The day will come, and come soon, when we will control our entire domestic lives with a phone. We will turn the lights on and off, we will change the temperature to the precise level we desire, we will cook our dinners and make our beds and brew our coffee and close our blinds and feed our pets with a tap and a swipe. We can do most of that now, in fact, though it's kind of expensive and cobbled-together to implement.

A good step forward is the new Satis toilets from Lixil, which connects to an Android smartphone via Bluetooth so you can tell it to do all those amazing things Japanese toilets can do. Tap to extend the oddly phallic bidet hose. Scroll to lift the toilet seat or flush. Select your favorite song to play it through the toilet's stereo, because the toilet has a stereo.

Perhaps the weirdest feature is that "you can set up a 'toilet diary' to monitor your visits to the can and check on your health," according to JapanTrends, which adds that it includes "cute euphemistic symbols for what you managed to achieve on different days." Not sure exactly how cute a symbol could be for what I personally "achieve" on the toilet, but I'm glad someone's trying! The toilet should be released in February of next year.

[via JapanTrends]

Billionaire Peter Thiel is already trying to create all sorts of zany things: 3-D printed meat, reconstructed brain tissue, antimatter-fueled spaceships and more. Now he wants to harness tornadoes. To produce energy.

Thiel's Breakout Labs has awarded Louis Michaud's company AVEtec $300,000 to research tornado power.

Michaud is a Canadian electrical engineer and entrepreneur. His idea is to create a power plant add-on that would tap into the waste heat generated at a regular gas- or coal-fired power plant. The add-on would work by blowing hot air into a hollow cylinder at a sharp angle, which would cause a swirling air current in the cylinder. Hot air rises, so the circular current would rotate upward. The temperature difference between the warm incoming air and cooler air above it would continually feed the vortex, which would suck in hot air rapidly at its base. This controlled tornado would spin other turbines, which would be used to create more electricity. The heat could also come from solar panels or warm water, Michaud says.

It's a pretty neat concept, and you can see some of Michaud's designs at his website. He says a full-sized vortex engine could be up to 100 meters in diameter--about 330 feet--and generate 200 megawatts of electricity. It wouldn't emit any carbon dioxide or any other waste products in the process of creating power. Michaud told the Toronto Star that the waste heat from a 500-MW power plant could produce another 200 MW using this vortex engine.

The first step is to build a working prototype with Lambton College in Ontario. The prototype would be 131 feet tall and 26 feet in diameter, which apparently would be enough to produce a one-foot-diameter vortex that can drive a small turbine.

"The power in a tornado is undisputed," Michaud said in a statement. And they would be safe to control--to shut them off, just kill the hot air supply.

"We hope Breakout Labs inspires more investors to fund real innovation; more young people to pursue technology and entrepreneurship; and more nonprofits to foster risky, radical ideas," said Thiel Foundation president Jonathan Cain. Check out more background on AVEtec here.

[via PhysOrg]

The end of the Egyptian pharaoh Rameses III's reign was never meant to be a mystery for the ages. The Egyptians left behind a number of detailed historical documents that clearly lay out some basic details: In the year 1155 BC, members of the pharaoh's harem attempted to kill him as part of a coup. The plan was found out and the conspirators were tried in court, convicted, and punished.

But the Egyptian scribes were vague on a few arguably important points. For one, they failed to put down, in straightforward language, whether or not the assassination was successful. Egyptologists have mostly interpreted cryptic phrases like "the overturning of the royal bark" to mean that the Rameses III was in fact dead before the trial, but the documents also say that the court received direct instruction from their king.

Fortunately--Egyptians being Egyptians--the empire also left behind an impressively well-preserved Rameses III. Recently, a group of scientists loaded a CT scanner into the back of a truck, drove it to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, and took a complete scan of the mummified corpse.

