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FYI: Why Is There A Winter Flu Season?

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flu in winterE. Elert
An illustrated explanation of why the world's most obnoxious virus at least doesn't stick around all year.

Flu season is in full swing across the U.S. this week, and it's right on time. Actually, it would have been on time if it showed up in November, too, or even in March--unlike the actual seasons, the timing of flu season is a little hard to predict. Except for one thing: it always happens in winter. In fact, everywhere on Earth where people have a winter season, they also have a flu season:

Part of what makes the timing of each flu season unpredictable is that scientists still don't understand exactly why we have one at all. There have, of course, been lots of theories:

One theory is that flu peaks in winter because people spend more time indoors, with the windows closed, breathing each other's air:

Other scientists have argued that the darkness (i.e. lack of Vitamin D and melatonin) and cold of winter weaken our immune systems, making us more susceptible to the virus:

A third theory is that--regardless of how we deal with the cold--the flu virus thrives in the cold, dry air of winter, but suffers in the warm, humid air of summer.

There's even a theory about how the winter flu is ushered in by changes in air circulation in the upper atmosphere:

For a while, scientists had a hard time thinking up ways to test these theories: they needed to be able to run experiments, but researchers aren't allowed to infect humans with nasty illnesses, and most lab animals aren't affected by the flu the same way people are. But then, in 2007, a medical researcher named Peter Palese stumbled across an 80-year-old journal article that reported that guinea pigs get infected and pass on the flu just like humans.

Palese decided to test theory #3--the idea that the flu virus does better in cold, dry air than warm, humid air. He acquired some guinea pigs and ran several experiments to see how temperature and humidity affect the way the flu spreads. In each experiment, he injected half the guinea pigs with influenza A (the common flu), and put them in a crate next to a crate of uninfected animals.

At a temperature of 41 degrees, all four of the exposed guinea pigs caught the flu, but when Palese repeated the experiment at 68 degrees, only one of the exposed animals was infected. And when he and his colleagues ran the test at a temperature of 86 degrees, none of the exposed animals got sick.

Since winter air is also much dryer than summer air--cold air can't hold as much water vapor--the researchers also ran experiments where they varied the humidity in the room but kept the temperature constant: the dryer the air, they found, the more animals got sick.

Palese's guinea pig study showed that the influenza virus really does spread more effectively in cold, dry air--but it left one important question unanswered: why?

One possibility has to do with the way the flu spreads through air. When an infected person breathes in and all the tiny airways in their lungs open, a thin film of fluid stretches across the opening airways and then breaks, releasing little virus-containing droplets into the air in the lungs. When the person breathes out, those droplets are expelled into the air, where they begin to fall toward the ground:

And here--in the flu droplet's earthward fall--is where humidity comes in. As this droplet falls, it also begins to evaporate. The dryer the air is, the more moisture evaporates from the droplet, and the smaller the droplet gets. AND if it gets smaller, the effect of air resistance gets bigger. Eventually, if enough of the droplet evaporates, the flu virus is whisked away on air currents and can float around for days, until someone else breathes it in:

Several studies have made the case for this "transmission" hypothesis since Palese's guinea pig study, but other researchers think the biggest factor is actually the virus's survival. One study found that the flu virus survives for much longer in low humidity than high humidity:

Quite possibly, the flu's annual winter-time parade through our immune systems has to do with both factors: the virus survives better and transmits more easily in cooler, dryer air. The case isn't closed yet--and researchers are still looking into some of those other theories, like the idea that our immune systems are weaker in winter--but, for anyone looking for ways to avoid the seasonal flu (in addition to the flu shot, of course), a portable humidifier seems like a good place to start.




Boeing 787 Batteries Same As Those In Electric Cars? Umm, No

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Boeing 787 Dreamliner
The FAA has grounded all 787s after a string of fires in their lithium-ion battery packs. But these batteries are very different from the ones in electric cars. Gird yourself: It's possible we're about to see a new wave of attacks on electric cars that ignore battery science.

This time the culprit is the troubled Boeing 787 Dreamliner aircraft. The FAA has grounded all 787s after a string of fires in their lithium-ion battery packs; other countries have done the same.

