A new survey finds that most people with smart TVs aren't using the majority of the smart features. TV manufacturers like Samsung, LG, and Sony stick all kinds of internet-connected features into their mid- and high-end TVs, but the interfaces are generally confusing and not optimized for sitting on a couch 10 feet away from a screen, and this survey confirms that nobody really wants to browse Twitter on a TV. But the silver lining is that a high percentage of users--more than half--are using the video-related apps, like Netflix and Hulu Plus. That's great! [via The Daily Mail]

After a massive earthquake and tsunami struck Japan in 2011, causing major meltdowns at three reactors in the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, local schools restricted outdoor activities and parents (understandably) wanted to keep their children indoors. That's had an unexpected consequence. Fukushima children 5 to 9 and 14 to 17 are the fatest in the country.

The education ministry released a nation-wide preliminary report last week, defining "obese" children as kids who are 20 percent heavier than average. In Fukushima, the obesity rate among 6-year-old boys was 11.4 percent, up from 6.3 percent in 2010. For 8-year-old girls in the prefecture, the rate doubled to 14.6 percent.

After the disaster, 449 schools set limits on how much time kids could be outdoors, and as of September, restrictions were still in place at 71 schools. But even in areas where radiation levels were marked safe, parents are still keeping their kids inside. The northeast area of Japan, where Fukushima is, typically tops obesity rates because of the harsh winters forcing people indoors, but it's never been quite this bad.

Here's the good news for those kids: dozens of indoor playgrounds are being built in Fukushima, giving them an outlet to work off some of that flab.

[Guardian]

Scientists have found the code for a powerful antibiotic within the giant panda genome, according to a story in the Telegraph. Pandas' immune systems naturally produce the small anti-bacterial protein, but their critically low numbers and almost invariable failure to breed in captivity rule the animals out as a potential source for the compound. Fortunately, the researchers were able to use the pandas' genetic recipe to synthesize the protein in the lab, and found that it can destroy certain bacteria in just a fraction of the time it takes currently available drugs to do the job. Now, the researchers are working to develop the panda peptide as a human weapon against drug-resistant bugs.

[Read Full Story]

NASA's past few Mars rovers have been friendly robots with head-like masts and cameras for eyes, easily anthropomorphized and adored. The next generation might be decidedly less cute--they resemble a medieval battle mace.

The Phobos Surveyor is a new concept from researchers at Stanford, MIT and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The spacecraft would visit the Martian moon Phobos, or maybe an asteroid. Then one or more mace-ball rovers would deploy from the mothership (which would stay in orbit above) and leap and tumble across the surface of the moon or asteroid. Marco Pavone, an assistant professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford, came up with the idea and nicknamed the hopping rovers "hedgehogs" (definitely a cheerier name than mace balls).

Hoppers are a favored design for future planetary explorers because they could cover much more terrain than a rover, and could easily cross canyons and other hazardous areas. With a hopper, you don't face problems like a stuck wheel, which doomed NASA's Spirit Mars rover. MIT and Draper Labs have a prototype moon hopper vying for the Google Lunar X Prize: The Terrestrial Lunar and Reduced Gravity Simulator, or Talaris. That one uses ducted fans and compressed nitrogen to hover and hop around.

The hedgehogs would not need much energy to hop on Phobos--the Martian moon's gravitational field is 1,000 times weaker than that of Mars--so their inertial spinning would propel them easily. Here's how it would work: The Phobos Surveyor, which Stanford's news service describes as coffee-table-sized with two umbrella-shaped solar panels, would travel to Phobos and map the moon's terrain. After a few months, it would deploy five or six hedgehogs, one at a time, each a few days apart. The spacecraft would communicate with each other to determine each hedgehog's position, and determine where it should hop next.

Each hedgehog contains three discs that rotate on all three axes, and spinning them at varying speeds produces an inertial force that causes them to move. A quick spin can cause a hop, and spinning even faster causes them to bound across the surface. Slight wheel spins force the hedgehogs to tumble slightly. Why the spikes? They could ensure the hedgehogs can gain purchase in any terrain, whether it is hard and rocky or soft and sandy.

