John McAfee--anti-virus pioneer, "person of interest" in Belize murder investigation, and launcher of increasingly bizarre media stories--has been captured. It happened after journalists from Viceaccidentally published an iPhone photo of McAfee with embedded GPS data.

In case you didn't know, a lot of newer devices store that kind of information, known as EXIF data, in images. EXIF data is helpful in providing details about a photograph's provenance. Remember when that now-famous photo of the Situation Room during the Osama Bin Laden raid started making the rounds? EXIF data revealed the camera's model and settings, plus the editing software used on the image. Cool stuff to know about one of the most iconic photographs of the decade.

But in case you're traveling with a murder suspect, you might not want to share that information. So here's a handy guide to getting rid of it.

Switch off location settings.
Since the Vice photo was published from an iPhone, we'll start there. There's a camera "location services" setting that can be switched off, and, easy enough, you've got a GPS-free photo to share with the world. (The settings changed slightly in iOS 6, so check the details here.) This video tutorial shows how to set the same functions for an Android phone.

Use editing software.
If you want to go through editing software, you have some other options, too. The "Save For Web" function (File, Save for Web & Devices) should scrub the data, but the scrubbing is probably the very last step you want to take before you release your photo, and there's usually a way to do it within your operating system. Here, for example, is a quick tutorial for Windows. (Alternately, if there's not an option for GPS scrubbing on the Windows version you're running, you can download software like Metanull.) On a Mac, it's a little tougher--you'll need some software. Here's a similar software download for Mac, but there are a lot out there. (And Lifehacker has a quick one for Linux users, too.)

Check your social networks.
For those of you who are especially worried about people tracking you down, Facebook and Twitter strip EXIF data and Flickr makes you opt in to using it (although not all third-party clients will do the same). So, be careful when sharing your anti-virus outlaw pics with friends!

Today marks 71 years since the attack on Pearl Harbor that catapulted the United States into World War II. The attack was devastating. More than 2,400 people died and more than 1,000 were wounded. It was also, in the cold language of military science, wildly successful.

At least it was at first. The December 1966 Popular Science feature, "The Secret Weapons That Hit Pearl Harbor," cites two main factors (among other factors) for Japan's success: its shallow-water aerial torpedoes and the fleet's ability to escape detection.

Pearl Harbor was too shallow for conventional torpedoes; they would've just dived in and stuck to the bottom of the ocean floor. So a few months before the attack, Japanese designers created finned torpedoes that could perform "a feat like that of an acrobat high-diving in shallow water."

By the fall of 1941, they had perfected the weapon. Now all they had to do was transport it to the American naval base. Japan's fleet of ships managed to stay undetected throughout the journey to Hawaii that began in November of 1941. Here's how:

Although Pearl Harbor was a victory for the Japanese--a triumph of their technological prowess and their brutal military tactics--the war, of course, did not end well for them. Most of their battleships sunk by the time World War II came to a close. The attack's chief planner, Admiral Yamamoto, died in a plane that'd been shot down by U.S. airmen in 1943. Dictator Tojo, who ordered the attack, was hung as a war criminal in 1948.

Read more in the December 1966 issue, "The Secret Weapons That Hit Pearl Harbor."

For the first time, scientists have used an imaging technique that's so precise that it's possible to see the different lengths of individual atomic bonds. Using a method called non-contact atomic force microscopy, IBM researchers scanned a microscopic probe with a tip only an atom wide over a nanographene molecule and measured the forces between the probe and the sample. In this colored image, the bonds with more electrons-which are also shorter-are a brighter green.

It looks like magic, but it's just technology. For a casual weekend hack, developer Adam Somers used a Leap Motion USB motion sensor device to turn his computer into a musical instrument. By adjusting settings in the AirHarp app and waving his fingers around like a wizard casting a hex, Somers was able to recreate the sound of a harp, playing in different keys, melodies and timbres. Watch the video to see and hear what we're talking about.

Want to know how he did it? You can browse the C++ source of the hack. Try it if you're computer science-savvy and have a hankering for some folk or classical harp tunes. You can preorder a Leap Motion device here.

