This infographic is a step-by-step guide for building a nerd's dream: grab some PVC, spray paint, LEDs, and a few other DIY trinkets, then make a lightsaber.

There are a few tools in here not everyone is going to have access to (a soldering iron, for example), but if you've got them, it's a relatively simple 22 steps to your sword of the future. Make the handle out of PVC, put on some spray paint for flair, and add LEDs for the glow. If you're proficient with the tools, there's also enough wiggle room in the instructions to personalize, letting you toy with the handle width and, of course, the color. (If Samuel L. Jackson can get an exception made for a purple saber, so can you.)

This would've been great for Halloween. But then again, maybe we want to wait until next year and plan a Darth Mickey costume around the Lucasfilm/Disney merger.

[visual.ly via Instructables]

It's beginning to look a lot like the holiday season. With this time of year comes the stress of trying to find the right gift for those hard-to-buy-for men in your life. Well, this season, don't worry-the folks at Stanley have your back. With their new line of amazing tools, they're virtually taking all the worry out of the holiday season. Everything from their new stud sensor line, FatMax Magnetic Measuring Tape, mechanic's tools, screwdrivers, storage options, and more; Stanley has something for him.

Has he been putting off hanging that flat screen television on the wall, for fear it will fall off in the middle of the night? With Stanley's new FatMax Stud Sensor 300 he will fear no more. A Backlit LCD screen with AC detection will clearly display any live wires, making sure he's always out of harms way. And the auto calibration, marking channel, and OnePass™ center-find technology will make sure every screw will be in the center of every stud.

They say, "measure twice, cut once" and with Stanley's newest FatMax tape, measuring never came so easily. It features a magnetic hook that provides greater accuracy and longer reach than competing models. The Tru-zero magnetic hook is accurate up to ± 1/32-inch and will make sure your dad, husband, or son is always going to make the right measurement.
Does your loved one like to tinker around in the garage? Have you ever heard him complain about not having the right-sized socket wrench? Well then Stanley's line of mechanic's tools is the perfect stocking stuffer for him. There are a plethora of different sizes and options in the mechanic tool line, so you're sure to find the right one to fit his needs whether he's a racecar enthusiast or a weekend warrior.

Is he still using butter knives to turn a screw? That's a good sign that it's time to upgrade his old, stripped screwdrivers with one of Stanley's ergonomic, dependable ones. Stanley has many screwdrivers and screwdriver sets to choose from and the good news is they are ultra-affordable and can be customized to fit his needs. So, go ahead and help him get on the right track and upgrade this most fundamental, useful, and practical of all tools.

Now, the question is, where's he going to store all his amazing new Stanley tools? Look no further than Stanley's line of storage options. Everything from Mobile Work Centers, Rolling Workshops to FatMax structural foam boxes and Contractor Chests-Stanley has the right storage for every tool.

The clash between Israel and Hamas-backed fighters in the Gaza Strip continued over the weekend and into today, with the death toll in Gaza inching toward 100 (there were 91 recorded deaths as of Monday morning). But amid the troubling images and stark numbers trickling out of the conflict there, one set of numbers represents a rare bright spot: the number of Hamas rockets that Israel's "Iron Dome" missile-defense shield is knocking out the sky. Scattered reports from various Israeli officials and news media suggest that Iron Dome has intercepted more than 300 rockets fired at Israeli population centers since hostilities began, or between 80 and 90 percent of rockets targeted.

As missile defense goes, these success rates are more or less unprecedented. One of the five Iron Dome batteries deployed to southern Israel reportedly intercepted a full 100 percent of incoming rockets fired during one Hamas salvo. The overall success rate has been described by various officials at anywhere between 75 and 95 percent. Calling it a conservative 85 percent success rate still puts Iron Dome in a class by itself where missile defense systems are concerned. Hitting a screaming rocket with a screaming rocket is, after all, really, really difficult.

When many people think of missile interceptors, they think of the American-made MIM-104 Patriot missile interceptor system and its much-heralded successes during the 1991 Gulf War, during which then-President George H. W. Bush called the Patriot missile interceptor overwhelmingly successful, using numbers that described it as something like 97 percent effective. But we've since learned that those success rates were really much lower--mostly after changing the parameters of what defines a success (later analysis showed that the Iraqi Scuds that the Patriots were "intercepting" were simply failing in flight far more often than the Patriots were destroying them). The dubious success of the Patriot system has since served as a lingering reminder--in-flight missile-defense is a challenge that even the most technologically advanced military in the world hasn't been able to overcome.

So how is Israel pulling it off with such unmitigated success? Intercepting Soviet-designed Scuds and the much smaller Grad and Qassam rockets largely fielded by Hamas are in some ways very different, but the primary problem is fairly universal. Any ballistic missile interceptor system needs to meet at minimum three requirements: it must have a way to detect and track an incoming projectile, it must be able to use that tracking data to predict the future course of that projectile, and it must be able to accurately be able to get in the way of that projectile. In Israel's case there's a further requirement. Because most of Hamas' arsenal has a range of just two to 20 miles, it has to do all of this very, very quickly.