Combining a global view with on-the-ground measurements has worked quite well for NASA's Mars program, and this would work in a similar fashion. The Phobos Surveyor might measure chemical elements, while the hedgehogs might study the terrain with microscopes or other tools. All this would help scientists learn more about Phobos' past.

It could also have much broader benefits for the space program, too. Because of that weak gravity field, Phobos might be a convenient first target for human visitors. This mission would provide a lot more information about what the moon is like.

The Stanford team already has a few hedgehog prototypes, and will test the latest one using a crane to simulate lower gravity. Flour will be a stand-in for asteroid dust, and the researchers will also bring in rocks and dirt to simulate Phobos. It's part of NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, which has spawned several other creative ideas we would love to see. The team plans to present a paper describing the concept at a conference this spring.

[Stanford News]

Advances in 3-D fabrication enabled some amazing feats of design and ingenuity this year: on-demand running shoes, labware, even body parts.

As with any groundbreaking technology, controversy arose, whether it was over a 3-D printed key that can crack open handcuffs or a 3-D printed firearm that could give average Joes on-demand access to guns--no five-day waiting period required.

But even the projects that raised ethical questions or exposed our legal framework to gaping gray areas are, in their own ways, technological triumphs--proof of 3-D printing's vast potential and popular momentum. Frankly, we can't wait to see what 2013 has in store for us. Until then, click though the gallery link below for a quick spin through the best and most mind-blowing 3-D printed objects we saw in 2012.

Concerns about the health risks associated with cell phones date back almost to the dawn of the industry. Over the last four decades, while cell phones shrunk and multiplied and worked their way into the very fabric of human existence, the vague threat of danger has slunk along behind like a faint but troubling and unshakeable odor: do what they could, scientists couldn't quite eliminate it, and they couldn't quite define it, either. The best they've been able to do is say that the radiation coming from cell phones may or may not cause cancer.

What's been holding researchers back up to this point is that, unlike x-rays and other forms of high-energy, ionizing radiation, low levels of radio-wave exposure don't have the power to penetrate cells and blow apart bits of DNA. For radio frequencies from cell phones to cause genetic mutations in brain tissue, the tissue must absorb an obscene dose of them, and scientists simply don't know whether or not that's happening--even in people who spend the better part of their days holding the little energy-emitting devices flush against the side of their heads.

To get a definitive answer, researchers need to be able to measure exactly how much radiation the brain absorbs during normal cell phone use--and they might finally have a way of doing it.

Radio frequencies get transferred to heat when they're absorbed by brain tissue, and those heat signatures can be detected by magnetic resonance imaging. Unfortunately, because of the intense magnetic fields involved, you can't just put someone inside of an MRI with a metal-laden cell phone and measure how much warmer her brain gets. In the past, researchers have used electrical probes to emit energy inside of model brains, and then measured the resulting heat signatures. But such simulations have never been close enough to the real thing to yield conclusive results.

Now, a group of researchers in New York and New Jersey have designed an antenna that emits radio frequencies in the same way as cell phones, but doesn't include any of a phone's pesky metal parts. They've already put the antenna next to a cow's brain inside an MRI and tracked the resulting hot spots in the brain.

In the future, the antenna system should allow scientists to build an accurate 3-D map of cell phone radiation in the human brain--a crucial step in determining how much energy the organ is exposed to at a time, and whether those little doses might add up to a real threat.

Click to launch the photo gallery

GeoEye, which continually snaps images of Earth with its Ikonos satellite, has a lovely new calendar series you can download to keep track of the new year. The company chose one image a year since 1999, the year Ikonos launched, and overlaid a 2013 calendar on it. Check out our gallery for a preview.

