The Pirate Bay, best known as a repository of copyright-violating Justified episodes and other audio, video, and software offerings that are not as fun as Justified, is expanding into something a little more legitimate: models for 3-D printers. The Pirate Bay is referring to these models as "Physibles."

What a lot of detractors miss about torrent repositories is how effective a means of sharing files they are, which is why this is sort of big news for the 3-D fabrication community. The biggest and best-organized site out there right now for these files is probably Thingiverse, which is great--it's run by MakerBot Industries, the folks behind the MakerBot Replicator, which we awarded a PopSci Products of the Future award at this year's CES. But it's still a single-source site, and the Pirate Bay has the potential to host a huge number of torrents of these files and distribute them in a volume hardly anyone else could manage.

The "Physibles" site is already live; at the time of writing, there are only seven files in it, including a plan to print out a 3-D version of the Pirate Bay ship logo. But the site is adamant about the importance of this technology: in a post, they wrote, "We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years." And we agree!

[The Pirate Bay via ZDNet]

In an unusual move, an international coalition of flu researchers agreed last week to a hiatus on work surrounding a highly contagious, mammal-adapted version of the avian influenza virus. Research on transmissible H5N1 flu will halt, and two manuscripts describing how to modify the virus won't be published, at least not yet.

The voluntary pause came a few weeks after an American advisory panel recommended censoring the research in the name of security. So it raises an interesting question - is some research just too dangerous to pursue? Not just for the scientists conducting it, but for the public in a post-9/11 world?

Voluntarily pausing science in the name of safety and public solace is certainly not common, but then neither is a potentially groundbreaking study into the mechanisms that could make bird flu more potent and more deadly. The decision, announced in Science and Nature, indicates influenza researchers want to quell public fears, but they also don't want to censor their work.

Dr. Nancy Cox, chief of the Influenza Division at the Centers for Disease Control, said flu researchers will confer during the hiatus about how to proceed, including making modifications to security procedures or the biosafety requirements for labs doing this work. Flu is dangerous, but it's not nearly as deadly as some of the other pathogens CDC studies, she noted.

"If you think of Ebola and Marburg, and some other pathogens with a high lethality, which are worked on in the lab and for which there aren't antivirals and there aren't vaccines, influenza falls into a little bit different category," she said.

One of the two main labs at the center of this debate does not have a Biosafety Level 4 facility, the highest security level reserved for the most deadly pathogens. Issues like that will be a topic of discussion during the 60-day break.

"(The hiatus) is unusual, but because there was so much concern about the work, it was an appropriate action on the part of the laboratories that are involved in this type of research," Cox said.

It does have some precedent, however, in a 1975 conference in which scientists agreed to pause research on recombinant DNA. That meeting, known as the Asilomar Conference, was organized to quell public concern, but also to allow scientists to agree among themselves about how best to proceed. At the time, recombinant DNA technology - the process of taking DNA from one organism, and recombining it with DNA from another - was still brand-new and researchers were still uncertain about the risks.

"There are always concerns about misuse of the products of research," said Jeffrey Kahn, deputy director of the Berman Institute of Bioethics at Johns Hopkins University. "Think about nanotechnology as another example, or genetically modified food. We like the benefits of these new technologies, but we always worry about he misuse, the misapplication, or the unintended consequences. The trick is, how do we oversee and prevent problematic outcomes, while still realizing the benefits of the technology?"

The flu moratorium stems from two separate studies prepared by scientists in the U.S. and the Netherlands (the latter having been funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health) investigating how the avian influenza virus could mutate and become transmissible among mammals, including us. The main paper is by virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, who engineered the genome of H5N1 to make a version that easily spreads among ferrets, the closest animal model of the human response to flu. After 10 virus generations, the mutated virus became airborne, infecting healthy ferrets who were housed near a sick one. The work was important because it disproves a previous assumption that avian flu could not easily adapt to mammals, requiring drastic changes to the virus' genetic makeup that would render it unable to reproduce.

In a manuscript prepared last year, Fouchier describes his methods and processes, hoping to shed light on the ways in which the virus could mutate naturally. A separate paper by virologist Yoshihiro Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Tokyo had similar results. The papers could help virologists look for vaccines or antiviral treatments. But some observers fear the work could create an extremely potent bioweapon, should the mutated virus escape from the lab - or should the work be replicated by someone with ill intentions. Interestingly, the moratorium letter (online here) does not address the latter concern, focusing instead on lab procedures.

"We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release," the letter reads.

The Asilomar Conference also led to a hiatus and had similar goals, as scientists sought to regulate themselves before government bodies did it for them. Researchers were able to shape their own rules, so when the National Institutes of Health did create an oversight committee, scientists thought it was legitimate, recalled Alexander Capron, a professor at the University of Southern California and co-director of the Pacific Center for Health Policy and Ethics. Capron was a participant at Asilomar and sees several parallels between that meeting and the flu debate, he said. Along with mitigating physical risks in the lab, scientists need to balance the risks of publishing their research with the risks of not publishing it, and the precedent that would set.

