Ah, physics: Taking the world's greatest mysteries and turning them into cold, hard facts. Even the mysteries in beloved children's stories. A group of physics students from Leicester University in the UK has subjected James and the Giant Peach, a classic tale by Roald Dahl, to aerodynamic modeling.

In the story, orphaned James seeks refuge with a bunch of anthropomorphized insects inside a huge stone fruit, which is then toted across the Atlantic Ocean by a flock of seagulls. Dahl said it would take 501 birds to do the job: "I shall simply go on hooking them up to the stem until we have enough to lift us. They'll be bound to lift us in the end," James explains. In fact, 2,425,907 seagulls would actually be needed, according to the students' research paper.

Emily Jane Watkinson, Maria-Theresia Walach, Daniel Staab and Zach Rogerson calculated the mass of the peach, which Dahl says is "as tall and wide, in fact, as a small house," estimating that it would have a radius of 6 meters. They examined footage from the 1996 Disney movie adaptation and calculated its height at 5.7 meters. Performing several other calculations, they determine it would require 4,890,579 newtons of force to lift it. "This greatly exceeds the carrying capacity of 501 Common Gulls," the students write.

To determine this, they modeled the seagulls as airfoils, which you can think of basically like an airplane wing. These curved shapes create the force known as lift. A common gull can provide 2.02 N of lift, the students write. "For a peach of the dimensions calculated, it would not be possible to fly such a heavy object with the assistance of such a diminutive number of birds," they conclude.

Their course leader, Mervyn Roy, said the exercise prepares his students for a career in scientific publishing. To be a research physicist in industry or academia, "you need to show some imagination," he explained.

As The Guardian put it, scientists still have not found the formula for the magic potion that caused James' peach to grow quite so large. Nor have they figured out how Matilda moved objects with the power of her mind.

[via AlphaGalileo]

Although not nearly as threatening as it was first perceived to be upon its discovery, the asteroid 99942 Apophis still has a very slight chance of impacting our planet on Friday, April 13, 2036. It will get closer to Earth this year, giving astronomers a chance to refine its trajectory for good and know whether we're in trouble. And you can get a glimpse of it online tomorrow, courtesy of the Slooh Space Camera.

The 27-megaton asteroid has a diameter of roughly three football fields, and would pack a society-ending punch if it really impacted Earth. So astronomers are interested in nailing down its trajectory and characteristics.

At its maximum brightness, it will still be quite dim, with an apparent magnitude of 19.7. That's not bright enough for a backyard telescope, but it should be enough for telescopes in remote spots like the Canary Islands, where Slooh's is located. The Arecibo Observatory and other radio observatories will also be watching.

It is named for the Egyptian god Apep the Uncreator, who tried to swallow the sun god Ra as he crossed the sky. The Greeks called him Apophis, and he personified death, destruction and chaos.

Originally, asteroid Apophis was thought to have a 2.7 percent chance of impacting Earth in 2029, but this was later dramatically reduced. It will still give Earth a close shave, flying by within the range of our geosynchronous satellites. And there's a very small chance that during that approach, Earth's gravitational influence will tug on it just enough to bring it back for good in 2036. Understanding its spin direction, size and other characteristics will help answer that question.

Or, new measurements could also confirm it will safely pass more than 30.5 million miles from Earth in 2036. Meanwhile, you can take a look at it here.

If an experiment is any good, the process needs to be replicated. That requires some details on the methods researchers used.

But, uh, how detailed, exactly?

Scientists have been playing off that idea, tweeting the TMI parts of their methods with the hashtag #OverlyHonestMethods.

Here are some classics:

Water stress was applied to the plants until we felt we had achieved an odd sort of victory over them #overlyhonestmethods

— Hope Jahren (@HopeJahren) January 8, 2013

We used jargon instead of plain English to prove that a decade of grad school and postdoc made us smart. #overlyhonestmethods

— Ethan Perlstein (@eperlste) January 8, 2013

We had to pause our ag stream expmt b/c beavers took a walk thru a cornfield & turned our stream into a pond. #overlyhonestmethods#real

— Holly Menninger (@DrHolly) January 8, 2013

The instrument was inoperable during this period because somebody hit one of the switches with their arse. #overlyhonestmethods

— Will Morgan (@willtmorgan) January 8, 2013

"Our results were non-significant at p>0.05, but they're humdingers at p>0.1" :) #overlyhonestmethods