A committee of GeoEye employees were tapped to offer suggestions for each year, following a set of criteria. Images had to be iconic, historic, or "just stunning," according to a company spokesman. The calendar team narrowed down images and all the imaging company employees voted on the selections to narrow them down to one image per year. But the company couldn't resist including a couple honorable mentions, too.

Click through the gallery for a stunning tour of Earth from space, and to find out how to download your own calendar.

Science and technology have utterly transformed human life in the past few generations, and forecasts of the future used to be measured in decades. But big changes arrive faster and faster these days. So here we've shifted our forecast to the near-term, because we're right on the verge of some extraordinary stuff. These are the trends and events to watch out for in 2013. See them all here.

On July 4, 2012, a panel of scientists at the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva announced the discovery of a new particle, the long-anticipated Higgs boson (or something very much like it). The Higgs is the final piece of the Standard Model of particle physics, a theory that accounts for everything we experience in our lives, from rocks to puppies to stars and planets. After decades of searching and billions of dollars, the Higgs discovery marked the end of one era and the beginning of another, which scientists will embark upon in 2013.

If the previous era was about understanding the physics of everyday stuff, the next will be dominated by the attempt to grasp more elusive realms, including one of the most mysterious of all: dark matter. Astronomers have verified that the universe has about five times more matter than we can account for with the "ordinary" particles we've discovered here on Earth. The rest is dark matter. Physicists haven't observed it directly yet, but they're getting much closer.

Several different detectors are currently searching for dark matter underground, conducting experiments designed to sense a dark matter particle scattering off the nucleus of an ordinary atom. A couple of them have already yielded tantalizing evidence-not enough to convince most physicists, but enough to get people excited. The LUX detector, recently installed in a South Dakota mine, should prove the most sensitive one yet when it begins collecting data in 2013.

Alternatively, dark matter could be found by looking up into space. Scientists analyzing observations of cosmic gamma rays in 2012 discovered an unusual excess at a particular energy emanating from the center of our galaxy. One explanation for the signal is that dark matter particles are colliding and converting into high-energy radiation. This coming year will no doubt bring new data, better analysis, and maybe, just maybe, evidence that pins down dark matter once and for all.

Science and technology have utterly transformed human life in the past few generations, and forecasts of the future used to be measured in decades. But big changes arrive faster and faster these days. So here we've shifted our forecast to the near-term, because we're right on the verge of some extraordinary stuff. These are the trends and events to watch out for in 2013. See them all here.

In 2009, the annual Pwn2Own cybersecurity competition provided hackers with a shot at cracking smartphones. They failed. In September, the event offered phones as targets again. This time, contestants seized control of them, successfully exploiting vulnerabilities in the two most popular operating systems, iOS and Android.

For the most part, smartphones have escaped the viruses and botnets that have plagued
desktop computers for decades. That luck may not hold out in 2013. The learning curves of cybersecurity professionals and cybercriminals track pretty closely. If the good guys have
hacked iOS and Android, the bad guys will quickly follow.

The first mobile malware attempted familiar invasions, stealing contact information and pictures from devices. But cybersecurity professionals expect a range of unconventional hacks as well. In the last couple of years, researchers have found ways to turn smartphones, with their cameras, GPS, and accelerometers, into portable spies.

Researchers from Indiana University and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, for example, created PlaceRaider, which enables a smartphone camera to surreptitiously take photos. The proof-of-concept program then stitches them into a 3-D representation of the user's location, enabling attackers to identify valuable information in the environment. In another demonstration, researchers from Georgia Tech used the accelerometer of a smartphone sitting next to a keyboard to track the vibrations of individual keystrokes. They identified typed text with up to 80 percent accuracy.

At the 2012 TEDGlobal conference, Malte Spitz, a member of Germany's Green party, showed he could use telecom data to re-create his whereabouts in detail for six months. Hackers have likewise already used malware to track a user's location. Combining that information with other sensor data, such as images from the camera, could give them an unprecedented look into their victims' lives.

Thinking of revamping your place? Do it in style with the newest technology for the home.