Which has led at least one supposedly authoritative commentator to say that Boeing is having the same battery problems as those "that have shown up in electric cars."

The problem is that the two types of batteries are, in fact, quite different.

Here's the offending quote, from Paul Czysz, professor emeritus of aeronautical engineering at St. Louis University, as cited in a Boston Herald article this morning:

"Unfortunately, what Boeing did to save weight is use the same batteries that are in the electric cars, and they are running into the same problems with the 787 as the problems that have shown up in electric cars."

The author of the Boston Herald piece then went on to describe a 2011 fire in a Chevy Volt crash-test car that occurred several days after it was wrecked and rotated through 360 degrees by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

In January 2012, the NHTSA closed an investigation into Volt fires, concluding that "no discernible defect trend exists" and that "modifications recently developed by General Motors reduce the potential for battery intrusion resulting from side impacts."

Here's the problem: While the battery cells in Boeing 787s and, say, Chevrolet Volts are both in the lithium-ion family, they use very different chemistries.

You can think of lithium-ion cells rather like motor vehicles: They all do some variation of the same thing, but there are many different types, sizes, shapes, and different technologies to make that happen. Consider the difference between gasoline and diesel engines, for example.

The cells in the 787, from Japanese company GS Yuasa, use a cobalt oxide (CoO2) chemistry, just as mobile-phone and laptop batteries do.

That chemistry has the highest energy content, but it is also the most susceptible to overheating that can produce "thermal events" (which is to say, fires).

Only one electric car has been built in volume using CoO2 cells, and that's the Tesla Roadster. Only 2,500 of those cars will ever exist.

The Chevrolet Volt range-extended electric car, on the other hand, uses LG Chem prismatic cells with manganese spinel (LiMn2O4) cathodes.

While chemistries based on manganese, nickel, and other metals carry less energy per volume, they are widely viewed as less susceptible to overheating and fires.

So if you see coverage of the Boeing 787 battery fires that says anything at all about electric cars, do consider dropping a friendly note to the reporter involved.

It may be unreasonable to expect every reporter in the world to know that "lithium-ion batteries" are a family of very different chemistries.

Science reporters, on the other hand--let alone engineering professors--really should know better.

You have been warned.

This article, written by John Voelcker, was originally published on GreenCarReports, a publishing partner of Popular Science. Follow Green Car Reports on Facebook and Twitter.



The Flu Virus Can Tell Time. Here's Why You Should Care

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Flu VirionCenters for Disease Control and Prevention
The flu knows how long it has to invade our cells and spread to other humans. So new treatments could fight the virus by resetting its clock.

The insidious little virus making so many Americans sick this winter has a newly discovered potential weakness we might be able to exploit. Influenza can tell time, and it choreographs its actions according to a strict schedule. If new vaccines can reset flu's clock, the human immune system might be able to fight it more effectively.

Viruses multiply by invading a host cell, hijacking its machinery and using it to make new copies of itself. Cells have warning systems that can detect this invasion and call in reinforcements, but that can take a while. The virus has to orchestrate its actions carefully--if it moves too fast, it won't have time to make new copies of itself, and if it moves too slowly, it might be stopped by immune defenses. Researchers at Mount Sinai's Icahn School of Medicine figured the flu virus must have some mechanism to tell how long it has to hijack a cell before tripping the alarm, so to speak.

Researchers knew the virus has about eight hours to make copies of itself before a cell will notice. To produce sufficient copies to infect another human, it needs about two days of continuous activity inside our cells, said Benjamin tenOever, a microbiology professor at Mount Sinai who led this research. The team figured out that the virus slowly gathers a protein it needs to make its exit, and leaves the cell in the nick of time.

"The virus has exploited the predictable nature of the
cell to establish a molecular timer and successfully coordinate
the processes of infection," tenOever and coauthors write.

To fight it, they tricked the virus into changing the amount of time it took to gather the protein. First, they made it acquire the protein too quickly, which caused the flu to leave the cell before it had made enough copies of itself. In this case, the cells were lung epithelial cells. Then they altered it to leave too late, giving immune cells enough time to respond and kill the virus before it escaped.