Images from the scan revealed that Rameses III's throat had been cut through to his spine, severing the windpipe, esophagus, and large blood vessels of the neck:

The researchers write that, while it's possible that the king's throat was sliced open during mummification, such a "treatment...by the embalmers has not been described in any other Egyptian mummy." The scientists also note the presence of a small amulet lodged in the pharaoh's neck under the injury, which they say was probably inserted by the embalmers to aid the healing process.

The researchers also examined an unnamed mummy buried near the king. Genetic tests revealed that the corpse was one of Rameses' sons, as historians have long suspected, and other clues strengthened the idea that he was, in fact, the son who was convicted of plotting to overthrow the king. The researchers cited the unceremonious nature of the mummy's burial (his internal organs were not removed, and his body was covered in "ritually impure" goatskin) and the eerily contorted expression still plain on his face as evidence that the son was buried in disgrace, and perhaps in punishment.

It's been a while since he tried to count them all, but Stan Gehrt estimates that more than 2,000 coyotes make a comfortable living in the Chicago metropolitan area today. And in the 12 years he's spent tracking the animals with radio and GPS collars, Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist at Ohio State University, has witnessed some remarkable adaptations. Suburban coyotes, like the pack in a residential area a few miles from O'Hare airport, have learned to live in much smaller territories than they do in rural places. Downtown coyotes, which roam among the towers and traffic of the Chicago Loop, thrive in the city by hunting enough small rodents to feed themselves and their young. Some urban coyotes have even been spotted crossing streets in busy traffic-at the light, looking both ways, just like human Chicagoans.

What's happening in Chicago is happening around the world, and not just with coyotes. Gehrt and other researchers in his field are convinced that urban areas should prepare to make room for large carnivores. Coyotes, which live in every state but Hawaii, have appeared in cities from Los Angeles to New York. This spring, biologists in Los Angeles radio-collared the first mountain lion ever found in Griffith Park, the home of the Hollywood sign. Complaints about bears in Nevada around Lake Tahoe increased tenfold between 1997 and 2007. Red foxes have colonized London.

These animals are going to great lengths to live in human territory. Two years ago in London, building staff found a fox living on the 72nd floor of the unfinished Shard skyscraper, where it had been living on construction workers' discarded food scraps. The new territory is changing animals' behavior, too. Some bears in Lake Tahoe, well fed on garbage year-round, now neglect to hibernate in winter.

It's reasonable to assume that these animals are moving to the city because they're being displaced by climate change and habitat destruction, but that's only part of the explanation. One of the biggest factors is that there are more large carnivores than there used to be-primarily, Gehrt says, because of successful conservation efforts. As we make our cities greener, they become more attractive to humans and animals alike. Finally, the relationship between humans and large predators is changing. "We're now seeing generations of certain carnivores that have had fairly light amounts of persecution by people," Gehrt says. "They may view cities quite a bit differently than their ancestors did 50 years ago. Then, if they saw a human, there was a good chance they were going to get shot." 

While the new inhabitants keep their distance from people most of the time, conflict is inevitable when these animals and humans share space. Sometimes the conflict is between the invading predators and our own domesticated animals. A few years ago in a Chicago suburb, an elderly woman fought off a coyote that tried to attack her leashed poodle in a mall parking lot. More serious clashes are rare but not unheard of. In a two-month span in 2011, a coyote attacked children in the Denver suburb of Broomfield on three separate occasions.

As we make our cities greener,
they become more attractive to humans and animals alike.Gehrt and two other wildlife ecologists traveled to Broomfield to help officials find out what was causing the attacks, and the report that they wrote serves as a template for other cities dealing with carnivores. Much of the advice is common sense. Taking away easy meals-garbage and outdoor pet food-can help control issues with any species. In Nevada, for example, bear-proofing garbage cans and dumpsters has helped decrease complaints by two thirds since 2008.