Birds learn to sing in much the same way humans learn to talk: by listening to, and then imitating, the vocal sounds of their elders. Of course, those sounds rarely come out right the first time, but a fledgling's sense of hearing can tell her just how off the mark she is. If a note is too low, she'll know to whistle it higher next time, and that feedback helps birds (and us) learn how to communicate.

It sounds simple, but the details of how a bird interprets an auditory signal that she herself has produced then uses it to correct her melody aren't totally clear. In fact, a recent study shows that some mistakes in vocalization are simply too big to rectify.

For the study, scientists at Emory University and the University of California, San Francisco altered the auditory feedback of six male Bengalese finches by playing back, in real-time, an altered version of the birds' own sounds.

During several two-week experiments, the scientists used audio processing equipment to shift the pitch of the finches' vocal sounds by a set amount. In some of the experiments, the scientists shifted the pitch down by just a fraction of a tone--if the birds sang a C, for example, the tiny headphones over their ears would play back a tone halfway between a C and a C flat. See if you can hear the difference between the 2-second clip below and its slightly altered version:

Here's the original:

Now, shifted up one half semitone:

In other experiments, the pitch-shift was much larger, so that the birds might sing a C and hear, through its auditory feedback, a B:
The original again:

Now, shifted up three semitones:

Surprisingly, the researchers found that the finches made larger adjustments to their singing when they listened to slightly altered versions of themselves than when the pitch shift was large:

As the chart shows, when the finches heard their singing downshifted by just 1/2 semitone, they up-shifted their voices by almost the same amount to correct for the imposed error. But when the alteration was much greater, the birds made little adjustment to their singing.

In addition, the researchers detected a mathematical relationship between the birds' songs and their ability to correct for errors: The more the musical range of the altered songs overlapped the range of the finches' original tunes, the more the birds adjusted their singing to compensate for the shift:

But when the researchers altered the pitch so much that there was no overlap between the ranges of the original and processed songs, the birds did not learn to adjust their own tunes:

The upshot is the more minor the mistake, the better a bird is at correcting it. Thus birds can fine-tune their vocal instruments until they become the superb singers we know them to be. Whether humans exhibit the same kind of learning pattern--correcting subtle speaking errors with aplomb but balking at more grievous ones--is unclear. But when it comes to singing, if there's no overlap between the song you are trying to sing and the notes that are coming out of your mouth, you're probably better off sitting it out at the karaoke bar.

Neil Armstrong always maintained that he'd thought up possibly the most famous line in American history just after landing on the moon, but in an interview with The Telegraph, his brother says the origin story starts months before the landing, back on earth, and with a game of Risk.

Dean Armstrong said his brother invited him to play a round of the game, then casually slipped him a note to get his opinion on the subject. The note said, "One small step for A man, one giant leap for mankind."

People have long debated the missing "a" in that first clause--"It should be A man," someone is saying to someone else somewhere right now, probably--and there's speculation Armstrong either messed it up or, as the man said himself, the message didn't come through clean back on Earth.

Some assumed that if he did flub it, the quote might've been spontaneously thought up, and Neil Armstrong went along with that narrative. This story from Dean Armstrong would contradict that version of history.

Either way, that "a" isn't much of a change, even if it would've made the sentence technically correct. But there's something that makes the "right" version a little less special to my ears, somehow less dense. Maybe that's just the weight of history.

[The Telegraph]

The New York Times published a little trend piece that argues "social media and science found each other in 2012." Evidence cited: there were scientific or science-related events that broke through to become part of the general public conversation, which includes Twitter and Facebook, like Felix Baumgartner's near-space jump and the Mars rover Curiosity's landing. And, yes, true! But we'd argue that social media is more a reflection of popular culture (with, yes, a slightly nerdy bent), and those events were easy-to-grasp, universally awesome things. Still, great to see more people talking about science. [NYTimes]

Click to launch the photo gallery

In the 10 years since the complete human genome was published, molecular biologists have been hard at work unraveling the genomic codes of multitudes of life forms. What stands out, time and again, is how much all life shares in common, and how complex everything is. Did you know the domesticated watermelon has about as many genes as you do?