Iron Dome satisfies all three of these requirements remarkably well. It starts with radar stations that detect a missile or artillery shell moving toward Israeli airspace. Trajectory data on the missile are beamed to a battle control system, which quickly assembles a ballistic profile of the missle--where it is now, how fast it is moving, and where it is going to be. The system and its overseers then make a decision; Is this projectile a threat to a populated area, or is it destined for a rural field or some place where people are not likely to be harmed. Roughly two-thirds of the rockets fired thus far from Gaza have fallen into the latter category, and Iron Dome lets those rockets fall harmlessly.

But if an incoming rocket is perceived to be a threat, that radar data is quickly transferred to a fixed or mobile missile battery--each of which packs 20 radar-guided Tamir interceptor missiles. Those missiles have thus far proven adequately effective in tracking down Hamas missiles in flight and destroying them before they can reach their targets. Moreover, they seem to have grown even more effective since the system was first deployed last year. In three separate (but much smaller) engagements last year, Iron Dome experienced success rates ranging from 80 percent in a short April conflict to a low of roughly 30 percent last October, when it stopped just three of nine incoming missiles. An inquiry into that October event found that a radar failure caused some of the interceptors to deviate from their marks. That, quite apparently, has been fixed.

Another driver of Iron Dome's success could be as simple as Moore's Law. It takes a lot of raw computing power to rapidly build a ballistic profile of a fast-incoming projectile, make a series of quick decisions concerning potential lethality, and launch a countermeasure capable of intercepting said projectile in-flight. One reason Iron Dome is showing a much more robust capability than the Patriot system did in the early 1990s could simply be the fact that its battle control hardware and software are several generations more advanced than those early interceptor systems.

Whatever the reason, Iron Dome is working, and there are reasons to celebrate this technological achievement--lives saved, property spared, infrastructure preserved, continuity of daily life unchanged--and reasons to temper our optimism. As Cold War missile ideology demonstrated, a defensive countermeasure that is perceived as too potent can sometimes make an adversary feel cornered, pushing it toward more extreme measures. As one senior Israeli official has pointed out, Iron Dome must be frustrating Hamas, and without the ability to point to battlefield successes, it cannot declare any kind of political or military victory, nor does it have much to negotiate with. That could prompt Hamas to keep up the fight longer than it might otherwise.

The Sequoia supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, recently crowned world champion of supercomputers, just simulated 10 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections among them--the most powerful brain simulation ever. IBM and LLNL built an unprecedented 2.084 billion neurosynaptic cores, which are an IBM-designed computer architecture that is designed to work like a brain.

IBM was careful to say it didn't build a realistic simulated complete brain-- "Rather, we have simulated a novel modular, scalable, non-von-Neumann, ultra-low power, cognitive computing architecture," IBM researchers say in an abstract (PDF) of their new paper. It meets DARPA's metric of 100 trillion synapses, which is based on the number of synapses in the human brain. This is part of DARPA's cognitive computing program, called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE).

To do it, IBM used its cognitive computing chips, which the company unveiled last year. They are designed to recreate the phenomena between spiking neurons and synapses. More than 2 billion of these cores were divided into 77 brain-inspired regions, with gray matter and white matter connectivity, according to IBM. The gray matter networking comes from modeling, and the white matter networking comes from a detailed map of connections in the macaque brain. The combined total 530 billion neurons and 100 trillion synapses ran 1,542 times slower than real time--actually quite fast, in computing terms.

The ultimate goal is a computer that works like a brain, and can analyze information in real time from multiple sources. Under SyNAPSE, it would also be able to rewire itself dynamically in response to its environment, just like real brains do. It would also have to be very small and low-power, which in some ways will be even more challenging than developing the connections. IBM presented its latest results at the Supercomputing 2012 conference.

[IBM via KurzweilAI]

For the past few years, scientists at Cambridge University have been working with dogs who were paralyzed in accidents to test therapies and new cell treatments that reverse the damage. A new study shows that their methods can work, restoring dogs' ability to walk by using cells grown from the lining of the animals' noses. In the study, 23 dogs with transplanted cells were able to walk again.

These are called olfactory ensheathing cells, and they surround olfactory neurons that allow us to smell. These are the only part of the body where nerve cells continually regenerate in adults, and as such they've long been a promising target for scientists studying nerve injuries--especially spinal cord injuries, as the BBC points out. This is the first study to use them in animals with real-life injuries, rather than animal models of paralysis.

The trial involved 34 pet dogs, 23 of which received the treatment and 11 of which didn't, serving as controls. The 23 dogs in the study had olfactory ensheathing cells removed from their inner noses, and the cells were multiplied and refined in a lab. Then the animals had them injected into the sites of their injuries. Many of the dogs that received the transplant saw improvement in their ability to walk, the BBC reports. None in the control group regained the use of their hind legs.

