This weekend, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission kicked off the 2013 Python Challenge in Davie, Florida, a smallish city near Fort Lauderdale. The Python Challenge registers python hunters and gives cash prizes to those who can gather the most--or the biggest--pythons. As much as it's weird to award people for killing the most snakes, this is absolutely the right move for Florida--unlike Wyoming's stance on wolves.

Burmese pythons, native to southeast Asia, are massive constrictors, reaching up to 17 feet long. They were brought to Florida as pets and either escaped or were released into the wild, and found themselves an environment totally unprepared for them. South Florida, especially the area in and around the Everglades, is home to an astounding number of rare and vanishing plants and animals, vanishing faster due to an all-out frontal environmental assault from land developers and politicians. The Everglades is a quarter of its natural size and nowhere near as healthy as it should be. And the Burmese python is one of the worst invasive species in the entire country.

Burmese pythons eat small endangered animals like the mangrove fox squirrel, the Key Largo woodrat, the wood stork, and the Key Largo cotton mouse. Burmese pythons drastically reduce the number of non-endangered species like raccoons, opossums, white-tailed deer (yeah. They are fearsome hunters), and coyotes, which can have a negative effect on the health of the ecosystem as a whole. There is no snake in south Florida anywhere near as big or as effective a hunter as the python, so these animals do not see snakes as a threat and do not attempt evasive action. Burmese pythons compete for resources--very effectively--with endangered or vulnerable endemic species like the Florida panther, American crocodile, and many native snakes.

In short, Burmese pythons are a menace, and they are bad for Florida. We know that because scientists have told us that. So, good. Offer cash to python hunters. But not all snake hunters! Snake hunting is a common event in much of the country, but in the cases of even dangerous snakes like rattlesnakes, mass killings are very bad for the environment, as this petition argues. That doesn't apply to introduced snakes like the Burmese python, so, go nuts, Florida. Win that prize.

If you didn't know better, you might think there were only one car at the Detroit Auto Show this year, because the spanking-new Chevrolet Corvette is the only car anyone's talking about here. Almost 60 years to the day after the very first Corvette debuted, General Motors has dusted off the Stingray name and attached it to the sexiest Corvette we've seen in far too long.

Advanced materials, including an aluminum frame, liberal use of carbon fiber, and magnesium seat frames lighten the car significantly and helped Chevrolet achieve not only an optimal 50/50 weight balance but a sub-four second 0-60 time from its 6.2L V8. A seven-speed manual transmission anticipates gear selections and matches engine speed for a better shifting experience. And even with an estimated 450 horsepower and 450lb.-ft of torque, this seventh-generation Corvette is expected to be the most fuel efficient, exceeding the EPA-rated 26mpg of its predecessor.

Personally, I'm more of an EV geek, but let's face it, hot is hot--and the new Corvette is exactly that. Driving is believing though... 'ya hear me, Chevy?

The U.S. military spends a good deal of money and energy on delivery systems--capabilities that allow U.S. forces to move assets to where they are needed around the globe as quickly as possible. But for the Navy, whose area of operation is the entirety of the world's oceans, DARPA is taking a different tack. Rather than trying to truck assets to where they need to be during a crisis, why not just plant them on the seafloor and activate them when you need them?

This is the driving idea behind DARPA's Upward Falling Payloads (UFP) program, which seeks to create technologies that would allow the Navy to leave unmanned systems and other distributed technologies hidden in the ocean depths for years on end and deploy them remotely at the push of a button when the need arises. Think: unmanned aircraft that travel to the surface and launch into the sky to provide reconnaissance or to disrupt or spoof enemy defenses, or perhaps submersible or surface sub-hunters that launch from the seafloor during times of heightened alert in a particular maritime theater.

The challenges, of course, are many (otherwise we'd already be doing this). DARPA is looking for technology proposals that can help address key issues mainly in the areas of long-term submersible survivability, deep underwater communications, and the "risers"--the vehicles that would contain the payloads and deliver them to the surface on demand. It's also looking for technical expertise for the payloads themselves, which could be anything from remote sensing platforms to electronic warfare and networking.

What DARPA doesn't need is weapons platforms, and rightly so. DARPA envisions the Navy leaving its Upward Falling technologies submerged in waters far from an actual fleet and (presumably) in areas where geopolitical hostility is at least possible if not probable. So it wants technologies that the Navy can feasibly lose without risk. After all, retrieval of unused systems would be difficult, and you certainly don't want to leave anything on a faraway seafloor that would endanger American operations if the enemy were able to locate and retrieve it. Therefore UFP is decidedly not a weapons program, even though an armed warbot emerging unexpectedly from the icy depths would most certainly drive fear into even the most formidable enemy navy.