— Richard L. Vance (@RLombardVance) January 8, 2013

You can download our code from the URL supplied. Good luck downloading the only postdoc who can get it to run, though #overlyhonestmethods

— Ian Holmes (@ianholmes) January 8, 2013

A detailed sedimentary log was carried out at this locality, because there was a comfy rock to sit down on beside it #overlyhonestmethods

— Christopher Jennings (@chrsphr) January 8, 2013

AND: Many more are collected in this Storify from Beckie Port:

[The Node]

A German guy just came around with a cameraman, asking people in the press room what their favorite thing at CES has been this year. (He did not ask me. I was shooting eye-daggers at him.) Two guys at my table were asked, and both said one of the 4K TVs -- Sony's OLED and Samsung's curved set. 4K is clearly the buzzword at this year's CES.

What is it? 4K is a new, higher resolution for screens and projectors, with roughly 4352 x 2176 pixels. It's about four times as pixel-dense as 1080p. Cool! That means more detail--you can get your greasy face right up next to a screen and it's still crystal clear. This is a higher resolution even than what's in most movie theaters.

Why should you care? The pictures look amazing from up close. I tried out both Sony's OLED and Samsung's curved 4K sets, plus a 4K 3-D set, plus about a thousand other ones. They all look stunning. These are really great TVs. Another reason to care is that this is the wave of the future: Sony's starting to produce content in 4K resolution, and it's one way to get true movie-theater-quality video in your house.

Why should you ignore this? Well, a bunch of reasons. It's not new technology, exactly, but 4K in the consumer space is very, very early, and that comes with a whole mess of caveats. First: assuming you actually can buy a 4K set, they are ludicrously expensive. And you can't really buy one, not yet. Several companies have said they'll come out with 4K sets this year, but we won't hold our breath. Expect the first generation to cost tens of thousands of dollars.

The other big problems are content and distribution. 4K content is incredibly rare; NHK and the BBC both produce some 4K content, and Sony is making a big push to film sports and movies in 4K, but right now there's basically nothing out there to watch.

And even if there were a ton of content you'd want to watch, you wouldn't really be able to. 4K video takes an outrageous amount of storage--we're talking nearly 10 terabytes for a normal-length movie. So you have to figure out how to store that--there's certainly no disk that can handle it, since a Blu-ray tops out at about 100GB, or a hundredth of the space you'd need.

The other problem is that America's internet infrastructure is nowhere near robust enough to handle the demands of 4K. You'd need a 100-megabit/second connection to stream a compressed 4K video, which isn't an ideal option since you'll invariably lose some quality in the compression. And basically nobody in the States has a connection that fast anyway; an average Verizon FiOS connection hits about a quarter of that. In South Korea, where they have gigabit connections, 4K would be alright. But not here, not for years.

To deal with that major problem, Sony is providing a big machine you can plug into your new 4K TV, if you're will.i.am or whoever else buys one this year. It's basically a computer with a ton of storage, and Sony will package 10 movies and a few shorts onto it. That's right, you need a huge hunk of machinery and special installation from Sony just to watch 10 movies. The Sony rep I talked to was pretty vague about what happens after you watch those 10 movies. He said the machine could be "updated" with more content, but when I reminded him that it'd take about three days to download a single movie over America's highest-speed internet connection, he didn't really have a response.

So what's the takeaway? 4K is cool! Sony's big 4K OLED is probably the most beautiful TV screen I've ever seen. Absurdly bright, vivid, clear. Sharp enough to cut diamonds. It's awesome.

But this is a showoff tech, not a "here's what you guys will buy this year" tech. And that's fine! We like amazing futurey stuff! But let's keep it in perspective.

We've known about the Razer Edge--a Windows 8 tablet designed top to bottom for gaming--for awhile, but today at CES was the first time we'd actually gotten a chance to play with it. And, despite my own reservations about Windows 8, small Windows 8 tablets, gaming tablets, and tablets with detachable joysticks, as soon as I started using it, I got it: this is probably the best Windows 8 tablet I've used, period, and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

The Edge, in its most basic form, is a 10.1-inch tablet with the specs of a mid-level gaming machine. At its cheapest, that's an Intel Core i5 processor, Nvidia GT640M LE GPU, 4GB of DDR3 RAM, and a 64GB SSD, all for $999. Bump that to $1,299 and you'll double the SSD's storage and the RAM, and replace the i5 with an i7 processor. That's powerful enough to run Dishonored and Dirt Showdown with tough settings, smoothly.