"It's much easier to ask what you can do to prevent physical risks from manifesting, than what you can do to prevent knowledge risks," he said. "The only surefire way is to not disseminate the knowledge at all."

But no one really wants that, said Kahn, who noted the public health value of understanding how H5N1 works.

"It's really important to know that for the purpose of planning and preparedness, but it has all these potential risks associated with it," he said. "If there weren't any good scientific reason to do it, or good policy, we'd say, ‘It's just mad scientist stuff.' But it isn't."

Most researchers agree that after the moratorium, the work must go on.

"Understanding why some animal viruses jump into humans, and can be transmitted from human to human and others don't, is one of the central questions we are trying to understand in the field of influenza," said Cox, the CDC scientist. "There are probably multiple different pathways. Influenza is a very simple organism, but it's also very complex in that it mutates very quickly, and with all those mutations come a danger. It's a pathogen that really keeps those who study it on their toes."

Eighty-five years so far. The pitch-drop experiment-really more of a demonstration-began in 1927 when Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland in Australia, set out to show his students that tar pitch, a derivative of coal so brittle that it can be smashed to pieces with a hammer, is in fact a highly viscous fluid. It flows at room temperature, albeit extremely slowly. Parnell melted the pitch, poured it into a glass funnel, let it cool (for three years), hung the funnel over a beaker, and waited.

Eight years later, a dollop of the pitch fell from the funnel's stem. Nine years after that, another long black glob broke into the beaker. Parnell recorded the second drop but did not live to see the third, in 1954. By then, his experiment had been squirreled away in a dusty corner of the physics department.

The pitch-drop experiment might have fallen into obscurity (or a wastebasket) had it not been for John Mainstone, who joined the physics department at Queensland in 1961. One day a colleague said, "I've got something weird in this cupboard here" and presented Mainstone with the funnel, beaker and pitch, all housed under a bell jar. Mainstone asked the department head to display it for the school's science and engineering students, but he was told that nobody wanted to see it. Finally, around 1975, Mainstone persuaded the department to take the bell jar out for the world to see.

Today the experiment is broadcast on a live webcam. Some of its fans send Mainstone e-mails within minutes if the screen goes black. Despite their efforts, on November 28, 2000, the eighth, and most recent, drop of pitch fell during a camera malfunction. To this day, no one has actually witnessed the moment a drop of pitch has detached and fallen.

Mainstone says it's impossible to predict when future drops will occur, especially because the lapses between will grow longer as gases in the pitch escape and the weight of the pitch in the funnel decreases. He expects, however, that the ninth drop won't break off before 2013. The experiment is far from complete. Says Mainstone, "It has at least 100 years left if someone doesn't throw it out."

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.

The coming year is going to be a big one in all kinds of areas, from space to supercomputing, research done both above and below the ocean, examinations into our distant past and into our future. And salmon. Expect to hear lots about salmon.

Click to launch our guide to the upcoming year in science.

2012: THE YEAR IN SCIENCE

• Garage Rocketeers Approach Orbit
• Games Go Outside the Box
• Now or Never for the Standard Model of Physics
• China Steps Up
• Congress Keeps Fiddling

Wiring up a home audio system is the past. Why bother, when there are so many great wireless options out there? Here's a quick guide to the kinds of unplugged music gear that can transform every room in your house into a neat, powerful listening chamber.

SPEAKER

The 100-watt MN5000 serves as both the amplifier and central speaker in a multi-room sound system. Over Wi-Fi, it combines songs on a user's hard drive with music from Pandora and other services into one mega-library. With a phone app, listeners can browse the catalog, choose the rooms in which music will play (the MN5000 syncs with other Altec gear), and adjust volume.
Altec Lansing MN5000 $500

WIRELESS ROUTER

D-Link's Amplifi prioritizes music and video streams so they'll play without sputtering, even if a bandwidth-heavy task, like a photo upload, is running at the same time. Outside the house, the Amplifi provides remote access to music. With an MP3-loaded hard drive plugged into the router's USB, listeners can play songs through a cloud- based smartphone app.
D-Link Amplifi HD Media Router 3000 (DIR-857) $170

SMARTPHONE

The HTC Rezound comes with the sharpest screen of any phone (342 pixels per inch, to be exact)-handy when navigating Altec's remote-control app or reading liner notes on the 4.3-inch screen. When used with headphones as a media player, the Android handset's audio equalization is pre-tuned for the deep bass of most pop and hip-hop.
HTC Rezound $300 (with two-year Verizon Wireless contract)

COMPUTER

HP's Phoenix has enough storage (160 gigabytes to start, in speedy SSD form) to hold an entire music library, enough power for users to mix and edit their own original songs, and a one-gigabyte graphics engine-ideal for rendering high-def games and video. All the while, the liquid-cooled tower can easily handle continuous audio streaming to Altec's speaker.
HP Pavilion HPE Phoenix $1,150

In the grand tradition of the awe-inspiring "blue marble" pictures, this newest shot from NASA's recently-renamed Suomi NPP satellite is the sharpest, highest resolution picture of its kind we've ever seen. It's a composite image, combining shots taken of the Earth's surface on January 4th. It's available in a crazybig 8,000 by 8,000 pixel resolution, ideal for murals or screen-printing a large area rug. Check it out in all its glory at NASA Goddard's Flickr stream. [via Gizmodo]

A newly designed metallic soap reacts to a magnetic field, a first in soap research that could lead to better control of cleanup chemicals in situations like aquatic oil spills. A magnet can overcome both gravity and the surface tension between water and oil to draw the soap away, ensuring it can be recovered after it's used.

