hardware is software, software is hardware. They are one product, one experience. It doesn't make sense to review just one; the quality of the Yoga 13, for example, is totally wrapped up in the quality of Windows 8. So, here's what it's like to use Windows 8 on a laptop that's specifically designed for it.

It's jarring. This isn't a bad thing, not for me and probably not for you. Playing with a totally new interface, one that works not entirely like anything else out there, is kind of fun. It's spelunking. Onnnnn the other hand I think Windows 8 will freak the hell out of a less gadget-inclined person, even if they've been using Windows for decades.

It's a little schizophrenic. For the purposes of clarity, I'm choosing to name the two disparate interfaces "tablet mode" and "laptop mode." Tablet mode is a touch-friendly, flashy, and totally new pseudo-operating-system--it's the whole swipey colorful squares thing that you see in ads for Windows 8. There are devices that use only tablet mode, like the new Microsoft Surface RT, but laptops like the Lenovo will also run laptop mode, which you get to by clicking/tapping on an icon called "Desktop," sitting next to all those other tablet mode apps. Laptop mode is pretty much regular Windows, with a few tweaks (most notably, there's no more Start menu; tablet mode sort of functions as a launcher, which was mostly what the Start menu was for). You can use the hardware however you want, for either mode: if you want to use the touchscreen to mess around with the control panel in laptop mode, or if you want to use a keyboard and mouse to scroll through an RSS app in tablet mode, fine.

My first impulse was to use tablet mode for everything--it gets a much more prominent place than laptop mode, and it seems like you're supposed to stay in tablet mode as much as possible. But over time you realize that Windows 8 is fluid, that you're supposed to tip the scales toward laptop mode or tablet mode depending on how you're using your device. Tablet mode is horribly inefficient when you're using the Yoga 13 like a laptop, which I did, most of the time. You can do just about anything, but you lose a lot of the benefit of having a laptop--increased power, increased screen space, increased dexterity thanks to a keyboard and trackpad. If you're using a laptop, of course you should use a program like, I don't know, Pidgin for chatting. Sure, you can use IM+, a tablet mode app that's pretty good--but it's just not designed to be used on a laptop. You can use the tablet mode's browser (more on that below) with a trackpad, but why? It's much more efficient to just use regular old Chrome in laptop mode.

And when you flip the Yoga 13 over into a tablet, you'll find that laptop mode is just as bad--your fingers have never seemed so fat and uncoordinated as when you try to mess around with resizing windows. Scrolling through a non-touch-optimized app was awkward or sometimes, like with Rdio's standalone app for laptop mode, just not possible.

But when you adjust properly, it works, mostly, pretty well. When I used the Yoga 13 as a laptop, I mostly stayed in laptop mode, and mostly got a typical Windows experience. All my old apps worked fine, the Yoga 13 is nicely zippy so even when using a whole bunch of demanding apps at once, I had very little slowdown. When I flipped the screen and used it as a tablet, I switched to exclusively tablet mode. Tablet mode is more "promising" than "great," since this is an ecosystem totally reliant on apps and there aren't enough of them (no official Twitter, Facebook, Rdio, or Spotify, key apps like RSS reader and chat are not good, and it has no magazine presence at all). But the ones that are there are often killer; Windows 8 has probably the best Netflix and Hulu apps I've ever seen, and the aesthetic is so strong and individual that even that apps that aren't good (Christ are the Twitter apps awful) are at least cool to look at. Bright colors! Right angles! Flippy squares!

I can definitely say that Windows 8's tablet mode is much more capable and exciting than, say, Android's tablet offerings. It's genuinely good now, and if Microsoft puts its sizable shoulder into getting good apps, I think it can be great.

The problems. Windows 8 is not particularly intuitive. I don't mean that it's hard to use, I just mean that if you've never used it or its ilk before (like a Windows Phone or an Xbox, which share a common design language), it'll be very confusing. Someone will have to tell you about swiping from the side or bottom of the screen, or about how to run multiple apps on the screen at once, or how to switch between apps. I'd like someone to tell me how to close apps, because there doesn't seem to be a good solution. (Ctrl-alt-delete works but it works the same way it's always worked, which makes it a very bad solution for tablets. The other solution is to grab an app and swipe downwards, which seems to hide more than close.)