The hardware is nice; it's chubbier than I expected, but not particularly heavy. It's not iPad-thin, but then, it's far more powerful than an iPad, and I didn't find it wildly uncomfortable to hold. The build quality seems sturdy, though a bit plasticky, with a nice little curvy bulge to the back. But where it really gets interesting is in the accessories. There's a keyboard sleeve, which is kind of small but okay to type on, a dock for outputting to a monitor or TV, and a joystick attachment that really impressed me, pictured up top. It gives you two joysticks, a D-pad, four face buttons, and six shoulder buttons, comfortably laid out, plus force feedback vibration. It turns the tablet into some kind of hyper-powered Wii U controller.

I did find that with the joysticks attached, the Edge was a little heavy to play like a Nintendo DS for long periods of time. But performance was impressively smooth, the screen is awesome--much better quality than the Microsoft Surface's--and playing games like this was really fun. That was the key takeaway--companies have been trying for awhile now to make gaming tablets, and mostly, they run Android, which is an immature and limited gaming platform. But not Windows! Give a tablet the full breadth of Windows games and some solid software, and you've got a very impressive gadget.

I could easily see recommending this for a gamer interested in a new, non-crazily-priced Windows machine. The price strikes me as pretty fair, actually; no way could you get a system anywhere near as portable with anywhere near the gaming performance of this thing. We'll keep you updated once we get our review unit in, probably later this month.

Sometimes, a trick gets pulled off better in nature than it does in a laboratory. That might be the case with new research claiming fireflies' unique lanterns can be reverse-engineered for LED lights, making the bulbs as much as 55 percent more efficient.

We've seen scientists get the idea to mimic the insect's chemical reaction, but this project deals with their also-impressive structure. This is how the researchers--a team from Belgium, France, and Canada--explained the process in a statement:

So the team took a gallium nitride LED, added a coat of light-sensitive material, then used lasers to recreate the roof shape they saw in the fireflies. Voila, they report in two papers today, out in the journal Optics Express: an LED that is up to 55 percent better at its job.

The team admits it's not the first time nature-inspired techniques aped by humans have improved LEDs, but they also claim this is the biggest increase in efficiency ever gained with a technique like it. Next up: reverse-engineering a different species of firefly that might be even more efficient.

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.

With his second term secured, President Barack Obama can now turn his full attention to advancing the priorities that will help define his legacy. On the stump, Obama championed science and technology. Under his administration, those fields, particularly renewable energy and medical research, should continue to enjoy significant federal support over the next four years.

John Holdren, Obama's science and technology adviser, told Popular Science: "We are committed to continuing our focus on ensuring that science, technology, innovation, and education have the support they deserve in order to fuel America's economy, prepare the tech-savvy workforce and science-savvy citizenry of tomorrow, and meet the manifold challenges of health and biomedicine, energy, environment, and national security."

Although the lion's share of federal research dollars still goes to defense-56 percent in fiscal year 2012-7.5 percent is devoted explicitly to "general science and basic research." Close to half of that finances the Department of Energy's Office of Science, which supports work that advances the development of new fuels, materials, and technologies.

Assuming it escapes sequestration at the end of 2012, funding for health research, which accounted for 22 percent of R&D dollars in 2012, should also remain strong. Advocates of stem cell research are particularly elated over Obama's win. An executive order he signed in 2009 lifts some limits on the use of such cells for federally funded research.

Federal support for research and development has been declining in absolute terms since 2010; the National Science Foundation's R&D budget fell from $7.6 billion in 2009 to $5.5 billion in 2011. Obama has proposed spending $142 billion on R&D in 2013, about $1.7 billion more than last year-but the Republican-led House will likely attempt to cut nondefense research dollars, as it has for the last two years.

Alan Leshner, CEO of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, says his group is optimistic. Even given current politics, Leshner is confident Obama can protect R&D from the budget ax: "Investments in science, everyone agrees, are investments in the future that have paid off handsomely in the past."

Root canals, head lice, cockroaches, Donald Trump, Ghengis Khan, Nickelback--they're all terrible things, but in the eyes of Americans, none of those things is worse than the United States Congress. People really disapprove of our nation's elected leaders, according to the most creative poll in recent memory, which was released today.