One of the main concerns in cleaning up oil spills (and other industrial waste) is the addition of new chemicals into the environment. Dispersants and surfactants - the technical word for soap - can also harm plants and animals, so researchers have long been looking for easy ways to retrieve them or break them down. Some soaps respond to changes in pH, others may break down in sunlight, and so on.

For the first time, scientists have developed a magnetic one, which can conceivably be hoovered up with a magnet after it's done cleaning. It is made of iron-rich salts that dissolve in water and a host of other inert soapy solutions, the same types found in mouthwash or fabric softener, according to the University of Bristol. The iron creates metallic centers inside the soap particles.

Led by Bristol professor Julian Eastoe, the team tested their soap by placing it in a test tube and pouring in a less-dense organic solvent material on top, so the soap was sandwiched at the bottom. They placed a magnet near the test tube and watched the soap levitate through the less-dense layers and reach the magnet. The team wanted to investigate how this worked, so they examined the iron soap at the Institut Laue-Langevin, a French research facility that uses a neutron beam for imaging experiments. The researchers learned that clumping soap particles brought about their magnetic properties, according to a news release from ILL.

The magnetic soap probably won't be appearing on supermarket shelves anytime soon, but it's an interesting breakthrough that could lead to new cleanup solutions for a wide range of industries. A paper on the soap was published in the journal Angewandte Chemie.

[via New Scientist]

In two separate studies, the world's most powerful X-ray laser has been used to build the first atomic X-ray laser pulse, as well as to superheat and control a clump of 2-million-degree matter. The atomic laser could be used to watch biological molecules at work, while the creation of hot dense matter could be used to understand the processes of nuclear fusion.

Researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used the Linac Coherent Light Source, a rapid-fire X-ray laser, to flash-heat a small piece of aluminum foil and create a solid plasma known as hot dense matter. A team led by Sam Vinko, a postdoc at Oxford University, took the temperature of this matter - 2 million degrees Celsius, or 3.6 million degrees Fahrenheit - and the whole process took about a trillionth of a second. The measurements will lead to more accurate models of how hot dense matter forms and behaves. These models could help scientists understand - and maybe someday recreate - the process of nuclear fusion that fuels the sun, according to a news release from SLAC.

Scientists can create plasma from gases using conventional lasers, but you need a super-powerful laser to create a plasma from a solid material. The LCLS' ultra-short wavelengths of light can penetrate a dense solid and look at it, all at the same time. The LCLS is underground in Palo Alto and covers a distance of a little more than a mile. It can create intense bursts of X-ray radiation more than a billion times brighter than any other laser source.

In a separate study, the LCLS was harnessed to build the first-ever atomic-scale X-ray laser, a feat that could open up a whole new field of atomic imaging.

Since the laser was invented more than 50 years ago, scientists have tried to lase at shorter wavelengths, but it's difficult to do because shorter wavelengths require faster atom pumping. But free-electron lasers in the X-ray range can produce superfast pulses of intense energy, so this pumping is now feasible. Scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory used the LCLS to give a pumped-up kick to a cluster of neon atoms. This knocked some electrons up to higher energy states and created a cascade of X-ray emissions - a mini atomic-sized laser.

The atomic laser's light is much more pure, and its pulses are much shorter, so it could be used to tease out sharp details of atomic-scale interactions and phase changes that would otherwise be impossible to see.

Both papers were published today in Nature.

Scientists trekking through the Suriname rainforest, one of the last road-free wilderness areas in the world, turned up a host of animals that conservation biologists believe are new to science. This little guy was just one of them.

This khaki-colored frog has white fringes on its legs and a spur on the heel, earning it the nickname "cowboy frog." It looks pretty similar to another tree frog, the "convict tree frog," but it doesn't have the convict's black and white stripes. Scientists from Conservation International discovered the cowboy frog on a small branch during a night survey in a swampy area of the Koetari River.

A new type of spiny catfish, henceforth known as the "armored catfish," was about to be eaten as a snack until one of the scientists noted its unusual appearance. The local guide who was about to chow down was instead told to preserve the fish as a specimen. The team found a couple other types of catfish, too.

The team also found a new species of katydid, which they nicknamed the "Crayola katydid" for its bright colors. They are the only katydids known to employ chemical defenses, according to Conservation International. There's a shiny water beetle and some damselfies to round out the list.

[Conservation International via BBC]

In the data age, pretty much nobody stores sensitive information under physical lock and key. Whether it's in Dropbox, Megaupload, a hard drive or an SD card, our confidential records are stored in ones and zeroes protected by encryption software.