When news broke of a 7.3-magnitude earthquake off the eastern coast of Japan early this morning, our first reaction was to fear a tsunami. The devastating earthquake that hit Japan last March and left 15,000 dead was in large part so damaging because of the ensuing tsunami, massive waves of ocean water which crashed up to six miles inland and over a hundred feet high. Luckily, today's earthquake and its aftershocks seem to have had minimal adverse effect, and the waves are not high enough to be damaging.

But it got us wondering. The San Francisco Bay Area, perhaps the most famous earthquake zone in the continental United States, is hit by dozens of small earthquakes every year--and only a century ago, pretty much the entire city of San Francisco was flattened by an earthquake. Yet we never worry about a San Francisco tsunami. Is that lack of foresight, or is something else going on entirely?

Tsunamis--the word derives from the Japanese characters meaning "harbor" and "wave"--are not like regular waves. Though they can be triggered by underwater landslides or even meteorological conditions, typically they're the result of immense energy being transfered by displaced ocean water. And what displaces ocean water? Earthquakes.

There are a few kinds of earthquakes, and the differences between the ones triggered by earthquakes is where we'll find our answer to this question. Most earthquakes are caused by the movement of the plates of Earth's crust moving against each other, which you all know, because you are all very bright. So there are a few kinds of "plate boundaries," and there are a few different types of "faults." The differences are confusing, because they're very very similar, but you can think about them generally that a plate boundary describes in a large general sense the movement of plates, and faults describe how chunks of plates interact with each other. Since the question of San Francisco vs. Japan is a large-scale question, we're going to talk with the large-scale language of plate boundaries.

So, plate boundaries! There are three main types: convergent, divergent, and transform. Convergent is when two plates smack into each other, divergent is when they move apart from each other, and transform is when they rub laterally against each other. We're putting aside divergent for now, because neither San Francisco nor Japan have to worry about them.

The movement of plates isn't smooth and it isn't clean; the plates stick to each other, pop loose, bounce backward of forward like a rubber band. (Yep, when you're talking about this much rock, it has a tendency to act elastic.) The most important term you need to know about convergent plates is subduction. Subduction is when an oceanic plate smashes into a land plate (or "continental" plate). Oceanic plates are made of heavier rock, so when the Pacific Plate smashed into Japan, it slipped under the Japanese land plate. That's not how all convergent boundaries work; sometimes, two continental plates will smash into each other and built a mountain range at the smack-point, which is what's happening between India and Asia right now. But subduction doesn't give us the Himalayas--just a ton of trouble.

Subduction does crazy things to the seafloor. Remember that earthquakes aren't smooth; these two plates have been smashing together for eons, sticking in places, being jammed down into the Earth's mantle, and all of a sudden, POP! Parts of the seafloor behind the contact point are forced up, in weird, non-uniform spots. If you had a piece of cardboard hanging off the edge of a table, and folded the edge down, it'd force some of the cardboard still on the table upwards. That's kind of what's happening here; it's not only where the two plates smash together that sees the impact. But a whole mess of the seafloor very suddenly pops up.

That displaced an absurd amount of water, and water carries energy very efficiently. Imagine jumping into a bathtub--the water reacts pretty violently. So you've got tons and tons of water, moving towards shore. As it gets closer to shore, it picks up speed for awhile, because there's less room for the water to be in, like when you put your thumb partly over a spurting hose. But eventually it starts to slow down due to friction with the ocean floor. Here's where things get ugly: the water may be slowing down, but its amplitude is increasing. (Amplitude refers to the height of this slow-brewing wave or series of waves.) So it slows down a bit, but that doesn't make this any less dangerous, because the wave is getting taller at the same time it's scrunching together. Then it his the shore, and it's a tsunami. A huge goddamn wave.

That's what happens in Japan. But it's not what happens in San Francisco.

San Francisco and Japan are both at risk of earthquakes because they lie close to plate boundaries. But they're not the same kind of plate boundaries. Remember those three types, convergent, divergent, and transform? Japan's dealing with a single convergent boundary, but San Francisco is staring down multiple faults, and the ones that matter are transform faults.