Ultimately, though, the key to living with urban carnivores might be to return to an older, more natural relationship between humans and wildlife-one in which they are genuinely scared of us. Gehrt's report urges anyone who spots a coyote to shout, throw rocks, or even shoot it with a paintball gun.

When a large predator loses its instinctive fear of humans, after all, that animal becomes more likely to attack. Gehrt says that culling truly fearless animals is necessary for maintaining a harmonious urban life with coyotes-a life that he sees as inevitable. "The question becomes, to what degree are we going to tolerate the risk, and what kind of adjustments to our lives are we willing to make?" Gehrt says. "Because we can't get rid of them."

A woman in Los Angeles went to her doctor with pain and clicking in her eyelid, following a cosmetic procedure a few months earlier. The doctor, Scientific American reports, surgically removed pieces of bone that were growing in the flesh around her eye.

The cosmetic surgery she had had extracted adult stem cells from her belly fat, isolated them, and injected them around her eyes, along with calcium hydroxylapatite as a filler. In the presence of the mineral, the stem cells -- which have the ability to develop into many sorts of cells -- turned into bone.

The FDA has not approved any cosmetic product or treatment involving stem cells, but they are growing in popularity regardless, both in clinics in the U.S. and around the world. The potential of stem cells is thrilling, but they are poorly understood and unpredictable. Expect more stories about bizarre somatic effects in the near future.

[Scientific American]

A recent bill sent from the Michigan House of Representatives to the Governor would make it easier to carry a concealed weapon in a school. After Friday's shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a spokesman for House Speaker Jase Bolger said the policy could have been "the difference between life and death for many innocent bystanders."

Is he right? Will allowing guns in schools make those schools safer? It hasn't helped much in homes or on the street, researchers say, and evidence suggests that access to guns could actually exacerbate violence.

A 2009 University of Pennsylvania study financed by the National Institutes of Health looked at the chances of being shot when holding a gun versus not holding a gun. In Pennsylvania, from 2003 to 2006, police sent the epidemiological researchers reports of gun-related assaults soon after they happened. A research firm then matched those victims with similar people in the area who did not own guns through phone surveys conducted by random-digit dialing. (This is the same sort of research setup that goes into studying the link between drunk driving and car crashes or smoking and lung cancer.) With both a gun-owning victim and a non-gun-owning Philadelphian, researchers had a variable and a control group. Then by comparing those who were shot and had a gun on them with the control group, the researchers looked for a correlation--and found one. In the study, someone in possession of a gun was about 4.5 times more likely to be shot. If the victim had a chance to resist, he or she was 5.5 times more likely to be shot.

Even more interesting is what the research didn't find. "There was an expectation that we should surely find a protective value," the study's lead researcher Charles Branas, of the University of Pennsylvania, says. But having a gun, he says, "on average was found not to be protective in assaults." This is the conclusion written in the study: "Although successful defensive gun uses can and do occur, the findings of this study do not support the perception that such successes are likely."

Branas says there are a few possible reasons why they saw the increased risk among those with guns: For one, people might enter an environment they'd normally avoid. A conflict might also escalate when a gun was involved. Finally, and most unlikely, someone could have the gun taken from him or her and be shot with it.

Other studies support the notion that guns and personal safety do not go hand in hand, especially with guns in the home. The Harvard School of Public Health's David Hemenway published a study in 2011 and concluded that the chances of violence occurring in the home were increased when a gun was around. "On the benefit side, there are fewer studies, and there is no credible evidence of a deterrent effect of firearms or that a gun in the home reduces the likelihood or severity of injury during an altercation or break-in," Branas says.

These studies don't zero in on school shootings, obviously. But it's not hard to see how the same conclusion might apply: having guns around is unlikely to swing a shooting toward a better outcome.

Cassini, the NASA spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004, captured this spectacular portrait on October 17. In the image, the sun is positioned behind Saturn, backlighting the fragments of ice that make up its rings, while the planet itself--the side we can see, anyway--remains in darkness.

