Ever wonder why flies always get away when you try to swat them? It turns out they're extremely acrobatic. Like, Neo-in-the-Matrix acrobatic. And New Scientist has captured one in near bullet-time to prove it.

This video is one of the winners in a contest held by the Flight Artists group at the Wageningen University in the Netherlands in which amateur filmmakers were taught how to use very high-speed cameras to shoot flying animals and plant seeds. The video captured here was taken by two biologists from the University of Washington and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute who study fruit flies in flight.

What they captured is a maneuver that takes place so quickly that it can't really be observed in real time. It's an evasive maneuver, undertaken when the fly is startled by something. As you can see, it goes into a quick and graceful forward somersault from its perch and catches air as it starts to fall, allowing it to regain control and fly away. Not bad for a fruit fly.

[New Scientist]

Wiretapping an enzyme and listening as it unfolds could shed new light on the way proteins work, allowing researchers to monitor structural changes over a longer period of time than was previously possible. To do it, scientists tethered a nanoscale transistor to a molecule found in human tears.

Understanding how proteins fold is a key challenge in biology - making synthetic versions is about much more than their molecular contents. Enzymes change their shapes when they bind their molecular targets, and the way in which this happens has some bearing on the way the proteins work. Researchers have even turned to online games to look for novel folds and structures that could be used in drug discovery and other uses.

Biochemists can glimpse these structural changes, but not over long enough time scales to really get a handle on the folding action. Now researchers at the University of California-Irvine say their wiretapping method provides a long-term window into the kinetic behavior of a specific protein.

Yongki Choi and colleagues worked with an enzyme called lysozyme, which is found in human tears and is particularly effective at neutralizing bacteria much larger than itself. They attached the enzyme to a single-walled carbon nanotube, and put the enzyme to work in a reaction assay. The folding and twisting motions induced teeny changes in electrostatic potentials, which the carbon nanotube could detect. Amplifying these signals gave the team a glimpse of the movements the enzyme was making. The team measured these changes in various conditions and over different time scales, they report in their paper, published online today in Science.

"It's just like a stethoscope listening to your heart, except we're listening to a single molecule of protein," said Philip Collins, a co-author on the paper who typically studies physics and astronomy.

Tiny nanotube field-effect transistors have also been used to listen to cells in action.

The team was able to compare the signals to other measurements made with a technique called single-molecule fluorescence resonance energy transfer spectroscopy. They found the enzymatic actions looked pretty similar between the photon signals and the electron signals - nice confirmation.

This is encouraging because the same technique could be used to study many other molecules, the researchers say.

The best space images are the ones that put our humble place in perspective, whether it's an image from the moon or a particularly stunning nebula. This one accomplishes the task brilliantly, giving a glimpse of the arm of our galaxy hovering over the limb of our little planet. Watch a timelapse video below.

This video was taken by the crew of Expedition 30 on board the International Space Station, over a 15-minute period Dec. 29. The space station is passing over central Africa, near southeastern Niger, toward the south Indian Ocean and Madagascar.

The Milky Way appears as a haze in the middle of the screen, with a brief appearance by Comet Lovejoy.

Last August in Huanchaquito, a town on the arid northern coast of Peru, the winter winds uncovered six human skulls. A villager alerted Yale University archaeologist Oscar Gabriel Prieto Burmester to the find, and soon thereafter Burmester and his team had unearthed the ancient remains of 43 children and 76 llamas, and not a single adult-a sacrificial site. Preserved by the area's dry climate, the 900-year-old mummies date to the age of the pre-Columbian Chimú culture.

The bodies, which lay facing the coast, rested in a single sediment layer, suggesting that they were killed as a group as an offering to an ocean deity, Burmester says, perhaps as an attempt to control the weather. A thick layer of sediment surrounding the mummies indicates that it rained violently right before or during the slaughter. For the sacrifice, the Chimú people offered the best they had. Children represented fertility and renewal, Burmester says, and llamas provided food, clothing and transportation. The now-excavated mummies await further study in a museum in the nearby city of Chan Chan.

Until now, there hasn't been an all-electric car fit for road-tripping. But Tesla's Model S, due out late in 2012, is made for extended drives. Its battery goes up to 300 miles on a charge. Its cabin is spacious enough for seven passengers. And it can get up to cruising speed fast-the Model S accelerates from 0 to 60 in 5.6 seconds.