San Francisco's seismic situation is incredibly complicated and, frankly, kind of a mess. We're not dealing with one fault line and two plates here, even though it's commonly referred to simply as the San Andreas Fault. The San Andreas Fault is the line between the Pacific Plate (which is oceanic) and the North American Plate (which is a land or continental plate), and it's a transform boundary. That means instead of smashing into each other, those two plates are sliding past each other, violently scraping and getting stuck and popping free. The last time the San Andreas really let loose was in 1906, which any Northern Californian will know as the Big One. The 1906 earthquake destroyed 80% of San Francisco and killed thousands.

But if you follow the San Andreas northward, you'll eventually get to a fork, where three faults all meet. It's called a "triple junction," and its where a small oceanic plate called the Gorda enters the fray in an everyone-loses tectonic brawl. The Gorda's boundary with the North American plate is actually a convergent boundary, just like the one going on in Japan, but the Gorda plate is so small that it has very little leverage to cause all that much turmoil. It's driven so far down into the earth that it's mostly locked there, stuck unmoving. But that's definitely not a safe place to be; that fault line between the Gorda and North American plates is called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, and it's one of very few subduction zones that are capable of delivering a "megathrust" earthquake of more than 8.5 magnitude. There hasn't been one there for three hundred years, but there certainly will be another eventually (although it probably will hit the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia harder than San Francisco).

So, San Andreas and Cascadia, that's two of the three. The last one, where the Gorda and Pacific plates meet, is called the Mendocino fault, which is also a transform (slipping and sliding) boundary; jolts along this fault regularly cause earthquakes in northern California.

Of the three main fault lines that would affect San Francisco, two out of the three are transform faults, and one is currently (but ominously) inactive. Transform boundaries are just as dangerous to people on land as convergent boundaries; they still shake the hell out of the land, which can lead to fires and floods and all kinds of disaster. But one thing they don't do is abruptly displace ocean water, because they're moving laterally rather than up and down. So, no displaced water, no tsunami. And that's why nobody's worried about a giant wave turning Golden Gate Park into a swamp.

Emily Elert contributed a LOT to this article.

Click to enter the gallery

Want to win this prehistoric 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:

• Study Says Women Can Spot Cheaters At A Glance
• Scientists Might've Discovered World's Oldest Dinosaur
• Researchers Can Tell A Liar By The Nose With The 'Pinocchio Effect'
• A Holiday Gift Guide For The Bearded Man In Your Life
• Love Of Spicy Food Is Built Into Your Personality

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

• FYI: What Do Forensic Chemists Do, And Why Would They Cheat?
• This Is What Thinking About Nothing Looks Like
• Better Than A Condom? Discreet Nanofabric Protects Against Pregnancy and HIV
• NASA Satellites Capture Earth As You've Never Seen It
• NASA Loves Mars A Lot And Plans To Send It Another Curiosity In 8 Years
• Why Aren't We Afraid Of A Tsunami Hitting San Francisco?
• Oceangoing Robot Comes Ashore In Australia, Completing A 9,000-Mile Autonomous Pacific Crossing
• FYI: What Makes Hair Curly?
• Remembering Dave Brubeck, The Mathematical Pianist (1920-2012)
• You Built What?!: A Remote-Controlled Robo-Arm
• Samsung's Galaxy Camera Is The Camera Of The Future [Review]
  
• Does Edible Deodorant Work?

Hristo Bojinov wants you to forget your password. More precisely, he wants you to never really know it in the first place. Bojinov, a computer scientist at Stanford, and his colleagues have developed a computer program that can implant passwords in a person's subconscious mind--and retrieve them subconsciously too. The technique could make it impossible for, say, a high-security government agent to reveal his password; the agent wouldn't actually know the secret code. Eventually, the use of subconscious passwords could even trickle down to the rest of us. And considering the precarious state of password protection, that probably can't happen soon enough.

"The problem with passwords is that they are easy to breach," says Ram Pemmaraju, the CTO of security company StrikeForce Technologies. The tools for cracking them, such as malware, are easy to come by. New processors and open-source software can break an encrypted password in days, if not hours or minutes. Take a seven-character password with upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Five to 10 years ago, the average computer would have needed more than 1,000 years to guess it. Today's home computers can do it in about a month. Because of this increasing computer power, some experts recommend 20- to 30-character passwords. But human laziness is also a huge problem. Who wants to remember a 30-character password? One recent study found that 5 percent of passwords are some variation of "password."