As it drifted through Saturn's shadow on October 17, Cassini's wide-angle camera took photos of portions of the planet using violet, visible, and infrared filters. Next, members of the Cassini imaging team overlaid the filtered images, adjusted their color, and stitched the separate pieces together into the mosaic you see here.

The sun, Saturn, and spacecraft all have to be positioned perfectly to allow for an image like this, and it's only happened once before during Cassini's mission. Such "high-phase viewing geometry," as its called, not only makes for a pretty picture, but also allows scientists to study elements of the rings and atmosphere that they can't see from other angles.

If you look closely, you can see two of Saturn's moons, Enceladus and Tethys, to the left of the planet below the rings. Both appear as white dots against the darkness; Enceladus is the one closest to Saturn's rings.

[NASA]

From Motherboard: I knew we were all in for an epic display of virality (sorry) last night when I saw about a dozen unrelated people share the same video last night, a video that features a toddler in Montreal, one turned into a tasty, immobile package of calories by its winter clothing, get snatched up by a golden eagle and dropped on its head. Whether or not you've seen it already, watch it again. Don't worry, I'll wait.

Thing is, the video was on the front page of Reddit and had just about everyone's mom sharing it, but I was still impressed to wake up this morning and see it'd grabbed 1.2 million views in 24 hours. That's impressive, and was for awhile the second-most viewed YouTube video in the last 24 hours. But it's also hogwash.

First off, the bird's white plumage doesn't look like a golden eagle. Adult golden eagles have white tails and smatterings of white in their wings, not a brown tail with white wing tips. That right there is enough for me to call it. But everything else is off too.

Already floating around are a couple videos claiming the original is a fake. Here's one I thought was the most helpful:

As you can see, the baby seems to float upward after being released by the eagle. That could be explained by the kid's inertia of being pulled upward by the eagle, or maybe the eagle's talon was hooked on a string or something that doesn't show up in the pixelated video, but the physics of the thing seem off. Right now, I'd figure any of the three scenarios are equally likely. (There's also the classic CGI "found footage" trick of the shooter aiming the camera at the ground while the camera changes scenes; it's really hard to keep the CGI trick up while a camera is moving quickly.)

There's also this image, linked in the description of the video above. It comes in early in the original video, and apparently shows the eagle being a two-piece eagle:

Again, that could be some sort of artifact of the video itself, but it's so large that I don't think it can be just a resolution error.

Still, all we're working with here is the usual tools of YouTube conspiracy theories: zoomed in, pixelated images, and image artifacts. But what about the actual biology? Could a golden eagle even snatch up a kid?

Well, golden eagles have wingspans between six and nearly eight feet (the video gets that right), and have a grip strength somewhere between 20 and 35 times that of the average human. They're immensely, unfathomably powerful birds, which is why they can take down deer:

Basically, I'd argue that if a real golden eagle was trying to snatch that kid, the kid would be hosed, especially considering he or she was wearing an easily-gripped puffy jacket.

Also, the behavior of the attack is off to me. Years ago I apprenticed for a falconer's license (yep) and I've hunted with a number of large birds, including red-tailed hawks and gyrfalcons. (No eagles yet, unfortunately, although I have chilled with a golden eagle, and yes, they really are huge.) The way the eagle homes in on the kid feels a bit off, with a wide turn and long approach that's more reminiscent of a fighter plane landing than a raptor, which generally circle at height for awhile before attacking, rather than taking a sudden u-turn to snatch a baby. Perhaps the CGI artist watched more Top Gun than Planet Earth.

That's not conclusive, but what's also odd is the eagle trying to fly away with the kid. Even with their size, golden eagles weigh no more than a couple dozen pounds, and that kid weighs at least that again. (I have no idea how much kids weight, so I'm erring on the light side.) Raptors that hunt fish snatch them out of the water and fly away, but I'm not sure an eagle could even lift the kid. Remember, the last time a golden eagle famously snatched something, it dropped the goat off a cliff, when it likely would have preferred to fly away with the thing if it could carry it. Also, as seen in the deer video above and with just about every raptor I've seen hunting, it's common for the bird to initially eat prey where it lands, rather than trying to carry it away.