The folks at Public Policy Polling, a well-respected public opinion tracker, have long known that Congress is not viewed favorably, explained Dustin Ingalls, assistant to the director at PPP. This was a lighthearted attempt to put it in perspective.

"The whole fiscal cliff brouhaha sort of drove home how unpopular Congress was, at least anecdotally," Ingalls said. "So we decided to test Congress against these things we thought would be unpopular as well, and see what voters would think was better--unpopular things which no one seems to like, and Congress, which also no one seems to like."

Staffers at PPP thought of some things they personally found distasteful, and director Tom Jensen put out a request through Twitter. So it was not necessarily scientific, but still--the group was flooded with creative suggestions for universally detested things with which to contrast our Senate and House of Representatives. Then the team narrowed down the list to 26 things, from the Kardashians to colonoscopies.

The poll asked 830 registered voters whether they have favorable or unfavorable opinions of Congress. Just 9 percent of the electorate has a positive opinion, and 85 percent disapprove. Then the following questions asked voters which was better, Congress or another loathsome thing.

For his part, Ingalls said he was particularly intrigued by how well the NFL's replacement referees fared against our 535 national officeholders. The refs and their mistakes, as you recall, elicited passionate vitriol from local bars all the way to the White House.

"They got so much flak, but apparently they were far more popular than Congress," Ingalls said bemusedly. Replacement refs 56, Congress 29.

Not everything on Earth is worse than those we have chosen to represent us, however. Congress fared better than telemarketers; meth labs; playground bullies; ebola and gonorrhea; Lindsay Lohan and the Kardashians; Fidel Castro, North Korea and communism generally; and apparently the worst former member of Congress himself, John Edwards.

You can read the full list on PPP's blog.

As for the result? It probably won't mean much, Ingalls admitted. "I don't know how seriously anyone in Congress is going to take this," he said. "But it's certainly time for reflection, I'd say."

If you're looking for worldwide press and Internet attention, there's really only one thing you need: a cat. At least that seems to be the lesson of the anonymous hacker that has led Japanese law enforcement on a wild goose chase for months.

On New Year's Day, media outlets received emailed riddles leading them to the "chance for a big scoop." After solving various emailed riddles, police found a digital memory card attached to the collar of a cat near Tokyo. The actual process of cat-finding is unclear, but we'd like to think it involved a massive cat-sorting on one of Japan's cat islands. Wired reports that it contained information about the "Remote Control Virus," information only its creator would know.

Using the virus, the hacker has sent bomb threats against schools from computers around the country. Police seem flummoxed, and after the National Police Agency (NPA) extracted confessions from four people who were later found to have nothing to do with the emails, the NPA chief has promised his cyber-crime unit would "brush up on its skills."

There's no word yet on what they did with the cat.

[Japan Today]

To help us understand just how big of a year 2012 was for Kickstarter, the folks over at the crowdfunding site put together a slideshow with some of their highlights.

First, some impressive statistics: Over 2 billion backers from 90 percent of the world's countries contributed to projects, for a pledge total of about $320 million. The category with the most funded projects was music, with 5,017, and the category that raked in the most money was games, with $83 million.

Awesome Kickstarter projects from 2012 include an open source Geiger counter, an invention kit that can be used to (among other things) make a piano out of bananas, the world's first pizza museum, and a civilian space suit.

Lots of projects also enjoyed considerable commercial and/or critical success: 10% of the films at Sundance are Kickstarter-funded, and one documentary short has been nominated for an Oscar. FUBAR, a Kickstarter-funded graphic novel, hit the New York Times Best Sellers List, and the adult version of Apples to Apples, Cards Against Humanity, topped the Amazon charts.

Check out the full retrospective here.

Peanut-fearers, rejoice -- new research suggests that treatment may be possible for peanut allergies. A study sponsored by National Institutes of Health in the January issue of the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology found that by exposing people to small amounts of peanut powder every day, they could increase their tolerance.

First, people with a peanut allergy went through a terrifying food challenge, seeing how much peanut powder they could eat before they had an allergic reaction. After 44 weeks of sublingual immunotherapy (SLIT), a treatment in which you place a small amount of the allergen under your tongue to decrease sensitivity, they were again asked to eat peanut powder until they had a reaction.

During the second challenge, 70 percent of the participants on SLIT could eat 10 times more peanut powder than before. After 68 weeks, many participants could consume significantly more peanut powder without having an allergic reaction.

