For a long time now, the ability to print electronic circuitry and components on commercially available 3-D printers has been viewed as the development that will thrust 3-D printing out of its current nascent maker space and into the mainstream of both manufacturing and home fabrication. And while it's already been demonstrated on specialized printers in the lab, researcher at the University of Warwick in the UK have developed a low-cost material they've named "carbomorph" that is conductive, piezoresistive, and printable in currently available, consumer-affordable 3-D printers.

Carbomorph is essentially a carbon filler within a matrix of biodegradable polyester, a medium that can pass through the printer head of a machine like the Bits and Bytes BFB3000 that the Warwick team has now used to create everything from touch-sensitive gaming controllers, a motion-sensing glove, and a mug that knows how much liquid is in it. These things are pretty far from printing, say, a smartphone or a computer in one go, yet they represent an important step forward.

For instance, using their multi-head printer the team fabricated its motion sensing glove from polylactic acid (or PLA, a kind of polyester derived form renewable resources like corn starch) and were able to embed it with strips of carbomorph. Because of its conductivity, the carbomorph can be connected to simple circuit boards and the like. And its piezoresistance means that when the strips are bent or otherwise stressed, their resistance changes--and that resistance can be measured by the aforementioned circuit board attached to the glove. The result is a 3-D printed glove with embedded sensor architecture that knows the degree to which the fingers are extended or clenched.

This might be great for motion capture technology or something like that, but think of broader applications like game controllers that could not only be custom printed to fit a user's hand, but that could also tell not only that the user is pressing a button but how firmly or softly the button is being pressed. This would open up whole new avenues of controllability, enhancing the way we interface with our electronics. With the ability to embed piezoelectric resistance into the very construction of our smartphones, television remotes, and other gadgetry, there are all kinds of opportunities to improve tactile control of electronic interfaces.

The next step here, of course, is the printing of more complex electronic structures, things like wires and cables and eventually batteries and circuit boards themselves, so the final product that rolls out of a 3-D printer is actually a final product. That's likely still a ways off, but the fact that the Warwick team has embedded electronic sensing capacity into products printed on consumer machines bodes well for that future.

[University of Warwick via ExtremeTech]

Click to launch the gallery.

Bears wide receiver Brandon Marshall caused a great engorgement in the wit of the sports commentariat when he admitted that he's "heard (of) guys using like Viagra, seriously" to gain a competitive edge on the field.

It wouldn't be the first time. Cyclists, runners, and football players have been allegedly popping the little blue pill to improve their athletic ability for years--but does it help? The short answer is that no one knows for sure. Correlations between Viagra and better performance (on the field) have been found in some studies, but not in others.

Here's the theory of why it would work: Viagra chemically relaxes muscles and opens arteries to help blood flow more easily. (To help it flow easily all over the body, but, you know, there's the primary mission.) With the blood flowing more easily, oxygen moves to the muscles more easily, which can (theoretically) improve endurance during competition. That's something like the idea that altitude training will improve your oxygen flow and help you move longer distances without tiring, which it does.

So you can imagine why it'd appeal to certain athletes like cyclists and endurance runners hoping to get the oxygen pumping. Don Catlin, former director of the UCLA Olympic Analytical Lab and researcher at the nonprofit Anti-Doping Research, Inc., adds a couple more athletes to that list: mountain climbers and skiers. While studies have not found a link between Viagra and athletic performance at sea level, other studies suggest Viagra improves results at a high altitude, like 6,000 feet or above, which would make it more attractive to high-climbing mountaineers and cross-country skiers. And athletes in those sports do use it, Catlin says.

Some researchers have argued that playing a contact sport at a higher altitude on Viagra would help, too, but Catlin has not found evidence to confirm that. Even researchers who are convinced that Viagra gives athletes an edge say it might only deplete the deficit already caused by competing at a high altitude.

Catlin also suggests that any improvement would be miniscule (although minuscule can sometimes matter). More to the point, athletes could gain that minuscule advantage elsewhere, without having to ask their doctor for erectile dysfunction pills. Altitude training, the process of switching between living at high altitudes and training at low altitudes, could improve performance by 1 to 1.5 percent. That doesn't sound like much, but even that might be more useful than Viagra. Beyond that, illicit substances would make for a relatively major increase in performance, much higher than what an athlete would get from Viagra.