So what happens when that data becomes evidence in a criminal trial, but because of your careful data husbandry, the government can't access it? You may be required to decrypt it for them, handing over access to personal records that might incriminate you. That's one vision of the future of personal data under a ruling by a federal judge in Colorado. It's a case that could bring the Fifth Amendment, and its protection against self-incrimination, firmly into the digital age.

Ramona Fricosu, who lives in rural southeastern Colorado, was indicted a year and a half ago on suspicion of mortgage-related bank fraud. Authorities seized several computers from her home, at least two of which were encrypted, according to her lawyer, Phil Dubois. One encrypted machine was already unlocked when it was seized, its records freely accessible, but another was protected with a password.

Federal prosecutors sought a court order to force Fricosu to decrypt that laptop, allowing them access to documents that they argue could be crucial evidence in their case against her. U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn issued that order Monday.

"If the government is permitted to get orders compelling us to decrypt our drives, we are headed down a very bad road.""If the government is permitted to get orders compelling us to decrypt our drives, not only to investigate but prosecute us, we are headed down a very bad road," said Dubois, who is filing an appeal.

Prosecutors contend that failing to compel a defendant to provide access is tantamount to letting them get away with crimes, so long as they use tough enough encryption keys to hide their records. A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Denver said attorneys couldn't comment on an ongoing matter, but he referred to pleadings in the case, which outline the DOJ's argument: "Failing to compel Ms. Fricosu amounts to a concession to her and potential criminals (be it in child exploitation, national security, terrorism, financial crimes or drug trafficking cases) that encrypting all inculpatory digital evidence will serve to defeat the efforts of law enforcement officers to obtain such evidence through judicially authorized search warrants, and thus make their prosecution impossible."

But civil libertarians and information-freedom advocates say this flouts the Fifth Amendment, which protects Americans against unwillingly incriminating themselves.

"The Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination is not necessarily a right to prevent you from giving bad things over to the government, but you are protected from disclosing your thoughts," said Hanni Fakhoury, a staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed an amicus brief in this case. "We argued that providing access to the contents is the equivalent to her ‘emptying the thoughts of her mind,' because it would require her password."

Blackburn's ruling is pretty limited to the facts of this case, and it also skirts one of the main constitutional questions surrounding cases like this. The order stipulates that if the government finds anything on Fricosu's computer and uses it against her at trial, they can't use the act of turning it over against her. That seems to meet the self-incrimination standard in the Fifth Amendment. The ruling compels Fricosu to decrypt the hard drive by Feb. 21, but Dubois said he is seeking a stay of execution on the order while he files a motion with the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The computer, a Toshiba laptop, was encrypted with Symantec software called PGP Desktop (for Pretty Good Privacy), Dubois said. (Incidentally, he previously represented PGP's creator, Phil Zimmermann, several years ago.) Were it protected by the lightweight protection built into Windows, government software and IT workers could have bypassed it and accessed the contents. They must follow certain evidentiary standards, but by and large, the government can do what it needs to do to access records on a seized device. But PGP's secure whole-disk encryption is another thing entirely, and there's no way to breach that wall without the key, Dubois said.

He wishes more people would use it, not just to stymie prosecutors, but to protect themselves against fraud and invasion of privacy. "But if we do, the government will more often be confronted with encrypted drives and media in general, and we're going to see this over and over," he said. "It's always the case that the law lags behind technology, and it should ... but it still has to recognize technology at some point, that this is the situation we have now, that's different from what we had 40 years ago or 20."

Fakhoury said the ruling's narrow scope means he doesn't consider it a watershed moment in information-related jurisprudence. But he agreed he expects to see many more cases like this in the future, as encryption becomes easier and more common. Appellate courts and even the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately have to resolve it, he said.

"It is a case that prosecutors are going to use when arguing you can compel a defendant to do this. I think this is the beginning of a long fight ahead, until it gets resolved," he said.

Its solar panels are dusty and its instruments are weakening, but the intrepid Mars rover Opportunity is still undaunted. Today marks the rover's eighth anniversary on the Red Planet, truly a feat for a mission that was designed to last a single season. As the rover embarks on its ninth year of work, it has some brand-new tasks that will give Mars scientists plenty to do long after it has beeped its last transmission home.

Opportunity is nestled for the winter at a rocky outcropping called Greeley Haven, perched at a southerly angle to provide its solar panels with maximum light. Winds have been kind to Opportunity during the past eight years, occasionally brushing its panels clean, but it's been a while and the panels are pretty obscured. Opportunity's science team has some winter missions planned, so the rover needs a steady power supply.

One key mission is a radio science campaign to study Mars' interior, according to rover scientists. The rover's high-gain antenna will track Earth and scientists will measure the Doppler shift in the radio signal as Mars wobbles. This will give some information about Mars' core, said Ray Arvidson, deputy principal investigator on the rover mission and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis. The wobble can indicate how much of the core is melted - the way a raw egg wobbles vs. the tight spin of a hardboiled one.

Opportunity will also use its alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to look at a rocky outcropping called Saddleback, determining what it's made of, and it will also stare at the floor of Endeavour Crater, checking for wind-caused changes, Arvidson said.