This is promising for new flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, which could target this internal protein clock. Although a flu vaccine is still the best way to protect yourself against the flu, not everyone is eligible to get one--especially the nasal spray, which is not recommended for the very young and the very old. These treatments also rely on an educated guess about which flu will spread throughout the population in a season, and there are only so many vaccines. But a treatment that targets the virus' clock wouldn't need a dead or weakened version of the flu--it would just need to fool the virus into losing track of time. The study is published in today's issue of Cell Reports.



Should We Establish National Parks On Mars?

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Proposed 'Parks' On MarsCockell/Horneck
There's a movement in the scientific community to create managed preserves on other planets and moons, to keep them pristine for future generations.

There's an old proverb that states "We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children." And if some in the scientific community have their way, that sentiment will extend to other planetary bodies as well. A movement among some in the spacefaring community believe that humans need to set up a kind of national parks system for planets prior to human and further robotic exploration to ensure that pristine environmental value--both scientific and intrinsic--is preserved beyond Earth orbit.

Earth orbit might be a good example as to why. The area of space where human activity has been most prevalent is filled with debris--the leftovers and byproducts of our presence there. And with private spaceflight now rapidly making up technical ground on even the world's most capable space programs, it's only a matter of time before manned exploration is happening elsewhere in the solar system and outside of the strict oversight of a state-sponsored space agency, advocates argue.

Therefore, given the fact that we have already mapped and extensively studied our closest planetary neighbors (like the moon and Mars) and we know what kinds of geologic features and areas are most valuable from both scientific and intrinsic standpoints, we should cordon off certain areas of interest within which exploration is either forbidden or restricted. For instance, Mars possesses various geographic regions like mountain ranges, deserts, polar ice caps, extinct volcanoes, and the like. And they could be scientifically interesting not just now but further down the road as we learn more about the universe.

So why not preserve sections of them now, as we do on Earth (at least somewhat) for our great forests, jungles, gorges, mountain ranges, wetlands, and so on? Such park designations wouldn't have to render these areas entirely off limits for exploration, of course, but would create rules like no landing of unmanned spacecraft, no spacecraft or human debris left behind within the park, and more rigorous sterilization standards for any object crossing the boundary to mitigate microbial contamination.

In the land and resource grab that very well may be in the offing on bodies like the moon and Mars, advocates say, having a parks framework already in place could quell future potential-use conflicts and ensure that irresponsible exploration is limited to the spaces outside of the most scientifically interesting regions of planetary bodies. If you have thoughts on this (or some really good spam!) drop them in the comments below. We're interested to hear what you think.

[SPACE]



Why Is Boeing's 787 Dreamliner Such A Piece Of Crap?

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Nippon's 787 DreamlinerWikimedia Commons
Amazing new plane keeps catching on fire. Here are the questions you've been asking and the answers you need.

Q: What is the 787 Dreamliner and why do we care?
A: The Dreamliner is a massive jet from Boeing, the company's most fuel-efficient airliner and the first major airplane to be made with composite materials--specifically, carbon fiber reinforced plastic. It's made of 80% composite by volume, which makes it much lighter than typical planes without sacrificing strength, and has a lot of nice consumer-facing features--bigger windows, new noise reduction techniques, modular bathrooms, and more space for passengers. It'll hold up to 296 passengers, too--this is a big boy. It's not a revolutionary plane, but we all care about it because it's the next evolution of the planes we'll all take. You probably won't fly on an all-electric plane any time soon, but you probably will fly on a Dreamliner.

Q: Cool! So how come I can't catch one flying out of my local airport tomorrow?
A: Well, here's the thing about the Dreamliner: it's been plagued with more serious problems than any other major new jet line in recent memory. Its batteries have a tendency to catch on fire. Earlier this week, both Japan Airlines and the FAA grounded all Dreamliners under their control until we can get a handle on why these things keep breaking.