So if that increase is so small, why would athletes use Viagra? Because players have heard (incorrectly, maybe, especially in the case of football players) it increases performance, even if just a smidgen. That's enough of a reason for some athletes. Plus, it's not banned in competitive use. Without some major evidence, Catlin says, official organizations like the World Anti-Doping Agency won't place a ban on a medication for a necessarily discreet problem. ("Excuse us, but we need to make a formal display of this condition before you compete.")

That might be the most convincing evidence that the jury's out on Viagra in sports: officials are unable to make a move when they're between a rock and a hard place.

Sorry.

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

Hey @PopSci, is the #mysteryanimal a baboon?

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

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

Update: And the winner is... @Katy_Stephenson, who correctly guessed the answer within five minutes. Wow!

So, this lovely creature is the Bukharan markhor, a large goat species that happens to be the national animal of Pakistan. It's extremely endangered--only about 2,500 left in the world--but well-known due to its impressive beard and amazing horns. The horns vary based on subspecies; some have very tightly curled horns, some have flatter, more gently curled horns, but all are pretty great. Hello markhor!

Remember those plucky writers who were reckless enough to walk outside during Hurricane Sandy? Oh, right...that was us. But we at PopSci might not be the only ones who enjoy a good disaster despite the danger. A volcano pouring lava into the ocean, for example, might be pretty impossible to resist. Hawaii tourism officials are banking on that.

The Kilauea Volcano has been erupting since 1983, but Saturday lava from its vent started flowing into the ocean. While Hawaii tourism officials expect many tourists to come see the live lava show, security workers are urging them to stay back. The lava forms new land in the ocean that is prone to collapse and could spray people as close as 100 yards away with hot water and molten chunks. Workers put up barriers during approved visiting hours so spectators can enjoy the tourist hotspot without getting seriously injured.

[Reuters]

MIT is calling this tiny device the Swiss army knife of the robotics world, though that doesn't really seem to do it justice. Developed at the university's Center for Bits and Atoms, the milli-motein is a caterpillar-sized robot that can be folded into assorted shapes, signaling a future in which devices shapeshift into almost anything imaginable.

The milli-motein is made of metal rings and strips. The key innovation: specially designed motors that can be instructed to move at certain angles and can hold their own position even with the power switched off. "It's effectively a one-dimensional robot that can be made in a continuous strip, without conventionally moving parts, and then folded into arbitrary shapes," Neil Gershenfeld, head of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, says. The design was inspired by proteins, which naturally assume various shapes. (Milli-motein is a mashup of "protein" and "millimeter.")

The researchers are hoping to make the structure stronger, so that it can be on par with more expensive gearing systems. This tiny Tranformer could then lead to robotic systems that can reconfigure themselves to perform any function needed. It's more futuristic that fixed-function robotics, and it could be cheaper to produce, as well, they say.

[MIT News]

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

• FYI: Why Are Mean People So Hot?
• Can Taking A Pill Before Bed Get Rid Of Bed Bugs?
• 7 Gift Ideas For The Climate Change Denier In Your Life
• Britain Is Testing An Amphibious House That Rises Along WIth Floodwaters
• Skylon Spaceplane Engine Endorsed By European Space Agency
  
• Cadbury's Chocolate Of The Future Doesn't Melt Even At 104 Degrees

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

• Gray Matter: Finding Water Where It's Least Expected
• Boxee TV Review: Not Ready For Primetime
• FYI: Can Viagra Make You A Better Athlete?
  
• Lava's 7-Mile Journey And 10 More Amazing Images From The Past Week
• Meet Spaun, The Most Complex Simulated Brain Ever
• Scientists Find Clearest Evidence Yet Of Monumental Polar Ice Melt
• 10 Animals That Are Smarter Than You Think
• How Does SpaceX Plan To Move Thousands Of Humans To Mars?
• 5 Of Physics's Greatest Sex Scandals

Eric Stackpole's passion for discovery was originally directed toward outer space. As a mechanical engineering student at San Jose State University in 2007, he founded a campus club devoted to building mini satellites. That landed him a job at NASA's Ames Research Center, which led to an emphasis on robotics in graduate school.