Again, as I'm not supremely familiar with golden eagle behavior, please chime in if you are. But the whole thing seems off to me, from the video side to the bird's flight, and the plumage situation is a huge red flag. I think it's a well done fake. In either case, it doesn't change the fact that the video is nuts. Just don't start worrying about golden eagles snatching your kids, please.

This post was syndicated from Motherboard.

Update: Yep, just got confirmation that the video was created using CGI by four students at Centre NAD as part of a school project. Apparently both the eagle and the child are CGI, added to the video afterward. Here's the statement.

It was really big news back in October when astronomers discovered an Earth-sized planet whipping around Alpha Centauri B, a star in the Alpha Centauri system, the closest star system to Earth. Now, it turns out the nearest single sun-like star to us is likely also harboring planets--five of them--and one looks to be orbiting in the so-called "goldilocks zone."

The star is known as Tau Ceti, which resides just 12 light-years away. That's further than Alpha Centauri (at just four light-years) but the Tau Ceti finding is significant. The Alpha Centauri exoplanet orbits its star at too close a distance to harbor surface water--it's simply too hot. The potential planet orbiting Tau Ceti, though its precise composition is unknown, looks to be a rocky planet like Earth. And it's orbital distance is such that liquid water could exist on the planet's surface.

Its minimum mass is just 4.3 times that of Earth, making it the smallest exoplanet to be discovered in the habitable zone of a sun-like star. And it's worth noting here that the this planet is not yet confirmed--while it appears to exist in data collected from three different instruments, further study is needed before astronomers can declare it a known exoplanet. But if confirmed, the Tau Ceti planets would be a prime candidates for further study--and perhaps for eventual exploration.

[SPACE]

Last night, a video supposedly showing a golden eagle swooping down to pluck a toddler from a Montreal park--it was unsuccessful, luckily--hit the internet. Great video! This morning, avian experts both amateur and professional began weighing in, saying the video was doctored, that the bird in question was not actually a golden eagle, that the bird's behavior is unusual and that, all in all, it's probably fake.

So, yes, perhaps a golden eagle didn't attempt to grab a Quebecois baby. But this whole thing reminded us that raptors--the larger family of birds of prey including eagles, hawks, vultures, and owls--are crazy strong and also sometimes crazy big. So let's take a look at the craziest, strongest, and biggest raptor that ever existed: the Haast's eagle of New Zealand.

The Haast's eagle is extinct now, and has been since, probably, around the year 1400, soon after the Maori first settled the South Island of New Zealand. (It has been reported as seen a few times since then, including once by "noted explorer" and generally reliable source Charles Edward Douglas, but, as you'll see, that's pretty unlikely.) The Haast's eagle was outrageously big and strong. Its wingspan was comparatively short, given its body size, at around nine feet long. I say "comparatively" because that's about as long as the longest wingspan of any extant raptor, including the golden eagle (which is huge) and the Steller's sea eagle (which is also huge).

The golden eagle, which is very common, has been known to hunt wolves and deer. It is a fearsome and formidable hunter. And it was about half the weight of a Haast's eagle, and nowhere near as powerful. The golden eagle hunts deer? Pretty impressive. The Haast's eagle hunted 12-foot-tall monster birds, striking at estimated speeds of 50 mph with the force of a cinder block dropped from an eight-story building. It didn't carry off prey, like that likely-fake Montreal golden eagle, but instead used its talons--the same size as a tiger's claws--to kill on the ground. One talon would grab the monster bird by the pelvis, and the other would deliver a crushing blow to the neck and head. The Haast's eagle's genus name is Harpagornis--a combination of Greek words meaning "grappling hook" and "bird." Yeah.

