Blue-spectrum light and weird work schedules can easily interfere with our bodies' master clocks, but did you know that food can, too? All those cookies and pies you've been eating this week are going to mess with your sleep, especially when you're nibbling on them all day. Holiday travel will make it that much worse.

Researchers at the University of California-San Diego determined the molecular basis for the interruption of our "food clocks," or food-entrainable oscillators. People who have jet lag or work night shifts--or Mars shifts--have the same problems.

Our bodies have master regulator genes that help us function according to natural circadian rhythms, and we can lose sleep when these are interrupted. Medical researchers are just figuring out how to re-train our bodies using natural cues, like blue light, to reset those disturbed clocks. Now a study led by Dr. Louis Ptacek of UCSF and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute explains how food gets involved.


The food clock, or more accurately food-entrained rhythms, exist to help our bodies manage our nutritional intakes. This system regulates genes that control functions like nutrient absorption and distribution, digestion, and so on. We bookmark the day according to when we eat, and interrupting these schedules can cause various problems. Other studies have shown that night shift workers and night owl eaters "exhibit depressed mood and impairment in cognitive function," Ptacek and colleagues write.

Ptacek and fellow researchers hypothesized that a certain type of protein kinase (PKCγ) is involved in this process, and is critical to resetting the clock if eating schedules change. They gave normal mice food during the animals' regular sleeping hours, and over time, the mice would wake up during the night in anticipation of their next meal. But mutant mice that lacked the PKCγ gene were not able to reset their clocks. It turned out that PKCγ binds to another molecule called BMAL and stabilizes it. This shifts the body clock's time, the researchers say in their paper, published a couple weeks ago in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Understanding the molecular mechanism for how eating at the "wrong" time of the day desynchronizes our body clocks can lead to better treatments for people with night-eating syndrome, shift work and jet lag, Ptacek said.

[via Science Daily]

Earlier this month, we wrote about Annie Dookhan, a forensic chemist at a Massachusetts-based crime lab who stands accused of some pretty stark negligence. Turns out she's not the only one. Problems in crime labs have reached the top levels of government and spread out across the country, shining a spotlight on the troublesome role of science in criminal cases.

The Justice Department, specifically, has announced a review of FBI cases to see if technicians misrepresented lab reports and testimonies that might have led to wrongful convictions. The DOJ will scour at least 21,000 cases conducted by the FBI Laboratory's hair and fibers unit before 2000. But there's another issue. About three dozen FBI agents trained 600 to 1,000 local and state technicians, and if the feds are using faulty methods, then it stands to reason that the local labs they trained with those methods aren't doing much better. Cases at these local labs, however, won't undergo the same review, even though the problems could be just as widespread.

It gets worse. An April Washington Post article noted that the Justice Department knew about flawed forensics for years, but prosecutors didn't let defendants (or their attorneys) know. Officials reviewed cases in the '90s, but only a few of them, and they focused on one scientist. Now we're seeing sloppy work nationwide, and people are going to prison because of it.

In short, it's a disaster for justice--and science. We look to science as a source of objective conclusions based on facts, but the sad truth is, those conclusions can be nudged. As we wrote before, the daily drudgery of working in a crime lab compounded by an institutional obsession with statistics can compel scientists to cut corners, even when someone's freedom--hell, when someone's life--is on the line. We're all aware that some police departments and prosecutors face tremendous pressure to meet arrest quotas and seek convictions. We just don't expect those pressures to make their way into the lab, too. The Huffington Post's Radley Balko points out that forensic scientists can be punished for simply testifying for the defense. So much for objective conclusions.

What can we hope for? A sort of overhaul in the status quo, even if it's hard to say exactly what that would be. The problems are pervasive enough that it'll take some major re-imagining of the relationship between government, crime, and science to even make sure this is less likely to happen, much less that it never, ever happens again.

[The Huffington Post]

After conducting a month-long study with several hundred Canadian tweens, researchers have arrived at the conclusion that permeates every after-school special you've ever been bored enough to watch: being nice makes people like you.

To investigate how kindness affects kids' happiness and social standing, researchers organized a controlled study with 415 9-11 year-olds in Vancouver, British Columbia:

At the beginning and end of the four-week period, the students rated their happiness and life satisfaction in written surveys, and also recorded the names of peers they "would like to be in school activities [i.e., spend time] with."