BIGGER BATTERY

At 85 kilowatt-hours, the Model S boasts more than triple the battery capacity of the Nissan Leaf. Its thousands of lithium-ion cells use a new electrode chemistry from Panasonic, which could allow them to store more power than other comparably sized cells.

FAST CHARGE

Tesla plans to install proprietary 440-volt charging stations (first along the I-5 Corridor between Los Angeles and San Francisco) built to match up with the Model S's circuitry. They will provide a full charge in an hour. Standard chargers will require a full night.

TEMPERATURE CONTROL

To protect the motor, circuitry and battery from heat, channels filled with liquid coolant run through the components. Pumps cycle coolant through a front radiator and a pair of A/C condensers. This helps the motor deliver twice the power of its Roadster predecessor.

LIGHT BODY

To increase the sedan's range, the designers of the Model S kept its weight low with a body constructed from 97 percent aluminum. They added heavier structural steel only where necessary for safety: in central supports and front-end crash zones.

ROOMY CABIN

The Model S's batteries sit beneath the floor in a large flat pack that spreads the width of the car and about two thirds of its length. This arrangement leaves ample space in the trunk for cargo or two backward-facing jump seats. The main interior holds five adults.

Top Speed:130 mph
Range: 300 miles
Seats: Five adults, two children
Price: $77,400

Working out can be boring, and sometimes the easiest way to get moving is to be entertained. But new interactive gym equipment brings real-world workouts to your basement, making your home training more fun and more effective.

See the gallery.

Programmable thermostats help save money by resetting the temperature when homeowners are asleep or away. But setting them up can be painstaking, and 89 percent of users never get them out of manual mode. The Nest thermostat requires almost no setup and teaches itself when to adjust the temperature.

It starts by building a schedule. For the first week, users change the temperature normally. The Nest notes their preferred at-home temperature, say 72°F, and also determines appropriate "away" temperatures-60º in winter and 80º in summer, for example. To account for conditions outside, the Nest checks the weather over Wi-Fi, and its indoor humidity sensor tells it when to kick in the fan for comfort. If everyone leaves, a motion sensor signals the processor to activate the away setting.

Even small tweaks can save cash. A change of a single degree from the preset program can reduce power consumption by 2 to 5 percent. The Nest also has a ZigBee wireless chip, so it can work with smart meters to turn on the A/C or the furnace when energy is cheapest.

We've got a delightfully plant-and-animal-heavy Images roundup for you this week, like newly rediscovered monkeys, unbelievably beautiful polar invertebrates (above), gorgeous orchids, and more. Of course, there are also some pretty space pics, because we love them, and you love them, and everyone else loves them, and a whole lot more.

Click to launch this week's Images of the Week gallery.

Good thing all that noise about SOPA and PIPA worked, at least a little. Otherwise you might not get to see this week's great Baarbarian illustration--we might've had to replace all of our images with big black censored bars.

Want to win this Mexican/Martian fusion 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 their 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:

• Borderworld: How the U.S. Is Reengineering Homeland Security
• Video: Rescuing Disaster Victims With Snake Robots Deployed By Dogs
• How Some of the Internet's Biggest Sites Are Protesting SOPA and PIPA
• Newly Found Meteorites Came From Mars, Scientists Confirm

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

• Did Global Warming Destroy My Hometown?
• The Most Amazing Images of the Week, January 16-20, 2012
• Video: How Flies Somersault to Safety Just Before You Swat Them
• Apple's New iBooks App for iPad Aims to Replace High School Textbooks
• FYI: What Happens if I Put Rocket Fuel in My Gas Tank?
• In Which I Designed a Part for My Truck, and Got It Built From Scratch
• Metamaterials Can Exert a Whole New Kind of Force
• Survey Establishes What Kids Want From Robots: Homework Help and Friendship

Every month we search far and wide to bring you a dozen of the best new ideas in gear. These gadgets are the first, the best and the latest. Check out the gallery below to get the first look at what consumer technology has brought us this month.

Click to launch our guide to this January's best gadgets.

It takes only 48 hours to distill a barrel of whiskey. The next decade is spent making it taste good. The liquor undergoes constant chemical changes, some from the charred oak of the barrel itself, which acts like a sieve, trapping the large-molecule forms of alcohol (methanol, butanol) that give young whiskey such a rough edge. The process takes years, and as a result good whiskey is old and expensive. Four-year-old bourbon runs about $20 and tastes OK. But a truly delicious bourbon out of its teens will easily fetch $200.