In this video, Jasper the dachshund can't use his hind legs at the start of the trial. After the injection, he can walk with all four legs and has a huge smile on his face.

Jasper's owner, May Hay, said before the trial, Jasper was unable to walk at all.

"When we took him out we used a sling for his back legs so that he could exercise the front ones. It was heartbreaking. But now we can't stop him whizzing 'round the house, and he can even keep up with the two other dogs we own," she said in a statement. "It's utterly magic."

Many of the dogs in the study were dachshunds, which are particularly prone to spinal cord injuries, because of their body shape.

The researchers say the therapy worked by forging new connections among nerve fibers in the damaged regions of the dogs' spinal cords. This enabled the dogs' motor cortices to communicate with the nerves in their legs, allowing them to move their hind limbs again. Some of the dogs in the study have been using wheelchairs or other mechanisms to move around, but were able to re-learn how to coordinate their front and back legs.

Robin Franklin, a regeneration biologist at the Wellcome Trust MRC Stem Cell Institute and study co-author, said humans should not get too excited yet, however. "We're confident that the technique might be able to restore at least a small amount of movement in human patients with spinal cord injuries, but that's a long way from saying they might be able to regain all lost function," he said in a statement. "It's more likely that this procedure might one day be used as part of a combination of treatments, alongside drug and physical therapies."

[University of Cambridge via BBC]

Across cultures and countries, humans experience a pretty well-defined U-shaped curve in our happiness. We're happy when we're young, and well-being descends into its nadir during midlife, only to rise again in old age. Midlife crises are a cliche, but they're real--and they're just as real in our primate cousins, apparently.

A study of 336 chimpanzees and 172 orangutans found a similar U-curve in their well-being, according to researchers in the UK, US and Japan. The animals were housed in zoos and sanctuaries in the US, Japan, Canada, Australia and Singapore, and keepers and caretakers measured their well-being. The animals received happiness scores, adapted from similar subjective measurements used on humans. It turns out they also experience a U-shaped curve in happiness throughout life, the researchers say.

It cannot be because of mortgages, marital breakup, mobile phones, or any of the other paraphernalia of modern life. Apes also have a pronounced midlife low, and they have none of those.

Obviously, economic changes, social forces and cultural norms influence midlife unhappiness in humans, and the researchers say they're not ruling that out. But the fact that great apes also experience a happiness drought in midlife suggests there are evolutionary and biological reasons.

"We hoped to understand a famous scientific puzzle: why does human happiness follow an approximate U-shape through life?" said economist Andrew Oswald from the University of Warwick. "We ended up showing that it cannot be because of mortgages, marital breakup, mobile phones, or any of the other paraphernalia of modern life. Apes also have a pronounced midlife low, and they have none of those."

There are several possible biological explanations, the authors say in their paper. Happiness is associated with longevity in both humans and apes, so it makes sense that older apes are happy. It could also be that the U-shape in happiness stems from changes in brain structure that happen as humans and other apes age, the researchers say. Or, and this is interesting, it could be that older adults rely on behavior to regulate their emotions. "For example, they may seek out situations and group members that elicit more positive emotions or shift to goals that are more attainable in older age," the authors say. We buy nice cars; middle-aged apes hang out with different friends.

"Our results imply that human wellbeing's curved shape is not uniquely human and that, although it may be partly explained by aspects of human life and society, its origins may lie partly in the biology we share with great apes," the authors write.

The study is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The aspiring rocket scientist in your life probably already has a model space shuttle, a telescope and an impressive cache of gadgets, so don't worry about those. What this person really needs are some accessories and home decor to reflect his (or her) professed love. Check out our gallery for some suggestions.

Click above to launch the photo gallery

The threat of autonomous killer robots is very real and we have to stop them before it's too late. Such is the theme of many a sci-fi film, but it's now also the official position of Human Rights Watch, which today published a 50-page report titled "Losing Humanity" that calls for an international treaty banning fully autonomous weapons technology from the battlefield. That makes perfect sense, though HRW is taking a rather straightforward stance toward technology and terminology that is anything but. Defining autonomy and just how autonomous is "fully autonomous" makes this a difficult issue to talk about in regulatory terms, much less to ban outright under internationally recognized rules of war.

[PhysOrg]

Centuries of underwater volcanic activity have blanketed the ocean floor in precious metals. Now, with the aid of the world's most powerful excavation machines, a company called Nautilus Minerals is set to begin extracting those metals from the first large-scale deep-sea mine. The Toronto-based firm teamed up with the deep-sea trencher specialist Soil Machine Dynamics to build three remotely operated machines. Hybrids of land excavators, sea robots, and vacuum cleaners, they will work together to harvest rock from the seafloor, smash it into bits, and then send it to the surface.

