A slight genetic tweak can restart the heart's own innate pacemaker system, according to new research. Someday, newly jumpstarted internal pacemakers could eliminate the need for electrical implants.

In the past couple of years, scientists have figured out how to turn non-beating heart cells into the type that beat, which are called cardiomyocytes. But these cells still have to beat to a specific rhythm, which is controlled by a tiny cluster of about 10,000 cells called the sinoatrial node. When this heart drum major fails, the billions of cardiomyocytes it leads will stop beating properly, leading to an uneven heartbeat or even cardiac arrest. Electronic pacemakers prevent this from happening.

But researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute had another idea. They knew a gene called Tbx18 is normally activated during the sinoatrial node's development, when an embryo is forming. So they set out to add Tbx18 into a functioning, fully grown heart. To do it, they inserted the code for this gene into a virus, which they then inserted into the hearts of guinea pigs. The infected hearts beat according to this newly formed pacemaker, Eduardo Marbán and colleagues report in Nature Biotechnology. It also worked in a Petri dish.

The team used ventricular cells, one of three main types of heart cells (along with pacemaker cells and atrial cells). The infected cells changed their appearance, taking on a distinctive tapered shape, and this lasts even after the Tbx18 has faded away. That suggests it's a permanent structural change, which means this could be a lasting treatment for diminished sinoatrial cells.

"This technology thus represents a promising alternative to electronic pacing devices," Marbán et al. write. Longer-term experiments are still needed, but the work so far is promising, they say.

Security experts have shown it's possible for hackers to remotely assume control of a pacemaker, forcing it to deliver a deadly shock or just shut down. While this is not likely, it's already been used for the most bizarre fake terrorist attack ever, the secret/unclaimed pacemaker failure and subsequent death of Vice President William Walden on "Homeland." So, you know, it's not totally crazy. Next time maybe it'll be a virus instead.

[Nature Biotechnology via BBC]

Last time the Jet Propulsion Laboratory provided live spacecraft commentary, it was for the white-knuckle landing of the Mars rover Curiosity. Today's will be somewhat less exciting--the demise of the twin lunar probes known as Ebb and Flow.

NASA's moon twins, washing-machine sized spacecraft that arrived at the moon over New Year's 2012, are going down later today. The spacecraft fired their engines over the weekend to alter their orbits and aim for an unnamed mountain-like structure near the moon's north pole. They are scheduled to crash at 2:28 p.m. Pacific time, or 5:28 p.m. EST. You can watch live commentary on NASA TV or on JPL's Ustream feed.

Navigators on the GRAIL team wanted to rule out the remote possibility that either of the probes would crash near a lunar heritage site. They tweaked the probes' trajectories to impact in a lonely site near the moon's north pole, far from any Apollo or Soviet landers. NASA's moon history is in the spotlight lately because of new missions planned there; the space agency doesn't want any of its historic artifacts interfered with. Along with the historic preservation motivations, there are scientific reasons for this--there are some trash bags and other waste astronauts left behind, and it might be useful to study those someday to see how any microbes may have fared on the freezing, barren lunar surface. New landings could stir up moon dust and interfere with those measurements.

The GRAIL mission, which stands for Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory, set out to map the moon's gravitational fields at the highest resolution ever. This information provides clues about the moon's interior composition and structure. The spacecraft did it by flying in tandem around the moon, and measuring tiny changes in the distance between them that were caused by varying gravitational pulls.

You can read more about the mission here.

More bad news for North Korea on the first anniversary of dearly departed leader Kim Jong-il's death: the satellite it launched into orbit last week is not only tumbling out of control, but is also likely completely dead, astronomers say. "It's tumbling and we haven't picked up any transmissions," Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who tracks space activity, told the New York Times. "Those two things are most consistent with the satellite being entirely inactive at this point." Meaning that while North Korea did manage to put its satellite in the right orbit--a technological feat in itself--the Democratic People's Republic is still far from being a space power. Or even a space lightweight.

[NYT]

Do you have a friend whose kitchen aspires to be a laboratory, who weighs every ingredient to the milligram, who can name half a dozen culinary hydrocolloids and their relative merits?

These are gifts for that person.

Fitness trackers, little pedometer-type things that purport to measure your activity and help you get into shape, are on about a billion gift guides this year. But maybe they shouldn't be. Here are the two most pressing reasons not to buy someone a fitness tracker like a Fitbit, Nike+ Fuelband, or Jawbone Up as a gift.

1. It implies your giftees are fat. And maybe they are but if you feel like that's something they should know you should probably not use a pedometer as a messenger. Be nice!

2. 99% of people won't use it. And this is the more pressing reason--it's not that they're bad products, exactly, it's just that fitness trackers have positioned themselves as gadgets for the masses, a futuristic way to get in shape. And they're not! They are helpful tools for a very particular type of person, and you know maaaaaybe one of that type of person, and that person probably already has one of these.

I've been using both of the new Fitbit products for a few weeks now. I am in awful shape, an overripe chimera of laziness and injury and sedentary job and also laziness, and I thought "hey, I bet this'll help motivate me to get into shape!" It did not, and that's only partly due to the execution of the product. The Fitbit One, which just about every reviewing publication ranks as the best or one of the best fitness trackers out there, is fine. It's tiny and well-designed, it can track your steps, it syncs with an app on your phone, it tracks your sleep patterns. All of that stuff together can be very helpful for monitoring your health, but I suspect very few people will actually see the benefit.

That's because fitness trackers are dumb. I don't mean dumb as in "bad," I mean dumb in the same way that an old flip-phone is dumber than a smartphone. It just can't do very much on its own. Here's one (unusually active) day of using the Fitbit.