[DARPA]

New 3-D models of some of the earliest four-legged animals reveals a surprising find: We imagined their backbones backward. Our ancestors the tetrapods--the first animals to crawl out of the muck and onto land--have spines that are organized the opposite way from what everyone thought. The findings could change evolutionary biologists' understanding of how the vertebrae evolved--and therefore how all vertebrate animals evolved.

All vertebrates--humans, fish, snakes, and so on--have a spine consisting of many vertebrae connected in a row. Unlike modern creatures, the vertebrae of early tetrapods contains three sets of bones, one in front, one on top and one in back. But the one that everyone thought was the back bone is actually in the front, said lead author Stephanie Pierce of the Royal Veterinary College in the UK.

Pierce and colleagues from RVC and the University of Cambridge were studying three tetrapod fossil types, from animals called Ichthyostega, Acanthostega and Pederpes. They subjected the 360 million-year-old fossils to high-energy synchrotron radiation, and used the X-ray images to build 3-D reconstructions of the animals' bones, which were buried in the rock they fossilized with.

They discovered that what was thought to be the first bone actually came last, and they noticed a primitive breastbone structure, too, where none was observed before. That's interesting because it suggests the animals may have moved around more like seals, hunching on their torsos, than they would have ambled like crocodiles.

"The results of this study force us to re-write the textbook on backbone evolution in the earliest limbed animals," Pierce said in a statement.

All this bone information provides new clues about how the animals moved from water to land. A sturdy sternum, for instance, would allow a creature like Ichthyostega to do the worm to get around--scientifically, that's called "crutching." "[Sternum bones] may have helped to reinforce the ribcage during synchronous forelimb crutching on land, allowing the animal to balance its body weight on its chest during the swing phase of forelimb movement," the authors write. "This study has broad ramifications for our future understanding of early tetrapod skeletal evolution."

The paper is published today in Nature.

At long, long last, General Motors has revealed the follow-up vehicle to the plug-in Chevrolet Volt. Based on the original Converj concept, the Cadillac ELR had been an on-and-off again project for the automaker. Now it's not only a reality, it's frickin' gorgeous. A sleek two-door coupe, the ELR shares the Voltec powertrain technology employed on the Volt, delivering roughly 35 miles of all-electric range before a supplemental 1.4L gasoline engine kicks in for a total driving range of approximately 300 miles, all of which can be done in the carpool lane in certain states that provide the coveted incentive to plug-in cars.

Unfortunately, a lingering concern remains about Cadillac's commitment to this little car. Group Vice President Bob Ferguson noted after the reveal that "we're only going to make so many, and only for so long." Hopefully that position will soften with market demand, assuming they don't price the car so high as to intentionally relegate it to collector's item status. We'll see...

And those enamored with the ELR will still have to hold their breath a bit longer; the car goes into production late this year, with deliveries beginning early in 2014. If it drives anything like it looks, though, it'll be worth the wait.

We may be safe from killer asteroid Apophis, but plenty of other near-Earth asteroids could pose a threat sooner or later. Sure, humans could send up a probe or a space sail in a desperate attempt to deflect it--but what if that mission fails? We had better start testing now, so we're sure this type of Hollywood scheme actually works. Enter the AIDA mission.

The European Space Agency and Johns Hopkins University are working together on a two-part asteroid interception and deflection mission, but they need help to refine it. ESA wants your research ideas for ground- and space-based studies that will improve the Asteroid Impact and Deflection mission, or AIDA.

It's a two-part mission with two separate spacecraft, which would fly up to intercept a binary asteroid. The goal is to see how the objects' relative spin changes, so you need a binary asteroid or one with a small moon. Several asteroids have mini-moons orbiting them.

The first spacecraft, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, would smash into the smaller of the two space rocks, which should change the pace at which it spins relative to its companion. This could change its direction and trajectory, too--that would be the entire goal if such a space rock threatened Earth. To see how well it works, a second spacecraft, the Asteroid Impact Monitor, would watch from a nearby post. Astronomers on Earth should be able to notice changes in the asteroids' relative motion, but AIM's close viewing spot will ground-truth those observations, as ESA explains.