Q: What's wrong with them?
The Dreamliner relies on electrical power much more than its predecessor, the 777. Earlier planes used bleed air, which is super-hot, super-pressurized air taken from within the engine, and used it for all kinds of functions, from de-icing to pressurizing the cabin itself. But in order to cut down on energy use, the 787 relies instead on electrical power for that, from some very powerful lithium ion batteries. Those batteries have of late taken up a new hobby: catching on fire and freaking the hell out of all of us.

Q: Wait a second, lithium ion batteries? Like in hybrid/electric cars? And phones and laptops and a million other things?
A: Well, kinda. There are different kinds of lithium ion batteries, using different chemicals and different reactions, and they behave pretty differently. This is a great explanation of what's going on in those batteries, but in short, the Dreamliner uses cobalt oxide batteries, the same kind as what's used in smartphones, laptops, and tablets. It's chosen for all of those purposes because it's got a crazy-high energy content for its size and weight--like, twice that of the batteries used in electric cars--but it also has one very big problem. That would be heat.

Gadget makers have worked for years on cooling methods so their batteries don't catch on fire, and sometimes they do anyway, but these batteries are pretty small and not all that hazardous. The batteries in a Dreamliner, on the other hand, are huge. And on fire.

Q: But planes always have problems at first, right? Aren't these just growing pains?
A: Yeah, that's a common thought, helped along by just about every Boeing exec and anyone else who has a financial stake in the Dreamliner not catching on fire repeating it. And it's not false, exactly. But the problems the Dreamliner is having aren't exactly the same kinds of problems as, say, the Boeing 777. The 777 has had eight so-called "aviation occurrences," which is airplane code for "accidents." But those problems were mostly easy to solve--there were a few issues with the de-icing system, which was subsequently redesigned, and all the other issues were one-offs, like a 2011 cockpit fire that was probably due to "a possible electrical fault with a supply hose in the cockpit crew oxygen system."

The Dreamliner has had many more problems. Cockpit windows have cracked several times. At least three of the 50 active Dreamliners have had overheating problems with the lithium ion batteries, leading to smoke and/or fire. Two planes have had fuel leak problems. These are much more difficult to manage than a de-icing flaw; you can't just swap out the batteries, since there are no other batteries with the same size and energy storage, and as the batteries are a much more integral part of the plane's entire operation, this isn't a small issue. The fact that the Dreamliners have had similar problems is a cause for concern.

Q: How long was this thing in development? How did this slip by?
A: Ah, good question. The Dreamliner has had a very long and tumultuous birthing process, with several redesigns over the years. The Dreamliner is actually several years behind schedule on many of its deliveries; you'd think in that time someone would make sure the thing didn't catch on fire. But nobody really knows how this kind of thing got by; best guess is that with such a new kind of electrical power system, nobody really knew how the Dreamliner would respond with repeated use. On the other hand, Qatar Airlines CEO Akbar Al Baker, among other "airline insiders," has said he's not surprised by the groundings.

Q: What happens now?
A: The FAA and the equivalents in other countries will conduct full-scale investigations into the problems with the Dreamliners. We won't know what the solutions are until we see those findings. So the answer to the sub-question here, "can the battery situation be fixed and how," is "it can probably be fixed, but until we know precisely what the problem is we won't know how." In the meantime, some of the airlines are demanding payment, considering they just spent millions of dollars on a plane they can't fly, and it's possible that others will decide not to continue with their purchases. Boeing has about 800 Dreamliners set to be built; if people start pulling out, the company is going to be in serious trouble.



Temple Run 2, Sequel To The Super-Popular Mobile Game, Is Out

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Temple Run 2Imangi Studios

This was the premise for the first Temple Run, a hit mobile game: Your character has stolen an idol from a temple, and has to outrun temple guardians (monkey-beast things) while avoiding obstacles and nabbing coins, for as long as possible. Now, just-released for iOS, is Temple Run 2, and that description pretty much sums it up, too.

Here's what's different. There's just one big monkey this time. The graphics are better, and the temple you run through is a little more expansive, featuring waterfalls and clouds this time around. The path you run curves slightly, unlike the first Temple Run's totally liner path, but that doesn't affect gameplay too much.