Last week, before going to bed, I remembered to have the Fitbit track my sleep. I dug the Fitbit out of my pants, put on the big velcro wristband, stuck the Fitbit in the wristband's pocket, pressed the button to tell the Fitbit I was going to bed, and then went to bed. Woke up the next morning, pressed the button to tell the Fitbit I was awake. Took the Fitbit out of the wristband, put it in my pocket again. Had breakfast. Logged onto the Fitbit app to tell the app I had breakfast. Searched for the specific breakfast I had, guessed how much I had eaten. Logged it. Biked to work--about a 6.5-mile trip--which the Fitbit did not register, because it only registers walking. Logged onto the Fitbit app to tell it precisely how long and how far the bike trip was.

Worked. Had lunch, logged onto the Fitbit app to tell it what I had for lunch. Fitbit directory didn't list what I had--it mostly includes fast food or chain food--so I guessed at the calorie count. Went to the gym after work. Moved Fitbit from pants to a clip on my workout shorts. Worked out. Fitbit doesn't pick up on any of that, because I didn't do anything like walking, which is what the Fitbit measures. Logged onto Fitbit app to tell it what I did. Weighed myself at the gym. Logged onto Fitbit to tell it how much I weigh. Biked home. Logged onto Fitbit app to tell it about that. Ate dinner. Logged onto Fitbit app and took my best guess as to calorie count. Took Fitbit out of pants, synced with iPhone app. Put it into wristband and told it I was going to bed.

From all of that, I saw how many calories I burned, how far I walked, how many flights of stairs I climbed, how many calories I took in. I could see graphs over time, comparing my activity day by day, week by week, month by month. All of that is cool! But I am not an obsessive type, and I lost interest in spending literally hours per day with the Fitbit app after about two days.

This isn't exclusive to Fitbit; all of the major fitness trackers (Fitbit, Nike+ Fuelband, Jawbone Up) have their own quirks and pros and cons--the Fuelband and Jawbone Up, as wristbands, don't have the problem of having to remember to bring it with you, though they don't track your food intake--but they mostly work the same way. They're glorified pedometers with added fitness tracking software. To really get the most out of these gadgets, you have to be kind of obsessive. Just using them casually gets you very little of value; for a few days, it's cool to see how many steps you take, and I did take the stairs rather than the escalator to get more "points," but I very quickly tired of it. They just don't give enough information because they can't extract enough data, and they can't be encouraging because they don't analyze the data they get.

I still think there's a place for fitness trackers. The Basis Band, for example, is one step closer to being actually helpful for two main reasons. First: it can measure your heart rate, unlike any of the other trackers I mentioned. Second: it uses that data to recommend new exercises--instead of just giving you a chart, it'll advise that you walk around the office for ten minutes. That's much more helpful to the vast majority of people who don't like looking at charts all day.

Fitness trackers can only really be helpful when they get smart. Data is great, but for most people, it's not enough to just gather data and present it. You have to analyze it, figure out what it means and how to use it. The dream of a fitness tracker is pretty much like a fitness-centric version of Google Now: it needs to take in your data and then figure out what you actually want to know. That's the next generation of this data tech--it's not about the data, it's about the conclusions. What we want is a fitness tracker that suggests, that figures out your lifestyle and then gives you advice, that actually helps you get into shape rather than just telling you exactly how out of shape you are. Hopefully the next generation of fitness trackers go in that direction. But for now, don't bother with a pedometer.

Imagine it: trillions of dollars worth of precious metals, fossil fuels, and fresh water, just lying around waiting to be claimed by anybody with a little know-how and an adventurer's spirit--any lucky person willing to travel a few million miles into the great black unknown, latch on to a big hunk of funny-shaped rock, and claim 'em!

Asteroid mining may be down the road a piece yet, but that doesn't mean it's too early to start scouting. With that in mind, we give you Asterank 3D, the first visual guide to our solar system's most valuable resources.

Software engineer Ian Webster created Asterank 3D to visualize the data in Asterank, a database with economic and astronomical information on over 580,000 asteroids in our solar system that Webster built using data from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Small Body Database and several other sources. Each object in the database is ranked according to its total value and accessibility from Earth. Webster also gives an estimate of the total profit--taking into account costs of processing and transport--of mining each asteroid.

While Asterank presents all the best, most up-to-date information on our exo-resources, the database comes with one big caveat: "Scientists know shockingly little about the composition of asteroids," Webster writes on the About page. "This information scarcity is exactly why Planetary Resources is going to spend years or even decades investing in LEO-telescopes and data-gathering flybys before they ever touch an asteroid."

So if you really are the prospecting type--and you've got a fair chunk of start-up capital on hand--the folks over at Planetary Resources can help get you set up.

At the end of each year, IBM releases its "5 in 5"--five technology predictions that IBM researchers foresee coming to fruition within the coming five years. These predictions are based on everything from emerging market trends to cultural and social behaviors to actual technologies IBM has incubating in its many labs. And if this year's predictions are to be believed, many computational systems--from your tablet and laptop to your smartphone--are about to get a lot more sensory, learning to see, hear, touch, taste, and smell in their own digital ways.

Welcome to the era of cognitive systems, IBM's researchers say. "Cognitive computing systems will help us see through complexity, keep up with the speed of information, make more informed decisions, improve our health and standard of living, enrich our lives and break down all kinds of barriers-including geographic distance, language, cost and inaccessibility," the company says in a press release.