The monster birds the Haast's eagle preyed upon were called moa, huge ratites related to other big flightless birds like the ostrich and emu. Both the Haast's eagle and the moa evolved due to what's called "island gigantism," a phenomenon in which animals isolated from other, more diverse populations of animals end up a much larger size than they'd be on the mainland. New Zealand, before the Maori arrived, had no land mammals at all, due to the impossibility of mammals actually getting to the islands. So birds and reptiles ended up filling the ecological niches that would have typically been filled by large mammals. The moa was a grazer, taking the place of ungulates like deer or cattle. The Haast's eagle took the place of the apex predator that hunts the grazers. It was, evolutionarily speaking, the tiger of New Zealand.

The Maori hunted the moa to extinction by around 1400, barely a hundred years after they arrived at New Zealand. No other prey was large enough to sustain the massive Haast's eagle, so they quickly died out as well. The Maori knew the bird as Pouakai, made use of its bones, included it in their stories, drew pictures of it on cave walls, and occasionally, probably, ate it. The bird was certainly big and strong enough to prey on humans but there's no sign that it ever attempted to hunt the Maori.

Evidence of the Haast's eagle were first found in caves in the 1870s and then studied in the 1890s by Julius von Haast, a German scientist. Amazingly, it's found to be related most closely not to other huge eagles like the golden eagle but to the little eagle of Australasia, a tiny raptor about the size of a peregrine falcon. Island gigantism! Crazy! Maybe if they hadn't gone extinct 500 years ago, we'd be watching a possibly faked YouTube video of them today, carrying off a full-grown Quebecois man.

At some point soon, we'll have wireless everything--wireless charging, wireless syncing, wireless video, wireless audio. We've already got a lot of that stuff, in fact. But today, we still need wires and cables, and a new creation from researchers at North Carolina State University could make them much more usable--by making them stretchy.

The basic construction of the new super-stretchy wires is an elastic tube filled with a highly conductive liquid metal alloy. Other attempts at stretchy wires, say the researchers, have relied on embedding conductivity into elastic, as opposed to separating them. The wires can be stretched up to eight times their original length, which is pretty amazing--an order of magnitude more stretchy than existing stretchy wires.

The paper appears in Advanced Functional Materials.

[NCSU]

Back in June, news sites began picking up the story of Rayfish Footwear, which claimed it could genetically engineer stingrays to have whatever skin pattern or color you want, and then make you some cool sneakers out of it. Just like we thought, that is not possible, and the company is fake. NextNature, the Dutch organization behind Rayfish (they've also done other pranks), just released a video documenting the prank, though it's not totally clear what point they were trying to make with the whole thing. Video after the jump.

In a single generation, China has transformed itself from a largely agrarian country into a global manufacturing and trading powerhouse. China's economy is 20 times bigger than it was two decades ago and is on track to surpass the United States' as the world's largest. But perhaps most startling has been the growth of China's ambitious and increasingly powerful military.

Click to see the planes leading China's military innovation

Just 10 years ago, the budget for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was roughly $20 billion. Today, that number is more like $100 billion. (Some analysts think it's closer to $160 billion.) The PLA's budget is only a sixth of what the U.S. devotes to defense annually, but defense dollars go much further in China, and in the years ahead, Chinese military spending will grow at the same rate as its economy. Meanwhile, Chinese president Hu Jintao has called for the PLA to carry out "new historic missions" in the 21st century-to move beyond the traditional goal of defending the nation's sovereignty and develop the global military reach of a true world superpower. In some cases, China's increasing international presence could lead to greater cooperation with the U.S., as it did in 2008 when China joined antipiracy patrols off Somalia. But if American and Chinese forces end up in the same place with different goals, the result could be a standoff between two of the best-equipped militaries in the world.