One day in 2010, Stackpole's shoe squeaked on a tile floor, reminding him of the "ping" made by sonar; in his mind's eye he saw the lights of a remote-operated vehicle (ROV) vanishing into deep, dark water. Inspired, he began to develop a cheap, camera-enabled mini submersible. He soon realized that Earth has an environment as strange as anything beyond the atmosphere. "There's this mysterious underwater world, a lot like space," he says. "You can move in three dimensions; the equipment has to be rugged. And there are aliens down there-creatures we've never seen before."

The mini submarine is designed to descend to 330 feet, too deep for scientific divers.Stackpole's sub is simple and cheap by marine science standards; it weighs 5.5 pounds and costs around $500 in mostly off-the-shelf parts. Two onboard battery packs provide about 1.5 hours of runtime. The vessel is designed to descend to 330 feet, too deep for scientific divers. That makes it a rich zone for observation-or, as Stackpole puts it, "armchair adventures and daily discovery."

The operator controls the ROV using either a keyboard or a USB game controller, and images are beamed to the surface over a tether plugged into a computer's Ethernet port. The sub can carry lightweight payloads, such as sensors or water samplers, which also makes it a valuable instrument for environmental monitoring.

Through mutual acquaintances, Stack-pole met David Lang, a community manager for a web startup. Lang had once run a Berkeley, California, sailing school, and the two quickly bonded. With an ROV, they agreed, anyone could probe underwater realms-especially anyone willing to solder, wire, and glue together a personal mini sub based on Stackpole's plans.

They envisioned a DIY community of professionals and amateurs, collaborating on robotic exploration for fun and science. Enthusiastic to foster it, they made the ROV open source, so anyone could improve upon its design and programming. They also started a Kickstarter campaign to crowd-fund the assembly and distribution of a couple dozen kits. Just two hours after launch, they had hit their $20,000 target; a month later they'd raised $111,622 and taken more than 100 orders. Kits began shipping to Kickstarter backers this fall, and the pair plan to set up an online store early next year.

The sub, now dubbed OpenROV, made its inaugural trip into Hall City Cave, a partially flooded cavern in California, last January, followed by a dive to the Aquarius Reef Base in the Florida Keys in June. Stackpole is now in Antarctica working on a science team; he's hoping to send Lang images from OpenROV's first voyage at the South Pole.
--Emily J. Gertz

Why a strand of hair bends or falls the way it does may sound like a simple question, but the answer is rather convoluted. On one level, the texture of a person's hair derives from his or her genes. A 2009 study looked at the genetics of waves and curls and reported a heritability of between 85 and 95 percent. (That means about nine tenths of the variation in hair texture within the sample could be ascribed to DNA.) How does this play out at the level of a single hair? Research shows that the curvature of a strand depends on the nature of its follicle. When a follicle is asymmetrical, the hair that it produces is oval in shape and tends to curl. When it's symmetrical, the strand that emerges grows round and straight.

A curly hair can also be described according to its composition and structure. A research team based in Clichy, France, and working for the cosmetics firm L'Oréal, used electron microscopy to compare straight and curly hair fibers. The former were circular in cross section and symmetrical in structure. The latter, though, had an uneven distribution of a particular type of keratin. This protein-which, along with other varieties of keratin, serves as the primary component of hair-accumulated near the inside edge of a curled hair, beneath the curve.

Even if you're born with symmetrical follicles, there are some ways in which straight hair can turn curly. Scientists have found that a cellular receptor called EGFR clusters on the outer root sheath of a follicle and appears to regulate the growth of hair. Certain cancer drugs that inhibit these receptors may cause a patient to develop curly hair as a side effect.