How? By mimicking the senses. IBM predicts that things like computer vision will revolutionize computing, particularly through health care where images like MRIs and CT scans won't just be used by individual doctors to diagnose specific patients, but to find trends and meaning within huge volumes of medical image data. Where sound is concerned, IBM believes distributed sensor systems will begin to capture and analyze sound in new and meaningful ways (by assigning relevance to the inaudible characteristics of sounds waves, for instance) to do all kinds of things, from testing materials for weak spots to deciphering baby talk (no joke). Likewise, computers will have a sense of smell. Computers like your smartphone will be able to diagnose illnesses based on biomarkers on your breath, helping to aggregate epidemiological data and keep health authorities out in front of outbreaks.

Perhaps most interesting, though, are IBM's visions of computers that can taste and feel. Where food is concerned, IBM more or less predicts the end of the chef who creates flavor pairings by intuition. IBM is already working on a system that "experiences" flavor compounds and uses that data to create flavor pairings and recipes at a very fundamental level, based on both food chemistry and human psychology. "In five years a computer system will know what I like to eat better than I do," says Dr. Lav Varshney, research scientist in IBM's Services Research branch.

And then there's the sense of touch, which IBM thinks will become something we experience through our smartphone screens. Using specially tuned vibrations, it is already possible to create the sensation of textures that aren't there. What we lack is a "dictionary of textures," a kind of lexicon of vibrational patterns that allow us to generate virtually any texture sensation that we want. IBM predicts that we will create this--and is in fact working on doing so--and that it will create a whole new online experience. Think: the ability to feel the texture of a shirt you are shopping for online through the screen of your smartphone.

If any of this sounds far-fetched, it is. And IBM's track record at predicting the future isn't flawless. In its own accounting of its success, there are years (particularly 2011 and 2009) where its predictions have not yet borne fruit--though the five-year clock hasn't run out on those predictions yet. Others, like real-time speech translation (2006), near-field communication payment technology for cell phones (2007), driver-assist technologies like self-parking and voice-activated commands (2007), and consumer market mind-reading devices (2011) have all proven true to some degree.

Judging purely from IBM's previous record, at least some of the technologies described above should be on the five-year horizon. Siri suddenly seems quaint by comparison.

[IBM]

After 350 days in lunar orbit, the twin probes Ebb and Flow ended their mission today with a carefully planned dive into a mountain near the moon's north pole. The probes' crash site has been named in honor of Sally Ride, the first American woman in space.

We are all star stuff, as Carl Sagan once so eloquently put it--we come from remnants, the leftover pieces of long-dead stars and the elements forged inside of them. But a new theory says we came together as the result of a slow agglomeration, not a titanic explosion. Our solar system was born like a snowdrift on a blustery day, particles slowly clustering together in ever-increasing groups until something notable forms.

This flies in the face of most solar system formation scholarship, which holds that shockwaves from a nearby supernova triggered the collapse of the dust cloud that eventually became our star and our planets. Computer models and 3-D simulations have confirmed that theory for at least the past couple of years. Now comes a new analysis of heavy elements by researchers at the University of Chicago.

Authors Haolan Tang and Nicolas Dauphas looked at concentrations of iron-60, a radioactive isotope of the metal that forms in an exploding star. Previous research has found high levels of this material in meteorites, early solar system leftovers that serve sort of like time capsules. An abundance of iron-60 is strong evidence for a supernova in the nearby cosmic neighborhood.

But Tang and Dauphas say it is well-mixed and in low abundance in our solar system, which casts doubt on that assumption. Tang and Dauphas examined the same meteorites, but used a different method--dissolving the meteorites to examine their contents--which reportedly reduced their error rates. To double-check it, they also looked for iron-58, an isotope that supernovas also produce. That isotope is also sparsely distributed, which confirmed the scarcity of iron-60 because the isotopes are so closely related.

If they're right, and there's not an abundance of iron-60, then there's no need to say a supernova shockwave collapsed our nascent solar system's dust cloud. So what did provide the push? Perhaps a massive star shed its gassy outer layers, spewing the material that would eventually become our solar system, according to these researchers. These materials coalesced and formed our sun, with some remaining mass eventually becoming the planets.

It remains to be seen how other planetary geologists will feel about this new wrinkle. But iron abundances will have to be taken into account when scientists try to describe how we got here, Tang said. The paper appears in Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

[University of Chicago]

On December 18, 1912, Charles Dawson told The Geological Society of London that a workman had uncovered the remains of one of the earliest humans in a gravel pit in Piltdown, England. The skull fragments and lower jaw bone of the "Piltdown Man" showed that it had a brain two-thirds the size of a modern human's and a jaw remarkably similar to that of a young chimpanzee.

The Piltdown Man became a starring figure in the human evolutionary tree over the next 40 years. (Popular Science even published a feature in 1931 about the "man-ape.") But the discovery was actually an incredibly successful hoax: In 1953, chemical testing and microscopic analysis revealed that the bone fragments had been filed down and stained with an iron solution and chromic acid to look more ancient. The Piltdown Man was actually a mix of medieval human skull, orangutan, and chimpanzee.

Exactly a century after Dawson presented his findings, The Geological Society is meeting again to discuss the bones. This time, scientists will try to figure out who perpetrated the UK's biggest scientific fraud. Dawson is of course the main suspect, but others are under suspicion as well. Researchers at London's Natural History Museum are using isotopic analysis to determine the sources of the bone fragments, which might have been stolen from an Egyptology collection.

In April 1956, Popular Science published the story of how the hoax was finally revealed by Joseph Weiner, a scientist-turned-detective who felt that something wasn't quite right about the Piltdown Man.