The browser situation makes no sense. There are two separate versions of Internet Explorer, one for laptop mode and one for tablet mode. To be fair, these are both better than you'd expect anything with the name "Internet Explorer" to be, but that's not the problem. The problem is that the tablet mode of Internet Explorer has the same limitations as a tablet browser on an iPad or other tablet--like, no Flash. What. It's running on the same goddamn hardware as the laptop mode version, which of course can show you the entire internet. What's the point of combining a laptop and a tablet if you retain the weaknesses of a tablet? I can't count how many times the Yoga 13 told me to go use the other Internet Explorer, the one that's difficult to use with fingers. This is stupid.

Back to the Lenovo.

The Yoga 13 is only 0.67 inches thick, which is a whole 0.01 inches thinner than the 13-inch MacBook Air at the Air's thickest point. It weighs in at 3.4 pounds, about half a pound heavier than the Air, but still fairly light for a laptop. But that's kind of the issue: it's a very nice size for a laptop, which makes it huge for a tablet. I used the Yoga 13 as my main computer for a week or so, and after the novelty of turning my laptop into a tablet wore off and I just needed to get things done, I found myself very rarely flipping the screen all the way around. It's far too big and heavy to be an effective tablet.

But as a laptop, I like it a lot. It's not a fantastically good-looking machine, but feels well-made and certainly isn't ugly or gaudy. The palm-rest is some kind of leathery-feeling material that I really like. The screen is good enough; it looks pixelly after using an ultra-high-resolution screen like a MacBook Pro with Retina, but at 1600 x 900 with good brightness, color, and viewing angles, it's plenty good enough for me. (Also important to note that it costs about half of what one of those ultra-high-res computers costs.) But I found two flaws with the screen. First: it's not especially firm when it's in a regular upright laptop position--you'll be tapping on it sometimes, and it bounces back and forth quite a bit. Second, and more serious, is that it occasionally has issues with responding, in specific cases. I found that it only really had trouble when trying to swipe from the side (which brings up the "Charms" menu, with search and share and settings options) or from the bottom (which brings up app-specific menu options). I often had to swipe twice, which didn't happen on the other Windows 8 laptops I tried. Not a huge deal, but annoying.

Aside from the tightness issues, I love the hinge idea. I expected to hate it; Lenovo advertises four separate positions, and I thought I'd never use half of them. The positions:

But they're useful! The "stand" mode is great when reading recipes in the kitchen, or when watching movies in bed. There's something about having the keyboard and trackpad out of sight that makes it feel much more like a tiny theater and less like a computer. The "teepee" mode is of limited use, but I could see it being fantastic when you have minimal table depth--like, say, on an airplane's folding tray table.

The one big fault, oddly, is the keyboard. Oddly, because Lenovo is kind of known for making ugly but incredibly usable keyboards. Yet the Yoga 13 has a half-sized backspace and right shift key, which means I mistyped a lot. When you're in tablet mode, there's the Windows 8 on-screen keyboard, which, due to the Yoga 13's huge screen (compared to other tablets), is great. You can actually use all ten fingers on the keyboard, rather than the two-fingers-and-a-thumb strategy you'd use on an iPad.

The trackpad, a big multitouch affair, is excellent; that's been a weak spot in Windows laptops in the past, so it's great that someone finally nailed it. It responds to scrolling, gestures, and taps perfectly.

Some will have issues with the connectivity. Those people are wrong, I think. The Yoga 13 has one USB 2.0 port, one USB 3.0, an HDMI-out, and a slot for an SD card, which is everything I use regularly. The SD slot is especially welcome--every laptop should have one of those.

The Wrap-Up

For most users, in 2012, I think an ultrabook is the way to go. Small, fast, sturdy, and light--that's what's important now. If your media is mostly in the cloud--you use Rdio or Spotify, Netflix, Hulu, Google Docs, any of a million cloud photo services--then this is perfect (though there's some weirdness with the 128GB SSD; you only have about 50GB available, and I'm not sure why). It's light enough to throw in a backpack, battery life reached more than five hours with moderate-to-heavy use, and, importantly and unusually for a Windows machine, the Yoga is actually fun to use. The hinge seems like a gimmick, but I actually think it's great, and whizzing through the colorful tablet mode is futuristic and cool.