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

People had hopes "The Daily," the once-a-day, tablet-exclusive newspaper from media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, would help bring publishing into the digital age. It had enough money behind it, but it wasn't enough: the venture is folding. It's hard to say exactly how this will affect media companies investing in tablet publishing, but it'll definitely be something for them to consider. [New York Times]

Earlier this fall, a forensic chemist at the Massachusetts-based crime lab William A. Hinton State Laboratory was charged with obstruction of justice. Annie Dookhan allegedly mixed drug samples, neglected to test them properly and forged colleagues' signatures throughout her nine-year career to drive up her productivity. She might not have even received the master's degree she claimed to have (University of Massachusetts officials are denying her credentials). Now a grand jury is investigating the case and is expected to return indictments against the disgraced chemist some time after today. The story is like something straight out of "Law & Order."

Which got us wondering: What exactly do forensic chemists do? And why might some feel compelled to cheat?

In crime television shows, investigators brush evidence into tiny baggies in leaky warehouses, then send the samples off to the crime lab. Minutes later, the results magically materialize, the bad guy gets convicted, and everyone else lives happily ever after.

But as Dookhan's case suggests, the reality is much less tidy and offers a dark portrait of the perverse incentives of a key aspect of the criminal justice system.

Forensic chemists are, first and foremost, scientists. These technicians usually have degrees in biology, chemistry, biochemistry or forensic science, and are trained in the sanctity of the scientific method. They specialize in either drug analysis, toxicology or arson and explosives. Adam Hall, an instructor at Boston University's School of Medicine, says drug analysts examine the five Ps: pills, plants, paraphernalia, powders and precursors (substances obtained from chemicals that are synthesized into new drugs.)

Hall says crime labs find that the three most commonly abused drugs are marijuana, cocaine and heroin. Marijuana, in particular, is easily identifiable. But even in the face of glaringly obvious evidence, lawyers don't simply present the sample as is. Each sample must be weighed, tested and confirmed as the drug in question. Dookhan was accused of "dry-labbing," looking at samples and slapping on labels without testing, which Hall says isn't considered an appropriate practice in crime labs.

"An untrained analyst would say that a white powder must be cocaine in drug analysis, but it could be almost anything," Hall says. "You certainly could group like items together but they would still require analysis to be able to determine what each of those items are."

Why does that matter? Because in a court of law, some drug convictions result in harsher sentences than others. A forensic chemist's tests could mean the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony; whether the case is tried on the state or federal level; and even whether the DEA gets involved.

You have to be there for 15 years before you get a bag of cocaine from Paris Hilton.

That helps explain the severity of Dookhan's alleged malfeasance, resulting in an estimated 60,000 tainted drug samples. Why would someone risk it? Dr. James Woodford has worked in crime labs all over the country since 1975, noting how for many technicians, the job is heavily bound by politics, hierarchy, money, and plain old boredom.

There are three tiers of forensic chemists. Woodford says that forensic chemists in the lowest tier have the tedious job of filling out thick stacks of drug-analysis documents for minor cases simply to please the prosecution. "The technician hands them all in and what happens--nothing," Woodford says. "Most of the cases get worked out or dropped."

Woodford adds that crime labs have a high turnover rate for low-level technicians because the job doesn't pay well and isn't nearly exciting as the crime shows would have you believe. The incentive is to either quit or work your way up through the tiers as quickly as you can. The high-profile, glamorous cases are usually saved for the top-tier technicians. "You have to be there for 15 years before you get a bag of cocaine from Paris Hilton," Woodford says.

Therein lies one possible motivation to cheat: Flying through your casework offers a fast track to the top-tier work--to big cases that aren't likely to be dropped. Dookhan admitting she forged colleagues' signatures because, as the Boston Globe reported, she "wanted to get the work done," which is a daily struggle for lower tier technicians.

"Out of the hundreds of drug tests you do in a week almost all of them go away--you feel like you've done nothing," Woodford says. "It's just exasperating. It's grunt work. And the technicians start taking shortcuts."

Like the desktop printer and the fax machine, the fluorescent overhead light might soon see a diminished role around the office. Researchers at Wake Forest University have developed a field-induced polymer elecroluminescent (FIPEL) lighting technology that silently gives off a soft, white glow, sans the annoying hum and yellow tint of fluorescent bulbs or the sharp, bluish hue of LED light fixtures.