Having two independent satellites increases the odds of mission success, because both can work without the other. But if they both work as planned, astronomers will get even better data, said Andrés Gálvez, ESA AIDA study manager. "The vast amounts of data coming from the joint mission should help to validate various theories, such as our impact modeling," he said. That would ensure a deflection mission could really work--which will be good to know if and when a menacing space rock like Apophis does set its sights on Earth.

You can learn more about AIDA, and send some input to ESA, by clicking here.

[ESA]

MATERIALS
Safety goggles
Large piece of cardboard
Pencil
Craft knife
Tape
Smartphone

STEP 1
Lay the safety goggles on the cardboard so that they're facing forward. Trace around the shape, adding at least 2 inches (5 cm) in front.

STEP 2
Roll the goggles up so that they're resting on an end. Trace around that side, adding extra space again.

STEP 3
Using the craft knife, cut out your tracing as one piece, then fold it so you have a four-sided rectangular tube that fits perfectly around your goggles. Secure it with tape and slide the goggles just inside.

STEP 4
On a separate piece of cardboard, trace the cardboard box's front, leaving 1-inch (2.5-cm) tabs on either side. Cut it out, then trace your smartphone onto its center. Cut out the shape of your phone, making a window, and insert this cardboard piece into the rectangular tube opposite the goggles.

STEP 5
Dial up Google Street View and locate a place you've always wanted to go and tape your phone over the window.

STEP 6
Don your virtual-reality glasses, and take a walk someplace far, far away.

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.

There's been a longstanding battle in northern Arizona over the use of faux-snow engineered from sewage "effluent," or runoff. On one side: a ski resort that wanted to use the fake snow. On the other: opponents who worried about the snow's potential health and ecological hazards. The ski resort triumphed and recently covered its grounds in the sewage-y snow, but there was one little problem: the stuff came out yellow.

Snow "guns" were used to cannon the discolored snow out onto the trails, where some people noticed the fake snow was a little, um, unconvincing. The resort's manager told the New York Times that the color was caused by "rusty residue in the new snow-making equipment" that's piping the snow in from a nearby sewage treatment plant. The government's environmental officials haven't confirmed or denied that.

The snow does contain small amounts of chemicals--hormones, antibiotics, etc.--it's just debatable what kind of health problems those can, or will, cause. A 2005 permit approved the resort's plans for the snow, which resort officials say they need to use when less snow falls naturally. Critics of the process say it's time for another look.

A state government inspector is being sent over to look into the discoloration problem, at which point we'll find out if that whole beware-the-yellow-snow adage is right.

[New York Times]

Facebook held a big announcement this morning in California, and though some had expected a Facebook-branded smartphone or some other gadgety item, what Facebook actually announced was "graph search," a new, Microsoft-Bing-powered search engine that'll live on Facebook.

Graph search takes all of the data that's plugged into Facebook--likes, favorites, tastes and photos and videos and status updates and everything else--and makes it easy to search and group those results. The most obvious way you might take advantage of that is through natural language search, sort of like what Apple's Siri attempted--instead of searching for keywords, you can just ask questions. That'll be useful for finding, say, all pictures of your friends from a certain year, or finding any Thai restaurants your friends recommended in a certain city.

So, you can search for photos, people, places, or interests, as four kind of large categories. Facebook says the "people" search will be great for dating; you could find single friends of friends in your city who also like BBC shows, for example.

Privacy settings are retained even with graph search, so if your data is hidden to anyone who's not a friend, it won't show up in graph search. But, interestingly, data from Instagram is not included: Facebook says it's "on the list of things we will one day get to," but who knows when that'll pop up.

Graph search is in the early testing stage, but you can sign up to try it out here.

Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency, will launch an unmanned mission to the moon in 2015, according to agency head Vladimir Popovkin.

The rocket carrying the robotic probe, called Luna-Glob, will be the first set off from Russia's new Far East launchpad, the Vostochny cosmodrome. Last year, President Vladimir Putin pledged to pour $1 billion into the new launch site, located near China. The new launch site will wean Russia off its dependence on Kazakhstan's Baikonur launch facility.

Luna-Glob, the first of four planned Russian moon missions, will carry scientific equipment to take soil samples and look for water, according to AP reports. State-run news agency Ria Novosti has said that it will carry dust monitors and plasma sensors to sense high-energy cosmic rays as well. It will be the first Russian trip to the moon since the 1970s.

