It seems like you can't throw a dart at a wall of research without hitting a "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" claim. Recently, we've seen some good studies along those lines (and some not so good studies). Now here's another one, out of Australia: women, researchers say, can tell if a person they've never seen before has a history of infidelity.

The researchers determined the sexual histories of 189 white adults. Then they showed photos of those adults to 34 men and 34 women, who had to decide which subjects had a background of cheating. The female participants, researchers said, could tell with "modest" (not high but not insignificant) accuracy which men had a history of cheating. The men had an insignificant correlation with guessing right about the women--in other words, they couldn't tell.

Women based their conclusions on the "masculinity" of the men's features, which the researchers write was indicative of their discretions--so watch out for the especially square-chinned ones, ladies. (Really, there is some data to back that idea up.) Men, by contrast, rated the more attractive women as more likely to cheat, which didn't correlate.

"We conclude that impressions of sexual faithfulness from faces have a kernel of truth," the researchers write, "at least for women, and that they may help people assess the quality of potential mates about whom they have minimal behavioural information." The phrase "kernel of truth" doesn't exactly inspire confidence in a study based on correlations (which, again, were relatively small on this). The sample size of men and women seems a little on the low side, too. It'll be interesting to see what other researchers make of these finds.

[Biology Letters via Reuters]

Sometimes, scientists need a hand. There's a lot of data to sift through, and now more than ever, the public can be part of that sifting. Take this fun new project: a crowdsourced hunt for star clusters in the Andromeda Galaxy.

An online program from the University of Washington, the University of Utah, and other partners lets any amateur astronomers take a look at images from the Hubble Space Telescope and search for star clusters in the galaxy. There's a lot of those clusters--as many as 2,500 in the images--but researchers have only found about 600, even after searching for months. (One big roadblock: Pattern-recognition software tends to skip over star clusters.)

That's where everyone else comes in. Volunteers can mark the images when they spot a cluster or galaxy in the background, and the researchers will pick up on it. There's even a fun bit of gallows humor in it: "We're on a collision course with the Andromeda Galaxy," the opening screen says. "Help researchers understand the awesomeness of the Andromeda galaxy, because one day we'll be in it..."

[University of Washington]

When the Mars Rover Curiosity left Earth, it was carrying a cruise stage, whose parts included a sun sensor and star scanner, propellant tanks, and a couple antennae. The craft released the cruise stage, along with two 165-pound blocks of tungsten ballast, to gain some aerodynamic lift right before it hit Mars' atmosphere, preparing for the "seven minutes of terror" it would take to reach the surface.

The blocks and cruise stage landed 50 miles away from where Curiosity itself landed. The Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter has captured images of these impacts.

Mars has plenty of impact scars, but usually scientists don't have access to details about the objects that hit the surface. Knowing information about the initial size, velocity, density, strength, or impact angle of the objects--the tungsten blocks and the cruise stage-- will help NASA scientists understand impact processes and the properties of both the atmosphere and surface of Mars, which will be helpful, especially if we ever move there.

[JPL News]

I saw Dave Brubeck play, once. That's not that unusual; he performed pretty much right up until he died, earlier today, the day before his 92nd birthday. I was in high school, playing piano, trying to figure out what I wanted out of the instrument. I had been classically trained, and got tired of the constraints, of the tamped emotion, the lack of freedom. I had a year or so of jazz training, but I didn't much like playing standards, and I didn't like playing with other jazz kids, who in high school tend to play anonymous and masturbatory jazz-funk, almost exclusively. Pop music was what I loved, but the piano parts were all boring.

Brubeck was the first pianist I ever heard that really put it all together. He was a songwriter, not an improviser, though of course he was an outrageously skilled improviser. His music was catchy, not showy; he wasn't interested in absurd runs like Art Tatum or Oscar Peterson, and wasn't interested in intellectually interesting but perhaps not as enjoyable music like that of the restless Chick Corea. His songs managed to be classics without being classical: they were innovative in small ways, in time signature and rhythm. He had a pop sensibility, jazz chops, and a classical soul.

And that lost him some prestige in the jazz community. I don't know that Brubeck has ever been "cool," though he's one of the most successful jazz composers of all time. There are maybe five jazz songs from his peak era (late 1950s to late 1960s) that became so successful that non-jazz fans would recognize them, and Brubeck probably wrote four of them. "Take Five" and "Blue Rondo a la Turk" are almost pop classics, so ubiquitous that it's easy to forget how ballsy they were in 1959.

Brubeck was 85 when I saw him. He played with his two sons (one on drums, one alternating bass and trombone) at a huge old colonial church in my Pennsylvania hometown, around Christmastime, which is a very good time to listen to Brubeck. My friend--a drummer with significantly more talent at his instrument than I had at mine--and I were the youngest in the church by decades. Brubeck walked slowly out to the piano before the show. He was an old man, hunched over, wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie. It took forever for him to get from the side of the stage to the piano in its center. But then he sat down, and he started playing, and it was Brubeck. He hadn't lost a thing; his music was never about physical strength and dexterity, but about precision, and creativity, and songwriting. His innovations in jazz were all under the surface, in the mathematical creativity and precision of his time signatures and rhythmic gestures. And his play that day was strong and sure. He was better in the last decade of his life than I'd ever be, better than anyone I knew would ever be.