The Yoga 13 starts at only $1,000, which is a very nice price for what feels like a very premium product. It's one of the cheapest Windows 8 tablets I used and yet it's the one I kept comparing all the others to. If you want to snap up a new laptop right now, this is my favorite Windows option.

In the new James Bond movie Skyfall, the Aston Martin DB5--a rare but staple race car in the spy fiction series since 1964--explodes into smithereens. We'll spare you the cinematic details, but take heart, auto aficionados. The real DB5 is safe.

A Bavarian 3-D printing company called voxeljet made three meticulously accurate 1:3 scale models of the classic vehicle, layer-by-layer. Each fake car (below) is made of 18 transparent plastic parts printed out of PMMA by voxeljet's high-end VX4000 printer, a machine that can make objects as large as 13 feet by 6.5 feet by 3 feet.

From there a British prop-making company called Propshop Modelmakers assembled the models and applied realistic finishing like paint, chrome polish, and even bullet holes to match different car chase scenes in Skyfall.

Only 1,021 real Aston Martin DB5s were manufactured between 1963 and 1965, and the cameo car in the James Bond movie Goldfinger was recently valued at $2.6 million.

The models themselves aren't cheap, either. Although one of the models met a fiery end, another sold for $99,041 at a Christie's auction.

[voxeljet/3ders.org]

The skies across northeastern Australia will go dark around 2:44pm EST today. That's when the moon will slide in front of the sun and cast a deep, circular shadow on the Earth.

It's the total solar eclipse, of course, and this one will achieve inky-black totality as it drifts toward the middle of the Pacific Ocean -- where almost no one will see it in person.

C'est la vie? Not really. A few clever nerds are barnstorming the region with telescopes, video equipment, and astronomical lineups of guests, which they'll use to live-stream the eclipse.

So if you'd like to procrastinate from work, and learn a thing or two about astronomy, look below for a live Google+ hangout hosted by the folks at Slooh, who run a network of robotic telescopes positioned around the world. Guests will include Slooh founder Patrick Paolucci, heliophysicist Lucie Green, astronomer Bob Berman, and more.

In case that feed fails, check out NASA's partner feed, by Eclipse Cairns Australia. NASA also has the ridiculously precise details on this total eclipse at their website, including the map of the eclipse's full path (below).

The eclipse begins promptly at 2:44pm EST and ends around 4:39 EST.

In a striking sign of the future to come, the car-kingmakers at Motor Trend magazine have for the first time named an all-electric vehicle their Car of the Year. The Tesla Model S is the first car without an internal combustion engine to win the coveted award. It's also much-loved by PopSci, FYI.

And for the first time since anyone can remember, the winner was a unanimous choice, according to Motor Trend. "Not a single judge had any doubts about the 2013 Motor Trend Car of the Year," the magazine said. The Model S--now Tesla's only offering after it ceased production on its Roadster--beat the Ford Fusion, the Porsche 911 and nine other finalists.

It was one of the most efficient cars ever tested, but that was hardly its most important factor. "At its core, the Tesla Model S is simply a damned good car you happen to plug in to refuel," wrote Motor Trend editor-at-large Angus MacKenzie.

It's a shining moment for Tesla, which briefly became a flash point in the presidential campaign when Mitt Romney dumped it in the same camp as failed solar-energy firm Solyndra. He called them "losers" that were bad bets for public funds.

The car is huge, seating seven people when you outfit it with some interesting rear-facing child seats. And its cargo capacity rivals an SUV--there's no hulking engine, so there are two trunks to store all your groceries and camping gear. It can travel up to 300 miles on its optional 85-kilowatt battery, and its motors can bring it from 0 to 60 mph in 4.4 seconds.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk was gleeful at the New York announcement Monday night, according to Slate and CNN, saying "This is a point at which the gears of history moved." He also recalled Romney's loser remark: "In retrospect, he was right about the object of that statement, but not the subject," he said.