Its emission spectrometer no longer works, and its Moessbauer spectrometer, which identifies minerals containing iron, is almost out of cobalt-57 juice, so some of these measurements will take a lot longer than they would with a younger rover.

But Opportunity - and its twin, Spirit, before it fell silent two years ago - have already far surpassed scientists' greatest expectations. Watch some of the rover team discuss their findings in the video below.

The golden mole, a small mammal (though not a "true mole") native to southern Africa, is the world's only known iridescent mammal: its coat is made of peculiar hairs that show a blue or green iridescence. This quality isn't unknown to animals; many fish, birds, and insects are iridescent, so why not mammals? But the golden mole can't attract a mate with its shiny coat: it lives underground, and is completely blind.

A recent study conducted by Matthew Shawkey at the University of Akron in Ohio found, through examination of hairs of four species of golden mole through an electron microscope, that the mole's hairs are not constructed at all as expected. Instead of the typical narrowing point shape, golden mole hairs are flattened, like paddles. And the individual scales on the hairs alternate light and dark, just like the scales of an iridescent butterfly's wings.

There's no conclusion as to exactly why an animal whose eyes are so non-functional that they're covered with skin and fur would bother with fantastically eye-appealing fur. Other iridescent animals typically use the unusual properties of iridescence--iridescent animals appear to change colors when the angle from which they are viewed changes--for camouflage or attraction of mates, both of which are clearly the wrong explanation for these moles' coloration.

Shawkey suggests that they are in fact an evolutionary accident--that the structure of the hairs makes it easier for the moles to "swim" through the sand in their native habitat, that it makes the hairs hardier and more repellant to water. So the shininess would by a byproduct of other useful traits.

[New Scientist]

Our material absorbs more than 99 percent of visible and ultraviolet light and 98 percent of infrared light. It's at least 10 times as good at capturing light as black paint, so we can use it in telescopes, where stray light can contaminate measurements. The nanotubes are sparse enough that light passes between them, like sunlight through trees in a forest. When photons hit the sides of the carbon tubes, they transfer their energy to the carbon's electrons, which start to move. The light is converted to motion-heat- which dissipates in the tube. -John Hagopian, optical physicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

To grow carbon nanotubes, we use a substrate, an adhesion layer and a catalyst: iron. The catalyst condenses on the substrate, a lot like if you boiled water and leaned over the pot with your glasses on. Then we put the whole thing in a quartz tube furnace at 1,382°F. We introduce ethylene gas, which is where the carbon comes from. The catalyst reacts with the gas, and the carbon molecules dissociate and form a tubular hexagonal lattice-a nanotube-on the surface of the iron. The nanotubes can grow in less than a minute. -Stephanie Getty, technologist, NASA Goddard

We put the nanotubes in an integrating sphere-a globe with a highly reflective coating inside. We shine light at the sample and, using a detector, measure the amount of light that bounces off the material. We put a shader near the detector to make sure it's not getting direct radiation and skewing the results. One thing that's kind of amazing is that the nanotubes, which are just 100 microns tall, can absorb infrared rays, which have wavelengths the same size as the nanotubes.-Manuel Quijada, engineer, NASA Goddard

"Are you on your period?" It's a question most women have been asked at one point or another by their boyfriend or spouse during a disagreement. It turns out that some men actually can tell when it's a woman's time of the month-and it's not because of bratty behavior.

In a study published online last month in the journal Ethology, psychologists Nathan Pipitone at Adams State College and Gordon Gallup at SUNY Albany asked three groups of men to listen to voice recordings of 10 women counting from one to five. Each woman was recorded four times over the course of one full menstrual cycle. (For those who aren't familiar with the ins and outs of the female reproductive cycle, women are most fertile during ovulation, when their ovaries release an egg, and least fertile during menstruation, when they shed the unfertilized egg and the lining of the uterus.)

After the first group of men listened to all four recordings from each woman, played in random order, they were asked to guess which recordings were made during the women's periods. The men had a one in four chance of guessing correctly, but they actually did so 35 percent of the time, a significant difference, the researchers say.

In 2008, Pipitone and Gallup showed that men find the voices of ovulating women more attractive than voices recorded during other points in the cycle, so for the second group in the new study, the researchers replaced the recording made closest to ovulation with one from a less fertile day. Even after the potentially telltale contrast was eliminated, the men pinpointed the voice recorded during menstruation 34 percent of the time.

Perhaps the most telling element of the study was the third experiment, in which a new group of men were not told that the research had anything to do with menstrual cycles. Instead they were asked to choose the most "unattractive" voice recording for each woman. They chose the menstrual recording significantly more often than was predicted by chance-again, 34 percent of the time.

In fact, according to the researchers' calculations, all three groups singled out the voices recorded during menstruation more often than any of the other voices.

So what was it about the women's voices that gave away their reproductive status? The men in group one who correctly identified the menstrual recordings said they could tell by the mood (bad versus good), quality (harsh versus smooth), pitch (low versus high) and speed (slow versus fast) of the women's voices. When the second two groups were asked to score the voices based on these characteristics, they reported that menstrual voices sounded lower in mood, quality and pitch. "The men seemed to determine menstrual voices by picking the most unattractive voice," Pipitone explains.