I shook his hand after the show. He was very nice, I was very nervous. I remember I couldn't think of anything smart to say; I was trying to say a cool-jazz-dude thing about his voicings or his tonality and nothing was coming. But he was nice, and his son chatted with my friend, and I listened to his music for weeks, nonstop, after that. And I'll do the same now, after he's gone.

Recommended works:Time Out, The Great Concerts: Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Carnegie Hall

When I was a kid, I'd watch in awe as my dad ate dinner. It wasn't just the heaps of food piled on his plate that impressed me. (The words "portion control" had yet to enter the public lexicon.) What always made me shake my head in disbelief was his curious habit of alternating bites of his meal with bites off a jalapeno pepper. To save time, he'd simply hold the pepper in one hand and his utensil in the other. I should also mention that my heritage is Indian, and that my mom served up traditional spicy dishes on a nightly basis. But it was never spicy enough for Dad.

I'd always assumed that he'd just burned all the taste buds off his tongue, leaving him desensitized to the pain I felt if a raw pepper came anywhere near mine. But the science of spicy food liking and intake -- there's a whole body of research dating back at least to the 1980s on this -- shows there's more to it than just increased tolerance with repeated exposure. Personality, researchers say, is also a factor in whether a person enjoys spicy meals and how often he or she eats them. The question is, how much of a factor?

Over the past few decades, culinary psychologists and other food researchers have proposed several cultural and biological reasons why we eat spices that may elicit pain, such as early learning, prior exposure, societal norms and physiological differences in taste and oral anatomy. Although desensitization to capsaicin, the plant chemical that gives peppers their burn, is well documented, there's also evidence that the effect is surprisingly small.

"This suggests chili liking is not merely a case of increased tolerance with repeated exposure, but rather that there is an affective shift towards a preference for oral burn that is not found in chili dislikers," write Nadia Byrnes and John Hayes, researchers at Pennsylvania State University's College of Agricultural Sciences, in a new study on spicy food consumption.

UPenn researchers have previously linked chili liking to thrill seeking, specifically an affinity for amusement park rides and gambling. Later, SUNY Stony Brook investigators found a relationship between chili liking and sensation seeking when using a more formal measure of personality called Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale. In both cases, however, the associations were fairly weak, and neither study looked at intake -- how often a person eats spicy foods, versus how much a person likes spice.

As part of a larger study on how the capsaicin receptor, TRPV1, influences oral sensations, Byrnes and Hayes decided to take another look at the psychology of so-called chili-heads. They used an updated measure of sensation seeking that avoided gender- and age-biased questions, as well as dated references (questions like "I would like to make friends in some of the ‘far-out' groups like artists or ‘hippies'" were replaced with prompts like "I would have enjoyed being one of the first explorers of an unknown land"). They also introduced a four-point scale for responses, allowing for more nuance than the older yes/no response method.

Ninety-seven male and female participants ranging in age from 18 to 45 filled out a food-liking questionnaire and rated the intensity of sensations after sampling six stimuli, including capsaicin mixed in water. Later they took an online survey that included personality measures and asked how often they consume foods containing chili peppers.

Sensation seeking emerged as a much stronger predictor of spicy food liking than in the previous studies, and it also predicted how often a person ate chili-laden meals. The personality trait, however, was not associated with high liking of non-spicy foods, which reduced the possibility that thrill seekers are just crazy about food in general.

Surprisingly, frequent chili eaters didn't feel the burn from the capsaicin sample any less than people who ate peppers less often. The study group may not have been large enough to show a desensitization effect, Hayes explains, or there may have been a disconnect between reported frequency of intake and actual dose. Someone who says he eats spicy foods twice a day may still be eating small amounts, for example. "No one knows the capsaicin dose or dosing frequency required in the diet to induce desensitization," Hayes says.

Still, the lack of evidence for desensitization in the study boosts the argument for personality as an important factor. "That is, chili-heads like the burn more, not just perceive it less," Hayes says. He can't yet say exactly why sensation seekers chase the pain of peppers, but a follow-up study in the works that breaks up the personality trait into two sub scales, intensity seeking and novelty seeking, may help to answer that.

Ultimately, a combination of factors influences who goes for the mild wings on Super Bowl Sunday and who reaches for hot. "Certainly, prior experience, childhood exposure and learning all play a critical role in liking for spicy foods," Hayes says, "however, there are also individuals who acquired an entirely [new] set of food preferences as adults once they moved away from home. It seems plausible that personality differences may be a major factor in this sort of exploration and learning."