For the most part, the game sticks to the formula that made it a success. Even the power-ups you gain by gathering coins, where you'd think the developers might be able to add some features pretty easily, looks almost untouched. Not that all that's a bad thing: If you liked the first Temple Run, there's a solid chance you'll like Temple Run 2, seeing as it's a better-looking version of the first game.

It's free in the App Store, with an Android version coming next week, so you don't have much to lose--except time, if the game hooks you in.



How Extreme Weather Links The Fates Of Four Adorable Arctic Species

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Arctic Fox This arctic fox lives in Svalbard. Brage Bremset Hansen
For the first time, scientists show how climate synchronizes different species.

Researchers are already learning how a changing climate can affect populations of individual species, from plants to animals. But they haven't been able to really pin down how entire communities of different species will respond to changing global patterns. Now a study that examines four super-hardy Arctic animals shows how climate change will bring the birth and death rates of each species into sync.

Just four animals make their year-round home in Norway's frigid Svalbard archipelago: reindeer, rock ptarmigans, little rodents known as sibling voles, and Arctic foxes, which eat the other three. Scientists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology studied populations of these animals living on the island of Spitsbergen, which is at 78 degrees north latitude. The three herbivores already fight for limited food supplies during winter, and when ice coats the frozen tundra, they have nothing to eat.

Svalbard, which serves as a sort of Arctic bellwether, is experiencing an increase in freezing rain, which encases snow in a thick crust animals can't penetrate. This is linked to shifting cycles related to a warming Arctic climate. The result: Fragile tundra vegetation will perish under the ice, and the herbivores will starve. Brage Bremset Hansen, from the NTNU's Centre for Conservation Biology, studied years of data on ptarmigans, reindeer, voles and foxes and noticed population crashes among the herbivores after icy winters. Arctic fox populations lagged a year behind, however.


Hansen and colleagues think this is because of a sharp spike and then decline in herbivore carrion. With a ready supply of starved-to-death animal carcasses, foxes have plenty to eat right after a nasty winter, resulting in high fox reproduction that spring and summer. But the next winter, whatever herbivores did make it are probably the hardy ones, and there's less competition among them for the limited food supply--so fewer of them perish. That means a lack of food for foxes that winter and in the following spring, and fox populations plummet. This climate-driven effect is likely present in more complex ecosystems than the frigid plains of Svalbard, Hansen noted--it's just harder to notice.

The Arctic is expected to see more ice fall in the winters as global climate patterns shift, according to the paper. "Svalbard is characterized by large weather fluctuations
and has been considered an ‘early warning' system for the projected increase in extreme events and rainfall during winter across the Arctic," the authors note. "As demonstrated here, such extreme events may have broad ecological implications." The paper is published today in Science.



Startup Wants To 3-D Print Tomorrow's Gun-Safety Tech

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Guns, gun, gunsSvetlana67 | Dreamstime.com
3Dlt, a 3-D printer template marketplace, has launched a firearm-safety design challenge.

When it comes to guns, 3-D printing is usually seen as a harbinger of evil, not good. Last year, a plan to build open-source blueprints for a working 3-D printed firearm drew fierce criticism in a country plagued by shooting deaths.

But at least one group is banking on 3-D printing being an answer to, rather than a source of, America's gun-safety problems. Following President Obama's announcement yesterday asking for more private investment into gun safety technology, 3Dlt, a "3-D template marketplace," has launched a crowd-funded innovation challenge to develop 3-D printed products that improve gun safety.

The Cincinnati-based startup 3Dlt is a platform for buying and selling 3-D printer templates, but it also envisions itself as a social innovator that can help improve the world, one 3-D printed object at a time. Using the crowd-funding platform Indiegogo, the startup launched its first big campaign yesterday: "Innovation Challenge: Improving Firearm Safety."

With a $1,000 minimum goal to reach before March 18, 3Dlt will use the proceeds of its fundraising campaign to launch an innovation contest this spring. Designers will submit their ideas, which will be vetted by a team of firearms experts and later voted on by the general public. In June, the winning teams will receive a certain percentage of the total money raised, and their designs will be sold on 3Dlt.com, which is still in beta.