If a person could subconsciously learn a password, though, he would never have to bother memorizing it. He wouldn't forget it by accident. And he'd never write it down on a Post-it note for others to find. Those are the benefits Bojinov had in mind this summer at the prestigious USENIX Security Symposium, where he presented his study--the first to show that people can subconsciously store passwords and retrieve them from their minds. In the experiment, participants learned a password by playing a computer game. On the screen, black circles fell one after another from the top to the bottom of six columns labeled S, D, F, J, K, and L. When a circle reached the bottom, the player typed the letter corresponding to that column. The game, which is nearly 4,000 keystrokes long, took about 30 to 45 minutes to complete. The players didn't know it, but the game contained a password--a sequence of 30 letters that they typed in 105 times. By the time players finished the game, they knew the password well enough that it seemed slightly familiar, but they still couldn't recognize it, let alone recite it. (On average, they rated the password's familiarity as a 6 out of 10, and a random password as a 5 out of 10.)

Five percent of passwords are some variation of "password."To use the password, the participants played a 5- to 10-minute version of the game. This time, the software compared how accurately they typed the actual password versus randomly generated 30-letter sequences. Seventy-one percent of participants scored better on the real passwords than the fake ones. Playing the game two weeks later, 61 percent did.

In the future, people could use a similar game to log into their computers in the morning. But Bojinov cautions that the work is still preliminary. The learning process takes too long for the majority of people, he says, so he's currently focused on honing the technique for high-security situations--the kinds of applications in which a 45-minute password ritual would be worth the trouble. He suggests that the system could be used as a form of secondary authentication, a substitute for the security questions now required to reset a password on an e-mail account. No matter what the application, Bojinov says researchers still need to answer critical questions about the technique. How can they make it work for more people? What's the best way to speed up the process? And how long do subconscious passwords last?

The answers to those questions could lead to an interesting twist in password protection. Russell Dietz, CTO of data protection company SafeNet, says the current strategy is to secure a system against both human cleverness and human failure. "You want to prove that someone is who they are while eliminating the weak link-the human users themselves," he says. But as Bojinov's research demonstrates, human experience might be the thing that no other person, or computer, can fake.

Researchers at Cornell University have somewhat accidentally created a strange new kind of metamaterial that flows like a liquid metal but also remembers its shape. In the presence of water, the liquid metamaterial snaps back into the form of its original container--a property that could have significant applications in treating wounds and beyond.

The material could be infused with drugs, then shaped to fit perfectly inside a wound. "When a drug can flow into a cavity as a liquid and then conform to the shape of the cavity and stay there as a solid (gel), it offers unprecedented opportunities [in the] delivery of drugs," researcher Dan Luo says in an email.

The material is actually a hydrogel, one of those matrices of organic molecules that are filled with empty spaces. They are among the lightest materials we know of. Hydrogels have been touted as the next big thing on many frontiers, including drug-delivery schemes in which their extra real estate is used to hold pharmaceuticals that are released over time as the hydrogel dissolves.

The hydrogel created by the Cornell team is made of synthetic DNA--snippets of complementary coding that snap together to form complete strands just like the real, biologically created stuff. By coding them in certain ways, researchers can conjure different shapes and structures, and by mixing synthetic DNA with enzymes that catalyze self-replication, the Cornell team was able to get the material to extend itself into long chains, creating a bundle of DNA-based hydrogel.

The hydrogel flows like a liquid, but the team found that when they introduced it to water it returned to the the shape of the container in which it was originally formed, a kind of shape memory that was not part of its intended design. And they're not exactly sure how it works. It could be the first organic metamaterial with "mechanical meta-properties."

That's intriguing on its own, but more tantalizing are the potential applications for a hydrogel with shape memory that can be triggered on demand. Such materials could be designed for very specific medical conditions, especially when blended with 3-D imaging technologies.