So what about my dad, who grew up on spicy foods? Had he eaten enough jalapenos, serranos and other spicy little beasties over the years to blast his taste buds off the Scoville scale? When I asked him why he used to chomp on a chili alongside his already-spiced meal (a habit that he shed as he aged, by the way), his response surprised me: "A chili is a chili," he said. "It was always uncomfortable. I think I did it for the excitement."

Jennifer Abbasi is a science and health writer and editor living in Portland, OR, and PopSci's Sex Files columnist. Follow Jen on Twitter (@jenabbasi).

Two summers ago, Easton LaChappelle thought it would be fun to build a robotic arm controlled wirelessly using a glove. LaChappelle, then 14, knew nothing about electronics, programming, or robots-but he was bored and desperate for a challenge. So over the next couple of years, the teen, now a high school junior, toiled in his cramped bedroom workshop in Mancos, Colorado, ironing out the details. In time, he emerged with a robo-arm operated by a gaming glove-and his mind.

LaChappelle began his bionic quest by scouring online forums and tutorials to glean as much know-how as he could about sensors, motors, and coding. His first model won him third place at the state science fair in 2011, but its fingers, made of flimsy electrical tubing, could not grasp anything heavy.

Unsatisfied, LaChappelle started over. He designed a new hand with computer modeling software, and then asked MakerBot Industries in Brooklyn, New York, to print the plastic "bones." The new hand had human-like digits with multiple joints and a thumb that could bend inwards. Small electric motors in the wrist could curl the fingers by pulling a piece of ligament-like fishing line through each digit to its fingertip.

But the stretchy fishing line loosened up over time. LaChappelle's mother, a former jeweler, suggested using nylon-coated steel wire instead. The wire could close the fingers but proved too rigid to recoil them, so LaChappelle rigged tiny dental rubber bands leftover from his awkward, brace-faced years into faux tendons for the joints. "The rubber bands provide a kind of spring-back mechanism," he explains.

To control his robo-limb, LaChappelle modified a 1980s-era Nintendo Power Glove to convert real hand movements into robotic motion. Next, he made a brain-based controller by hacking parts of a headset from the board game Mindflex, which can read a player's brainwaves. Simply by concentrating, LaChappelle says he can open and close the robo-hand.

The glove-based system earned him second place at an international science fair in 2012, and his parents rewarded him with his own 3-D printer, now housed in his bedroom closet. For his next goal, LaChappelle plans to evolve the current robo-arm into an inexpensive yet highly capable prosthetic. "I'm going to keep going and trying to make it better and better," he says.

See how it works on the next page./>

HOW IT WORKS

BUST A MOVE

LaChappelle built a skeletal frame out of scrap metal with industrial chain for a spine. A custom-built robotic arm rotates the hand at the wrist and bends at the elbow and shoulder. Two battery-powered, geared DC motors can lift the arm 90 degrees and lower it down.

MIND GAMES

Our minds emit faint frequencies of electrical energy called brainwaves, which doctors use to analyze everything from seizures and coma to sleep and focus. LaChappelle hacked Mattel's focus-measuring Mindflex headset by writing software to convert the device's data for his robo-hand. As a wearer's brainwaves shift above or below a set frequency, the hand opens or closes.

SENSITIVE GRIP

When he's not using the headset, LaChappelle controls his robotic limb with a 1989 Nintendo Power Glove. Flex sensors in the glove provide data for the robotic fingers to mirror his motions. To feel the robo-hand's grip, he added eraser-size force sensors to the robotic fingertips. A wireless radio relays this data to the Power Glove and activates a cellphone's vibrating motor: The stronger the squeeze, the more vibration he feels in the glove.

BUILDING A ROBOT ARM

Time: 1 year
Cost: $900

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

When marine biologist David Kline, of Australia's University of Queensland, set out for Heron Island in the Great Barrier Reef, he and his team were determined to help answer a pressing question: How will rising acidity from climate change affect coral reefs? So they brought along their Coral Proto FOCE, the first device that lets scientists manipulate acidity in a reef's natural environment.

The Coral Proto is a three-foot-long plastic box with sliding doors. After embedding it in a reef, researchers select a pH on a computer. A pump then squirts pre-acidified seawater from an onshore tank into the box. The Proto's acidity sensors track levels to maintain the preferred pH. When it's time to measure how the reef is faring, the researchers slide down the Proto's doors to create a sealed chamber. They can then check the water inside for oxygen (a marker of photosynthesis) and alkalinity (a marker of coral growth).

Working two hours by ferry from the nearest city presented its share of challenges. When the bumpers that kept the computer afloat exploded from the sun's heat, "we wound up trading someone a bunch of beers for some hard plastic floats," says Kent Headley, a team engineer. Fish and sea cucumbers were regular visitors to the site, but so were venomous blue-ringed octopuses and cone snails. In the end, the researchers managed to pull off a weeklong proof of concept. Next, they're making the Proto more portable and appropriate for deeper waters, where they can monitor other ecosystems, including kelp forests.