Last year, Nautilus won a 20-year lease from Papua New Guinea to mine in the Bismarck Sea. The company's first customer, Tongling Nonferrous Metals Group of China, has already claimed the entire contents of the first site, Solwara 1, which is roughly the size of 21 football fields and contains 240,000 tons of copper and 25,000 pounds of gold, plus silver and zinc. Although metal prices fluctuate, the total take could approach $3 billion. Nautilus plans to put its machines to work by the end of next year.

HOW TO MINE THE SEAFLOOR

1. From a ship on the surface, a crew sends down remotely operated vehicles (A) to do final surveys and help install 14 sonar buoys, which will track the three mining machines to within 1.5 feet.

2. Workers lower each machine to the seafloor a mile below using a pair of steel cables. One cable provides support (G). The other contains communication, power, and navigation lines (D). During the 1.5-hour descent, operators orient the machine by firing its thrusters (I).

3. Once on the ocean floor, the machines move on Caterpillar-style tracks (J). They send HD video and 3-D sonar maps back to operators aboard the ship.

4. The auxiliary-cutter machine (H) harvests rock from steep and uneven areas on the seafloor. Two hundred tungsten-carbide teeth (K) mounted on an adjustable boom chomp the rock into small pieces. The bulk-cutter machine (B) follows behind, harvesting rock from flat areas using a rotating cylinder (C) equipped with three-inch teeth.

5. Both cutters grind the rocks to under two inches in diameter and then suck them through their bodies, where internal sensors measure the rubble's density, speed of flow, temperature, pressure, and vibration. After that, the cutters deposit it on the seafloor. The process is slow-the cutters will move at about three feet a minute-so the company plans to operate the machines 24 hours a day.

6. The collecting machine (E) follows the cutters and delivers the wet rock slurry to an external 150-ton pump (F) suspended near the ocean floor, which propels the material to the surface through a rubber pipe reinforced with steel and Kevlar.

7. On the ship, a dewatering plant filters the rock slurry and spins it dry. Workers then load the material onto a barge to bring it to shore
for refining.

There's an elevator in the Brown University Biomed building (hopefully fixed by now) that I've heard called "the elevator to hell," not because of destination but because there is a bent blade in the overhead fan. The elevator is typical of older models, a box 2 meters by 2 meters by 3 meters with requisite buzzing fluorescent, making it a perfect resonator for low-frequency sounds. As soon as the doors close, you don't really hear anything different, but you can feel your ears (and body, if you're not wearing a coat) pulsing about four times per second. Even going only two floors can leave you pretty nauseated. The fan isn't particularly powerful, but the damage to one of the blades just happens to change the air flow at a rate that is matched by the dimensions of the car. This is the basis of what is called vibroacoustic syndrome-the effect of infrasonic output not on your hearing but on the various fluid-filled parts of your body.

People don't usually think of infrasound as sound at all. You can hear very low-frequency sounds at levels above 88-100 dB down to a few cycles per second, but you can't get any tonal information out of it below about 20Hz-it mostly just feels like beating pressure waves. And like any other sound, if presented at levels above 140 dB, it is going to cause pain. But the primary effects of infrasound are not on your ears but on the rest of your body.

Because infrasound can affect people's whole bodies, it has been under serious investigation by military and research organizations since the 1950s, largely the Navy and NASA, to figure out the effects of low-frequency vibration on people stuck on large, noisy ships with huge throbbing motors or on top of rockets launching into space. As with seemingly any bit of military research, it is the subject of speculation and devious rumors. Among the most infamous developers of infrasonic weapons was a Russian-born French researcher named Vladimir Gavreau. According to popular media at the time (and far too many current under-fact-checked web pages), Gavreau started to investigate reports of nausea in his lab that supposedly disappeared once a ventilator fan was disabled. He then launched into a series of experiments on the effects of infrasound on human subjects, with results (as reported in the press) ranging from subjects needing to be saved in the nick of time from an infrasonic "envelope of death" that damaged their internal organs to people having their organs "converted to jelly" by exposure to an infrasonic whistle.

By the time 166 dB is reached, people start noticing problems breathing.

Supposedly Gavreau had patented these, and they were the basis of secret government programs into infrasonic weapons. These would definitely qualify as acoustic weapons if you believe easily accessible web references. However, when I started digging deeper, I found that while Gavreau did exist and did do acoustic research, he had actually only written a few minor papers in the 1960s that describe human exposure to low-frequency (not infrasonic) sound, and none of the supposed patents existed. Subsequent and contemporary papers in infrasonic research that cite his work at all do so in the context of pointing out the problems of letting the press get hold of com- plex work. My personal theory is that the reason that his work survived even in the annals of conspiracy is that "Vladimir Gavreau" is just such a great moniker for a mad scientist that he had to be up to something.