"After surgical removal of solid tumors, a key challenge is to kill the remaining cancerous cells that might spread afterwards," Luo says. "A conforming gel after flowing into the cavity will have much more contact surfaces while at the time stay-put there. This will result in a more effective sustained release of drugs."

But that's not the only possible application. "In addition to the drug delivery, many more applications can be envisioned for different fields such as diagnostics, bio-separations and processings," Luo says. "The potential will be significantly expanded when one thinks about combining other materials with our DNA metagel. Other materials can be gold nanoparticles, proteins, etc."

It's all kind of T-1000, but very, very interesting to think about.

[Cornell University]

The Apple Maps saga continues! The latest chapter finds police in Victoria, Australia, issuing a formal warning to motorists not to use the app. The reason: Police there have had to rescue half a dozen motorists who were quite literally lost in the wilderness after using the app's directions to try to navigate between cities. Some were stranded in a national park for up to 24 hours.

The glitch in the app is specific to the inland city of Mildura, which Apple Maps apparently thinks is more than 40 miles from its actual location. The app places Mildura in the middle of Murray Sunset National Park, which contains no potable water supply and where temperatures can soar to 115 degrees. Police are calling it a "potentially life-threatening issue." In other words, it's not a great place to run out of gas.

[via The Verge]

It turns out urine isn't just human waste. Chinese researchers have managed to reprogram kidney cells harvested from urine samples into neural cell progenitors--immature brain cells that can develop into various types of glial cells and neurons. Reprogramming cells has been done before, of course, but not with cells gleaned from urine and not via a method this direct (more on that in a moment). The technique could prove extremely helpful to those pursuing treatments for neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

The innovation here is in the source and the method. We know that embryonic stem cells offer potential treatments for neurodegenerative disorders. And we know that we can turn adult human cells--that is, non-embryonic cells gathered from adult humans--into pluripotent cells (those that can become a different type of cell) by reprogramming them, usually with genetically engineered viruses that tamper with the cells' genetic codes.

But embryonic stem cell treatments are fraught with ethical issues and non-embryonic methods are complicated--and complexity introduces a greater chance of something going wrong (in this case that means mutations and genetic defects). The new method, which taps skin-like cells from the linings of the kidney tubes that are present in urine, converts its source cells into neurons and glia cells via a more direct route, making the process more efficient while narrowing the margin of error.

In their study, the researchers harvested kidney cells from the urine samples of three human donors and converted the cells directly to neural progenitors. Rather than using a genetically engineered virus to reprogram the cells, they used a small piece of bacterial DNA that can replicate in the cellular cytoplasm, a technique that eliminates the need to tamper directly with the chromosome (in theory, at least, this should reduce mutations) while also speeding up the entire process. After growing their progenitors into mature neurons and glial cells, the researchers transplanted the progenitors into the brains of newborn rats. A month later, the cells were still alive in the rats' brains, though it is not yet clear that they can survive for extended periods or mesh with the brain's wiring to become functioning parts of the neural machine.

There's still a lot of research to be done on this method of course, but the researchers think it may provide a way to take cells gathered non-invasively and quickly and efficiently convert them into neural cells while reducing the likelihood of genetic mutations.

[The Guardian]

Last week, an alpha female grey wolf known as 832F, perhaps the most widely seen wolf at Yellowstone National Park, was shot and killed after straying just outside the boundaries of the park and into greater Wyoming. Wyoming is a lunatic state that has legalized the mass shooting of an animal that poses basically no threat to anyone and is, in fact, an essential part of the ecosystem as a whole.

The grey wolf (Canis lupus) was historically found throughout the northern reaches of North America and Eurasia. In North America, it's still well-spread in Alaska and Canada, despite the best efforts of Alaskans, who like to shoot them from planes. But in the continental United States, it's had to be reintroduced and protected because state laws have bowed to the ill-informed power of agribusiness and hunters and allowed the wolf to be shot, for no reason, all the time. Yellowstone, just under 3,500 square miles in size, is home to, says the National Park Service, about 98 grey wolves, all protected within the park's boundary. Wyoming, the aforementioned lunatic state, covers nearly 100,000 square miles, and the state's absurd legislators have legalized the shooting of any wolf (even right outside the park's borders, which a wolf wouldn't recognize as borders because it's a wolf) so as to keep the total number of grey wolves in Wyoming to 150. Wyoming residents have shot 87 wolves this year, including the alpha female wolf, which spent 95 percent of its time within Yellowstone and made the mistake last week of venturing out into a state that has legalized its murder for no reason.