Read the full story in our April 1956 issue.

Stem cell surgery, in which stem cells from a patient's body are transplanted into some other part of the body, is gaining in popularity. One patient in Los Angeles found out the hard way that the surgery is largely untested and unregulated. Stem cells are sometimes used for anti-aging purposes, the idea being that they'll turn into brand-new tissue and help heal aging cells nearby. But her doctors also used a dermal filler largely made of calcium hydroxylapatite, which happens to trigger stem cells to turn into...well, bone, rather than new tissue. The woman is recovering nicely, but it's a really fascinating story of how powerful and potent stem cells are--and how we need to be careful with how we use them in these early stages of stem cell use. [Scientific American]

On August 19, 2012, in week two of the NFL preseason, Indianapolis Colts wide receiver Austin Collie ran 17 yards out from the line of scrimmage, cut right toward the center of the field, caught a pass, and was immediately tackled by Pittsburgh Steelers cornerback Ike Taylor. As Taylor came in for the hit, his helmet appeared to glance off the left side of Collie's helmet. Then the cornerback wrapped his arm around Collie's neck and jerked the receiver's head to the right. An instant later, Steelers linebacker Larry Foote came barreling in from the opposite side and slammed his elbow into the right side of Collie's helmet. As the receiver fell to the ground, his helmet first hit Foote's knee and then struck the ground face-first.

Collie sat up, dazed, and had to be helped off the field a minute later. He didn't return to play for three weeks. The diagnosis: concussion. It wasn't the first time Collie had suffered what's clinically called a traumatic brain injury. On November 7, 2010, he spent nearly 10 minutes lying motionless on the 34-yard line after being hit in the head almost simultaneously by two Philadelphia Eagles players. Medics carried him off the field on a stretcher. In his first game back, two weeks later, he left in the first quarter with another concussion. He missed three more games, only to suffer yet another concussion on December 19, which ended his season.

Professional football players receive as many as 1,500 hits to the head in a single season, depending on their position. That's 15,000 in a 10-year playing career, not to mention any blows they received in college, high school, and peewee football. And those hits have consequences: concussions and, according to recent research, permanent brain damage. It's not just football, either. Hockey, lacrosse, and even sports like cycling and snowboarding are contributing to a growing epidemic of traumatic brain injuries. The CDC estimates that as many as 3.8 million sports-related concussions occur in the U.S. each year. That number includes not only professionals but amateurs of all levels, including children. Perhaps most troubling, the number isn't going down.

In the past two years, the outrage surrounding sports-related concussions has mounted. In January 2011, Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) called for a Federal Trade Commission investigation of the football helmet industry for "misleading safety claims and deceptive practices," which the agency is currently pursuing. In June 2012, more than 2,000 former NFL players filed a class-action suit against the league as well as Riddell, the largest football-helmet manufacturer and an official NFL partner, accusing them of obfuscating the science of brain trauma. The litigation could drag on for years and cost billions of dollars.

The real issue is that lives are at stake. In 2006, this fact became tragically clear when former Philadelphia Eagles star Andre Waters committed suicide by shooting himself. Subsequent studies of his brain indicated that he suffered from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage that results in dementia and is caused by repeated blows to the head. A sickening drumbeat of NFL suicides has followed, including former stars Dave Duerson, Ray Easterling, and Junior Seau, who by one estimate suffered as many as 1,500 concussions in his career.

For equipment manufacturers, the demand for protective headgear has never been greater. Leading companies, as well as an army of upstarts, have responded by developing a number of new helmet designs, each claiming to offer unprecedented safety. The trouble is that behind them all lie reams of conflicting research, much of it paid for, either directly or indirectly, by the helmet manufacturers or the league.

For players or coaches or the concerned parents of young athletes, it's hard to know whom to believe. And despite all the research and development, and the public outcry, the injuries just keep coming. What makes the situation even more tragic is that a helmet technology already exists that could turn the concussion epidemic around.

THE TROUBLE WITH CONCUSSIONS

To understand why current helmets aren't better at reducing concussions, consider the nature of the injury. A concussion is essentially invisible. Even the most advanced medical-imaging technology isn't sensitive enough to show the physical manifestations, the damaged brain tissue. Diagnosis, then, is based entirely on symptoms and circumstances. Is the patient dizzy or confused, or was he briefly unconscious? Does he have a headache or nausea? Does he remember what happened, and did it look like he got hit in the head really hard?/>

Click to tour the booming helmet market.

Even if doctors could reliably diagnose concussions, identifying the injury does little to protect against it; for that, scientists need an accurate picture of what's happening inside the head. For generations, doctors believed that concussions were a sort of bruising of the brain's gray matter at the site of impact and on the opposite side, where the brain presumably bounced off the skull. The reality is not nearly that simple: Concussions happen deep in the brain's white matter when forces transmitted from a big blow strain nerve cells and their connections, the axons.

To understand how that happens, it's important to recognize that different types of forces-linear and rotational acceleration-act on the brain in any physical trauma. Linear acceleration is exactly what it sounds like, a straight-line force that begins at the point of impact. It causes skull fracture, which makes perfect sense: You hit the bone hard enough, it breaks.

Rotational acceleration is less intuitive. It occurs most acutely during angular impacts, or those in which force is not directed at the brain's center of gravity. You don't have to know much about football or hockey to realize that rotation is a factor in a whole lot of hits. "Think about it," says Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon at Boston University School of Medicine and the author of 29 books on neurology and sports medicine. "Because most hits are off-center and because our heads are not square, most of the accelerations in the head are going to be rotational."