Conspiracy theories aside, the characteristics of infrasound do lend it certain possibilities as a weapon. The low frequency of infrasonic sound and its corresponding long wavelength makes it much more capable of bending around or penetrating your body, creating an oscillating pressure system. Depending on the frequency, different parts of your body will resonate, which can have very unusual non-auditory effects. For example, one of the ones that occur at relatively safe sound levels (< 100 dB) occurs at 19Hz. If you sit in front of a very good-quality subwoofer and play a 19Hz sound (or have access to a sound programmer and get an audible sound to modulate at 19Hz), try taking off your glasses or removing your contacts. Your eyes will twitch. If you turn up the volume so you start approaching 110 dB, you may even start seeing colored lights at the periphery of your vision or ghostly gray regions in the center. This is because 19Hz is the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. The low-frequency pulsations start distorting the eyeball's shape and pushing on the retina, activating the rods and cones by pressure rather than light.* This non-auditory effect may be the basis of some supernatural folklore. In 1998, Tony Lawrence and Vic Tandy wrote a paper for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (not my usual fare) called "Ghosts in the Machine," in which they describe how they got to the root of stories of a "haunted" laboratory. People in the lab had described seeing "ghostly" gray shapes that disappeared when they turned to face them. Upon examining the area, it turned out that a fan was resonating the room at 18.98Hz, almost exactly the resonant frequency of the human eyeball. When the fan was turned off, so did all stories of ghostly apparitions.

You would have to use a 240 dB source to get the head to resonate destructively. At that point it would be faster to just hit the person over the head.

Almost any part of your body, based on its volume and makeup, will vibrate at specific frequencies with enough power. Human eyeballs are fluid-filled ovoids, lungs are gas-filled membranes, and the human abdomen contains a variety of liquid-, solid-, and gas-filled pockets. All of these structures have limits to how much they can stretch when subjected to force, so if you provide enough power behind a vibration, they will stretch and shrink in time with the low-frequency vibrations of the air molecules around them. Since we don't hear infrasonic frequencies very well, we are often unaware of exactly how loud the sounds are. At 130 dB, the inner ear will start undergoing direct pressure distortions unrelated to normal hearing, which can affect your ability to understand speech. At about 150 dB, people start complaining about nausea and whole body vibrations, usually in the chest and abdomen. By the time 166 dB is reached, people start noticing problems breathing, as the low-frequency pulses start impacting the lungs, reaching a critical point at about 177 dB, when infrasound from 0.5 to 8Hz can actually drive sonically induced artificial respiration at an abnormal rhythm. In addition, vibrations through a substrate such as the ground can be passed throughout your body via your skeleton, which in turn can cause your whole body to vibrate at 4-8Hz vertically and 1-2Hz side to side. The effects of this type of whole-body vibration can cause many problems, ranging from bone and joint damage with short exposure to nausea and visual damage with chronic exposure. The commonality of infrasonic vibration, especially in the realm of heavy equipment operation, has led federal and international health and safety organizations to create guidelines to limit people's exposure to this type of infrasonic stimulus.

Since different body parts all do resonate and resonance can be highly destructive, could you build a practical infrasonic weapon by targeting a specific low-frequency resonance and thus not have to carry around a heavy amplifier or lock your victim in an elevator car? For example, imagine I am a mad scientist (a total stretch, I know) who wants to build a weapon using sound to make people's heads explode. Resonance frequencies of human skulls have been calculated as part of studies looking at bone conduction for certain types of hearing aid devices. A dry (i.e., removed from the body and on a table) human skull has prominent acoustic resonances at about 9 and 12kHz, slightly lesser ones at 14 and 17kHz, and even smaller ones at 32 and 38kHz. These are convenient sounds because I won't have to lug around a really big emitter for low frequencies, and most of them are not ultrasonic, so I don't have to worry about smearing gel on the skull to get it to blow up. So how about if I just use a sonic emitter that puts out two peaks at the two highest resonance points, 9 and 12kHz, at 140 dB and wait until your head explodes? Well, it'll be a while. In fact, it's not likely to do anything other than possibly make a nice dry skull shimmy on the desk a bit, and it will do nothing to a live head other than make it turn toward you to see where that irritating sound is coming from.

I've always wanted to be able to run around blowing holes in things and chasing away supervillains.

The problem is that while your skull may vibrate maximally at those frequencies, it is surrounded by soft wet muscular and connective tissue and filled with gloppy brains and blood that do not resonate at those frequencies and thus damp out the resonant vibration like a rug placed in front of your stereo speakers. In fact, when a living human head was substituted for a dry skull in the same study, the 12kHz resonance peak was 70 dB lower, with the strongest resonance now at about 200Hz, and even that was 30 dB lower than the highest resonance of the dry skull. You would probably have to use something on the order of a 240 dB source to get the head to resonate destructively, and at that point it would be much faster to just hit the person over the head with the emitter and be done with it. So while we still cannot use infrasound to defend ourselves against dangerous severed heads and have not found the "brown sound" that would allow us to embarrass our friends, infrasound can cause potentially dangerous effects on living bodies-as long as you have a very high-powered pneumatic displacement source or operate in a very contained environment for a long time.