Whether you'll like the iPad Mini has a lot more to do with your physical health than you'd think it would. How healthy are your eyes? How big are your hands? How strong are your forearms? How acute are your ears?

If the answers are "very," "not very," "not very," and "very," respectively, then the iPad Mini will serve you well. Those with weak (or just discerning) eyes may think otherwise.

What is it?

It's an iPad 2--the one right before the Retina Display iPad--but shrunk, from a 9.7-inch diagonal screen to a 7.85-inch diagonal screen. Same screen, same processor, same storage options. There honestly is not much else that's different. It has a different charging port, I guess? Oh and the magnetic smart cover has padding on the magnets so it doesn't scratch up the side of the Mini.

But, you know. It's an iPad but smaller. Next section!

What's good about it?

It works just like an iPad, and iPads are great! Simple to use, responsive, a bazillion apps (many of which are designed just for the iPad, unlike Android's tablet offerings). Apps are frequently incredible: futuristic magazines, great music and video apps, newspapers and books and games and utilities. Games in which you physically tilt the iPad around, like in racing games, are much easier on the Mini than the big iPad. There's nothing a big iPad can do that the Mini can't. The hardware is luxurious and tiny; only 7.2mm thin, only 0.68 pounds. It feels immediately more expensive and classy than any of the competing little tablets, even though I very much like the leathery Nexus 7. But the super-thin, minimalist glass and aluminum of the iPad Mini is pretty much tops.

Reading, mostly, is much better on the Mini. The Kindle app feels, suddenly, non-silly. It's not crazy to use the Mini to read on the subway; the size and weight make it feel much more like an ebook reader, and it slips into a jacket pocket or bag without adding much weight. Compared to other 7-inch tablets, I think the screen size and ratio--it's a 4:3 screen, squarer (and, as we found out, classier) than an Android tablet's 16:9--is much easier to use for everything but video. Web browsing is so much more comfortable, and you can fit more in an app, especially with multi-pane apps like a chat app or a Twitter app.

Other folks had trouble with the keyboard. I did not; it's not like the full-sized iPad keyboard is all that good, and my two-fingers-and-a-thumb technique carried over just fine. And, actually, when holding it in portrait (upright) mode, you can thumb-type on it just like an iPhone. It's not great, but I didn't have any particular issues with it.

What's bad about it?

Well. I have strong eyes and a weak body, so I like the Mini a lot. But it has the same resolution as the iPad 2, which means it's not nearly as sharp as the bigger iPads, and, actually, not as sharp as the otherwise-inferior Kindle Fire and Nexus 7. (It clocks in at 163 pixels per inch, compared to 216 pixels per inch for the other tablets.) And I definitely found it to be more reflective than other tablets, let alone electrophoretic devices like the Kindle and Nook. The Mini fears the sun! And reading in general is less pleasant than on a Kindle or Nook, just because there's an LED light shining at your unblinking, enraptured eyes for hours at a time.

But the bigger problem is that iPad apps run natively but scale down for the smaller screen. I like small text, so I had no problem reading, say, the New Yorker on the Mini--but the text is much smaller, and there's no way to increase the size. Magazines, which are one of the best things to do with an iPad, are definitely a little bit tougher on the Mini. It's not just text, either--gorgeous photography in National Geographic or, uh, Popular Science just doesn't wow in the same way it does on a fancy high-resolution full-sized iPad. Video looks kind of silly. It's better than on a phone, I guess, but there's an awful lot of letterboxing due to the screen's length-width ratio.

It's also definitely last-gen internals; there are slight hiccups as you whiz around iOS. Opening apps or swiping between screens sometimes caused a stutter, unlike the slick clay marl smoothness of the iPad 3 or 4. I don't care about this as such, but it's a bummer when compared with the full-sized iPad. For what it's worth, I found the Mini much speedier than the Kindle Fire and moderately faster than the Nexus 7.

What's it cost?

It starts at $330, with 16GB of storage and no cellular (4G LTE is available). If you're going to buy this, that's the one to get--if you opt for cellular or more storage, you'll very quickly get into the price territory of the full-sized iPad, which is, you know, better.