To review the Samsung Galaxy Camera, Popular Photography's Dan Bracaglia lends his photographic expertise to talk about the camera from a photog's perspective, while Popular Science's gadget reviewer, Dan Nosowitz, reviews the camera from a gadget-geek's perspective.

Dan Nosowitz: I wasn't optimistic about the Samsung Galaxy Camera. The idea of a camera with a big touchscreen and a full version of Android, complete with 4G LTE connection, is enticing, but I do not care much at all for Samsung's other Galaxy products, which to this point have just been smartphones and tablets. I find their hardware chintzy and their software difficult and confused, as the company insists on mucking up Android (which is really great!) with their slow and bloated skins. Yet to my surprise, the Galaxy Camera is by far my favorite product in the Galaxy line.

The Galaxy Camera is by far my favorite product in the Galaxy line.As an Android device, it's got pretty much the same guts as a modern Galaxy smartphone. That means a huge 4.8-inch screen, a quad-core processor, a Samsung-ified version of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, and 4G LTE connectivity. It even has a microphone, intended to be used while taking video, so theoretically you could ditch your phone, make calls with a VoIP service or Google Voice, and use this as your exclusive camera/phone. And of course it has access to the entire Android app store, which has fairly recently been renamed Google Play. But this is not a Galaxy smartphone with an improved camera; this is a high-end Samsung point-and-shoot with Android.

Using the Galaxy: Performance is pretty good; it's not as fast getting around as the screamingly-fast Nexus 4, but it's certainly not laggy. Android 4.1 is very nice; the Galaxy Camera has all the benefits of Google Now and all kinds of other great Android stuff. The screen is not the best screen I've ever used (not quite as sharp as the iPhone 5 or Nokia Lumia 920), but it is a very good screen, and it is definitely the best screen I've ever used on a camera. I think 4.8 inches is too big for a phone, but man is it awesome on a camera. You can actually share photos with a group on this thing!

Samsung's software is, as always, annoying. It's not as in-your-face with a million new gestures and pop-ups and buzzword-y features that plague its Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note smartphones. It's not wildly different from stock Android but aside from the camera interface, there's not a single thing I like better about the changes Samsung's made. Even the soft buttons (Menu, Home, Back) work differently on this phone than on other Android devices. Why? And the keyboard I think is pretty poor (autocorrect is unhelpful, word recognition isn't good), though it's very easy to download a new keyboard from Google Play.

It's only a little awkward to use as an Android device; I'm not sure exactly how to hold it, as it's thicker than a regular Android phone and also has the lens mount protruding. Dan Bracaglia's solution left his finger sitting on the little door in from of the lens--not good, since that door is notorious on compact cameras for breaking or locking up, rendering the camera useless. But it's not that hard, and I found it pretty capable for browsing Twitter or the web, checking email, and doing most other things you'd do on a smartphone. And that's kind of an achievement in itself; this isn't a skimped, shitty version of Android--it's high-end, just like on a top-tier phone.

I think the camera interface is great; the new stock camera app on Android is innovative and excellent in its own right, but it doesn't offer as many manual controls, so I think Samsung's camera app is a perfect solution for a more capable camera. For someone who's not an expert photographer, I really loved how Samsung guides the user through the app. And everything is done on the touchscreen; the only buttons are a shutter, a zoom toggle, and a flash trigger. That's great for novices who are much more comfortable with navigating menus on a smartphone than navigating the airplane-cockpit-like controls of a DSLR. Everything's right out in the open: you don't have to guess at what a switch means, because it's spelled out on the screen.

The sharing options are easy and intuitive; when you look through photos, the top bar gives you sharing options, and it places your most recently used sharing option in its own little spot up there. For me, that means posting to Instagram is a one-tap affair, right from the camera app. Love it.

Image quality for me is kind of an interesting beast. It will take, without question, the best Instagram photos of any device that actually has Instagram on it. (Yes, I know you can take photos with a DSLR and post them to Instagram. But that's not really what Instagram is about.) It's no question that the Galaxy Camera takes better shots than any smartphone I've ever used.

Size: But the camera is too big. For me, a camera's physical size is second only to image quality as the most important element, and then only barely second. The Galaxy Camera is not pocketable. (I do wear skinny-ish jeans, but I can't imagine what kind of pockets could comfortably hold it.) I actually like the hardware design a lot; it's all plastic, but, unlike Galaxy smartphones, doesn't feel cheap at all. It feels really well-constructed, sturdily and simply designed without getting too basic. It's one of the most attractive gadgets Samsung's ever made, frankly, but I would much rather it had a slightly smaller screen in return for a smaller footprint. Dan Bracaglia noted that the weight also has the benefit of stabilizing the camera; light cameras can sometimes move around too much, and he thinks Samsung "nailed" the weight.