Earlier this year, under pressure from hunters and agribusiness, the US Fish and Wildlife Service de-listed the grey wolf from Wyoming's endangered species list--after spending millions of dollars to reintroduce it to its natural habitat after the last time Wyoming residents shot them all. In 1995, wolves were reintroduced into the national parks, and they're still protected in the parks, but it's hard to explain the vagaries of national park borders and state and federal law to a wolf, so they tend to stray into the 80% of the state where they can be shot on sight. And wolf populations are still dangerously low in Wyoming. Yes, dangerous: shooting wolves isn't just useless, it's actively harmful to the environment.

Here are the reasons proponents of wolf hunting give to keep shooting wolves, and why those reasons are stupid and wrong.

Stupid Reason #1. Wolves kill livestock. Well, yeah, sure. In Russia wolves can really damage a watermelon crop (this is true, amazingly) but in North America the grey wolf is so far down on the list of things that can kill livestock as to render this reason completely ridiculous--and, what's worse, incredibly easy to check. You think you can't just look up the numbers and see what kills livestock? This isn't up for debate! This is thoroughly surveyed every year!

In 2010, according to the USDA, wolves killed 8,100 head of cattle, resulting in a total revenue loss of $3,646,000. Whew, lotta money, right? NO IT IS NOT. That's only 3.7 percent of the total of other predators; coyotes, which are everywhere, account for 53.1 percent, or 116,700 head of cattle. Other animals which kill more cattle than wolves include: dogs (21,800 head), big cats like mountain lions, bobcats, and lynx (18,900 head), and vultures (11,900 head).

And just for the record, we shouldn't shoot coyotes, either. Coyotes are not technically an invasive species, but they have shown a remarkable ability to adapt to heavily human environments and are certainly a bigger risk to livestock, people, and pets than wolves. In response the US government kills about 90,000 coyotes a year, so there's no need for you to wander around with a rifle shooting wild animals for fun. And if you live in an area with lots of coyotes, just get a dog. Dogs have been proven to be an extremely effective deterrent for coyotes, which are relatively small canids and are also fairly timid. Get a border collie. That's a good dog.

Now let's get into the real embarrassing stats. The idea that carnivorous predators are a major problem for agribusiness is like saying the cost of maintaining movable type is a real problem for the newspaper industry. That's just not how these things work anymore; if livestock is your business, you've got a lot of problems, but wolves aren't even close to one of them. Remember that wolves killed roughly 8,100 head of cattle in 2010. The USDA's National Agriculture Statistics Service estimates that 1,055,000 head of cattle were felled by respiratory problems in that same year. Over a million. Digestive problems took out another half a million head. And let's not pretend the inhumane manner in which agribusiness raises cattle didn't have something to do with that. Write off another 500,000 each to the weather and various problems with calving. Hell, just flat-out cattle rustling accounted for nearly twice as many lost head of cattle as wolves. Predators are only 5.5 percent of total cattle losses, and wolves are only 0.23 percent of the total. If you're shooting wolves it's because you like to shoot wolves, and I hope "gets enjoyment out of shooting majestic creatures" is listed in the next version of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders.

Stupid reason #2: Wolves kill elk, caribou, and other ungulates. There are groups, like Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd, who maintain that wolves should not be protected because they kill too many elk. Here's how friendly the Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd is: they are such good friends with the elk that they want to eliminate the elk's major natural predator...so there are more elk for the Friends to shoot, with their guns. This is a hunting organization that is annoyed that a natural ecosystem is making it difficult for them to shoot the animals they want to shoot. In many of the Big Sky states, this is how hunting legislation gets written: with input and political pressure from hunters. Stop listening to hunters. Listen to scientists.