There's already evidence that men subconsciously judge where a woman is in her cycle-lap dancers make 80 percent more money in tips when they're ovulating compared to when they're menstruating, according to a 2007 paper-but the new study is the first to demonstrate one way men make that determination.

A subconscious (and often conscious) aversion to menstruation makes sense in evolutionary terms, since males wanting to pass on their genes are better off seeking out females closer to ovulation. Over time, the ability to parse a woman's menstrual cycle could have proliferated, as more perceptive men reproduced more successfully.

Pipitone says the adaptation is an example of the reproductive arms race known as sexually antagonistic coevolution, a phenomenon seen across living species, from humans to brine shrimp. Males show more interest in females when they're fertile, so it makes sense that human females-who need a lot of help to raise their particularly helpless infants-hide their fertility status. (Female chimps, by contrast, broadcast their fertility with engorged genitalia.) Theoretically, human males retaliated by developing the ability to detect more subtle fertility cues such as those "leaked" by the female voice.

Hormones induce the vocal changes that give women away. "Vocal production is closely tied to our biology," Pipitone says of men and women. For example, "Cells from the larynx and vagina are very similar and show similar hormone receptors." The result is that, "The sound of a person's voice contains a surprising amount of reproductively relevant information," Gallup says. The obvious example: By speaking on the phone, we can determine a person's gender and age. But researchers have also shown that voices alone can be used to directly and indirectly predict characteristics like facial appearance, body type, physical strength and even sexual behavior.

I think one of the most interesting results of the study is that across the board, men chose the menstrual voice around a third of the time. It would seem some men are more perceptive to women's cycles than others. Pipitone and Gallup plan to investigate this question next.

Jennifer Abbasi is a science and health writer and editor living in Brooklyn. Follow Jen on Twitter (she's @jenabbasi) and email her at popsci.thesexfiles@gmail.com.

Current optical communications schemes rely on a narrow 1.55 micron wavelength band of about 10 terahertz, a band in which optical signals can be well controlled and loss of signal/data is fairly low. But to open up optical networks to the high data load of the future, we need to open up the span of available wavelength. And using a novel quantum dot technology, researchers at the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) in Japan have done exactly that, to the tune of a roughly tenfold increase.

They did so by creating a whole new process of quantum dot formation involving what's called a "sandwiched sub-nano separator structure." Conventionally, crystalline quantum dot structures are grown directly on a silicon surface, which leads to a somewhat uneven, disordered layer of dots. But by inserting an ultra-fine, sub-nanometer-thick separator structure in between the silicon and the quantum dots, the dots grow in a far more dense and ordered structure, leading to a layer of very high-quality, more uniform quantum dots.

The result is a quantum dot light source that is highly stable with a communications-worthy optical frequency band that covers about ten times the width of the current communications band. That opens up optical fiber networks to a lot more usable light, which in turn could speed optical communications and boost capacity. Moreover, the new wavelength band includes light that permeates skin, so there's an interesting medical imaging aspect to this technology to explore as well. A more thorough visual explanation resides in the video below.

[NICT via DigInfo News]

At the sunset of Newt Gingrich's putative presidency, the moon would be the 51st state, colonized by permanent American settlers. Tourists would honeymoon in low-Earth orbit, space factories would manufacture goods in microgravity, and America would have a rocket powerful enough to send us to Mars.

This is all according to a discussion Gingrich hosted Wednesday in Florida, which holds its presidential primary next Tuesday and which lost thousands of jobs as the space shuttle program drew to a close last year. But this is Gingrich talking, so it's safe to say this isn't all politics. A self-professed space nut and fan of science, Gingrich has dreamt of a lunar colony for decades. Even if this dream is inherently irrational:

"The reason you have to have a bold and large vision is you don't arouse the American nation with trivial, bureaucratically rational objectives," Gingrich said.

It's odd for a politician to trump his own ideas as grandiose and not rational. But hey, going back to the moon sure fires up the patriots! So America's space goals are once again a political football - one, incidentally, that seems to rev up Republicans more than it does Democrats. Gingrich has a long list of space dreams, which we'll get to in a minute. But this debate brings to light an interesting volley since the Reagan administration, between Democratic presidents who seem not to really dwell on America's space ambitions and Republican presidents (and would-be presidents) who just love the idea of Americans on the moon.

Dubbing himself a "visionary" for his space plans, the former House speaker and GOP presidential hopeful compared himself to John F. Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln and the Wright brothers. But he didn't compare himself to another conservative Republican, George W. Bush, who also wanted the U.S. to go back to the moon as a launch pad for Mars. His new vision was gestated in the wake of the Columbia disaster, and centered on the retirement of the aging shuttles, but it also sought a more ambitious future for the space agency. The Constellation program never really got off the ground, however, and critics found plenty of faults.

But contrast this with Bill Clinton's presidency. While he was in the Oval Office, the U.S. partnered with Russia to build the International Space Station - certainly a major achievement, but it was arguably more impressive for its geopolitics than its science scope. Both countries already had space stations before, and the ISS took way more time and money to build than anyone had anticipated. Otherwise, Clinton apparently didn't have much to say about the space program, even in his autobiography "My Life."