Sorry to be a spoilsport about sonic weapons. I've always wanted to be able to wire up a couple of speakers in my basement lab and run around blowing holes in things and chasing away supervillains, but most sonic weapons are more hype than hyper. Devices such as the LRAD exist and make effective deterrents, but even these have pronounced limitations. A handheld sonic disruptor will have to wait for some major breakthroughs in power source and transducer technologies. But the uses of sound in the future probably hold more interesting promise than the ability to destroy things.

* You can get a similar visual display, called phosphenes, by rubbing your eyes in a dark room.

Excerpted with permission from The Universal Sense: How Hearing Shapes the Mind by Seth S. Horowitz, Ph.D (Bloomsbury USA, 2012). Horowitz is a neuroscientist and former research professor at Brown University. He is the cofounder of NeuroPop, the first sound design and consulting firm to use neurosensory and psychophysical algorithms in music, sound design, and sonic branding. He is married to sound artist China Blue and lives in Warwick, RI. Buy The Universal Sense for $15 here.

Last week, Hostess Brands, Inc. announced it was going out of business, raising fears of an orphaned Twinkie the Kid, inciting Twinkie runs on eBay, and turning up home-made recipes for the snacks. (Somanyrecipes.) It's since been reported that mediation will save the company, but we still need to know: Can you really make a homemade Twinkie taste the same as the version with the Hostess stamp of approval?

The abundance of recipes available online will yield a similar but not identical treat. Twinkies, notoriously, make use of an arsenal of industrial ingredients like sodium caseinate to ensure an exactly reproducible and shelf-stable texture and flavor. Chances are, you don't have a full stockpile of sodium caseinate in your cupboard waiting for you to recreate childhood memories, but that sort of thing is more and more available.

The industrial baking process is tough to replicate at home as well, says Steve Ettlinger, author of Twinkie, Deconstructed. There's a lot you can do at home, but a precisely-timed, industrialized mold-release system isn't in the budget for most families. Neither is a continuous over that quick-bakes them in just a few minutes, or a line to immediately package the snacks as soon as they're done.

For the majority of home cooks, then, those recipes that use more-common ingredients--pound cake mix, powdered sugar, a reasonably large number of eggs--are a safer bet. Nothing wrong with those. In fact, Ettlinger writes in Twinkie, Deconstructed, the original Twinkies were probably closer to the ones produced through such processes; the recipe was only changed later, to increase the shelf life.

So what is it about the way an industrial Twinkie tastes that's so hard to copy at home? The way Twinkie filling leaves a coating on the tongue, Ettlinger says by way of example, might be a result of the polysorbate 60 used as an emulsifier. The flavor of the cake itself comes from artificial vanilla flavor (as opposed to actual vanilla extract). Dextrin is used as a crispness enhancer. The more exotic ingredients in Twinkies also help keep moisture out, something that the sponge-cakey version made with home ingredients can't replicate as easily. "They have perfected the art of stabilization," Ettlinger says of the commercial bakers. Only one of the ingredients on the list is a true preservative -- sorbic acid -- but as a result of the moisture barrier, says Ettlinger, a Twinkie stays fresh much longer than it would if it were made with traditional dairy-based ingredients, which spoil easily and need to be served relatively quickly (but arguably taste better).

When Hurricane Sandy struck New York City a few weeks ago, seven of the 14 under-river subway tunnels flooded as a result of the storm surge, halting operation of some subway lines for more than a week. One possible future safeguard for this kind of disaster: huge, inflatable tunnel plugs. At the University of West Virginia, researchers working with the Department of Homeland Security are testing a massive balloon made of high strength material that could potentially be used to plug subway tunnels during future calamities--be they weather- or terrorism-related--keeping water out and important infrastructure functional. Catch a video of this technology inflating over at the NYT.

[NYT]

We Americans raised about 254 million turkeys this year, and ran up a $9.1 million turkey trade deficit by importing even more birds from Canada, according to the Census Bureau. But the fowl we'll eat this Thursday do not bear much resemblance to the birds enjoyed by European settlers in 1621. They're genetically distinct from their wild ancestors--in fact, they have almost no genetic variation at all, geneticists say.

What's more, the turkeys on our dinner table this week have less genetic variation than both their wild counterparts andother domesticated animals, including pigs and chickens. The lack of variance can be explained by the way Americans like their turkeys--big and huge-breasted. Variation in genes that code for those traits can lead to more scraggly and therefore less appetizing turkeys.

Rob Fleischer, head of the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute's Center for Conservation and Evolutionary Genetics, said the team wanted to compare how domestic Thanksgiving turkeys compared with their ancestral wild brethren from southern Mexico.

"Ancient turkeys weren't your Butterball," he said in a statement.

To figure this out, SI scientists sequenced the full genomes of birds from seven different commercial turkey-breeding lines, as well as the genomes of three south Mexican turkeys collected in 1899. Those turkeys' DNA was extracted at the National Zoo from samples stored in the Smithsonian's collections. Fleischer said the museum specimens worked surprisingly well. This will help geneticists nail down the genes involved in turkey domestication and enfattening.