Furthermore, there is a great deal of evidence that wolves are actually good for the long-term health of the Yellowstone ecosystem, which is something you certainly can't say about hunters. Wolves prey on the weak and enfeebled; by culling the elk herd in this way, the remaining elk tend to be stronger and healthier, with less competition for resources. Wolves certainly do not pose any kind of long-term threat to the Yellowstone elk, unlike hunters, who prefer to shoot the strongest and most glorious elk they can find, because this is how you measure your worth if you are the type to measure your worth by your skill at shooting things with guns. Subsistence hunters, by the way, should be thankful for wolves, because subsistence hunters rely on strong and healthy herds, which wolves help maintain. This is how the damn planet works.

Oh, and without wolves, elk (and caribou and moose, if you go further north) experience crazy overpopulation, which is awful for the biological ecosystem, and further leads to a lack of resources which leads to a crash in population far worse than if there were wolves (and mountain lions, and bears) around to naturally cull the population. Wolves--even an unnaturally small population like that in Wyoming--are good for the environment, not bad.

Hunting to maintain natural order is sometimes required; in my home state of Pennsylvania, for example, there is a dangerous overpopulation of white-tailed deer. They have few natural predators, because we've shot them all (see: wolves, mountain lions), and there are more than the local ecosystem can handle. They damage forests by eating and trampling young plants, they wander into roads and get hit by cars because they encroach on human areas. They are dangerous, and there is a state program to cull them, in concert with scientific findings, to make sure there is a safe number of deer. Pennsylvania certainly isn't perfect, but that's the way this should be done.

Stupid reason #3: Wolves are dangerous to humans. Jesus Christ, no they are not. The grey wolf is a timid animal, much more likely to run from an approaching human than to make any kind of aggressive gesture. To be fair, wolves can occasionally contract rabies from other animals--they're not natural carriers themselves--and nearly all reported cases of wolf attack have been by rabid wolves. But that doesn't even matter!

There have been between 20 and 30 wolf attacks, three being fatal, in North America in the entire 20th century. Since wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in 1995, there have been zero attacks. In that same 100-year period, there were 71 fatal attacks from brown bears (including the grizzly subspecies). Oh, and about 17 people die every year from dog attacks. Wolves run when they see humans. They are not dangerous. You are not "protecting your property" when you shoot a wolf in your backyard; you are murdering an animal that's scared as hell of you.

There is no valid reason to make it legal to hunt wolves. The only honest argument you could make is "I like to shoot wolves for fun," which is kind of psychotic, so shut the hell up about livestock or elk herds or danger to humans. And don't get angry when us sensible folks listen to scientists and make your insane compulsion illegal. Shooting wolves is bad for wolves, meaningless for livestock, bad for the environment, and bad for people. Conservation of individual species is incredibly difficult; we have done damage to our ecosystems, and they don't work as well as they should, and, yes, we need to find a way to keep it as healthy as possible given our own needs. And that's why we need to listen to scientists, not ranchers or hunters. We need to get the best data possible, run it through the best minds we can find, and make our laws in accordance with what will do the most good. We sure as hell shouldn't listen to a group that wants to shoot wolves on Tuesday so they can shoot elk on Wednesday.

Yellowstone estimates that a million people saw 832F in its short, six-year life. I don't even need to get into the whole "it was a protective mother, a fierce hunter, a noble leader of its pack" stuff, because this isn't about anthropomorphizing a wolf. 832F was almost certainly the most visible element of an important effort by the National Park Service to restore Yellowstone's ecosystem to its natural order, an effort that's vital to the survival of this park and even this country. People came from all over the world and saw this wolf, this rare creature, in one of the country's most beautiful places, the way it's supposed to be. That is an amazing thing. And now nobody will see it again, because it was shot, perfectly legally. And now it's dead.

British astronomer and television show host Patrick Moore died Sunday at his home in Selsey, England. He was 89. The beloved xylophone-playing, monocle-wearing scientist published his first paper about the moon when he was just 13 and went on to author more than 60 books about astronomy.