American officials aren't just concerned about the amount of money the Chinese military is spending. They're worried about the technology that money is buying. U.S. military hardware remains a generation ahead of any rival's, but the Chinese have begun to close the gap. Consider China's progress in building advanced warplanes. Until recently, American officials thought their F-22 and F-35 aircraft were the world's only fifth-generation fighters (the name given to a class of stealthy fighter jets developed in the past decade, which are equipped with radar-evading features, high-performance engines and avionics, and networked computer systems). Then, on a 2011 trip to China, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates learned otherwise. While Gates met with Hu Jintao, his hosts "coincidentally" revealed the existence of an advanced new fighter, the J-20, by staging the inaugural public flight over the city of Chengdu.

The J-20 is far from China's only new aircraft. The PLA is also aggressively upgrading its drone fleet. A decade ago, the army had almost no unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). At aviation trade shows today, Chinese contractors display scores of drones under development. Among the most notable: the Yilong (Pterodactyl I) and BZK-005, which greatly resemble the U.S. military's Predator and Global Hawk, respectively. China's future UAVs may also get a boost from American technology: Iran has reportedly given Chinese scientists access to the RQ-170 advanced spy drone that went down in its territory last year.

Additionally, China is investing heavily in its navy. Today, the U.S. is the only country that can send aircraft carriers loaded with fighter jets to any corner of the globe. The PLA would like to change that. The Chinese have spent the past few years retrofitting a 65,000-ton Soviet aircraft carrier (which the PLA acquired using a fake travel agency as a front) with new engines and weapons including Flying Leopard surface-to-air missile batteries and automated air defense machine-gun systems. The ship, called the Liaoning, can carry approximately 50 aircraft, including the Shenyang J-15 Flying Shark, a fighter jet that may be as capable as an F-18. China is also building stealthy 8,000-ton destroyers, along with nuclear submarines and amphibious assault ships. A new 36,000-ton cruise ship modified for military purposes, the Bahai Sea Green Pearl, can carry more than 2,000 soldiers and 300 vehicles. With its new naval muscle, China has dispatched troops and police to U.N. peacekeeping operations in places as far-flung as Africa and Latin America.

In some ways, China's rise echoes that of imperial Germany at the turn of the 20th century. At the time, Britain was the world's undisputed economic and military superpower. When Germany decided to build battleships to match the Grand Fleet's dreadnoughts, the two nations entered an arms race that helped set the stage for the first world war. But when war broke out, Britain didn't lose a single battleship to Germany's High Seas Fleet. German mines and submarines, on the other hand-new technologies that arrived unexpectedly and changed the rules of battle-sunk 13 British battleships.

Similarly, the PLA has more to gain by developing new technologies than by racing to match American sea and air power. China doesn't have to amass a navy as powerful as the American fleet if it can make the seas too dangerous for U.S. ships to travel. To that end, the PLA is acquiring weapons such as mobile, truck-launched anti-ship ballistic missiles and radar-evading, ramjet-powered Sunburn cruise missiles, which tear toward their targets at Mach 2.5, giving defenses only seconds to respond.

China could also easily go after American vulnerabilities in space. More than 80 percent of U.S. government and military communications, which direct everything from soldiers in the field to precision missile strikes, travel over satellites. GPS satellites control the movement of 800,000 U.S. military receivers on everything from aircraft carriers to individual bombs and artillery shells. The system isn't foolproof: In early 2010, a GPS "glitch" left almost 10,000 of these receivers unable to connect for days.

Meanwhile, China is also expanding its ability to knock things out of space. In addition to its proven satellite-killing missiles, the PLA is developing maneuverable microsatellites that would act like tiny space kamikazes, along with directed-energy (laser) devices that could blind or melt U.S. systems in space. In 2007, Senior Colonel Yao Yunzhu of the Chinese Academy of Military Science (the highest research institute in the PLA) announced that the U.S. wouldn't be the world's only "space superpower" for long. The Chinese plan to send more than 100 civilian and military satellites into orbit in the next decade, and the PLA is testing what appears to be an unmanned, reusable space plane.