SLIT caused only some minor side effects, like mouth itching, and overall it seems that daily therapy may be safe under the watchful eye of a professional. In the future, it could help people with peanut allergies avoid severe reactions to accidental exposure.

[Science Codex]

This is the good news about a recently-patented gadget that sucks food out of the stomach: it could work as a last-ditch effort to get obese people to shed some weight. This is the bad news about said gadget: the method might be a little extreme.

AspireAssist, created by Segway inventor Dean Kamen and a team of bariatricians, works like this. A valve gets surgically implanted in the user's stomach, and the gadget sends a tube through it into their belly. About 20 minutes after eating, the gadget sucks out some food, and when the user squeezes a bag filled with water, the liquid gets sent back into the stomach instead. Rinse and repeat until up to 30 percent of your meal is gone. (There's no anesthesia involved, but some sedatives will be used along with it.) It's already available in some parts of Europe, but no FDA approval yet.

Here's the word from the gadget's site:

In a trial, obese people who used it lost, on average, about half of their excess weight. That was about 45 pounds, according to the patent. But there were some hiccups, too, like when the machine had trouble breaking up certain foods. One patient "avoided eating cauliflower, broccoli, Chinese food, stir fry, snow peas, pretzels, chips, and steak."

Other than that, it sounds convenient (unless you live in China), albeit a little gross. Not surprisingly, though, convenience and effectiveness don't always inspire the greatest confidence when it comes to weight loss, and some experts are already a little wary of AspireAssist. One wondered to LiveScience if this was just an At-Home Bulimia Machine™. Nutrients from food are kinda important, after all, and removing one-third of them might not be such a good idea.

[AspireAssist via LiveScience]

The massive earthquake that walloped Japan nearly two years ago is still bringing some unfortunate news. The quake happened in an area where it was assumed it shouldn't--and a new model shows how the type of fault involved can turn destructive, seismologists say. The new findings could force governments and researchers to reevaluate seismic hazards in areas that were thought to be at low risk for earthquakes.

Faults in the Earth's crust--a meeting point between tectonic plates--dissipate stress in a couple of different ways. Some plate areas slip against each other excruciatingly slowly, moving a few millimeters or tens of millimeters a year, explained Nadia Lapusta, a professor of mechanical engineering and geophysics at Caltech. These are called creeping faults. Others are known as stick-slip faults, in which the plates push against each other with mutual force until the fault finally ruptures, which we perceive as an earthquake. Faults around the world can function in both ways.

There's a key difference in the fault areas' stress relief methods, Lapusta said: Creeping faults ease tension by gradually moving against each other, like a steam valve releasing pressure. Stick-slip faults, on the other hand, build up stress and wreak havoc when it finally releases in the form of seismic waves. "The prevailing view is that earthquakes would not propagate in [the creeping] segment, whereas the ones that lock are prone to earthquakes," she said. "And this kind of behavior will continue forever."

There is also evidence that subduction zones, in which one plate sinks below another, might be more stable than stick-slip zones. And there's evidence that shallow fault sections are more stable generally; they could experience some micro-quakes, but in general, the most massive earthquakes happen deep within the Earth. But the March 11, 2011 Tohoku-Oki quake proved this all wrong.

The terrifically powerful earthquake, magnitude 9.0, ripped along the subduction zone between the Pacific plate and Eurasian plate. It triggered a tsunami that killed some 19,000 people and destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Deep within the Earth, it was just as destructive--estimates vary, but most earthquake models show between 50 and 80 meters of slip, a humongous number. By contrast, along California's San Andreas fault, which could experience an earthquake around magnitude 7.8, the fault would slip 10 meters, Lapusta said.

"Tohoku-Oki was really unprecedented; there are no other measurements of such a large slip," she said. There were some other strange behaviors, too, including differences in the shallow depth where seismic waves propagated from the earthquake's epicenter.

What happened? Rather than preventing the earthquake, the creeping fault zone may actually have amplified it, Lapusta and a co-author, Hiroyuki Noda of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, write today in Nature. Sparked by a nearby fault rupture, the supposedly stable creeping area became active, contributing to an even larger, more destructive earthquake. Noda and Lapusta built a new mathematical model for this behavior, and it matches what happened in the 2011 quake as well as a massive 1999 temblor in Taiwan.