In 2012, genome researchers sequenced the DNA of an unborn human baby, the western lowland gorilla, fruits and grains, and livestock. Click through our gallery to see the highlights.

NASA's (and President Obama's) vision for sending a manned space mission to a distant asteroid by the 2020s doesn't seem to be gaining much steam, but a conceptual mission under development by the Keck Institute for Space Studies in California could bring an asteroid much closer to home in that timeframe. An estimated $2.6 billion could fund a mission that would send a robotic spacecraft out into interplanetary space and drag an asteroid into orbit around the moon where robots and even humans could explore it far more conveniently.

The reasons for doing this are many. For one, a manned mission beyond the moon to a faraway asteroid would likely take six months or more to reach even the closest passing asteroid of interest. During that time out from under the protective umbrella of Earth's magnetic field, astronauts would be exposed to long periods of cosmic radiation--the effects of which aren't exactly defined. Moreover, it would be costly, dangerous, and might not yield that much scientific benefit. But an asteroid in orbit around the moon meshes well with some other initiatives NASA has cooking, including placing a fixed space station at a Lagrange point on the far side of the moon from which human inhabitants could tele-robotically explore the moon (and, if available, an asteroid).

The Keck concept calls for an Atlas V rocket to launch a slow-moving, solar/ion powered spacecraft toward a rendezvous with a target asteroid. This wouldn't be an Earth killer or anything even close--the Keck study calls for something in 20-25 feet wide. The spacecraft would then literally haul the asteroid in a huge bag back to lunar orbit. Total mission duration: six to 10 years.

NASA's not the first entity to speak seriously of moving asteroids into more favorable orbits for human observation (and consumption). Last year billionaire-backed private space startup Planetary Resources announced an ambitious agenda to explore and mine minerals from asteroids, including potentially moving a target asteroid from deep space into an orbit more accessible to mining robots. The idea is not only to extract minerals for export back to earth, but also to create "orbital gas stations" where water ice on asteroids could be processed into hydrogen and oxygen to refuel rockets in space. That's an idea that's also been kicked around NASA over the years where the future of deep space travel is concerned. Pulling a small asteroid into lunar orbit would be a good start.

[New Scientist]

Sometimes inventions, even the important ones, aren't pretty. Case in point: this vomiting robot. It could help us understand, and then battle, an illness that no one's found a cure for in 40 years. Even if it's not the cutest 'bot out there.

The unfortunately but appropriately named Vomiting Larry is an anatomically correct model of a freshman at a frat party and, more importantly, an anatomically correct model of someone vomiting after contracting norovirus, a nasty bug that causes puking and diarrhea. It spreads fast--less than 20 virus particles can infect someone--and it's been a higher-than-expected year for infections.

For the most part, the virus isn't especially serious; people usually kick it in a few days. But for a lot of reasons, including the fact that we're unable to grow human norovirus in a controlled environment, we have to study the spread of the virus in other ways. That's where good ol' Larry comes in, helping us to model how puking could spread the illness. The spray can travel nearly 10 feet (!), and when even a tiny bit of the stuff can be enough to pass the disease on, it's important to get a grasp on exactly how the virus travels. It's widespread, too: 21 million cases are estimated in the U.S. annually, and the only virus more commonly reported is the common cold.

BBC has some video, and Larry comes in at around 2:43. (Spoiler alert: it's kind of disgusting.)

[BBC]

Here's a pretty cool interactive map made by Brandon Martin-Anderson showing, according to census data, every single person in the United States and Canada. The map uses the 2010 US census and the 2011 Canadian census, for a total of 341,817,095. But interestingly, there are no other visual aids--no landmarks, no borders, no rivers or lakes. So if you want to find yourself, you'll have to go by population groups, which gets pretty difficult as you zoom further in. Unless you live in Nunavut or something.