Further complicating matters, the human brain is basically an irregularly shaped blob of Jell-O sitting inside a hard shell lined with ridges and cliffs. After a football tackle or a hockey check, that blob moves, and does so in irregular ways. "Rotational forces strain nerve cells and axons more than linear forces do," Cantu says. "They're not only stretching, but they're twisting at the same time. So they have a potential for causing greater nerve injury."

So what's the problem? If scientists know that a concussion is nerve strain caused largely by rotation of the brain, why can't they figure out a way to stop the rotation?

Just as the actual injury isn't visible to medical imaging technology, the rotation that causes the injury isn't measurable in impact conditions; scientists cannot be inside an athlete's brain measuring its movement. But in a grisly 2007 study, researchers at Wayne State University in Detroit used a high-speed x-ray to observe the brains of human cadaver heads fitted with football helmets and struck from various angles. The research, corroborated by computer models, showed that the brains moved very little-just millimeters. Yet those small movements are enough to cause nerve strain and affect neurological function.

Making things even more difficult is that every brain is different. Young brains respond differently than older brains, female brains differently than male. Researchers have also found that weaker, subconcussive hits can have a cumulative effect over time and lead to CTE, which is likely the cause of many former-player suicides. But how many hits it takes, and what kind, is unclear-and the condition can't be diagnosed while the player is alive. Only when his brain is cut open can researchers spot the dead zones in the tissue.

The scientific ambiguity surrounding concussions clearly impedes the development of better helmets. But there's another reason helmet technology hasn't improved, one more troubling than gaps in our knowledge: a self-regulated industry governed by badly outdated safety standards.

40-YEAR-OLD STANDARDS

Picture the head of a typical crash-test dummy, the kind you see in car commercials. It's attached to a rigid metal arm that hangs above a cylindrical anvil topped with a hard plastic disc. A lab technician straps a football helmet to the headform, cranks the arm up to precisely five feet above the anvil, and lets it drop-crack. Inside the dummy head, an accelerometer positioned at the center of gravity records the linear acceleration transmitted during impact. This brutish trial is called a vertical drop test, and it's the basis for how all football helmets are certified safe by the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment (NOCSAE), an association funded by equipment manufacturers, which in turn funds much of the research on sports-related head trauma. The standard has remained largely unchanged since its creation in 1973.

 Now think back to Austin Collie's concussion in August 2012-the jerking of the head after the initial hit, the collisions with Larry Foote's elbow and the ground. Those impacts don't look much like the straight-line force of the NOCSAE drop test. And that brings up a very important question, perhaps the central question scientists and helmet makers are trying to solve today: Is the linear acceleration measured by a drop test correlated to rotational acceleration, and if so, by how much?/>

Untold lives and billions of dollars in sales, medical fees, and litigation costs could depend on a clear answer. If the relationship between the forces is strong, the key to reducing rotational acceleration is the same as reducing linear acceleration: Add more padding. Clearly helmet manufactures would prefer such a simple solution. If the connection is weak, however-or at least weak in the most dangerous hits-more padding will do little to reduce concussions, and companies will need to rethink current designs entirely, a very costly endeavor.

In 2003, a New Hampshire-based company named Simbex introduced a research tool called the Head Impact Telemetry System (HITS). Among other things, it seemed to have the potential to answer the question of correlation. HITS is an array of six spring-loaded accelerometers positioned inside a helmet to record the location and severity of significant impacts. After any hit over a certain threshold, the system beams the data to a companion device on the sidelines. Coaches can monitor players in real time, and researchers get reams of real-world data to dig through. Stefan Duma, the founding director of Virginia Tech's Center for Injury Biomechanics, is among those working with HITS data; at his urging, every player on the university's football team wears a HITS-equipped helmet. After analyzing data from two million impacts, Duma says there is a clear and strong connection between linear and rotational forces.

Unfortunately, other researchers say it's not that simple. The correlation is high if you look at all hits, they say, but it falls apart when you look at highly angular ones-the hits that carry a greater risk of concussion. "Take an extreme example," says Boston University's Cantu. "If you impact the tip of the face mask, if you have another player coming at it sideways, you're going to spin the head on the neck and have very low linear acceleration and very high rotational acceleration."

Indeed, for every advocate of the HITS data, there exists an equally vocal critic. They say that helmets deform under the force of a 250-pound linebacker, skewing data. They say the HITS algorithm that calculates rotation is flawed. They point out that the founder of HITS is a co-author on all the published studies that validate the system. Blaine Hoshizaki, a biomechanics professor at the University of Ottawa whose research focuses on angular hits, sounds exasperated when I ask him about Duma's findings. "You've got to look at the events that are really contributing to concussion," he says. "It may be that in 1,000 hits, only 50 are highly non-centric, but maybe those 50 are the most dangerous-and that's what our data shows."

In essence, the system created to answer questions about concussions has raised a lot more questions. The resulting confusion sets off a cascade of effects. Unclear science makes for unclear standards, and unclear standards leave a lot of room for interpretation. The impact on the helmet industry is conspicuous: It's become a free-for-all.

THE HELMET ARMS RACE

In December 2010, a longtime auto-racing safety equipment maker named Bill Simpson happened to attend one of the Colts games in which medics helped Austin Collie off the field after a concussion. Following the incident, Simpson asked the Colts' offensive coordinator, a friend, what had happened to his receiver.

"Oh, that's just part of the game," the coach said.