Then, a while after taking office and organizing a blue-ribbon NASA review commission, President Obama harrumphed at the idea of returning to the moon - "we've been there before," he famously said - and charted a bumpy course for a future NASA that will eventually visit an asteroid and someday Mars.

Now Gingrich has set his sights back on our natural satellite, with a much tighter timeline. But there is one catch - he favors private development, not necessarily NASA leadership.

As Charles Houmans notes in Foreign Policy, the space program presents a conundrum for dedicated conservatives. It's the most unassailably awesome achievement in American history, and as such it's fertile ground for jingoists. But it's also plagued by huge federal spending overruns, a risk-averse bureaucracy and - let us not forget - scientists, whose findings do not always comport with the conservative worldview. Gingrich seems able to toe this boundary carefully, coupling his love of science and space with his free-market beliefs.

In a debate earlier this week, he said privately funded prizes spurred Charles Lindbergh and Burt Rutan to reach new milestones, and private incentives could do the same for lunar settlement and Mars exploration.

For his part, his rival Mitt Romney has been a little more vague and a little more NASA-centric, discussing a space agency with more partnerships with universities and commercial enterprises.

Wednesday's talk is just the latest in a long list of Gingrich's space ideas, some of which are wackier than others. In 1981 he sponsored an unsuccessful bill called the National Space and Aeronautics Policy Act, which set forth "provisions for the government of space territories, including constitutional protections, the right to self-government and admission to statehood," the New York Times reported in 1995. He proposed a lunar mirror network that would illuminate highways and dark alleyways. He envisions space factories creating new opportunities for the unemployed.

"If we'd spent as much on space as we've spent on farm programs, we could have taken all the extra farmers and put them on space stations working for a living ... in orbiting factories," he told a science fiction convention in 1986.

But other predictions and desires have borne out. A quarter-century ago he said "space tourism is coming," predicting Hiltons and Marriotts of the solar system. There are no space hotels yet, but space tourism is likely just around the corner.

So does anyone really think a president Gingrich would set up a successful moon base? Not really, especially given this country's economic situation and (depending on whose hyperbole you believe) debt crisis. Gingrich has given no indications of how he'd pay for it, incentives or otherwise, and the details are sparse. And most of the reaction from space observers has been tepid at best.

Space policy expert John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University, called it a "fantasy," according to Space.com. "It would be much better to set realistic goals, but that is not Mr. Gingrich's strong suit," he said.

But you can hand Gingrich one thing: At least he's talking about American leadership in space, something that's been sorely lacking of late. Maybe his grandiose visions will start a real conversation.

The search for the perfect invisibility cloak lumbers onward, but that lumbering is starting to pick up speed. We're hearing more and more these days about metamaterials, the possibilities of time cloaking, and other such future-stuff. And today, from deep in the heart of Texas, we get another tantalizing finding: UT researchers have, for the first time, cloaked a three-dimensional object in free space. That is, no matter the angle of observation, the object was rendered invisible in 3-D.

So that's pretty huge. What we generally hear about when we hear about invisibility is some new trick with metamaterials that allows for cloaking in two-dimensions by bending light around some tiny object. This means that from a single side, the object is concealed. Take a walk around the object, and it reappears. Less like a cloak, more like an invisibility curtain.

The UT team used a different method, known as plasmonic cloaking, to conceal an 18-centimeter cylinder from every direction. This is true "cloaking," as the plasmonic material is actually coated onto the object to be concealed. These plasmonic materials work by doing the opposite of what normal materials do: reflecting light. When you see an object, it's because light is bouncing off of it and striking your eyes, which send that info on to the brain for processing. Plasmonic materials scatter light instead, producing what is essentially transparency from all angles of observation.

Ready for the attached strings? This has only been demonstrated with microwaves. In the visible range, the cylinder is still plenty visible. But the UT Austin team thinks that making this work in the visible spectrum isn't outside the realm of possibility. And if they can pull that off, you'll know it because it will be leading the news here. In previous studies the team has shown that its plasmonic coating can cloak any object regardless of shape or symmetry. If they can sort this out in visible light, we may someday be able render just about anything invisible.

[Institute of Physics]

Proteins are like the workhorses of genetic biology, but they can be notoriously difficult to study. Their structure has everything to do with their function--and sometimes dysfunction--which has far-reaching implications in health and medicine. That's why it's such a big deal that a couple of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have more or less hacked their cryo-electron microscope to see at far greater resolutions than its manufacturer intended and produced the first 3-D images of an individual protein with enough clarity to determine its structure.

Cataloging the shapes and structures of proteins is fairly routine science at this point. Pharmaceutical companies dealing in biologic drugs do so all the time as they search for protein therapies that might relieve one condition or another. But it's not easy, and these conventional protein models are averages of the analyses of many thousands of molecules because it's simply too difficult to get the resolutions necessary to image the features of an individual protein.