I like whiskey, but I also appreciate a deal. So when I heard that Orville Tyler, a retired chemist from South Carolina, had invented a way to radically accelerate whiskey aging, I was intrigued. Tyler says his Terrapure process can produce reactions within hours that ordinarily require years. I'd heard about all kinds of tricks for improving liquids-the bottlers of H20m water, for instance, invigorate their drinks with Buddhist mantras. Tyler's company, Terressentia, seemed a little less snake-oily than that. With about 50 corporate customers, mainly hotel and restaurant chains that use the process on their private labels, it must be doing something right. So I sent Tyler's team a sample of four-month-aged whiskey, and they promised to put it through their time machine.

Some distilleries attempt to speed up aging by using small barrels, which increases the liquid's ratio of surface area to volume, exposing more of the liquor to the influence of the oak. The technique gives young whiskey a gorgeous ruddy color, like strong tea. It also makes it sweeter and slightly mellower-but hardly enough to temper the underlying harsh taste of young alcohol, like caustic runoff from a sawmill. It takes more than wood to make whiskey palatable. Compounds in the spirit such as isopropanol (harsh on your tongue and, the morning after, on your head) need time to react with fatty acids, leaving behind esters, the aromatic compounds largely responsible for giving fruits their odor and flavor.

Tyler's process picks up where small barrels leave off. He pumps young liquor through an oxygenated chamber, where it is subjected to high-intensity ultrasonic energy. The agitation sets esterfication in motion. "In six hours," he says, "you have every reaction you need for vodka, and in 12 hours you have every reaction you need for the darker spirits."

A week after I sent in my four-month sample, Earl Hewlette, the CEO of Terressentia, delivered my processed whiskey in person. I poured a taste, alongside a sample of the original, "un-ultrasonicated" batch. The color of the two liquids was identical, but the original gave off a strong whiff of boozy vanilla. Sipped, the processed sample was smoother than the original, and glyceride molecules, newly formed out of fatty acids, let it linger on the tongue rather than evaporate in an astringent haze. The wood flavor still whacked like a two-by-four, but all the drink's harsh edges were rounded away. Not bad for 12 hours' work.

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter hasn't enjoyed a whole lot of good press lately, with a slew of budget overruns, technology concerns, and one very public grounding for the Marine Corps' F-35B variant casting long shadows over the effort to develop America's new fifth-generation fighter jet. But that hasn't stopped the press team at Lockheed Martin from casting the F-35 in a more favorable light in these newly released images of the jet's first night flight.

The F-35A pictured here (that's the conventional takeoff and landing Air Force variant) reportedly performed well during straight approaches at dusk, and we're told that the test pilot described the cockpit lighting as the best he'd ever seen. The green exterior night formation lights set against the atmospheric effects of a California sunset make for some pretty good lighting as well.

[Lockheed Martin via Business Insider]

The notion of multiple universes is one that cosmologists like to theorize about but generally don't relish proving, mainly because doing so would be very difficult. But a team of researchers that showed a few years ago how matter might travel between our universe and others now think they ought to be able to observe this phenomenon in action using existing technology, lending credence to the multiverse theory. All they need is a neutron bottle, some neutrons, and a year.

The experiments would require bottling neutrons in an ultracold state, a process that physicists have been performing for years to measure how quickly neutrons decay. These bottles--made of ordinary matter imbued with magnetic fields--are able to trap these super-cooled neutrons and keep them moving slowly enough that they can be observed. Physicists can measure the rate at which these trapped neutrons strike the walls of the bottle and how quickly this rate declines as the neutrons decay.

In a perfect experiment, the neutrons would always decay precisely at a rate equal to the beta decay rate, but this is never the case because neutron bottles aren't perfect--the rate of decay is always a bit faster, presumably because some of the neutrons escape by means other than decay.

Or maybe they don't. Michael Sarrazin at the University of Namur in Belgium and a few colleagues have postulated that maybe these neutrons simply depart for another universe. They have already shown how, theoretically, large enough magnetic potentials could provide the basis for inter-universe matter swapping. Now, in a paper available at arXiv, they've used decay rate data to place an upper limit on how often this might be able to happen. They found that it's probably quite rare if it happens at all--according to their figures, the probability of a neutron making the leap to another universe is smaller than one in a million.

But that doesn't rule it out completely, especially considering how many neutrons there are out there. Moreover, Sarrazin thinks he has a way to observe this experimentally. A change in the gravitational potential should also affect the rate of matter swapping, and the gravitational potential her on Earth changes as the planet moves around the Sun. Run a neutron trapping experiment for a full year, and you could see if there is a modulation in the rate of neutron decay based on some kind of annual cycle. If so, that means the neutrons probably aren't just decaying, but swapping universes as well.