China's most potent new capability, though, might be what the PLA has called "informationized warfare," or cyber war. Just as the U.S. military has created its own Cyber Command, the PLA has assigned more than 130,000 personnel to cyber warfare programs. And while Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has warned about a potential cyber Pearl Harbor, the greater threat might be the theft of U.S. government secrets and intellectual property. So far, operations thought to have originated in China have compromised sensitive networks in the State Department as well as computers involved in the F-35 joint strike fighter program.

In the 1984 movie Red Dawn, one character explained why war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union seemed inevitable: "Two toughest kids on the block, I guess. Sooner or later, they're gonna fight." A few years ago, when Hollywood set out to remake the movie, the filmmakers updated the script by replacing the Soviet bad guys with the Chinese. Then real-world economics came into play. To avoid losing access to China's multibillion-dollar film market, they digitally switched the adversary to North Korea in postproduction.

The episode underscores an important point: Unlike the U.S. and the Soviets, the U.S. and China are bound together by hundreds of billions of dollars in mutual trade and investments. War between the two countries would be mutually ruinous. Leaders on both sides know it. American and Chinese forces will eye each other suspiciously, and the relationship may become tense. But recall that the much feared war between the U.S. and Soviets-the issue that defined world politics for the second half of the 20th century-never did break out. With so much to lose, the two toughest kids decided it wasn't worth it to fight.

Peter W. Singer is director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative and a senior fellow in foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. This article appeared in the January issue of Popular Science.

We don't want to be unkind, because it's nice that people are working toward a future where we won't have to rely on traditional brick-making methods, which produce tons of carbon dioxide. But a new idea for "green" bricks is a little less, uh, aesthetically pleasing than other ones we've noticed. (See here and here.)

That's the downside. The upside is this brick-making project comes from stuff in the recycling bin. Researchers from the University of Jaen in Spain collected waste from a paper factory and sludge from the factory's waste-water purification process. By mixing that with clay and sending it through a "pressure and extrusion machine," the researchers got bricks. (The "pressure and extrusion machine" is also reminiscent of the sausage-making process, which doesn't help with the disgustingness.)

The composition of the bricks makes them especially good insulators, the researchers say. But they aren't perfect. Though they pass legal requirements for use, they are less durable than traditional bricks. So we probably won't see many of these in buildings. Good news for our eyeballs.

If traditional cancer therapies like chemotherapy are the WMDs of medicine--powerful, indiscriminate killers--targeted drug therapies are the assassins, trained to seek out and destroy enemy cancer cells, one at a time.

Scientists recognize the clear advantage of the assassin approach, of course, and have successfully engineered several targeted cancer-killing drugs over the past few decades.

The problem is, assassins ain't cheap. A single course of targeted drug therapy can cost upwards of $100,000. That's largely because the drugs take a lot of effort to create--scientists have to first grow human antibodies capable of recognizing enemy cells, and then equip those cells with a weapon by attaching them to toxic molecules. The process is, apparently, as hard and time-consuming as it sounds.

But recently, a group of scientists at University of California, San Diego engineered algae to produce a human antibody with a built-in toxic weapon--a ready-made molecular cancer assassin. The researchers produced the new therapy by embedding the genetic code of the toxin P. aeruginosa into a human antibody gene, which they then spliced into the algae's DNA.

In their research paper, the scientists note that this feat has been attempted before, using bacteria instead of algae, but the bacteria weren't capable of folding the complex antibody into the right shape, so the method required a researcher to follow along behind and refold the proteins. The new therapy could not be produced by mammal cells, either, the researchers write, because the presence of the toxin would prohibit the engineered cells from reproducing.

If the new treatment is able to stand up to the battery of medical trials required by law, the targeted, assassin-style fight against cancer may soon get a lot more affordable.