That size means I have the camera in my bag rather than my pocket. When I'm out and about and see something I want to shoot, it's just faster and easier to snag my phone out of my pocket than fish around in my bag. And unlike a DSLR, which takes photos that are in a completely different league than my phone, the Galaxy Camera is merely "better" than my phone. I found myself not always bothering; if I can get a B- photo with my phone, who cares about a B+ photo from the Galaxy Camera? It's not like I'm going for an A-level photo from my DSLR.

Price: And that brings us to the most salient point in this whole review: who is the Galaxy Camera for? Its image quality is not wildly improved from a nice $200 point-and-shoot, though it is certainly a superior product, thanks to its connectivity, interface, and bonus access to all of Android. At $500, the camera is right at the very top of the price pyramid for compacts; in fact, for that price, you could snag any of several very nice mirrorless interchangeable-lens cameras from Sony, Olympus, or Panasonic, or even a low-end DSLR like last year's Nikon D3100. All of those cameras would thoroughly trounce the Galaxy Camera on image quality, but they're also less capable in a lot of ways.

The other problem is that to get the full benefit of the Galaxy Camera, you really need to spring for the 4G LTE plan--yeah, yet another monthly bill. So it's not even just $500--it'll be several times that over the course of its life.

That puts us in the weird position of having a gadget that's really cool that we can't really recommend to anyone. It's much better than a phone's camera, but the device as a whole is very similar, so do you really need both, especially at this price?

In Conclusion: What's most interesting about the Galaxy Camera is how obvious it now is that this is what consumer cameras will look like in the future. A mirrorless camera with interchangeable lenses but with this kind of connectivity and interface? That would be amazing. It's so much easier and faster to use for non-professionals than the more traditional camera control schemes, and the sharing options are the wave of the present and future. Of course you should be able to instantly upload photos to the cloud, to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, to email them to your friends and family, to edit them in a mobile version of Photoshop. The Galaxy Camera isn't quite right for most people, but it's so close. Someone's going to do this right, and soon, so let's just consider the Galaxy Camera a sneak preview.

On page two, read Dan Bracaglia's take on how the Galaxy Camera is as a camera.

/>

The Camera

Dan Bracaglia: The general idea of camera connectivity is something I can get behind, and frankly, as a camera field tester, I am surprised that this level of connectivity has taken so long to get to the consumer level. And of all the consumer electronics companies out there, it makes sense that it was Samsung to take the first real stab at this kind of hybrid device. Despite all that, I was uneasy about a smartphone/camera--it wasn't until I played with it in person at Photokina that I started to get excited about the Galaxy Camera.

So, from a camera specs perspective, the Galaxy Camera is pretty much an average compact shooter. It offers up a 16 MP 1/2.3-inch backside illuminated sensor, 21x optical zoom with a 35mm equivalent of 23-483mm. That sensor is actually a bit small compared to other high-end compacts like the Canon S110, and much smaller than the Sony RX100's massive sensor. That'll affect image quality, and that sacrifice was largely made to make room for the huge 21x optical zoom.

The zoom was probably the feature, outside of the connectivity, that most impressed me with this camera. When zoomed out to the 35mm equivalent, the lens is a reasonably fast f/2.8, but by the time you're zoomed all the way in, you're looking at a fairly lackluster f/5.9 low aperture. I like the huge zoom--it definitely separates this camera from any smartphone camera--but I might rather have cut back on it and had a larger sensor.

The image stablization on this camera is damned impressive. Even when zoomed in all the way, I had no issue getting a clear shot--in daylight, mind you.

The camera features a tiny, run-of-the-mill xenon flash, which does a terrific job of blowing out subjects at a close distance. Placing a small piece of masking tape over the flash and compensating for the slight loss of light via exposure compensation can help with this problem, though whether most people that buy this camera will know to do that is anyone's guess.

Video: The Samsung Galaxy is capable of 1080p (or 720p) capture at 30 fps, but with no option for 24 fps. Considering the small size of the sensor, and the slow lens, getting any real cinematic shallow depth of field is virtually impossible. But the image stabilization does do a decent job during video capture of producing a shake-free shot. You can also shoot at 60 fps at 720p or 480p, which is a nifty feature.

Image Quality: Image quality and noise is about what you'd expect coming from a camera with a 1/2.3-inch sensor. It offers the following ISO's: 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600 and 3200. My personal rule of thumb for shooting with any camera is to never venture higher than the second highest ISO. In the case of the Galaxy Camera, that's only a meager ISO 1600. And even at ISO 1600, the images look noisy when viewed at full resolution. At ISO 3200, unless you're sending it right to Instagram or grey-scaling the image, forget about it.