FIPEL technology is by no means brand new, but turning it into a viable light source has taken some time. The Wake Forest team used a multi-layer white-emitting blend of polymers imbued with a small amount of nanomaterials that glow when stimulated with an electric charge. This nano-engineered polymer matrix is essentially a whole new type of light bulb, different from both the filament-filled Edison bulb and mercury-exciting fluorescent, as well as the LEDs and compact fluorescents (CFLs) that have been slowly replacing some traditional light sources in recent years.

Moreover, it is at least twice as efficient as CFLs (which are filled with hazardous materials that can leak into the environment if the bulb is broken--FIPELs are not) and roughly on par with LEDs, both of which emit light that is not quite suited to the human eye. And the FIPEL technology is tunable--it can be manufactured to give off the soft, white light human eyes prefer or to emit any other color, making it potentially useful for billboard lighting and other displays. Its form factor is even customizable--it can be molded into bulbs with Edison connections to fit existing fixtures, but also into large sheets or panels that could fit into ceiling tiles or wall spaces to provide lighting that is unobtrusively embedded in the spaces around us.

Perhaps best of all, FIPEL technology has been around for quite a while and is already well-understood, meaning two things: Firstly, we know the technology is long-lasting (one of the researchers has had a prototype FIPEL light source that he claims has worked for a decade), and secondly we already know how to produce it. This kind of FIPEL lighting could be on the consumer market as early as next year.

Americans waste 40 percent of the food they buy, whether because they forget about it in the back of the fridge, fail to wrap it properly, or something else. It's equivalent to about 20 pounds per person per month, according to one study. Now a new spinoff company claims it can preserve at least some of our food for longer, by zapping it with microwaves.

Nuked bread can last up to 60 days, according to the company, MicroZap, which spun off from Texas Tech University. Among wasted foods, bread is a major culprit, meeting its end in the garbage can once it becomes festooned with greenish growths of mold. This usually happens within 10 days of the bread being baked. MicroZap's method kills the mold spores, keeping bread mold-free for two months and helping Americans reduce some of their food waste. Now you could preserve all those loaves of Wonder Bread you hastily grabbed at the supermarket during the Hostessocalpyse!

The equipment, which looks like a CT scanner for food, was originally developed to kill organisms like multi-resistant staph bacteria and salmonella. But its developers realized it also kills bread mold in about a 10-second zap. It works much like a home microwave, but the waves are produced in various frequencies, which allows for uniform heating, MicroZap CEO Don Stull told the BBC.

The technology could also preserve fresh food like poultry, produce and more. Just no cantaloupes, unfortunately; they get damaged tumbling around in the mold-zapping machine.

[BBC]

In a frigid lake some 65 feet below Antarctica's icy surface, NASA scientists and their partners from the Desert Research Institute in Nevada and several other institutions have made an important discovery both for our understanding of life on Earth and for the search for extraterrestrial life. In the briny depths of Lake Vida, an oxygen-free, nitrous oxide-rich saltwater body buried underneath Antarctic ice for millennia, the researchers have found a thriving colony of bacteria. This, in an environment that would instantly extinguish most life.

Despite the cold (it averages 8 degrees below zero) and lack of sunlight, as well as the extreme isolation and high salinity (six times greater than that of normal seawater), these bacterial colonists survive, and apparently have been surviving for some time. Previous studies of Lake Vida suggest the icy habitat has been isolated from the surrounding environment for more than 3,000 years, making it an excellent analog for the conditions that might be found in the subsurface environs of Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's Enceladus.

Studying these bacteria and the processes by which they sustain life in such harsh environments could lead to better understandings of how life might survive (or has survived) on planetary bodies aside from Earth. For instance, geochemical analysis of the bacteria found at Lake Vida suggest that the brine and the iron-rich sediments blanketing the bottom of the lake share in a chemical reaction that produces nitrous-oxide and molecular hydrogen. That hydrogen may be what provides energy to the life cycle that exists there--a mechanism for supporting microbial life that isn't well-understood but could underpin ecosystems elsewhere in the universe.

More on this over at NASA.

[NASA]

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity can't yet confirm any organic compounds on the Red Planet, NASA scientists said today--but the rover is seeing some intriguing chemicals, which will lead to further careful analysis about whether its home in Gale Crater could have played host to life.