The researchers found that kids in both groups received more peer nominations at then end of the study than at the beginning, but, while students in the place-visiting group had an average of .7 more friends (peer nominations) at the end, students in the do-gooder group earned an average of 1.5 friends throughout of the study.

There are, of course, lots of reasons to be kind, and now we have one more: the data support it.

Though they can rapidly spread pathogens that afflict humans, bats somehow avoid getting sick from viruses like Ebola, SARS, and other deadly bugs. A new genetic analysis of two very different bat species shows how the animals avoid disease, and live exceptionally long lives. It may all be related to their ability to fly, researchers say.

This research comes from the "Bat Pack," a team of scientists at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, and the Beijing Genome Institute. The team sequenced the genomes of a huge fruit bat and a tiny insectivorous bat and found both were missing a gene segment that can cause extreme immune reactions to infection. In most mammals, the so-called "cytokine storm" that results from an invading virus is actually what kills, not the virus itself. This inflammatory response doesn't happen in bats.

By understanding how bats suppress this response, researchers might be able to design new drugs to minimize inflammation in people, according to Chris Cowled, a post-doctoral researcher at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory. This could include anti-inflammatory drugs that take cues from bats to suppress cytokine response, or it could be genetic therapy that directly targets certain segments of DNA.

But bats are not immune to everything. Millions of North American bats have perished from a fungal infection known as white-nose syndrome, which rouses the animals from their winter slumbers and causes them to starve. This new study is especially intriguing in light of a different recent study in insect-eating North American bats, which shows they can suffer an acute immune response in the face of an invader. When bats are hibernating, their immune systems are suppressed, which makes them more susceptible to white-nose infection. When they wake up, their immune systems go into overdrive. This is called immune reconstitution inflammatory syndrome, or IRIS. This has only been observed once before--in AIDS patients.

What makes bat immune systems so adept at handling viruses, but so weak at handling fungi? Ongoing research should provide some answers. What's more, understanding how bat and human immune systems compare could shed some light on human disease prevention, too.

Beyond their avoidance of viral infection, bats have evolved to resist aging-related illnesses and cancer, the researchers say. Compared to other animals their size, like rodents, bats live an extraordinarily long time--between 20 and 40 years, compared with two or three for a rat. The researchers believe all this has something to do with the animals' ability to fly.

Flying requires intense physical activity and expends vast amounts of energy, which produces toxic free radicals that can cause tissue damage and cancer. To deal with this, both species evolved a surprisingly large amount of DNA repair genes, the authors found. They believe the heavy mutations helped the bats maximize their metabolism, which in turn allowed them to take flight. One specific gene, called P53, is involved in cancer and repair of damaged DNA.

"We're proposing that the evolution of flight led to a sort of spill over effect, influencing not only the immune system, but also things like aging and cancer," Cowled said in a statement.

The study examined two very distantly related bat species, the black flying fox of Australia (Pteropus alecto) and David's Myotis of China (Myotis davidii). It appears in the year-end issue of Science.

CSIRO

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Nerds have a love-hate relationship with big-budget sci-fi movies. We admire how they take us on mind-bending journeys that'd otherwise prove impossible (or kill us). But we loathe them for torturing science to paint a sloppy portrait of how the universe works, instantly crushing our enjoyment of the movie.

Herewith, we bring you the year's most memorable cinematic offenses, ranging from excusable infractions to nerd-rage-inducing disregard for grade school-level science.

(Spoiler alert: Our complaints will betray the plots of these movies.)

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Over at The Washington Post, Todd Lindeman has crunched some numbers and put together an infographic organizing violence-related deaths by age.

One axis shows age, the other ranks the cause of death. If the deaths were homicides, the box is shaded brown; if they were suicides, the box is shaded blue. They're also shaded more heavily if there's a large number of deaths associated with that cause. So, for example, the leading cause of violence-related death for people ages 65 and above is suicide by firearm, and because there were more than 30,000 of those cases recorded between 1999 and 2007, it's shaded dark blue.