Europeans apparently discovered turkeys in Mexico during the Spanish Conquest and brought them to Europe, where breeders created different varieties. Researchers say it's important to know the differences between ancient and modern turkeys, just in case something happens to our very genetically non-diverse population.

The new research is published in BMC Genomics.

Smaller is better, thinks every small person, feverishly. And the gadget world goes back and forth on that; smartphones are getting bigger, but tablets seem to be getting smaller. High-end cameras are still huge, but now there are advanced compacts and mirrorless cameras that are nice and small. Here's a gift guide for the modern-day Napoleon in your life who likes tiny gadgets with tons of power to prove size isn't everything--or just for anyone who prefers things on the small side.

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The problem with the backseat--really with the whole rear of the car--is that it's in your way when you're trying to reverse. So researchers at Keio University in Japan have applied optical camouflage technology to automobiles, making the back seat appear transparent so the driver can see straight through it when backing up. After a pair of rear-mounted cameras project what's behind the car onto a half mirror, the video is processed in such a way that objects appear in actual size, giving the driver the same sense of depth he or she would have if the rear of the car were really transparent--something standard camera/monitor setups don't provide. Ultimately the researchers want to kill the blind spot by making the entire car appear transparent to the driver.

[DigInfo News]

Did the Mars rover Curiosity sniff signs of life last week? It's not clear yet, but scientists have definitely seen something interesting. Everyone is keeping mum, but potential findings by the Sample Analysis at Mars instrument, one of Curiosity's prime life-hunting instruments, have Mars-watchers on the edges of their seats.

Curiosity's principal investigator, John Grotzinger, was quoted on NPR Tuesday morning saying the team might have some very big news soon. "Earthshaking" was the word of choice from NPR's science correspondent, Joe Palca. Palca was apparently in Grotzinger's office when some of the data from SAM started streaming in through the Deep Space Network last week. Grotzinger wouldn't tell, but his excitement was obvious: "This data is gonna be one for the history books. It's looking really good," he said.

SAM is one of Curiosity's key science instruments, specifically designed to look for evidence of past life-friendly environments. It is looking for carbon-based molecules, which may or may not indicate life. All life as we know it on Earth contains organic molecules, but organic molecules can exist without any life--scientists have seen signs of carbon compounds on Pluto and elsewhere in space, for instance. Finding them on Mars would definitely be intriguing. At the very least, they'll indicate that Mars could play host, now or in the past, to organic material. That might, might indicate that it could have hosted life, too.

What could it have found?

SAM might have found evidence for some organic material, or it could have found nothing. A nil result would be scientifically interesting, too, because it would help round out the history of Gale Crater. But it's safe to assume that Curiosity's principal investigator probably wouldn't describe a nil result as one for the history books.

Even if SAM found some organic molecules, it's still a long way from finding hard evidence for life, or even evidence that Gale Crater could have been a haven for life in the distant Martian past. But it will be a step toward answering that question. Curiosity's science team already found clear-cut evidence for lots of liquid water in the past, and life as we know it needs water, too.

What is SAM, anyway?

It's a huge part of Curiosity, both physically and metaphorically. Physically speaking, it's a gas chromatograph and two kinds of spectrometers, which can identify compounds inside Martian rocks and soil. The gas chromatograph will bake rocks and soil until they start to vaporize, and analyze the resulting vapors. The mass spectrometer will measure the masses of different elements and minerals, and the tunable laser spectrometer--which we met a week or so ago, when it did not sniff much methane on Mars--will measure the abundances of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen compounds.

Why are people so excited?

Grotzinger is a cautious scientist, and showed restraint during those recent methane findings, as Palca also pointed out. At first, the team noticed a strong methane signal, which created a buzz in the scientific community. But they wanted to be sure it wasn't methane from Earth contaminating Curiosity's instruments, so they made another measurement. Turns out it was Earthly methane the first time, and more detailed analysis showed a negligible amount of the hydrocarbon--not much reason to get excited.

The MSL team is showing caution here, too. Part of the reason is probably that SAM is still doing some work. The instrument contains a self-test kit, which it will use to validate its findings and ensure there are no false positives. The kit is a ceramic sample-blank that contains a known engineered fluorinated organic compound that would not occur in real life on Earth. SAM can use that to double-check what it sees.

But still--when a high-ranking scientist like Grotzinger starts dropping words like "history" and "really good," odds are something interesting in the works. He told NPR it would likely be a few weeks before the team is ready to talk about it--so stay tuned.

A new class of gel-based sponges can be molded to any shape, soak up drugs or stem cells, shrink down and be injected into the body, where they inflate to their original size and leak out their contents. They work kind of like those "dinosaur egg" sponges you can get at museum gift shops, where contact with water inflates little pellets into soft dino-shapes. Only they'll be inside your body.