3Dlt tries to make it clear that their motivations aren't political, declaring "WE ARE NOT TAKING A STANCE ON GUN OWNERSHIP."

"Whether you support 2nd Amendment rights or think tougher gun legislation is the answer, we can all agree that gun safety is vitally important," the project summary notes. Gun safety technologies, such as "smart guns" that only allow an authorized shooter to fire them, are relatively unavailable on the commercial market despite years of research and development poured into them since the late 90s.

As Robert Spitzer--a professor at SUNY Cortland and author of four books on control--told The New York Times last week, "The gun industry has no interest in making smart-guns. There is no incentive for them." Gun manufacturers are concerned with liability, and gun advocates worry that technology would fail in a life-or-death situation.

However, 3Dlt's challenge seems to be more about creating better gun accessories than smarter guns. 3Dlt is not looking for gun designs or gun enhancements, according to the Indiegogo description. The contest info instead suggests that gun locks, safety accessories and ammunition storage could all be designed to be 3-D printed and mass-produced.

The campaign hasn't gotten many funders yet, but if the contest does materialize--and generates genuinely innovative ideas--safer firearms could be a click closer.




NASA Sends Mona Lisa To The Moon Via Laser

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A new way of communicating with far-away objects


NASA has officially just sent the Mona Lisa to the moon using lasers. That is amazing.

How they did that is slightly tricky, so here's some quick background. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is orbiting the Moon. NASA scientists want to see if long-distance communication to space is possible with lasers, and the LRO is tracked by laser, unlike other orbiters, which use radio waves. So, the LRO is perfect for an experiment.

NASA converted an image of the Mona Lisa into a black and white, 152-by-200 pixel image. After that, they signaled to the orbiter how bright to make each pixel by delaying the message (or "pulse) to one of 4,096 slots in a very small time-frame. In other words, instead of a continuous stream of pulses in regular intervals, the laser varied the time between intervals. Depending on the length of that variation, the pixel appeared one of 4,096 shades of gray. Rinse and repeat with each pixel until you have the Mona Lisa.

There were still some kinks in the transmission--some of the pixels weren't the right shade of gray--but scientists corrected for it through processes that are used in correcting problems with CDs and DVDs. And anyway, give the laser a break: it created a masterpiece and sent it into outer space.

[The Atlantic]



GameSci: What Makes A Mobile Game Great?

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Crazy Taxi For iOSSEGA
Two big iOS games show what divides the field.

Two big games dropped for iOS Wednesday night: Temple Run 2 and Final Fantasy: All The Bravest. On my bus ride to work yesterday morning [Ed note: Colin lives in New Jersey for reasons unclear to any of the rest of us.], I played both. I quickly realized that of the two, I'll play the hell out of one and may never pop open the other again. You can tell almost immediately if a game will work on iOS: in many ways, it's about how the game deals with death.

The best iOS games are seamless, with rounds that come in bite-sized bits. When you die, or when it's time to enter the next round of play, it just happens; you barely notice between one play-through of the game and the next. I play games like this in transit, for the most part, and being able to put down or pick up one whenever I want is key to the experience.

You can say that's just asking for low-investment games, sure, but I'm not making my way through Angry Birds Star Wars for the tale of intergalactic politics. If I'm looking for depth in a game, I probably want to be in a position where I can get the most out of the experience--i.e, at home, playing on a screen that doesn't fit in the palm of my hand. For everything else, there's games like these two.

The first game is Temple Run 2, descendant of the enormously popular Temple Run, which I have played more than would be wise to admit. Sequels to iOS-native games often don't mess with the formula all that much, and this sequel is not much different. In the first Temple Run, you maneuver a character as he or she runs through a temple, chased by monkeys, collecting coins and power-ups along the way. But this time, guys, there's just one, bigger monkey, and there's ropes and you're floating in the sky and the graphics are a little better.

If the monkeys get you or you're consumed by fire, you die, as is often the result with attacks by malicious monkeys or fire. Then Temple Run 2 picks you up and drops you back at the beginning of your run, where you live to flee another day. There's an option to purchase more "gems" so you can continue your run where you were, but other than that, it's pretty much seamless from one escape to the next.