Here's what we can glean: The leading means of violence-related deaths are guns. For people ages 5 to 9 and 15 and above, it's the No. 1 cause. (For children ages 10 to 14, suffocation is No. 1; for children under 4, the top cause is listed as "unspecified.") Guns are also the second-highest cause of violent death among people ages 10 to 44. How can they be both first and second? Because, as mentioned above, Lindeman drew an important distinction between suicides and homicides. So while gun homicides are the leading cause of violent death for people ages 15 to 24, gun suicides are the second leading cause. For people ages 35 to 44, it's reversed. And overall, there are far more suicides than homicides. The third leading cause of violent death across most age groups is suffocation (primarily by suicide).

[Washington Post]

Never has it been easier to kick back, relax, and enjoy the home entertainment of your choice. In this gallery, find the top innovations in game systems, streaming, video cameras, and more.

A barebones site has collected the 100 most popular Wikipedia stories from each major language. The different languages have different pages entirely, as they're more like localized versions of Wikipedia than translated versions of the original, English-language site. The view counts are public; anyone can check and see the popularity of any individual page. So what was the most popular?

The top five English-language pages are Facebook, Wiki, Deaths in 2012, One Direction, and The Avengers (2012 film). The list includes an awful lot of pop culture stuff like that--Fifty Shades of Grey, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Hunger Games are also in the top 10--but there's a whole mess of tech in there, too. Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, SOPA, Android, Stephen Hawking, and more can be found in the top 100.

The page we investigated awhile back, for Hurricane Sandy, didn't make the top 100. But the page on Human Penis Size did. I suppose that's kinda scientific.

The British Antarctic Survey above Lake Ellsworth was a Great White Hope for discovering never-before-seen life. Scientists spent years planning an ambitious study of the lake, which sits two miles below the Antarctic surface, hoping to burrow through the ice with a hot-water drill. If they'd arrived at the bottom, the team might've found microbes with biology never observed by humans. Instead, the team's heading home.

What happened? First, it's important to know what was supposed to happen. Scientists would open a borehole with the drill, giving them enough time to lower remote-control probes into the depths. Those probes would search for life. All of this would've taken a mere six days.

But there were complications. The drill, meant to dive straight down, leaked hot water into the ice well before its destination--just 300 meters under the surface, or about 10 percent of the way to Lake Ellsworth. A part for the drill apparently malfunctioned, too, forcing the team to fly a spare all the way out from Britain.

These were expensive missteps. in all, the project cost about 8 million pounds. When the researchers return, there will be a review that offers a more detailed look at what exactly went wrong, and the researchers might even get another shot at it. But that could mean another few years of planning and implementation.

Some other Antarctic studies are faring a little better. Earlier this month, NASA scientists, along with other researchers, dug a (relatively meager) 65 feet below the surface, uncovering microbes in Lake Vida. A Russian team reported success for its foray below the ice in February, drilling up to 800 meters into a lake that's been buried for 14 million years (though not without some controversy).

The big appeal of Ellsworth is that it might be home to even older, more isolated microbes. The older the microbes, the weirder they are--and possibly the more we can learn from them. Scientists were hoping projects like Ellsworth would provide a window to similar environments on Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's Enceladus, which means it would help scientists understand how life might look on other planets.

Maybe we'll have to cut out the middleman and head to space.

[BBC]

The Nest thermostat is a test case for the proposition that better consumer products can save the world. It is indeed an excellent consumer product, but the early results on world-saving are inconclusive.

Most programmable thermostats are clunky at best, and their user interfaces are about as intuitive (and technologically advanced) as the clock on a VCR. The Nest, conceived, constructed, and very cleverly marketed by a former Apple design engineer, was supposed to bring some much needed West Coast design mojo to this crucial but unexciting appliance. Sounds good! I got mine in May, and the installation and wiring were simple enough. It took a little while to figure out how to navigate the physical interface, which involves twisting and clicking an exterior ring-not the easiest method by which to enter my WiFi password-but things got easier from there. Twist left, the temperature goes down, twist right, the temperature goes up. Click the whole thing like a mouse and you get a menu of options-and once the WiFi is up and running you can do most of the serious programming by way of an elegant Web interface.