Simpson saw an opportunity. In auto racing, he's known as the Godfather of Safety, and once set himself on fire to demonstrate the efficacy of one of his racing suits. He figured he could make a better football helmet, so he got to work in his Indianapolis warehouse. By 2011, several pros, including Collie, were wearing early experimental versions of Simpson's helmet. />

That an individual inventor could develop, produce, and deliver a product into the hands of professional athletes speaks to the upheaval in the world of helmet manufacturing. What was once a rather staid industry dominated by a few large companies has now grown to include an increasing number of upstart firms, serial entrepreneurs, and individual inventors. The result has been a proliferation of new designs. Mainstream helmet makers have stuck with variations on previous models: polycarbonate shells filled with various densities and thicknesses of padding. Newcomers have developed more creative, albeit less rigorously tested, approaches. Perhaps the best-known is the bizarre-looking Guardian Cap, a padded sock that slips over a typical helmet. Another approach that received a lot of attention in 2011, the Bulwark, came from the workbench of an aerospace engineer and self-professed "helmet geek" in North Carolina; it had a modular shell that could be configured to match the demands of different players. It never made it out of prototype stage.

For his part, Simpson officially launched his SGH helmet in October 2012 to immediate fanfare. Sports Illustrated "injury expert" columnist Will Carroll tugged one on and had someone whack him over the crown of the head-a strong, almost purely linear force. He reported not feeling much at all. His conclusion: This helmet must work.

When I called Simpson to discuss the helmet and ask how it reduces the forces responsible for concussion, he mentioned that none of the neuroscientists he's spoken with have been able to tell him what forces actually cause a concussion. "How do you know you're stopping the right forces, then?" I asked him. "If you don't know what's causing a concussion, how can you prevent it?"

"You're asking me a lot of questions that are pretty off the wall, my friend," he said. "A lot of questions I can't answer." He explained that his helmet uses a composite shell made of carbon fiber and Kevlar, plus an inner layer of adaptive foam made of Styrofoam-like beads. It performs better in a NOCSAE-style drop test than anything else on the market, he said.

"Does it specifically address rotational acceleration?" I asked.

He laughed. "No helmet does that."

I tried a more direct approach: "Can you make claims about concussion reduction with your helmet?"

"Oh, hell no," he said, "I would never make a claim about that."

The NFL, at least since Congress took an interest, has gotten serious about sorting out who is claiming what-or not. "There is not a week that passes that I don't see a new device," says Kevin Guskiewicz, a University of North Carolina sports medicine researcher and MacArthur Genius Grant recipient who also chairs the NFL's Subcommittee on Safety Equipment and Playing Rules. "There's a binder weighing down the corner of my desk. I don't think you're going to see the NFL flat-out endorsing a product, but they certainly feel that they're responsible for trying to help prevent these injuries. So we're going to be reviewing these technologies in order to say, here are three or four that need to be studied further."/>

The boldest claim from mainstream helmet makers comes, perhaps not surprisingly, from Riddell. The company's newest helmet, the 360, builds on a system called Concussion Reducing Technology (CRT), which it first launched in 2002. According to a highly adrenalized promotional video, which has since been removed from the Riddell website, engineers designed CRT in response to an NFL-funded study by a Canadian research lab called Biokinetics. Researchers looked at film from actual NFL hits that resulted in concussions and attempted to map their location, distance, and speed. The two main findings: that rotational acceleration is a major factor in concussions, and that players get hit a lot on the side of the head.

In response to the study, the designers developing CRT added energy-attenuating material (extra padding) to side- and front-impact areas. They also increased the overall dimensions of CRT-equipped helmets by a few millimeters to allow for still more padding. The designers of the 360 built on the CRT but went a step further, adding an even greater amount of padding to the impact areas. It wasn't clear to me how those changes addressed rotation-the single greatest factor in the concussions that CRT and the 360 helmet meant to reduce. So I asked Riddell's head of research and development, Thad Ide. "Well, in many cases the linear acceleration and the rotation that linear imparts go hand in hand," he said, echoing Duma's HITS findings at Virginia Tech. "Reducing linear forces will reduce the rotational forces."

So the question remains: If addressing linear force is the key, and better padding is the way to do that, then why hasn't the number of concussions decreased? "You haven't seen it change because [the helmet makers] haven't addressed it," says the University of Ottawa's Hoshizaki.

A NEW HOPE

In a small room off the basement garage of a building on the outskirts of Stockholm, an entirely different kind of helmet test is taking place. Peter Halldin, a biomechanical engineer at the Royal Institute of Technology, is strapping a helmet onto a dummy head affixed to a custom drop-test rig. Rather than slamming a helmet into a stationary anvil, as in the NOCSAE test, Halldin's rig drops it onto a pneumatic sled that moves horizontally. By calibrating the angle of the helmet, the height of the drop, and the speed of the sled, Halldin says he can more accurately re-create the angular forces that result in rotational acceleration than other labs can. Within the dummy head, nine accelerometers measure the linear force transmitted during impact; a computer nearby calculates rotational acceleration from that data.

Today Halldin is testing two ski helmets that are identical except for one thing: Inside one, a bright yellow layer of molded plastic attached with small rubber straps sits between the padding and the head. This is the Multidirectional Impact Protection System (MIPS), which is also the name of a company he co-founded. Halldin spends about half of his time as CTO of MIPS and the other as a faculty member of the Royal Institute.

The idea behind MIPS is simple: The plastic layer sits snugly on a player's head beneath the padding. By allowing the head to float during an impact, MIPS can eliminate some of the rotational force before it makes its way to the brain.