"If you assume that area was stable, and was dynamically triggered by the nearby segment, that results in the seismic radiation that matches what actually happened," Lapusta said. "There are other ways to match that pattern, but it is a suggestion that this model may be relevant."

She and Noda compared rock samples from the fault zone in Taiwan, and found the stress-radiation properties fit their model. As it happens, seismologists are hoping for samples drilled by the Japanese Chikyu research vessel, which set new records last fall for the deepest-ever science-based penetration into the planet. Measurements from those samples could help validate this model, too.

The takeaway? This suggests creeping fault zones may be quite dangerous. The San Andreas fault has a similar seismic profile, Lapusta said. Understanding its possible dynamics would have implications for earthquake prevention strategies here and around the world.

In 2008, an image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope showed the world one of the first directly imaged extrasolar planets, 25 light years away in a system resembling the all-seeing Eye of Sauron, in the giant disk of debris surrounding a young star called Fomalhaut. But the instrument used to see the purported planet, Fomalhaut b, broke in 2007, and the team involved in the discovery couldn't replicate their results.

The next time they saw Fomalhaut b, using a different instrument, it didn't appear to be in orbit around the star, and some scientists dismissed the exoplanet discovery. But a few months ago, other telescopes also spotted Fomalhaut b.

With new images, scientists have identified that the debris belt around Fomalhaut is wider than previously thought, 14 to 20 billion miles from the star. The original Fomalhaut team has now been able to calculate a few potential orbits for the previously maligned Fomalhaut b. It's likely a rogue planet, moving in an unusual elliptical orbit more like a comet, but could be as big as Jupiter. It comes as close as 4.6 billion miles away from its star, then moves out to 27 billion miles away during its 2,000 year-long orbit.

The Fomalhaut team thinks the strange orbit is evidence of other planet-like objects in the system, which may have knocked Fomalhaut b onto its weird path. Another planet could have shoved Fomalhaut b from a placement closer to its star, moving its orbit out beyond the dust belt.

The dust and ice belt around the star Fomalhaut also has a gap cut through it, possibly a path forged by some other undetected planet. It's not certain if Fomalhaut b is on the same plane as the belt and will pass through it. If Fomalhaut b's orbit intersects the dust belt, 2032 will bring cosmic fireworks as icy and rocky debris crash into the planet's atmosphere.

Despite the evil nickname, NASA says Fomalhaut provides a glance into what our own solar system might have been up to 4 billion years ago, as its planetary architecture is still in the process of evolving.

[Wired]

The world's fastest legged robot mimics the cheetah. The second fastest? The mighty cockroach. Not to be confused with a cyborg cockroach, VELOCIRoACH is a small, six-legged cardboard cockroach that can scramble across varying terrain and over obstacles at 3.2 meters per second (or just more than 7 miles per hour).

For its size, VELOCIRoACH is easily the fastest robot in the world--it can cover 26 of its own body lengths in the span of a second. It does so by employing legs much like those of the actual cockroach that act like springs as they hit the ground 15 times per second. At any given time three legs are touching the ground giving the robot very good stability. And, like the real thing, the cardboard cockroach can skitter right over obstacles by bouncing its front end upward and pulling itself over. It can even carry four times its body weight.

If the very motion of cockroaches doesn't induce a skin-crawling sensation in you, check out the video below.

[New Scientist]

Virtual reality sounds almost quaint in these days of OLEDs and 4K and the Kinect and glasses-free 3-D and all the other amazing ways we have now to experience and interact with games. But it's back in a very, very big way with the Oculus Rift, which I tested out today here at CES in Las Vegas.

Oculus started out as a hobbyist project from one Palmer Luckey--just a guy with an idea, taking apart smartphones and making what turned out to be a predecessor to the Oculus Rift. Luckey posted about his project on a forum, where it was found by gaming legend John Carmack, creator of Doom, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D and more. Carmack asked Luckey for a test unit, loved it, and became its biggest cheerleader, bringing it out on stage at the E3 gaming convention and even assisting with the development process. Then it landed on Kickstarter, where it made boatloads of money, and now it's here.

The unit I tested was a prototype; the screen, notably, was not the final screen that'll be used, and the team is working very hard to eliminate the (very minor) latency I experienced. The design, too, is a bit different. But what was so surprising and impressive about the Oculus Rift is that the thing actually works.