Thermostats don't have to make a lot of choices. Turn on the heat, turn off the heat, turn on the AC, turn off the AC. That's it. The environmental argument is that the motion-detector equipped Nest will "learn" how to make those decisions at the optimal intersection of comfort and efficiency. I set it up and let it go, per the instructions, but alas-as Brooklyn entered yet another record-breaking summer heat wave-I could detect no particular logic to its approach. Sometimes the apartment was too cool, sometimes too hot. Since adjusting things manually was
easy enough, I ended up treating the Nest like any other programmable thermostat: One temperature by day, another by night, and cranking it up or down as comfort and eco-guilt demanded.

The Nest is excellent in other interesting ways nonetheless. The immediate thrill of the Nest is that you can control it from anywhere. I did a lot of traveling this summer, and it was satisfying to remotely fire up the AC as soon as I hit the tarmac, both because I like having yet another gadget to fool around and because it is inarguably excellent to have a non-scorching apartment waiting for me at the end of a long trip.

The true world-saving features of the Nest are psychological, though. First there's the nudge factor: When you set it within certain energy-saving parameters, Nest displays a little leaf, a pat on the back not unlike that delivered by the "energy monitor" on the Toyota Prius. There's no denying it: I like to see the leaf. The Nest also emails me regular reports on my energy usage. Some months I do well, some months I don't. My guilt varies accordingly.

Then there's the larger, slightly weirder psychology of having a thermostat that's fancy enough to play a non-trivial role in my life: As I'm turning on the air conditioner from the airport, I'm forced to reflect not just on the fact that I'm flying too much, which is probably the worst thing a person can do for the environment, but also using too much air conditioning-a close second in terms of generating a massive carbon footprint. An irony of the consumer world is that now you can spend a lot of money on products that remind you what a terrible person you are for consuming so much.

That said, being reminded to consume less is certainly better than being reminded to consume more. And I've become very fond of my Nest. Move a hand past the motion-sensor and it comes aglow with a lovely temperature display: red if it's heating, blue if it's cooling. Sometimes at night I'll walk by and wave at it just for the little burst of color.

The narrative possibilities in video games are endless, even if there are a few well-worn tropes (save the princess, shoot that guy). But what about the really unexpected ways games are used? We've rounded up some of the most compelling video-game experiments in 2012. Enjoy.

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World-changing devices don't need to come from big labs funded with big money. Sometimes radical technological innovations roll, whir, or fly out of basements and garages.

Do you know you've invented something that's poised to disrupt a market, or have you toiled building prototype after prototype in your home workshop to prove your idea works? Whether you're a professional researcher working on a self-funded side project, a hobbyist who has launched a successful crowdfunding campaign to refine your gadget, or an obsessive teenager who's built a sellable product in your bedroom, please tell us about it! Enter the seventh annual Popular Science Invention Awards.

We're looking for game-changing products developed by passionate, independent inventors -- not academic or corporate R&D labs. Popular Science editors will pick 10 entries that best represent the spirit of homegrown ingenuity and solve real-world problems in a practical, innovative way. Then, in our May 2013 issue, seven million readers will get the first look at the winners.

Send as many details as you can about your invention to inventions@popsci.com, and feel free to attach photos, links to videos, or provide outside testimony (note: your e-mail entry should be no larger than 25MB). Below are some key guidelines:

• Inventions must be physical objects -- not abstract processes or concepts.
• There must be a working prototype, or something that demonstrates that an invention actually works.
• An invention should be poised to create a market or disrupt an existing one -- not be a boondoggle in search of a problem.
• Inventions must be the work of independent inventors or small teams; outside funding is fine (even from movie stars), but inventions created wholly inside universities or other R&D labs won't be considered.
• Inventions intended to become commercial products are acceptable, but they must not already be available for sale.
• Inventions must be something new, not just a minor, incremental improvement on an existing thing.
• Popular Science will not publish an entry online or in print without notifying the inventor first, but we will contact outside experts to verify the technology and significance of the invention.
• All intellectual-property protection is the responsibility of the entrant.
• All entries must be received by January 14, 2013 (the earlier, the better).

Finally, we encourage you to review winners from previous years -- e.g. 2012, 2011, or 2010 -- to see what kinds of inventions make the cut.

It's been a great year for science--Curiosity! The Higgs Boson!--and intrepid photographers have been there all along to document it. Narrowing our favorite photos down to just a dozen wasn't easy, but here they are. Until next year, everybody.