[BMander]

Setting up specialized grow lights that mimic the sun's rays is a good solution, but you can get similar results with LEDs. We connected three inside a clear plastic tube to make a "light spike" that you can stick into a pot for direct exposure, and added a controller that adjusts the brightness.

MATERIALS
Project box
Drill
2.1-mm power-connector jack
10-position header
100k-ohm slide potentiometer
Soldering iron and solder
Electrical wire
10k-ohm resistor
Wire strippers
White LED design kit
Five clear plastic tubes with endcaps
Five two-position connectors
15-volt 1A wall-mount power supply

STEP 1
Drill six holes in your project box to accommodate the various components, then assemble the controller by mounting the power-connector jack inside the box and the 10-position header and the 100k-ohm slide potentiometer on the box's sides.

STEP 2
Wire the box according to the circuitry diagram.

STEP 3
Cut the wire inside the LED design kit into five equal lengths. Attach the red wire to the red connector, and the black wire to the black connector, on each LED strip. Slip each strip inside a clear tube, and seal it with the endcaps so that it's watertight.

STEP 4
Add the two-position connectors that will hook up the tubes and the box. Attach each one to the red and black wires from each LED strip.

STEP 5
Press a spike into your plant container. Keep all wiring, electrical connections, and the LED strips away from soil and moisture.

STEP 6
Plug the spikes' two-position connectors into the control box's 10-position header, and connect the power supply to turn the LEDs on.

STEP 7
Adjust the slide potentiometer to control the brightness of the spikes, and watch your garden grow.

This project was excerpted from The Big Book Of Hacks: 264 Amazing DIY Tech Projects, a compendium of ingenious and hilarious projects for aspiring makers. Buy it here. And for more amazing hacks, go here.

International Space Station astronaut Chris Hadfield just tweeted this photo of... some sort of tank or something on board the International Space Station.

This vital equipment is used in both the US and Russian sections of the Space Station. Do you recognize what it is? twitter.com/Cmdr_Hadfield/…

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) January 2, 2013

Hmm. Some very important space technology, no doubt. But what could it be? Well, we got the answer pretty soon after.

@thisisobject - on the Space Station we recycle our urine and sweat back into drinking water. Same as on Earth, just more ... personal.

— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) January 2, 2013

Aha! It's a tank that turns urine and sweat back into drinkable water. Important indeed. In fact, we remember when the astronauts first toasted to this equipment with tall glasses of their own recycled urine. As we reported, the whole setup costs a whopping $250 million, but can you really put a price on such a futuristic toilet?

Research suggests we pick up on the nuts and bolts of speech six months after birth. But a new study suggests newborns have already learned parts of a language, can distinguish between their native tongue and a foreign one, and even--in a really weird way--demonstrate that they know the difference, much earlier than we thought.

Researchers took a look at some especially young infants: 40 boys and girls between seven and 75 hours old were studied in both Tacoma, Wash. and Stockholm, Sweden. The team set up a pretty bizarre and ingenious metric for determining how well the babies recognized the speech: they measured how long the kids sucked on a pacifier wired to a computer. First the researchers split both the Swedish and American babies into two groups. Within each of those groups, they rigged a pacifier to detect when each of the babies sucked, then started to pipe in vowels. Half of the babies in each group got vowels in their native language, while the other half got the foreign one. The babies consistently sucked faster on the pacifier when a foreign language was being played, which, the researchers say, is evidence they're ready for something new by the time they're a few hours old.

Vowel noises are the loudest bits of speech and therefore, the researchers say, the most likely to be noticed in utero, probably from when the mother is speaking. Other studies have done similar research, looking to see if newborns can recognize music or certain phrases, but recognizing vowels is even more fundamental: they can't be picked up by learning just the rhythm or tone the way other sounds can be.

During the last 10 weeks of pregnancy, the researchers say, the baby is already starting to pick up on those noises. So mind your language around the pregnant.

[Pacific Lutheran University]