Auto mode does a pretty terrific job in most situations of nailing the exposure.Interface: I spent about half my time with the camera shooting on Auto mode and the other half shooting on manual or "Expert Mode." Auto mode does a pretty terrific job in most situations of nailing the exposure. "Expert Mode" allows you to choose between Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority and manual mode. Seeing as controls like these in a compact are pretty rare, I was impressed to find them here. The interface is a series of concentric part-circle dials that looks sort of like a side view of a lens. It'll let you adjust shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and more, depending on how manual your mode is. It's definitely an intuitive way to adjust these settings, and Samsung is good at guiding novices through the process. But for experts, it's a bit slow--it'll take a couple taps and swipes to adjust, say, your ISO, whereas on other cameras, you can just twist a physical knob.

Speaking of things that are slow, when the camera is fully shut off, it occasionally took an incredibly long time to fire back up. That meant that I missed a couple of shots while testing it. Oddly, sometimes it'd fire up super fast, sometimes slow, with no obvious reason why. But I do like the smartphone-esque "Sleep Mode," in which you just tap the power button to unlock it super fast, with all your previous settings, rather than booting it up after it's been powered down.

Click to launch the gallery.

It should be noted that during testing I completely ignored Samsung's "Smart Modes," as I do with most compacts I test. Generally speaking, these modes do a decent job of what they claim, but as the editor of a photography magazine, I tend to warn folks away from sticking to them. Why learn the 18 modes on the back of your camera when you can learn the basics of exposures, get the photo you want, and know how you got it? I realize that many people, specifically non-photographers may disagree with me on this.

It's also worth noting that the huge touchscreen and access to Android apps gives the Galaxy Camera on-camera editing abilities that completely outstrip any other camera on the market. Samsung includes both a photo and video editor; the photo editor is pretty capable, though of course there are about a million photo editing apps in the app store.

Battery: It's no secret that 4G drains battery, but the battery is actually fairly good--you'll get about a full day of average use, about the same as any 4G smartphone. Any more than that, and you're going to need a second battery, but since it uses the same 1650mAh battery as Samsung smartphones, they're easy to find and very inexpensive (about $15 at Amazon).

In terms of storage, the Galaxy Camera offers 4GB of internal memory, which I think is actually a great idea. That'll hold about all the photos you need, without having to mess around with removable cards, and it should be able to access the storage much faster. For bonus storage, it features a microSD card slot, which is kind of lame. MicroSD cards, compared to SD, are expensive, easy to lose, and much less common. Your laptop probably has an SD card slot, but for microSD, chances are you'll need an adapter. MicroSD might be standard for smartphones, because you hardly ever remove the storage from a smartphone, but it's not well-suited for cameras.

In Conclusion: This camera marks an incredible important leap forward for photography and it's only a matter of time before more companies jump on this bandwagon. And, to be fair, I actually like this camera much more than I thought I would--but I can't imagine to whom I'd recommend it. Its firepower is beyond overkill for an avid Instagrammer, considering no one views Instagrams on anything larger than a smartphone screen (though once Instagram pushes web profiles, my opinion on this may change). Anyone looking for a solid compact who doesn't care or is reluctant to pay a monthly 4G fee is better off turning to Canon and grabbing something like an S110. And the lack of really solid image quality, no RAW capture and mediocre low-light performance will surely cause most professional or serious photographers to ignore this camera all together. Conceptually brilliant, this forward-thinking camera deserves a footnote in the history of photography, and not much more.

Aliens looking at our planet from a close distance could detect Earth's life in lots of ways, from the methane in our atmosphere to the reflectance of all the green plants. But only if they saw it at night would they understand that some life here is intelligent.

This image and the video down below are the highest-resolution, best-detailed pictures of Earth at night ever taken to date. The Suomi NPP satellite, designed to study weather phenomena, can look at the dark Earth like never before. It is not nearly as dark as you might think.

Highways across the American Midwest flicker in and out at tiny towns and rest stops, like a map of connect-the-dots. Along a line north from Houston, half the country is plunged in darkness, except for the great western oases of Denver and Salt Lake City. And then there is Europe, awash in light. And the Middle East, with boats illuminating the length of the Nile River and oil-field fires burning in Saudi Arabia. It's amazing, and NASA stitched it all together in this video.

It's also fun to zoom in so you can pan around. A Dublin-based photographer and developer built a lovely way for you to do that, which you can see here.

NASA stitched together Suomi NPP data from 312 separate orbits taken from April to October of this year. You can read more about the satellite and its methods over at NASA.

Our brand new drones aren't the only things becoming increasingly autonomous. This newly-released video of a November 5 flight over the Diablo Range in California shows a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter autonomously navigating through hills and valleys at low altitude. While the Army has released no plans to automate its workhorse fleet of Black Hawks, the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center is using the platform to demonstrate autonomous technologies that will enable the automation of next-generation helos.

Last month's flight demonstrated two key pieces of this technology: obstacle avoidance and navigation, and determination of safe landing areas. In the video, you can see the terrain map that the helicopter is creating with its optical sensors to make navigation and landing decisions. But the most interesting aspect is the radio chatter between the human pilots onboard and the other mission participants. At several points it is evident that they don't know exactly what their helicopter is going to do next, but each time it comes up with a satisfactory solution.