In 1957 (more than a decade before Neil Armstrong's famous journey) Moore published "A Guide to the Moon," a magically detailed travel manual to Earth's natural satellite. The book is so descriptive that, according to the Popular Science reporter who reviewed it, "you may be unprepared for an outstanding impression of your first visit to the moon." Here's more:

Read the full story in our November 1953 issue.

A team of Japanese motorcycle makers may soon remind the world that another type of bike--one with pedals--can be an incredibly efficient way to get around. Team Aeroscepsy is gunning for a new world record for distance flown in an aircraft under human power.

Team members built their airplane from polystyrene and carbon fiber, so it weighs only 81 pounds. Its wingspan stretches 117 feet, which is about half that of a Boeing 747, notes AFP. The craft is called Gokurakutombo, which means "happy-go-lucky" and apparently also "happy dragonfly" in Japanese. The team--whose members all work for Yamaha--wants to fly it 75 miles over the Pacific Ocean in Japan.

The plane can take advantage of thermal air currents to help it get around, but that's a double-edged sword, because even a light ocean breeze can also work against it. This is especially tricky flying over water, as the lessons of Daedalus prove. Daedalus the real plane, not the Greek mythological hero. I researched Daedalus for my recent feature for the October issue of PopSci, which focused on the several ways humans can fly under our own power. The aircraft was built at MIT and holds the world record for human-powered airplanes, flying 71.5 miles from Crete to the Greek island of Santorini.

Piloted by an Olympic cyclist, Daedalus flew between 15 and 30 feet above the water throughout its journey, which was aided by a tailwind. But the landing failed because of a thermal gradient caused by Santorini's black sand beach. One of the wings lifted higher than the other, turning the craft back around. Increasing shore winds eventually broke the tail boom and the plane splashed down a few feet from the beach. Pilot Kanellos Kanellopoulos was fine and swam to shore.

It's not clear exactly what route the new Gokurakutombo will fly, but it will be a few miles longer than Daedalus' flight. Team Aeroscepsy plans to take off from a field near Mt. Fuji next spring.

[PhysOrg]

The high-resolution image above shows a region on Mars called Charitum Montes, a mountain range on the planet's southern hemisphere. The brighter features are covered in seasonal carbon dioxide frost.

ESA's Mars Express orbiter shot these photos in June, which would have been winter in the southern hemisphere. The terrain here is very old, which you can tell by the filled-in craters. The area also has smaller pedestal craters, where the ejected material forms a plateau in the surrounding area. ESA explains: "The ejecta surrounding pedestal craters form erosion-resistant layers, meaning that the immediate vicinity around the crater erodes more slowly than the surrounding terrain. The resistant ejecta layer is largely untouched, forming the pedestal." These stand out in three dimensions thanks to the Mars Express stereo camera.

Look at the image above for some further detail. This large crater shows some interesting sedimentary deposits, which appear to have entered the crater through a breach in its northern rim. Several of the other annotated boxes also depict dunes and sedimentary deposits. Planetary geologists are studying these features to determine how they form.

As the Mars rover Curiosity and its predecessors have shown, Mars once had plenty of water flowing across its surface, which is a likely culprit in forming these deposits.

[ESA]

Research shows that all kids are basically tiny scientists who learn about their world through advanced experiments disguised as play. The seven toys in this gallery aren't just super fun--they'll also teach children how circuits work, how things fly, and how to build adorable robots.

If there is a miniature engineer, biologist or roboticist in your life, here's what to buy him or her this year.

Click here to enter the gallery

Design student James Boock is turning Christchurch's seismology into something more than a record of natural disaster. Quakescape, a project conceived in the aftermath of last year's earthquakes, transforms seismological data into a work of art in realtime, splashing color across a 3-D topographical model of Christchurch that corresponds to the magnitude of the earthquakes that occur there.

Using stepper motors that move a paint nozzle across two horizontal axes, Boock's fabricator streams seismological data from GeoNet to paint the topographical model as earthquakes happen. When an earthquake happens, Quakescape moves the nozzle to the corresponding geographic location on the model. It then deposits a drizzle of paint to the epicenter corresponding to the magnitude of the tremor. See it in action below.

Quakescape 3D Fabricator from Oliver Ellmers on Vimeo.

[via PSFK]