I'd definitely recommend the Mini over the competing Android tablets, but that doesn't necessarily mean I recommend it. It's still very expensive and very frivolous. Nobody needs a tablet, is the thing, so if you're going to get one, I'd say go all out and get the best one, which in this case is only half again as much money. I guess it'd make a nice gift, if you're a very specific rich person who likes giving $330 gifts but not $500 gifts.

As a standalone gadget, I think it's great. It does all kinds of stuff and it does them all pretty well, with just a few problems for those with weak eyes. It's weird to get this precise with cost, but I think at $250, I'd be saying something different--I'd say, this is a crazy deal, just like what I said when Amazon showed their $80 Kindle. "It's basically as good and so cheap!" But at $330, the iPad Mini is still pretty expensive. It's not an impulse item, it's not a stocking stuffer. No sane person would have both a Mini and a Big Boy iPad, so if you're getting an iPad, or, really, if you're shopping for a tablet at all, go for the Big Boy iPad.

The next pandemics will come from animals, in all likelihood, as zoonotic diseases jump into the human population. Global health authorities keep tabs on sick livestock and sick people for that reason. But nobody keeps tabs on your dog or cat--and an international group of veterinarians wants to change that.

The World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA) has something called the One Health Committee, which promotes the closer integration of human and animal healthcare. The committee recommends a new global monitoring network involving vets who work with small companion animals--your pets, not livestock. It would work by creating a computer database that any vet could access, managed by some sort of international consortium. If you bring your pet to the vet and it's diagnosed with, say, flu, then the vet could log in to this database and report it, and global health agencies like the Centers for Disease Control, the World Health Organization and others would be notified. Agencies could get real-time data overlaid on maps, and they could prepare vaccinations or response tactics based on potential outbreak sites.

A system like this could serve as an early-warning system for the millions of four-legged pets living with us. There are 72 million dogs in the U.S., living in 37 percent of American households, according to the study. Americans have 81 million cats living in 32 percent of households. (More people like dogs!)

Dogs and cats can give us rabies and leishmaniasis, and we can give them staph infections and flu viruses. But future diseases could be much worse, the authors write: "Small companion animals might play a major role in potential zoonoses of the future, either by acting as a reservoir or as an intermediate host."

Michael Day, professor of Veterinary Pathology at the University of Bristol in the UK, noted that the WHO and other organizations already monitor livestock health.

"The benefits of pet ownership on human health, well-being and development are unquestionable, but as dogs and cats have moved from the barn, to the house, to the bedroom, the potential for disease spread to humans increases," Day said in a statement.

Obviously, it would not be simple to do something like this--the paper says it would be a "major political, financial and scientific challenge." The study is published online in Emerging Infectious Diseases.

[via ScienceDaily]

Researchers in Japan are using a brain-machine interface to control the actions of a humanoid robot. The goal is to allow people "to feel embodied in the body of a humanoid robot," in the words of one researcher.

Roboticists at the CRNS-AIST Joint Robotics Laboratory, a collaboration between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the Japanese Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, are trying to interpret brain waves into actions that can be understood by a robot. In the video below, a volunteer wears an electrode cap and watches a screen with flashing dots, which is used to teach his brain to associate flickering objects with actions. By focusing his attention, he can induce actions, which are translated from his brain activity into robotic motion.

A signal processing unit on a computer translates his brain activity and classifies it into a series of tasks. Then the team can instruct the robot on which task to perform. It could help paraplegics who can't perform certain tasks on their own. Or it could be used for crazyfuture tourism, says Abderrahmane Kheddar, director of the JRL: "A paraplegic patient in Rome would be able to pilot a humanoid robot for sightseeing in Japan."

[DigInfo]

Since we inaugurated these awards a quarter of a century ago, the pace of innovation has quickened with every passing year. Twelve months is now a very long time. It takes something greater to be revolutionary than it did when we first saw HDTVs, electric cars, or even the iPhone. Now, more than ever, this is truly the Best of What's New. Check out all 100 award winners here.