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...@Seth_Rosenthal, who after an understandable first incorrect guess landed on the right answer: this animal is a greater grison. Many folks guessed it was a honey badger, or ratel, a ferocious animal that gained widespread internet fame after a video of its toughness circulated. The greater grison is a mustelid, like the honey badger, related to weasels, skunks, and otters, but the grison lives in South America, not Africa or Asia. It's one of two species of grison--the other is the lesser grison--and we actually know very little about it for one very interesting reason. Its neck is extremely wide, wider even than its head, so it's basically impossible to strap a collar onto it for tracking.

In a stellar nursery far away, a solar system with enough heft to make seven Jupiters is in the process of being born, the youngest planetary system ever observed. The system is just 300,000 years old, astronomers say. That's incredibly young--our own middle-aged system is 4.6 billion years old.

Before this new observation, the oldest baby star disks were of fully grown "protostars," which had already swallowed up most of the mass in the gassy dust disks surrounding them. But this new star has only used up 20 percent of the mass in its surrounding envelope of material, according to astronomers at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. "This very young object has all the elements of a solar system in the making," said John Tobin of the NRAO in a statement.

The star system, which is called L1527 IRS and is located in the constellation Taurus, is currently about one-fifth the mass of the sun. It will eventually have about the same mass as our star, Tobin and colleagues estimate. It's very bright, which is likely a result of the titanic energies involved in the accretion process.

This is an interesting observation for many reasons, not the least of which is the sensitive radio-range data used to ascertain the nascent star's existence. The astronomers used the Submillimeter Array and the Combined Array for Millimeter-wave Astronomy to detect dust and carbon monoxide around the object. They examined radio waves emanating from the carbon monoxide, and used the Doppler effect to study how the disk was rotating. They found the speed in the disk changes relative to its distance from the star, just like the planets in our solar system change their speeds relative to our star.

This is called Keplerian rotation, after planet-motion-genius Johannes Kepler. The phenomenon will allow planets to form, explained Hsin-Fang Chiang of the University of Illinois and the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii. The disk's rotation and slower speeds far out will prevent all the material in the disk from accreting onto the star. The leftover swirling material will coalesce to form planets.

Next up is studying the baby disk in more detail with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, which is almost done being built at 16,400 feet in the Chilean desert. ALMA will be able to provide even more detail about what's happening to the disk, which will tell astronomers how planetary systems are born, Tobin said.

The paper describing the infant system is published in the journal Nature.

[NRAO]

Poachers kill a rhino per day, elephants are slaughtered for their ivory, and tiger poachers sell and trade the whole animal--from whiskers to tail, according to the world's leading wildlife welfare agency. Now the World Wildlife Fund is getting some secret weapons of its own to combat the illicit killers.

The WWF just received $5 million under Google's new grant program, the Global Impact Awards, with which it plans to use technology like aerial surveillance and radio-frequency ID tags on wild animals.

Poaching has been a problem for centuries, but it's getting worse because of demand from wealthy customers--especially in emerging Asian markets. It's a "crisis that is emptying the world's forests and oceans," in the words of the WWF--and it's worth $7 to $10 billion annually. The BBC reported that in the past five years, the number of rhinos killed in South Africa has risen from 13 to 588. The WWF has been beating this drum especially hard of late--it is apparently a very bad time to be an elephant.

We've seen a couple other uses of technology to curb poaching in the past, notably the use of GPS tags on rhinos, but this time the WWF wants a larger umbrella of monitoring tech. It would include sensors on animals and in their environments, which would be monitored by a network of drones overhead. These could detect poachers and dispatch mobile ranger patrols to catch them, the WWF says. It will be used in four separate sites in Asia and Africa, according to Google.

Carter Roberts, president of the WWF, said in a statement that the world faces an unprecedented poaching crisis. "We need solutions that are as sophisticated as the threats we face," he said. "This pushes the envelope in the fight against wildlife crime." You can read more about the WWF's efforts here.

[via BBC]

On the heels of SpaceX's vision of a human colony on Mars, here's another idea for people who think of outer space the way the rest of us think of Hawaii: a space-tourism startup is selling trips to the moon at $750 million each.

The company, known as Golden Spike, actually has good pedigree: former NASA science administrator Alan Stern is working on the business. The plan is to repurpose space hardware for moon journeys, rather than build rockets from scratch, and to use the sort of commercial rockets we'll be seeing more of in coming years. The passengers would get the trip, and a chance to walk on the moon, before returning home. (A two-person mission like that would cost about $1.5 billion, Stern told The Washington Post.)

Oh, and Newt Gingrich, he of let's-build-a-moon-base-by-2021 fame, is listed on the board of advisers, along with other political big wigs.

This is part of a statement from the business: "The company's plan is to maximize use of existing rockets and to market the resulting system to nations, individuals, and corporations with lunar exploration objectives and ambitions."