First up in Halldin's test is the non-MIPS helmet. Halldin flips on a high-speed camera and steps back from the impactor, ready to catch the helmet on its rebound. "Five, four, three, two, one…" There's a loud clattering as the sled shoots forward at 22 feet per second and the helmet drops to meet it at 12 feet per second-crack.

I can see on the computer that the head sustained about 170 Gs of linear force, and it rotated 14,100 radians per second squared (the standard scientific metric for rotation). It's a big hit, one that would probably result in a concussion or worse.

Now comes the second helmet. Every variable is the same as in the first test except for the addition of the low-friction MIPS layer. "Five, four, three, two, one…"-crack. This time the computer shows rotation of 6,400 radians per second squared, a 55 percent reduction.

Halldin starts in on a detailed explanation of the effects of multiple impact tests on the performance of a helmet over time, but I interrupt: "How would you characterize that test result?"

He looks at the colorful graphs on the computer screen again. If the test dummy were a football player, he would have just walked away from a game-ending impact without a concussion. Halldin smiles just a bit, and permits himself a very un-Swedish boast. "I would say that's f---king amazing."

Halldin is careful not to claim the MIPS system can create those kinds of results in all impacts in all helmets. But, he says, "we can reduce rotation in all directions, and it's significant in most directions. We might get 35 percent in one direction, 25 percent in another direction, and 15 percent in another. And hopefully the 15 percent is not in the most common impact direction for that sport."

MIPS is not new: The company's roots go back to 1997, when Hans von Holst, a neurosurgeon at Stockholm's Karolinska Hospital (the same hospital that adjudicates the Nobel Prize for medicine), got tired of seeing patients come in with brain injuries from hockey and other sports, and decided to do something about it. He joined up with Halldin at the Royal Institute, and together they spent the next 10 years studying traumatic brain injuries.

Rotational forces quickly became their focus, and eventually they came up with the idea for MIPS. The first product was a complete helmet, designed for the equestrian market. Although the helmet was well received, the team quickly learned that a smart concept in the lab doesn't easily translate into a successful product launch. Production problems and quality-control issues led the team to rethink their strategy and hire a new CEO, an experienced Swedish executive named Niklas Steenberg. Steenberg took a look at the situation and decided that, like airbags in cars or Intel chips in laptops, MIPS was not an end-market product. Instead they would focus on licensing it to existing helmet companies so those manufacturers could improve their own products.

Since then, MIPS has licensed its sliding low-friction layer to about 20 helmet manufacturers, for sports from snowboarding and skiing to cycling and motocross. Recently, Steenberg decided, the company was ready to start hunting the big game-first American hockey and then the biggest of all, football.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

One would think the Riddells of the world would fall all over themselves to license or create something like MIPS, a simple product that directly addresses a critical factor in concussions and incorporates easily into existing helmet designs./>

"I thought we'd have people hugging us, saying, ‘Thank you!' " says Ken Yaffe, a former NHL executive who left the league in March 2012, after 19 years, and signed on with MIPS to help them get an audience with U.S. manufacturers. But after nearly a year of squiring Steenberg and Halldin around to different companies, he says, "we've been met with skepticism."

One of the reasons, Yaffe suspects, is that current safety standards don't require the companies to do anything more than what they're already doing. It's a criticism privately echoed by most helmet researchers: Simplistic certification standards provide convenient legal cover for the manufacturers. If NOCSAE certifies a company's helmets as safe, then the company has less risk of being held responsible for injuries. On the other hand, if that same company goes above and beyond the standards, it could put itself at risk of getting sued: Suddenly all of its existing helmets would appear to be inadequate, and worse, the company might have to admit knowing that they fell short.

Duma, of Virginia Tech, points to NOCSAE's industry funding to explain how such a situation has persisted in football. "Follow the money," he says. "Imagine if Ford were the only organization testing its cars, and it was saying that every one got the top rating. It's a very unusual arrangement."

To Steenberg, the MIPS CEO, the situation is both harmful and backward. "If something is available that makes your helmet more safe, you should be held liable for not using it," he says. It's not the first time a new safety technology has faced such a paradox. All too often implementation hangs on the grim calculus of whether the cost to industry of adopting a safety measure is more or less than the cost to the public of going without it. When liability enters the equation, lawyers and judges and lawmakers get involved, and even the most urgent matters can end up mired in argument. For example, it took more than a decade to legislate seat belts as standard equipment in automobiles. It's worth noting that the two companies that first popularized and implemented seat-belt standards were Saab and Volvo, both Swedish.

Change is on the horizon, though. The University of Ottawa's Hoshizaki has a grant from NOCSAE to develop a new standard that incorporates rotation. "I want to be fair to the manufacturers," he says. "If they could make a safer helmet, they would. I don't think they are against it; they're just making sure they don't cross that line and say, ‘Yeah, we should be managing rotation,' because that would bring up liability issues." With a new standard, that roadblock could vanish.

One enterprising company has already launched a product to directly address rotational acceleration in another contact sport. In the summer of 2012, Bauer, the number-one helmet maker in ice hockey, released the Re-akt. Inside the helmet, a thin, bright-yellow layer of material sits loosely between the head and the padding, allowing the head to move a little bit in any direction during an impact.

Called Suspend-Tech, the layer appears, to the color, suspiciously similar to MIPS. In fact, during the development of the Re-akt, MIPS co-founder Halldin tested an early version on his impact rig at the Royal Institute. The stories diverge as to how that collaboration came about, and how Bauer came up with the idea for a sliding layer, but any questions that arise about intellectual property may not matter. Bauer's Suspend-Tech is a significant debut: It is the first attempt by a mainstream company to include a rotational layer in contact-sports helmets. MIPS is betting that since one hockey manufacturer has embraced the idea, the rest of the field will start shopping for their own version. And that, in turn, could create enough momentum for MIPS to break into the football market.