The Rift looks like a pair of ski goggles, more than anything else. Inside are two lenses, one for each eye, pointing at a single LCD display. (The final screen will be a 7-incher; the one I tested was 5.6 inches.) The screen delivers two separate images, one to each eye, so you get stereoscopic 3-D. Here's where it gets amazing: there are sensors in the goggles--accelerometer, gyroscope, that kind of thing--that are keyed into PC games. You turn your head and your vision moves just about perfectly with it--360 degrees around, plus all the way up and all the way down. It is, by far, the most immersive interactive experience I have ever seen.

The Rift works (and will work) like a peripheral: you'll plug it into your computer and play PC games with it. It requires a pretty beefy gaming PC at the moment, but it's still a little ways off, so by the time it's released, its requirements will be less pricey. And the Oculus team is very concerned with creating a product that everyone can use, not just the folks with $3,000 liquid-cooled gaming PCs.

I played a game in which I was walking around a kind of medieval castle scene. I used an Xbox controller to move forward and backward--you stay seated while using the Rift--and turned by turning my head. It's impossible to really get across how world-shifting the Rift is; it's exactly like we'd dreamed virtual reality would be. You put on these goggles and you slip into a completely new world, in which your body movements respond pretty much the way they would in the real world. It's comfortable, too, and not particularly heavy, which I was worried about. Feels mostly like ski goggles.

The only problem I found was a tendency to move the rest of my body and not just the headset. If you lean to see around a corner, for example, which I did instinctively several times, the headset can't translate that into in-game movement. (The Oculus team noted that they're aware of this and plan on tackling it, though they wouldn't say quite how.) Then there's the issue of motion sickness, which is not a term Oculus uses--they prefer "disorientation"--but is real all the same. It's a little hard to tell if my nausea was caused by the Rift or by the fact that I was up until 3:30 AM playing poker, but the human body's interaction with such a complete perception replacement is not something to be taken lightly, I think. I suspect some people will react more poorly than others.

The distribution of games is also kind of a question mark, though that's not necessarily a bad thing. The Rift isn't a new kind of gamepad; it's an entirely new medium, a new way to experience games, and though ports are sort of possible and will definitely be released, that's not really what the Rift is made for. Sure, Call of Duty would be fun, but it's going to take a lot of development work to get new games out that really take advantage of this amazing hardware, not unlike what happened with the Microsoft Kinect. But John Carmack's involvement will help with that, and I think pretty much any developer that sees this thing will want to create amazing new stuff for it. Development kits are going out in March, so that work should start pretty soon, and the company is hoping to have consumer products out in the near future--like, this isn't a pie in the sky thing, this could well see release in 2014. Oculus tells me they're aiming for around a $300 price point, which is fair.

The Rift is certainly one of the most amazing things I've seen at CES this year--hell, in any year. It's not really possible to describe what it's like to use it, but as soon as I put the goggles on and turned my head, I think my mouth dropped. It's flat-out awesome.

STEP 1
Arduino microcontrollers come in a variety of types. The most common is the Arduino UNO, but there are specialized variations. Before you begin building, do a little research to figure out which version will be the most appropriate for your project.

STEP 2
To begin, you'll need to install the Arduino Programmer, aka the integrated development environment (IDE).

STEP 3
Connect your Arduino to the USB port of your computer. This may require a specific USB cable. Every Arduino has a different virtual serial-port address, so you 'll need to reconfigure the port if you're using different Arduinos.

STEP 4
Set the board type and the serial port in the Arduino Programmer.

STEP 5
Test the microcontroller by using one of the preloaded programs, called sketches, in the Arduino Programmer. Open one of the example sketches, and press the upload button to load it. The Arduino should begin responding to the program: If you've set it to blink an LED light, for example, the light should start blinking.

STEP 6
To upload new code to the Arduino, either you'll need to have access to code you can paste into the programmer, or you'll have to write it yourself, using the Arduino programming language to create your own sketch. An Arduino sketch usually has five parts: a header describing the sketch and its author; a section defining variables; a setup routine that sets the initial conditions of variables and runs preliminary code; a loop routine, which is where you add the main code that will execute repeatedly until you stop running the sketch; and a section where you can list other functions that activate during the setup and loop routines. All sketches must include the setup and loop routines.

STEP 7
Once you've uploaded the new sketch to your Arduino, disconnect it from your computer and integrate it into your project as directed.

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.