Bioengineers at Harvard and Caltech designed the sponges, which are primarily made from alginate, a gel made from algae. They can be molded into any shape or size and contain large pores, which allow liquids and large molecules to pass through. The pores can also hold cells, proteins and small-molecule drugs, which can then pass into the body when the alginate starts to break down.

They could be promising new tissue scaffolds at sites of injury or infection, according to David J. Mooney, a bioengineering professor at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. They could transplant stem cells, bulk up tissue that's been lost or degenerated, or even transplant immune cells, Mooney said. Because they can be built to any shape--the team made hearts, stars and squares--they could theoretically be used for any size or shape area in the body.

Over time, the alginate safely degrades in the body, leaving nothing behind but the drugs, cells or proteins it delivered.

The research team formed the sponges using a process called cryogelation, which causes patterns of ice crystals throughout the alginate as it is frozen. When they melt and the water flows away, the gel is left with a network of pores. This also enables the alginate to be soft and spongy, rather than brittle like alginate would otherwise be.

Led by postdoc Sidi Bencherif, an associate in Mooney's lab at SEAS and at Harvard's Wyss Institute, the researchers shoved their sponges through a syringe to prove the material keeps its shape. In lab tests, cells that were delivered with the sponges worked better than transplanted cells that were injected in a standard way, with no sponges. The next step is to refine the sponges so they release their contents in precisely timed ways, Bencherif said.

The research appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

[via Harvard SEAS]

You know we've found something new and interesting when scientists don't really know how to classify it. Using the Subaru Telescope an international team of astronomers has discovered a "super-Jupiter" so massive that it seems they're not quite sure whether to call it a planet or a low-mass brown dwarf (in other words, a star that failed to fire). Located roughly 170 light-years from Earth, the host star is roughly 2.5 times more massive than the sun and its planet is about 13 times larger than Jupiter, making this the highest-mass star to ever host a directly imaged orbital companion--especially one of this size.

Kappa Andromedae is part of what's known as the Columba stellar moving group, and at just 30 million years old it is relatively young (our Sun is estimated to be more like five billion hears old). That's significant if only for the mode of discovery--young stars are good targets for directly imaging exoplanets because their planets (also young) tend to retain more heat leftover from the formation process and thus reveal themselves more readily via infrared emissions. That's how the researchers were able to zero in on Kappa And b, the super-Jupiter orbiting Kappa Andromedae at a distance about 1.8 times Neptune's distance from the Sun, over the glare of its host star.

All of this is scientifically significant because according to the way we understand both star formation and planetary formation there are parameters that determine whether objects of certain masses can do certain things, and both Kappa Andromedae and its orbiting super-object sit at interesting places within these parameters. In theory, Kappa And b probably falls just shy of being massive enough to trigger internal fusion--it is right on the brink of potentially becoming a star (hence the speculation that it might be better classified as a brown dwarf).

And as for Kappa Andromedae, its 2.5 solar masses demonstrate that stars its size are capable of producing these huge orbiting bodies--super-planets relative to those found in our solar system--in their planetary discs. That's something that some theorists thought impossible due to the massive amount of radiation these stars put off (the idea is that this radiation would interfere with the normal planet formation process that takes place around smaller stars like the Sun).

So the strange case of Kappa Andromedae and super-Jupiter Kappa And b gives astronomers some things to think about. The team that discovered it plans to keep the Subaru Telescope trained on it for awhile to better defines the planet's chemistry and orbital characteristics, which will further their understanding of exactly what is going on over there.

[Subaru Telescope]

Postprandial weight gain is all a matter of timing. In the short term-I mean the very short term-any food and drink that you put into your body will make you exactly that much heavier. Eat a pound of marshmallows, and you'll have added one pound to your mass, at least until your body starts to excrete the food or use it for energy. So until metabolic processes kick in, the amount you gain from Thanksgiving dinner depends exactly on the amount you've decided to stuff down your gullet.

That increase will start to wane almost as soon as it begins. The time it takes for food to pass through our digestive tracts varies widely. In general, the "colonic transit" of a meal takes between 20 and 56 hours.

Once you've metabolized and excreted your food and drink, how much remains in your body the next day? If you ate a very salty meal, you'll tend to retain water, and a greater proportion of the weight will linger on your frame. But that water weight, too, will disappear, leaving you with a tiny fraction of your Thanksgiving dinner as lasting weight gain. How much depends on the energy content of the foods consumed: A calorie-packed serving of stuffing will be more fattening than a tall glass of club soda. Excess calories are converted into fat to be used for energy in the future.

Other factors, like the time of day, might also have an impact. For a study published in March, a team of Israeli scientists tested different diets on almost 200 obese adults. One group consumed a greater proportion of their calories at breakfast and lost significantly more weight, on average, than the others in the study.

But whatever your eating schedule, the net weight gain associated with any one repast, no matter how sumptuous, will be very small. Even so, says Lawrence Cheskin, director of the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center, a series of overindulgences, however slight, can accumulate to have a significant, long-term effect. "Even a tiny excess over what your body needs has to be stored. And people do this three times a day, if not more."

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