Until now. Gang Ren and Lei Zhang are reporting in the journal PLoS One the creation of their own brand of electron microscopy that they are calling "individual-particle electron tomography," or IPET. Their images are still a bit fuzzy, but they are good enough for researchers to define a protein's structure. Moreover, by creating a novel method of keeping their samples extremely cold (flash-frozen-in-liquid-nitrogen-to-negative-292-degrees cold) and tilting them up to 140 degrees while under the lens, they can generate more than a hundred images in a matter of a couple of hours.

Once stitched together those images inform each other, creating not only 3-D depth but helping to focus in on the subject protein and remove noise from the imagery. The result is the best structural imagery of an individual protein that we've ever heard about, one with the potential to go far in pharmaceutical research and in informing our fundamental understanding of protein dynamics. LBNL has a more in-depth explanation of the technology via the link below.

[LBNL]

In 1999, professors Robert Twiggs of Stanford University and Jordi Puig-Suari of California Polytechnic State University began to standardize the satellite business. They designed a small orbital unit--a four-inch cube with little metal feet--that was wide enough for solar cells, basing their design on a plastic display box for Beanie Babies. Their "CubeSat" had enough room for a computer motherboard and a few other parts necessary to do limited experiments in space, such as monitoring weather or photographing Earth. The design would significantly lower the cost for students to conduct experiments in space. CubeSats could be launched at the same time and piggyback on larger, more expensive missions, mitigating the expense of getting satellites into orbit.

With the design complete, Puig-Suari began to work with the three U.S. agencies that regularly launch satellites-the National Reconnaissance Office, the Department of Defense's Space Test Program and NASA-to convince them to build CubeSat-ready berths into as many launches as possible. Meanwhile, the aerospace engineering department at CalPoly has become a sort of standards clearinghouse for NASA, testing each academic satellite to make sure the box won't shake itself apart and cast shrapnel through the rocket during launch. CalPoly and Stanford maintain a forum and post all standards on CubeSat.org.

With so many scheduled launches, an undergraduate engineering student [...] can design one during her freshman year and see it reach space before graduation.Twiggs and Puig-Suari's efforts are paying off. Since 2001, about 50 CubeSats have entered space. The pair sent up their first in 2003, spending $100,000 in grant money to stow it on a Russian Dnepr launch. When the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched in December 2009, six CubSats were aboard, packed three units at a time inside a spring-loaded jack-in-the-box container called a Poly-Picosatellite Orbital Deployer (P-POD), that was developed at CalPoly. After the payload deployed, the door of the P-POD popped open and the spring pushed all three satellites into orbit, where they unfurled solar panels and began transmitting information to their creators below. This year at least three rockets will launch with room for CubeSats, including the NROL-36, which can fit 11.

With so many scheduled launches, an undergraduate engineering student at one of the nearly 100 schools making CubeSats can design one during her freshman year and see it reach space before graduation. When Roland Coelho, a CalPoly graduate student, was filling out a preflight survey for his CubeSat last year, the range safety officer at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California approached him in confusion. "It asks whether you'll need a military convoy to escort you," the officer said. "You don't?"

"Oh, that's right," Coelho replied. "It fits in the trunk of my car."

Many academic CubeSats currently in orbit report their position, battery life and findings to ham-radio operators on Earth, who forward the information to the originating school. But projects are becoming more ambitious. The Air Force plans to use two networked CubeSats to monitor the Earth's atmosphere and provide the world's first real-time look at space weather. Carl Brandon of Vermont Technical College is developing an ion-drive CubeSat system that he says will be able to propel itself to the moon.

Puig-Suari and Charles Scott MacGillivray, who ran a small team of satellite developers at Boeing until last year, have now spun off their own company, called Tyvak, which produces CubeSats on a contract basis for private clients and the U.S. government. A marketplace of standardized components has also emerged, led by Stanford engineering professor Andrew Kalman's Pumpkin, Inc., which has sold CubeSat kits to more than 100 universities, governments and nonprofit organizations. Kalman says that once people begin to think of CubeSats as disposable, building them out of off-the-shelf components and sending them up 100 at a time, the devices will truly have come of age. "If we launch a group of satellites built out of Android phones, you'll have app developers able to dream up what to put in space," he says.

A CubeSat today can cost as little as $100,000 to build, and buying a berth on something like a Falcon 9 runs around $250,000. In the aerospace industry, that's spare change. The low cost also makes losing a CubeSat tolerable. Last March, a rocket carrying NASA's Glory satellite and three CubeSats crashed into the ocean. "We were bummed," says Coelho, who watched the failed launch. "But the NASA guys had lost a $400 million satellite." One of the lost CubeSats was, in fact, a duplicate. In October, its twin made it into space.

HOW TO READY A CUBESAT FOR SPACE

The pre-launch guidelines for CubeSats stipulate that the object must be 10 by 10 by 11 centimeters (the extra centimeter is for the little metal feet) and no heavier than 1.3 kilograms. A satellite must remain fully deactivated-no power of any kind-until it exits its spring-loaded launch container; errant signals could scramble the electronics of the primary payload or the rocket's guidance system. And teams must submit a detailed plan for de-orbiting-tipping the satellite such that it disintegrates in the atmosphere-within five years of leaving Earth, or risk having their satellite killed before it ever takes off.