Roscosmos' latest moon exploration project has been postponed several times since 2010, and will be its first mission after 2011's Phobos-Grunt failure. The probe, set to collect samples from the Martian moon Phobos, unsuccessfully aimed its course for Mars and crashed into the Pacific Ocean after two months in Earth's orbit.

Luna-Glob and its successors are part of a larger plan to revamp development of Russia's space industry. Plans are also in development to send a manned spacecraft to the moon in 2018.

[Washington Post]

A flat rock with pale, veiny fissures could be the first thing the Mars rover Curiosity drills for a sample of the Red Planet, NASA scientists said Tuesday. It's the most challenging task yet for the intrepid car-sized rover (after its landing). No spacecraft has ever penetrated a rock on Mars.

The drill is a cornerstone of the mission, able to breach the surface of interesting-looking rocks and determine what their insides contain. It can drill about 5 millimeters into Mars, which is enough to get some aspirin-tablet sized samples of dust for the rover's instruments to ingest. The goal is to find out whether Mars could have ever been hospitable for life, and understanding the formation of Mars rocks will help answer that question. It's taken the rover team quite a while to pick out a suitable sample, in part because they keep finding their rover surrounded by so many interesting things.

"It does take us a while to do stuff; that's a product of the fact that this mission is so complex, there are a lot of different things to do, and there's a lot of interesting things to look at," said Richard Cook, the Mars Science Laboratory's project manager.

In the past few weeks, Curiosity has been stationed in a region called Yellowknife Bay, which features fractured ground with different temperature swings compared to other nearby terrain. The rover's cameras have spotted veins, blueberry-like nodules, layers and even a rare "Martian flower," which is actually just a shiny pebble embedded in sandstone. The zone where Curiosity will drill has been dubbed "John Klein," for a deputy project manager who died in 2011. There's an embarrassment of riches when it comes to possible targets--Cook called it a "candy store."

It will mean plenty of opportunities to test new hypotheses, said John Grotzinger, Curiosity's project scientist. "We chose to go there because we saw something anomalous, but we wouldn't have predicted any of this stuff from orbit," he said in a news conference Tuesday. "We can't wait to get drilling on this stuff."

The rover's suite of other instruments has been doing the initial reconnaissance, including several laser blasts with the ChemCam spectrometer. ChemCam has been seeing signs of possible gypsum, or other hydrated calcium sulfates. That means there was likely water in those fractures. Drilling into them will provide more answers, Grotzinger explained.

"What we are hoping to do is sample the main filling material as well as what we call the ‘country rock' around it, to get a sense of the mineralogy," he said.

Curiosity will spin its drill bit for the first time probably in about two weeks, according to Cook. The team will probably take its time sampling the rover's current parking spot before sending it to the base of Mt. Sharp within Gale Crater, its ultimate destination.

The winners have just been announced in Nikon's Small World in Motion digital video competition, giving us the opportunity to look through the microscope from the comfort of our office chairs.

This is the second year Nikon has offered a category for video time-lapse photography. Any sort of movie taken through a light microscope qualifies for entry, and an independent panel of judges evaluated each video for originality, informational content, technical proficiency and visual impact. The top three winners in the movie category receive 500-2,000 dollars toward the purchase of Nikon equipment. (If you haven't entered yet, this year could be the year to do it -- they've upped the prize range to 1,000-3,000 dollars.)

This year's first place winner, by Dr. Olena Kamenyeva from the National Institute of Health, shows an immune reaction in the lymph node of a mouse, in response to damage from a laser.

Dr. Stefan Lüpold of Syracuse University's biology department snagged second prize using fluorescence to record competing sperm from two males racing through the reproductive tract of a female fruit fly.

A time-lapse tracing the tree-like development of kidney cells over four days snagged third place for Dr. Nils Lindström of the University of Edinburgh.

Some of the honorable mentions are worth a wide-eyed gander, like Wim van Egmond's mesmerizing look inside a rotifer and Kathryn R. Markey's up-close view of a feeding scallop. Most the videos clock in at under 30 seconds so you can't ruin too much of your workday by watching all of them.

Not that he's known for anything else, but Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn once again aggressively underscored his company's commitment to electric vehicles by dropping the MSRP on the 2013 Nissan Leaf by 18 percent. A newly added S trim level of the five-seat EV will now start at $28,800 which means a net price in the high teens in states that offer supplemental incentives to the $7500 federal tax credit. Nissan is also offering a 36-month lease on the Leaf at $199/mo, far below other vehicles in that price range.