"SAM has no definitive detection to report of organic compounds," said Paul Mahaffy, the principal investigator for the SAM instrument, which stands for Sample Analysis at Mars. The instrument did see some carbon-containing material--it's just not clear whether the carbon in it comes from Mars, or whether Curiosity toted it from Earth. What's more, at least some of the detected material was most likely created in chemical reactions inside Curiosity's belly, as the SAM instrument's oven baked sand samples.

The results mark the first soil sample analysis from the SAM lab suite, the most complex chemistry lab ever sent to another world. "We really consider this a terrific milestone," Mahaffy said at a news conference Monday.

The presence of perchlorate may be the biggest news from the press conference, which kicked off the day at the American Geophysical Union's fall meeting in San Francisco. The Mars Phoenix lander also saw evidence of this chlorine-oxygen compound, which could conceivably be used as an energy source by Martian microbes. The analysis of these chemicals--which involves baking samples inside SAM's oven and measuring the vapors that come out--in and of itself created new chemicals which the sensitive instruments picked up. Among those newly formed chemicals were some chlorinated methane compounds.The chlorine is from Mars, Mahaffy said. The carbon's origin is still unclear. Scientists will try to figure it out by measuring isotope ratios and making other measurements.

Other results from Curiosity's first few months on Mars include some analysis of the soil and rocks, which are apparently very similar in both chemical composition and appearance to rocks in other spots on the planet. The Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity rovers saw very similar soil in different locations. At Curiosity's present location, a site in Gale Crater called Rocknest, the soil is about half volcanic material and half crystalline materials, like glass. Interestingly, the water bound up in this soil is much, much heavier than water in Earth's oceans, Mahaffy said.

Scientists, Curiosity followers and Marsphiles around the world eagerly awaited Monday's announcement because of earlier rumors and speculation that the rover team was about to share something "Earth-shaking." Curiosity is not designed to find life, just evidence of environments that could have played host to it at some point. Finding organic molecules would be an interesting step toward an eventual life-finding experiment. Organic compounds in this case means carbon-containing complex molecules, not something alive (or formerly alive). These compounds rain down on all terrestrial planets and are found throughout space, and they do not necessarily indicate the presence of life.

For one small drift of sand, the SAM and CheMin (for Chemistry and Mineralogy) instruments did a whole lot of work, said Curiosity's project scientist, John Grotzinger of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "We used almost every part of our science payload examining this drift," he said in a statement.

A couple weeks ago, Grotzinger was quoted in a story by NPR saying some freshly downloaded data from SAM would be "one for the history books." This fed speculation about what the results could be, although the agency tried to tamp down expectations. Grotzinger said today he was misunderstood, and that he meant that the continuity of data from SAM, and the mission as a whole, would be historic in its breadth and depth.

"I've learned that you have to be careful about what you say and even more careful about how you say it," he told reporters Monday. "We work at the speed of science. The rest of the world works at the speed of Instagram."

What do empty thoughts look like? According to the artist Gustav Metzger, they look like the weird blobby object above. Metzger hooked up his brain to a robotic sculpting machine that carved away at a piece of Portland Stone based on the stimuli it received from Metzger's EEG readings as he tried to think of nothing at all. Titled "Null Object," the work is now on display at London's Work Gallery.

In other words, this is Gustav Metzger's Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, empirical proof that even when we try our hardest to think of nothing, there's always something going on up there.

[DesignWeek]

When John Lane stood in his backyard and pointed his laser at the rain, he wasn't thinking about weather on Earth. He was trying to figure out the best way to track lunar dust, part of a project to protect NASA's Apollo landers from would-be moon visitors. But he ended up helping weather forecasters anyway, by finding a new way to measure the size of raindrops--something weather radar can't do.

Lane, a physicist at Kennedy Space Center, was trying to calibrate a laser sensor that would pick up fine dust particles on the moon. The project is part of a NASA effort to protect its lunar heritage. New lunar landers, perhaps from the Google Lunar X Prize or other nations, would likely kick up dust and other material as they touch down on the moon. NASA wants to be sure its six Apollo sites are unperturbed, and understanding dust mechanics will help nail down how close new robotic landers could get.