Which would be mind-blowing, to say the very least. More at arXiv.

[Technology Review]

A recently-concluded DARPA program sought to extinguish fires using unusual methods. No water or simple common chemicals for DARPA: instead, this is "a novel flame-suppression system based on destabilization of flame plasma with electromagnetic fields and acoustics techniques." Below, you will find a video of somebody rubbing a fire with some sort of rod, which puts the fire out.

"Instant Fire Suppression" is the name of the program; it was undertaken by the DARPA research team at Harvard University, aiming to find a way to put out fires that treats them in a fundamentally different way. Typical methods, like, say, using water, or a blanket, are chemical solutions, seeking to starve the fire of oxygen or introduce a substance that destroys the fire's source, that kind of thing. But what if you looked at fire from a physics point of view, rather than a chemical one? Others have tried--we even wrote about one method--but this is the first time we've seen one in action.

"From a physics point of view," says DARPA on their site, "flames are cold plasmas comprising mobile electrons and slower positive ions." So this project was designed to manipulate and extinguish fires using "physics techniques" like acoustics, ion injections, and manipulation of electromagnetic fields. DARPA hasn't said exactly how the fire-killing rod in the video works, but the results of the project will hopefully be scaled up and used inside military vehicles, especially sensitive ones like ships that may not respond well to traditional firefighting methods.

[DARPA via Gizmodo]

Handheld terahertz scanners could soon be sniffing for drugs and explosives, transmitting super-high-speed data, and looking inside your body, based on a new nanoscale T-ray device developed by researchers in the UK and Singapore. The new device can produce a much stronger beam of terahertz radiation than was previously thought possible, and at room temperature to boot. The T-ray beam could be integrated into portable scanners, like a real-life Tricorder, the researchers say.

Electromagnetic waves in the terahertz range, known as T-rays, are used in highly sensitive security scanners, some prototype medical devices and a host of other technologies. Like X-ray scanners, T-ray scanners can penetrate where optical light cannot - through paper, clothing, and you. They can also sense any molecule, because every one has a unique signature in the THz range, according to researchers at Imperial College London. This makes them useful as drug sniffers or medical imagers - they could sense molecules associated with cancer or other diseases, for instance. But THz imaging devices, like quantum cascade lasers, require huge amounts of energy and must operate at low temperatures, so they're expensive and therefore not very common.

This new design creates a T-ray beam at low temperatures, essentially by mixing and amplifying beams of light at different wavelengths. It uses a pair of electrodes situated just 100 nanometers apart on a semiconductor substrate. Light in two different wavelengths shines on the electrodes and is funneled through the 100-nm gap. A strong current between the electrodes acts as an antenna and amplifies the light to the THz range. The T-rays can even be tuned to create a constant beam, which would be required for a T-ray scanner. The setup is two orders of magnitude stronger than existing THz systems, the researchers say in their paper, which was published this month in Nature Photonics.

Along with their efficacy at low temperatures, the best thing about this T-ray beam is its small size - it's tiny enough to be integrated into existing silicon chips. So the T-ray scanner of the future could be as small as a handheld little gun, just like the Tricorder on Star Trek. It's possible a team developing this type of technology will win the Tricorder X Prize much sooner than anyone expects.

[via Extreme Tech]

There was a time when one rarely had to worry about incoming doom born of outer space, but that time is not now. Between mysterious space balls, falling satellite after falling satellite after falling satellite, and the buildup to 2013's solar maximum, the sky seems more threatening all the time these days. Just ask NOAA, which is today warning of the strongest solar storm since 2005 currently en route to Earth, spawned by a massive M8.7 class flare that erupted from the solar surface late last night.

Just shy of 11:00 p.m. eastern U.S. time last night, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory picked up a huge flash of ultraviolet energy resulting from a massive flare erupting form sunspot 1402. The storm was also picked up by the Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) and the Stereo mission, all of which contributed data to NASA and NOAA.

That data says that a burst of highly energetic particles known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME, is hurtling toward the home planet at a rate of about 1,400 miles per second. That burst of radiation isn't expected to hit Earth squarely, but to deliver a glancing blow to the northern part of Earth's magnetic envelope as early as tomorrow morning. That means people at lower latitudes may be in for some good auroras, but it also means there is some risk to satellites, communications, and aircraft.