The idea of dark materials might sound familiar to you if you read fantasy trilogies or like casually memorizing lines from Paradise Lost. Unfortunately, this material isn't used to create more worlds--but it might help save this one. Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VACNT), the darkest material known to man, was developed by researchers at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in 2007. With the ability to absorb 99.970 percent of light, VACNT has significant implications in solar energy research. For instance, it can be used to improve the efficiency of solar panels.

Rennselaer's researchers aren't the only ones attempting to produce ultra-dark materials. They've been in a quasi-competition with NASA, which developed a material also made of carbon nanotubes and created using the same process. But at only 99.5 percent absorption, it is not quite as dark as Rennselaer's VACNT.

Why a race for dark materials at all? Isn't regular black paint dark enough to absorb all the colors of light? Conventional black paint and graphite absorb most visible light but reflects a significant amount due to dielectric interface--a moderate reflection of 5 to 10 percent in the air. Researchers found that they could create a super black object by developing long, low-density nanostructures with deep pores, ordered in arrays. In the static electron micrograph, the material looks almost like a forest.

While scientists have not yet reached the goal of achieving near-zero reflection, RPI's dark material--and future, better versions of it--can be used for solar energy conversion and pyroelectric detectors. Since the material absorbs light, it could also be used in cooling applications. No wonder there's a race to perfect it--in a warming world, it could be pretty darn useful.

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.

Materials science has been at the root of material progress, and indeed all progress, for so long that we may be tempted to think that its greatest contributions are behind us. The Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age: They were all defined by dramatic improvements in how we manufactured and manipulated everyday objects, from knapped flint for sharper ax heads to alloyed aluminum for lighter airplane wings. But now, in the Silicon Age, isn't progress just about manipulating ones and zeros?

The answer is a resounding no. Materials matter more today than ever, which is why Popular Science dedicated much of this issue to them. In labs across the globe, scientists are hard at work creating the foundations of tomorrow's products: ultrasmooth coatings that repel everything from ice (on those lightweight airplane wings) to Staphylococcus aureus (in germ-ridden hospitals); self-regulating materials that alter their properties with temperature or pH; and piezoelectric films that capture wasted energy, even as other smart materials put that energy to more efficient use. As engineers prove out these materials in test labs and incorporate them into designs that leverage the new capabilities, everything stands to improve, from space suits ready for interplanetary exploration to nuclear reactors.

In fact, Moore's Law, the central tenet of the Silicon Age, describes a principle not of data science but of materials science-every 18 months, we're going to find a way to cram twice as many components onto a finite chip. So better materials are making better computers, which in turn are helping us design still even better materials. After a couple of million years of progress in materials science, we're still only just getting started.

-The Editors/>

SPIDER-SILK IMPLANTS

Human tissue tears all too easily; spider silk is stronger than steel. So at Utah State, researchers are spinning spider silk into a fix for damaged shoulders and knees. They bred transgenic goats to produce large volumes of spider-silk proteins, spun those proteins into strands, and braided the strands into a fiber. The filaments retain the silk's stretchiness­ but are 100 times as strong as human ligaments and up to 20 times as strong as tendons. Spider silk could also make bone grafts less brittle, says Markus Buehler, who combines spider-silk proteins with collagen at MIT. Both groups estimate spider-silk implants could be approved for use in humans by 2030.

-Sarah Fecht

ELECTRONIC SKIN

Skin doesn't just protect the body-it transmits sensations. By making electronics soft and fleshy, engineers have found a way to make the artificial skin covering grafts and prosthetics feel something, too. Researchers at the University of Illinois have created circuits thin and flexible enough to cover a fingertip, where they convert pressure into electrical signals. A gel developed at Stanford, capable of storing electricity, could become a moldable battery. And Carnegie Mellon's Carmel Majidi is trying to turn rubber into pressure and friction sensors. He embeds it with small channels of liquid metal, which change conductivity as the liquid moves. Electronic skin may be useful to nonhumans, too. "This approach to engineering could potentially make robots and machines a lot more lifelike," Majidi says.