At least part of the lower price is due to the fact that, for the first time, the Leaf will be produced domestically, in a new LEAF production facility in Smyrna, TN. Ghosn demurred on a sales goal for 2013 model, but noted that it was fair to assume it would be "at least 20 percent higher" than 2012.

Meanwhile, Global Vice President of Leaf Sales Billy Hayes was quick to remind what really draws buyers to electric vehicles like the LEAF. "We get so caught up in talking about the technology and the green" he said, "but the car is really great to drive."

The Irish version of the FDA, called the FSAI, has found distinctly non-beef animal protein in ground meat labeled "beef," in some supermarkets. Meat from two Irish processing plants has been found to contain substantial portions of pig and, curiously, horse DNA. Of 27 samples analyzed, 23 were found to contain pork, and 10 were found to contain horsemeat. In one sample collected from Tesco--a major supermarket chain all over the UK--approximately 29% of the meat was found to be horsemeat. Looks like it's not just seafood that isn't quite what it claims to be.

Now, none of the samples were found to be unsafe for human consumption in any way, and it's likely that many would have no objection to eating pig or, even, horsemeat. (Horse is a traditional meat in some areas of France, among other places.) The pork can be explained away by the fact that both pork and beef are processed at the same plant, though nobody seems to have any idea how a significant amount of horsemeat made its way into the ground beef. But there are two major concerns here. The first is for people with dietary restrictions: neither pig nor horse is kosher, and pig is not halal.

The second is that, even though these samples of meat are safe, it does not speak very highly of the regulation in place for meat processing, especially in the UK, which has had the worst experience with BSE, commonly known as mad cow disease, of any country in the world.

In response, all products from those suppliers have been withdrawn, and the FSAI is investigating to see how this could have happened.

[via BBC]

From OpenTable to Amazon to your Netflix queue, algorithms sift through what we seem to like and offer future suggestions tailored to fit those trends. But the problem is they do this for everybody. So if everyone gets the same recommendations on OpenTable, everyone will try to reserve a table, and there won't be any seats left. What's more, if everyone gets a movie recommendation and everyone decides to watch it, the movie gets more popular--creating biases in the system. To improve matters, some researchers in Switzerland took a cue from the master rules of physics.

In particle physics, a given boson or lepton tends to occupy the most favorable energy state. If it's a force-carrying boson--like a photon, a W boson or a Higgs boson--there's no limit to how many particles can share real estate in that state. But if it's a fermion--like a quark, or an electron or proton--then only a certain number can be in the same place at the same time.

Algorithms should take this approach and function according to the rules of fermions rather than bosons, according to Stanislao Gualdi of the University of Fribourg and colleagues. After all, an object's utility declines with an increase in the number of people using it, they argue. It's like everyone buys the same guidebook and goes to the same quiet beach, meaning the beach is no longer quiet.

To study this concept, Gualdi and colleagues looked at DVD rentals. Using this model, a service like Netflix could limit the number of people who can have a single DVD at a time, forcing other DVDs to be recommended and chosen as secondary options. This limits biases that can happen when you give everyone unfettered access to the same thing, and this is good because it gives the whole recommendation engine some new fodder.

As Tech Review's arXiv blog points out, this is not necessarily a way to increase profits, so it's hard to see any recommendation service implementing the idea anytime soon. But it's an interesting concept.

"Crowd-avoidance can be applied to find a good compromise between satisfying the preferences of users and distributing them among objects evenly," the authors write. Their paper is posted to the arXiv preprint server.

[Technology Review]

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology just released an online archive filled with thousands of animal noises. The archive doesn't have everything--it mostly focuses on birds--but you could still waste a whole afternoon or more sifting through the aural wonders of Earth's many species. To wit: Did you know that a singing walrus sounds like a Tommy gun followed by a tiny spaceship floating away?

And did you know katydids make noises? Song-like noises, even.

You can also search by taxonomy, meaning you can peruse, at your leisure, the subtle differences between the Chilean flamingo:

And its American counterpart:

Or, enjoy the otherworldly squeak of the Montezuma Oropendola:

There are a total of 150,000 audio recordings here, covering about 9,000 species. That's more than 7,500 hours of squawks, squeaks, and roars there for your enjoyment.

[Macaulay Library via Live Science]