Those threats aren't thought to be all that serious at this time--NASA says the crew aboard the International Space Station is not in any danger, and NOAA officials say the resulting solar storm activity should be moderate. Still, polar flights on Earth are likely to be rerouted tonight and tomorrow until this latest storm has blown over.

The BBC just got a look at the newly-unveiled anti-doping testing facility that'll be used at the London Olympics this summer, and it is rightfully hailed as the most high-tech, complete such facility ever conceived. We're talking thousands of workers, testing going 24 hours a day, seven days a week, in a space estimated at the size of seven tennis courts.

The Olympic Committee partnered with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, which donated the facility's millions and millions of dollars worth of lab equipment. We haven't been given all that much detail into how the testing will be done, or if it'll differ in any major way from the standards of drug-testing. But they did note that every single medalist, as well as more than half of all Olympic athletes in general, will be tested. Results will be available in about 48 hours, thanks to the nonstop pace of testing that's planned.

That testing will be done by upwards of a thousand workers, including "a team of more than 150 anti-doping scientists, flown in from all over the world," which will do the final analysis to see if a sample sets off any alarm bells. There'll be over 400 samples coming through the Essex-based facility every day, so they'll need all the help they can get.

Short of an alternate league for performance-enhanced athletes, this seems like about the best way to ensure a fair Olympic games.

[BBC]

Our inspiration came from a classmate who has spina bifida-a split spine-and can't ride a regular bike. Our trike has extra back support and a steering system to make turning easier. On a normal bike, leaning in the direction you want to go helps you turn. It's hard to do that on a trike because it's rigid, but ours has hydraulic pistons that tilt the tires when you lean, allowing you to make tighter corners. You can go just as fast as you could on a regular bike, and we're going to add an electric motor, so it is going to be really fun to ride. We're building a prototype in our shop at school.

SEATING

I took an office chair and bent it backward 45 degrees. Eventually we will make the seat in carbon fiber. The seat can slide so people of different heights can use the trike and reach the pedals. -Tack Dallas, grade 12, computer-assisted design (CAD) specialist

STEERING

You know how on a Segway when you lean forward, the wheels roll forward? That's because the wheels are trying to catch up with the momentum of your body. Our trike is based on the same idea: To steer, you lean. -Elli Shook, grade 10, designer

HYDRAULICS

When you lean to one side, the hydraulic piston on that side depresses and the other hydraulic goes up. This tilts the tires, helping you turn. When you come to a stop, the hydraulics will automatically reset so the tires aren't leaning. Then, when you get going, a sensor flips and you can lean to steer again. -Jordan Kooi, grade 12, lead designer

The students were awarded $10,000 to build the trike by the Lemelson-MIT Program's InvenTeam Initiative.

Having contributed in large part to the Internet's very existence, DARPA is now setting out to make its secure networks more secure. But rather than relying upon the conventional notion of a password--a complex string of letters and numerals that an individual must remember--the agency is looking to create a "cognitive fingerprint" for individuals that constantly authenticates that person for the duration of the time he or she has access to a network.

DARPA's approach relies on biometrics, but not the usual brand of biometrics we're used to seeing, like iris or fingerprint scans. DARPA wants to employ what it calls software-based biometrics--biometrics that don't require any extra equipment and can be deployed on any computer via a software package--to recognize individual humans.

That means identifying humans not by a physical characteristic, but via a blend of mental or behavioral traits that are inherent in the way the person interacts with the terminal and the network. These things could include analysis of patterns in a person's keystrokes, use of a computer's built-in camera to track eye-movement patterns, semantic analysis that evaluates how a user searches and selects information (how you structure search queries, for instance, or what verbs and predicates you tend to use), the structure and syntax of a user's sentences, the speed with which an individual tends to read content--the list goes on.

The idea is that the Active Authentication program, as the initiative is known, will replace passwords with a far stronger proof of identity--the user him- or herself. This overcomes some major shortcomings of the common password, not least of which being that passwords can be stolen and used by anyone. As long as the password fits, computers generally make no distinction between individuals using it. Passwords also generally authenticate entire sessions. If users are careless and don't log out, anyone can pick up the session where the intended user left off, gaining access to secure information.

Active Authentication makes the user his or her own unique authentication key, meaning that his or her identity is verified constantly throughout the time he or she spends accessing a given network. DARPA wants to teach every computer in the DoD environment how to use this "cognitive fingerprint," ensuring that regardless of where a user is logged in, the system knows--constantly--exactly who is who.

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