-Lauren Aaronson

A SAFER NUCLEAR REACTOR

The nation's 104 nuclear power plants rely heavily on steel for many of their components, including the pressure vessels that contain uranium. But eventually, the steady barrage of radiation can degrade steel, making it susceptible to fractures. Researchers at Caltech and Los Alamos National Laboratory have created nano­laminate composites, materials that could better disaster-proof future reactors. The interfaces between the composites' metal layers absorb the radiation-induced defects that cause irradiated material to become brittle. In the near term, the laminates could be incorporated into steel to replace aging parts in existing plants, says Caltech engineer Julia Greer. Spacecraft materials could also be coated with nanolaminates, safeguarding them against the cosmic radiation of deep space.

-L.A./>

ELECTRIC RUNNING SHOES

Engineers have been converting mechanical stress into electricity using piezoelectric devices for more than a hundred years, but the goal of powering an iPod by pounding the pavement has remained elusive. Current piezoelectric materials are difficult to manufacture and typically contain toxic metals, such as nickel and lead. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have solved both problems by using a genetically engineered virus that self-assembles into a film. When pressure is applied, helical proteins on the viruses' shells twist and turn, generating a charge. Tapping a postage-stamp-size swatch produces 400 millivolts of electricity, or enough to briefly power an LCD screen. Within 5 to 10 years, says bioengineer Seung-Wuk Lee, the film could be used to harness power from building vibrations, heartbeats, and other types of movement, too.

-S.F.

HEAT-SEEKING SOLAR PANELS

Like sunflowers bending toward light, solar panels can increase their energy output by rotating as the sun moves. But swiveling requires energy too. "Not many materials can respond to sunlight and also have a mechanical response," says Hongrui Jiang, an engineer at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Jiang developed a material that could passively shift the base of a solar array. He combined carbon nanotubes, which absorb sunlight, with
a liquid-crystalline elastomer (LCE) that contracts when it heats up. As solar energy warms one side of the base, the LCE shrinks, causing the solar panel to tilt toward the sun; once that side falls into shadow, the LCE cools and returns to its original height. Field tests show the system increases the efficiency of solar panels by an average of 10 percent.

-S.F.

GERM-FREE HOSPITALS

Bacterial infections caught at U.S. hospitals kill about 100,000 patients annually; staff must continually sterilize surfaces to halt their spread. A material pioneered by a Harvard lab could prevent organisms from growing on medical equipment like catheters in the first place-it's so slippery not even bacteria can stick to it. Based on SLIPS (slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces) technology, it leverages the same mechanism that causes insects to slide into a pitcher plant. Nanopores texturing a solid base, such as Teflon or metal, wick an ultrasmooth lubricant to it; everything else, including germs, simply slides off the liquid coating. Harvard materials scientist Tak-Sing Wong says SLIPS have the same effect on dust, ice, and graffiti, making them potentially useful to many more industries.

-Laura Geggel/>

BAT-WING PLANES

Today's aircraft have nowhere near the agility and precision of nature's best fliers. "Bats
are different from most animals-and from most engineered materials-because they have very flexible wings that offer a lot of interesting aerodynamic properties," says Kenny Breuer, a mechanical engineer at Brown University. Patrick T. Mather and his team at Syracuse University have created a material with a similar quality: The polymer chains line up to make it stiff and stable in one direction, but 12 times as elastic in the other. Five to 10 years from now, such a material could allow the wings of small unmanned aircraft to flap by expanding and contracting, which would enable planes to fly at slow speeds and pivot precisely during surveillance missions.

-L.A.

INTELLIGENT CLOTHING

By donning different clothing, people can prepare for the sun, rain, and cold-but never before have shirts or pants intelligently adapted to their environment. Anna Balazs, an engineer at the University of Pittsburgh, says that within two decades "your clothes could do the thinking for you." A material developed at Pitt and Harvard can regulate its temperature to keep within a certain range. A chemical and mechanical feedback loop within its layers turns a heat-producing reaction on and off at preprogrammed degrees. The same strategy could be used to make materials that self-regulate in response to other stimuli, such as pH, light, or glucose-meaning water pipes, windows, and medical devices could be just as smart.