So, yes, a niche market. Which might explain the cost of those tickets.

[Washington Post]

The internet is a dangerously addicting place. If you have a friend who spends all his free time with his eyes glued to the web, he or she is likely doing a few things there. Maybe chatting on Twitter or Reddit or Facebook with kindred souls, re-posting every possible GIF to Tumblr, or blogging about cats. Or maybe just browsing--bouncing from meme to meme, weird corner of the internet to weird corner of the internet. It's somewhere between therapeutic and physically harmful, which is why it's so addictive.

Click to launch the photo gallery

The best gift you could give to a web geek has already been given--it's the internet itself. So, barring that, use this gift guide to brainstorm the perfect present for your loved one, even if you only talk to him or her via Facebook.

Click through the gallery to see some suggestions.

In the cool of the early morning, insects like this dew-covered blue damselfly move slowly, making it the perfect time to capture them on film. Ondrej Pakan, a photographer fascinated by insects--he describes them as inhabitants of "a world of small monsters"--snapped this shot at Lake Dubnik in Slovakia. Damselflies, often mistaken for dragonflies, spend most of their lives underwater. They live anywhere from a few weeks up to a year as gilled larvae. Even after transforming into air-breathing, winged adults, several species of female damselflies return to the water to lay eggs. While they descend, their hairs trap oxygen bubbles that serve as miniature air tanks; their mates wait at the surface to pull them out when they reemerge.

The makers of Deo Perfume Candy claim that if you eat a few of their pink lozenges, the odor compounds contained therein will travel through your body and start oozing out of your pores, giving you a vague and pleasant rose-smelling aura. That's right. It's edible deodorant. But don't throw out your Speed Stick just yet. I tried it for a week, and suffice it to say "pleasant" is a wild overstatement.

First, how it's supposed to work: The theoretical mechanism of action is pretty easy to grok if you know something about chemistry. The "active ingredient" in the candy is geraniol, a monoterpene alcohol found in rose oil, citronella and geraniums. It is used in perfumes and in artificial flavors such as raspberry, peach and lime. Those who read my BeerSci column will remember me talking about terpenes, as they pertain to hops and cannabis active ingredients. Well, geraniol is another terpene. If you look at geraniol, you'll see that it's mostly carbon and hydrogen; as such, it's at least moderately fat-soluble, and thus it should pass easily through cell walls and therefore through your skin.

To test if this candy really does make one smell like roses, I agreed to 1.) eat them for a week and 2.) not use antiperspirant. I also refrained from using any perfume or scented lotions during the testing period. I did shower every day, though. My lucky (read: brave, foolish, insane) coworker Susannah agreed to smell-test me during the week.

Day 1
Test smell before the experiment. Susannah reports that I smell "normal" (whatever that might mean). The instructions that came with the candy say to eat four pieces of candy to get enough geraniol in your system. So I do. I don't eat them all at once, but over the course of an hour. By the third candy, I am already dreading piece number four. It's not that the candy tastes bad--it's tart-sweet with a rose-raspberry character--but more that I don't actually have a sweet tooth. After I pop the fourth candy, I wait for an hour or so, then demand to be smelled. It's probably a mercy that Human Resources is on the other side of the building, otherwise I might have been answering some rather pointed questions about my shouting in the middle of a cube farm, "Susannah! Smell my rose-inflected funk!"

Result: I do not smell like a rose.

Day 2
Same as Day 1, except that I eat candies about once an hour, all day. Again, I have Susannah smell-test me before I shove the first candy into my piehole. By 3 p.m., I figure I've had enough geraniol-laced sugar to be stencherific. I stand up and present my arm for the smell test.

Result: I do not smell like a rose.

Day 3
I'm starting to really despise that bag of candy. I haven't looked at a sweet with that much hate since the last time I got a Bit O' Honey while trick-or-treating. In 1983. I dutifully eat more candy and make other people in the office smell me pretty much constantly. I start feeling nauseated due to general sugar overload, and I am pretty sure my pancreas is planning a bloody coup against my hands and my mouth. Susannah shakes her head sadly and reports that, no, I do not smell any different. She says, and I quote, that I "smell like a girl," and that I'd been smelling like a girl since before the experiment. Needless to say, I do not smell like a rose.

After that, I give up.

Two, or even four, pieces of Deo candy aren't bad. In fact, I actually like the flavor of it. The problem is that it just doesn't work--at least it didn't for me. If you already "smell like a girl," the candy will not likely make much difference to your personal odor. Susannah, who, it should be noted, also smells like a girl, did a follow-up study of her own the following weekend, and came to the same conclusion. I would love to say I'd forgo the shower for a week on behalf of science, but I am pretty sure my colleagues would lock me in a closet. It's one thing to "smell like a girl." It's something else entirely to smell like feet and onions, even with the vaguest hint of rose scent on top of it.

The candy, which is made in Bulgaria, is imported to the U.S. by Ecodeum LLC. You can buy it from Amazon.