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Want to win this hungover Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the T-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

• FDA Says Giant, Genetically Modified Salmon Is Environmentally Safe
• Say Goodbye To Christmas By Watching This Giant Tree Explode
• Asparagus Prevents Hangovers, Incredibly Useful Study Finds
• Stuffing Your Face With Holiday Cookies Disrupts Your Body Clock, Just Like Mars Time Would

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

• Popular Science's Best Longreads Of 2012
• The 6 Best Video-Game Experiments Of 2012
• What Kind Of Violence Kills Americans? [Infographic]
• The Most Egregious Science Mistakes In Movies This Year
• 12 Incredible Works Of Astrophotography By Brad Goldpaint
• The Year On Mars: The Red Planet's Greatest Moments Of 2012
• GameSci: The Wii U's Unlikely Influence
• FYI: What Causes Motion Sickness, And How Do You Cure It?

As an increasingly connected world generates ever-more data sets, and the tools to examine and analyze those data sets become easier to use, the fields of data visualization and illustration (called infographics as a catch-all term), have enjoyed something of a renaissance. We dug through our archives and the archives of our favorite infovis blogs to find some of our favorite science-related infographics from the past year.

To make the grade, we look for science-themed infographics that are engaging--either literally as an interactive graphic or metaphorically due to excellent design aesthetics. The infographic also must clearly communicate the concept being presented--it must tell a complete story, allowing the reader to draw his or her own conclusions rather than having to be told what the answer might be.

Click through to see which ones we chose.

The desire to eat high-fat foods after drinking too much is rooted in human's earliest, humblest beginnings, some scientists say.

"All mammals gravitate to eating the most energy-dense foods," David Levitsky, professor of human ecology and nutritional sciences at Cornell University, says. "Fat is the most energy-dense food available." It's just that sober, you won't usually give in to those cravings. But after a night of boozy indulgence, you lose such learned inhibitions as disciplined eating, Levitsky says.

Another explanation involves brain chemistry, specifically a brain chemical called galanin.

William Gruchow, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, has studied and written about galanin and its effects on various neurotransmitters. "Galanin increases appetite for fats, and consumption of fat causes more galanin to be produced," Gruchow said. "Alcohol intake also results in increased galanin production."

Gruchow says he thinks galanin might be stimulated by triglycerides, which are released by fat and alcohol.

Triglycerides, converted calories stored in fat cells, are typically released by the body when energy is needed between meals, according to the Mayo Clinic's website.

By consuming large quantities of high-fat foods and alcohol, you increase your triglycerides possibly stimulating galanin production. That, in turn, makes you crave that calorific Denny's breakfast you'd never touch otherwise.

"The bottom line here is that alcohol intake increases one's appetite for fat, and fat intake does the same. This is a double whammy for drinkers who eat fatty foods while drinking," Gruchow says.

Here's the latest technology in the eco-universe. We have shirts that require less water in the dyeing process, a backpack that purifies water, a biofuel harvester and more.

The link between teenagers smoking pot and psychosis is ripe for a correlation-causation debacle. Studies have indicated there's a relationship between psychotic symptoms and above-average marijuana use, but the reasons behind that correlation are not clear. Does pot cause psychosis in teens, or are teens with mental health issues retreating into marijuana use to deal with those issues?

Dutch researchers set up a study to figure that out. Researchers surveyed 2,000 teens in the Netherlands through their adolescence. Subjects' were asked about their marijuana use, then asked questions designed to gauge their mental state ("Do you ever see things that others do not?"). The research team also factored in alcohol and tobacco use and a family history of mental illness. If the teens reported mental-health issues years after smoking marijuana, the researchers assumed maybe pot was the cause. If the opposite happened, maybe people with psychosis just smoked more pot.

The results were, disappointingly, inconclusive. In the survey, 44 percent of teens admitted smoking pot. Using it at age 16 was linked to psychotic symptoms at age 19. But the researchers found a link running in the opposite direction, too. Teens showing psychotic symptoms were also more likely to smoke pot later in life, well after the symptoms developed.

So maybe it's not a simple A-to-B conclusion with marijuana use and psychosis; maybe both points have some truth to them--or neither. Earlier studies couldn't definitively link marijuana and psychosis in one direction or the other, and this study couldn't, either.

[The Atlantic]