"It's like sandblasting," Lane explains in a NASA news release. "If you have something coming down like a rocket engine, and it lifts up this dust, there's not air, so it just keeps going fast." Some of this regolith (lunar soil) can even escape into orbit. It might even smack into the sensitive foil skins of the lunar descent modules, or maybe samples of waste left behind by astronauts. Impact by moon dust would ruin possible future experiments that would analyze what happened to some of that waste, so NASA wants to have some parameters for explaining the dust's behavior.

To do this, Lane was measuring raindrops, which are apparently a good analogue for airborne lunar dust. His laser and reflector measures the raindrops' size with great accuracy, which could be a major boon for weather forecasters.

Weather radar can see individual drops of rain, clouds of insects, birds and bats on the wing. But it can't distinguish the sizes of these objects very well. A massive national upgrade to dual polarization radars is under way, which will improve matters. This adds a vertical element to the horizontal sweep of radio range-finding. Rain, sleet, snow, birds, insects and bats all have distinct signatures in dual-polarized radar.

But even then, raindrop size is an imperfect estimate. Lane's new laser method does it by measuring the average cross section area of raindrops in the beam's line. This is known as the "second moment of the size distribution," according to NASA. Understanding this size distribution would improve the algorithms used by weather radars to track objects in the air. This could improve rainfall measurements using radar, which in turn could improve forecasting.

As far as the moon is concerned, these size estimates could better judge how lunar dust will move in response to a robotic or human-occupied lander. NASA has considered placing a laser sensor on the bottom of one of the X Prize competitors, which would measure how dust and soil move, according to the space agency. This would help NASA formulate restrictions for other landers, including how far they must land from the existing lunar heritage sites.

Lane has already presented his findings at a meteorology conference and is writing a scientific paper about it, according to NASA.

[Kennedy Space Center]

University of Washington researchers have developed a new contraceptive that for the first time offers women a discreet way to protect against both sexually transmitted diseases and pregnancy. An electrically spun nanofabric, the technology is designed to dissolve in the body, releasing preventative drugs. The goal: to empower women to make their own reproductive choices safely and cheaply.

Existing contraceptives can safeguard women against both unwanted pregnancies and STDs, such as the female condom and nonoxynol-9. But the former method lacks discretion and the latter "in vivo is not safe for multipurpose prevention," researcher Kim Woodrow says in an email. "To date, no single product exists that women can use discreetly for simultaneous and effective prevention of STIs (including HIV) and contraception," she says.

The researchers used electrospinning, a method of creating fibers from liquid in an electric field. The fibers are easily manipulated to control material properties like solubility, strength and shape. After the dissolved polymers and antiretrovirals form fibers in the electric field, they stick to a collecting plate.

The researchers are then left with a stretchy fabric that functions in quite a few ways. It can be inserted directly in the body or act as a coating on vaginal rings or other contraceptive products. It blocks sperm and can release chemical contraceptives and antivirals. The scientists created fabrics that dissolve in minutes for immediate protection and others that dissolve over a few days for sustained delivery. Mixing fibers into one nanofabric could yield both results.

The team wants to focus its efforts in places where HIV is common and protection might not be as widely available, especially if sexual assault is common. As the researchers further develop their product, they could incorporate fibers that shield against many STIs and multiple anti-HIV drugs to discourage and protect against drug-resistant strains.

[UW Today]

Duchess, a 4.4-ton, 45-year-old African elephant at the Paignton Zoo in Devon, England, had already lost her right eye to glaucoma, and cataracts threatened to blind the other. So in September, veterinarians put Duchess under the knife for the second cataract operation ever performed on an elephant. The surgery was similar to the one that 1.8 million Americans undergo each year.

First, vet Jim Carter made two incisions in the cornea to access the lens. Next he used a machine with a needle that vibrates at an ultrasonic frequency to break up and suck out the diseased tissue. But to operate on one of the largest land animals on Earth, Duchess's nine-person team needed elephant-sized equipment. Carter ordered custom tools just for the procedure, including a six-inch-long speculum to hold open Duchess's eyelids and a cataract-removal machine with a needle three times the length of a standard one. After two and a half hours and a few stitches, the procedure was complete. The zoo reports that Duchess is in good health.