-S.F./>

SELF-REPAIRING COMPUTERS

Integrated circuits may have enabled the digital age, but they are still subject to one great limitation: physical damage. A new coating developed at the University of Illinois will be able to bring a dead circuit back to life in less than a millisecond, even if you "take an X-Acto knife and slice through it," says engineer Nancy Sottos. Her team coated gold wires with microscopic capsules of liquid metal. When a wire snaps, the capsules break open and the liquid metal fills the crack, restoring electrical conductivity. Within 5 to 10 years, similar self-healing coatings could cover the wires that connect the components of circuit boards, Sottos says, giving nearly any computer or gadget the ability to repair itself.

-L.A.

IMPENETRABLE ARMOR

"In many areas of materials science, we've reached the best we can do with engineering techniques," says McGill University engineer Francois Barthelat. "I think nature has a lot of new tricks to teach us." The protective armor of many marine animals is up to 3,000 times tougher than the materials that form it. By replicating the structure of fish scales, Barthelat similarly amplified the toughness of a composite material. Engineers at Villanova University stacked ceramic crystals in a softer compound at angles similar to those in a conch shell. Because cracks zigzag and peter out instead of shattering the material, it is 10 times as strong as the base ceramic. Such advances could fortify armor in three to five years.

-L.A.

In between shots of soldiers meeting their brutal end and Sally Field being the most perfect Mary Todd Lincoln of all time (besides maybe MTL herself), the trailer for Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, a war drama in theaters everywhere November 16, presents Honest Abe as an honest badass. "I am the President of the United States of America...clothed in immense power," he declares, because if you're going to abolish slavery you have to be the toughest dude in the room. In our 1957 issue, PopSci celebrated Lincoln as the awesome war scientist he was. We wrote about how the great emancipator tested out and helped create at least a rudimentary form of most of the weapons we knew in the mid-20th century.

Lincoln's crowning achievement in the history books is the Emancipation Proclamation--even though the executive order didn't actually make slavery illegal or give slaves any rights. The fact remains that Lincoln won the Civil War and kept the union together, and catalyzed the dissolve of slavery.

It wasn't just dumb luck. Lincoln took his title of commander-in-chief seriously, helping develop modern weapons to give the North a fighting chance. The president was really into inventors. He talked to them, encouraged them, and tried out their weapons until they produced the desired result. During the war, Lincoln's government issued 16,000 patents while the South only issued 266.

See Lincoln hanging out with these cool weapons? The president knew a thing or two about tinkering and technology because of his log cabin background. Growing up in the backwoods primes you for being creative with tools. That's why Lincoln was down to whittle gunsights for Spencer Carbines, a long-range gun, and test them to see how useful they would be for soldiers. On the right side of the above image, Lincoln turns a crank on a machine gun that he calls the coffee-mill gun. The Union used this weapon in 1862 against the southern cavalry, who totally forfeited the game and ran away.

Read the full article, How Lincoln Modernized The Science Of War.

Apple Maps has, as promised, come a long way since its disastrous beta days, but it's still not great, lacking public transit directions, bike directions, and offline maps, and still getting things wrong sometimes (or jeopardizing national security). We've been waiting for Google's replacement Google Maps app for iOS, but there might be a third competitor: Nokia.

Nokia Maps, formerly Ovi Maps, is actually very good, with all those features Apple Maps lacks, and, don't forget, Nokia owns Navteq, one of the biggest mapping companies in the world. And now Nokia says that "in the coming weeks," the company plans to release a maps app for iOS (and, soon, Android, though Android's Google Maps is pretty outstanding). Hell, if you can't get people to buy Lumias, why not sneak the Lumia's map app onto iPhones? [via NYTimes]

The App Store is filled with health apps and most of them are garbage. At least, that seems to be the overarching sentiment running throughout the Washington Post's extensive examination of bogus health-related apps now cluttering both the iTunes App Store and Google Play. Key statistic: "Of the 331 therapeutic apps, nearly 43 percent relied on cellphone sound for treatments. Another dozen used the light of the cellphone, and two others used phone vibrations. Scientists say none of these methods could possibly work for the conditions in question". You don't say. Read the whole story over at Washington Post.

[Washington Post]

Excellent Tumblr Thanks, Textbooks found this great one from a physics textbook involving a somewhat questionable activity. [via Maggie Koerth-Baker and Popperfront]