In perhaps the most hopeful sign of all, the NFL acknowledges that MIPS-like products have the organization's attention. Kevin Guskiewicz of the NFL's safety equipment subcommittee says the league is already evaluating the concept. "We're looking at it very seriously," he says.

Meanwhile, as scientists do more tests and manufacturers bicker, 4.2 million people will suit up and play football this year, most of them children with still-developing brains. Every one of them needs a good helmet.

Tom Foster is based in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first story for Popular Science. It originally appeared in the magazine's January 2013 issue.

Drones have been taking on more creative jobs lately. (Artsy skateboarding photographer? Check. Local news reporter? Check.) So it was just a matter of time before drones joined the construction game.

Design pair FG+SG has started enlisting a drone that can snag (very pretty) shots of buildings from the sky. The team plans on turning it into a client-based service, with the presumable sales pitch being: "Instead of trying to find that perfect position nearby, or paying up for a helicopter, let our drone do the work for you."

Of course, having a pro photographer behind the drone doesn't hurt, either. Fernando Guerra uses a camera system mounted to the lightweight, carbon fiber-based machine to capture the beautiful shots, whether they're pictures of a building in progress or a landscapes of a completed structure.

[Architizer via ultimasreportagens]

Some of the best robot swarms we've seen can either fly in formation or swim in a group, and while these are certainly awesome, they represent somewhat singular abilities. A new swarm that looks like a bunch of ping pong balls is both simpler and more complex, with potentially much more flexibility.

Nikolaus Correll, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, has a team of engineers building basic robotic building blocks that can be taught to work together. After they learn their skills, the individual robots can be modified or used for a variety of purposes. The goal is to develop a robot skill set that can be reproduced--from self-assembly and pattern recognition to shape-changing.

"Our robots aren't really designed for one particular problem," said Nicholas Farrow, a research assistant in computer science who is working on the project. "When our robots are completed, we'll be able to apply them to problems we haven't even thought of right now."

The team is led by postdoctoral researcher Dustin Reishus, who works in Correll's lab. The team built 20 robots, each the size of a ping pong ball, which they call "droplets." When the droplets swarm, they create a smart "liquid," as Correll explains it. About 10 of them are actually functional, but the team is still writing code to make the droplets capable of swarming together.

They could be modified to swim and clean up oil spills, potentially. Or they could be sent into space to assemble space station or satellite parts--or even self-assemble, Terminator-style, into whatever structure is required.

[University of Colorado]

Add this to the murderous microbe highlight reel--a single strain of bacteria could have worsened the Great Dying event 250 million years ago, producing prodigious methane and choking out most other life on Earth. During the Permian-Triassic extinction event, 96 percent of everything in the oceans and 70 percent of everything on land died out. And much of the blame could lie at the feet of one type of marine bacteria, a new study claims.

The era around 250-252 million years ago is marked by a huge and rapid die-off of most of the ocean's life, and scientists have several hypotheses explaining why. Some have argued it was a major meteorite impact, like the one that killed the dinosaurs; others posit that gigantic volcano eruptions were to blame; others argue for mass ocean poisoning; and still others blame huge methane releases.

Researchers at MIT say it may be a combination of all these things, hinging on the ability of bacteria to break down nickel and produce methane. They presented their theory at the American Geophysical Union's recent meeting.

Volcanic activity at the Siberian Traps in northern Russia produced vast amounts of nickel, right around the same time as the Permian die-off. These eruptions--one of the largest volcanic events ever--also threw massive quantities of ash and dust into the atmosphere, and as such they have been fingered as a global-cooling culprit that dramatically altered the atmosphere. But Daniel Rothman and colleagues had another theory for the Siberian Traps' influence.

Somehow this nickel-rich material made its way into the oceans, where it was gobbled up by bacteria called methanosarcina, they argue. Rothman and his team determined that these bacteria evolved the ability to break down nickel about 251 million years ago. The new nickel glut caused a huge bacterial population spike, which produced mountains of methane and also depleted the oceans' oxygen.

Scientists have already theorized that bacteria and algae hoarded most of the remaining resources after everything else died, which made recovery even more difficult. But pinpointing what caused the Great Dying remains elusive.

This new theory is speculative, to say the least, and it doesn't explain how nickel from Siberia got into the world's oceans. But it offers an intriguing possibility. As we learned after the Deepwater Horizon spill, ocean-dwelling microbes are quite capable of both consuming and producing hydrocarbons.

[Livescience]

Don't be fooled: this isn't a real spider. It's a fabrication! A lie! It's a decoy spider built from twigs, leaves, debris, dead insects, and whatever stuff nightmares are made of.

Researchers discovered the insect in (where else?) the Peruvian Amazon, and even though its decoy looks like a medium-sized spider that's about an inch across, the impressive fake was actually made by a tiny, tricky 5-millimeter spider. That spider behind the curtain is probably, the researchers say, a new species of Cyclosa, a genus known to pull similar stunts. But those creations are relatively un-spider-like--nothing at this level of detail. The smaller builder-insect even moves back and forth, giving the impression that the decoy insect is moving and, in the process, confusing predators into attacking the decoy instead.

Now the researchers, who found the spider near the Tambopata Research Center, will go through the process of making sure it's really a new species: checking it against other species, dissecting it, publishing the find in a journal, etc. Its artwork probably won't get the same treatment.

[Peru Nature via The Verge]