Then there's Final Fantasy: All The Bravest. It's more detailed than I have space to explain here, but I'll offer up the short version. You get a mini-battalion of troops, then tap on those troops to make them attack enemies you encounter--and that's about it. If the enemies get the better of your crew, then you can use an item to revive them or, if you must, wait three minutes until one survives, then 3 minutes for the next one, etc.

Yesterday morning, it was too much for my fragile commuter psyche. I had to look around during those 3 minutes, risking eye contact with others. What I was really thinking while I waited for one of my little characters to poof back into existence so I could tap him frantically and hear more terrible dialogue from the next encounter ("I AM THE VOID") was this: I could play an entire round of Crazy Taxi in this amount of time.

That, I think, is what separates truly addictive mobile games like Temple Run from the not-so-fun ones. You might say the best mobile games create a routine that's fun even through repetition; that re-doing what's ostensibly the same task doesn't dull it. That reminds me of the quarter-sucking arcade games of yore, but it also makes me wonder about the future of mobile games. Right now, developers are looking at mobile games and deciding what it is that keeps people glued to them. Once they figure that out, it opens up some room to experiment. Emotional depth isn't what I play mobile games for right now, but maybe, once developers know what hooks us in, they'll create mobile games that move us, too.



Skateboard Scraps Put the Party In Party Wall

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Party WallCODA
MoMA PS1's summer arts installation will feature a large wall built with cast-offs from the skateboard-making process. Party on, Party Wall.

Each year, New York's Museum of Modern Art and its contemporary art affiliate MoMA PS1 select an emerging architect to design a temporary, environmentally minded outdoor installation for MoMA PS1.

This year's winning design by CODA -- an Ithaca, New York-based experimental design studio -- calls for the creation of a large wall covered in woven wood scraps, harvested from an eco-friendly Ithaca skateboard manufacturer. The wall is ballasted by water-filled, polyester-based pillows that can be illuminated at night. A series of archways will provide the shade during the day.

The Party Wall, opening in late June, will be the site of MoMA PS1's summer outdoor music series, Warm Up. Part of the wall can be detached to form benches and communal tables, and a shallow wood stage around the base forms micro-stages for various performances. To top it all off, the wall functions as an aqueduct, carrying a stream of water across its top before feeding it into misting fountains and pools.

[Architectural Record]



How Much Would It Cost To Live On Mars? [Infographic]

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Mars Lander ConceptWikimedia Commons
Spoiler: A lot.

Somebody--no one remembers exactly who--once said that there are three things that matter in real estate: location, location, location. And so it seems: a cramped, roach-ridden studio apartment in Manhattan's West Village will run you $36,000 a year; a cramped little lander with inflatable rooms on Mars will cost something in the neighborhood of $200 million.

Plus transportation. And food, of course. Here's a full breakdown, infographic-style, from the good people at Neo Mammalian Studios:

Click here to see a larger version.



Meet The 19-Year-Old Taking On Louisiana Creationists

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Zack KopplinBaton Rouge Advocate

A 2008 Louisiana law that brought creationist texts into classrooms didn't sit well with Zack Kopplin. Now 19, Kopplin has been battling the Louisiana Science Education Act, becoming one of its harshest critics and, as our friends at io9 show in a great piece, a defender of science in schools. Definitely worth a read. [io9]



10 '80s Tech Inventions That Never Really Took Off

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Head-mounted displays from the December 1989 issue of Popular Science
Including a vibrating sauna, an all-in-one credit card, a van that converts into a sports car and more

Life in 2013 isn't that much different from life in the 1980s. There are no flying cars. There are no floating cloud cities. There is no teleportation or interstellar space travel.

But what we do have in abundance are those quirky little inventions that make life just that tiny bit easier: affordable cell phones, GPS systems, high-speed internet, debit cards, frost-free freezers, budget airlines and longer-lasting batteries to name a few.

And then there are the inventions that never really took off.

The difficulty of predicting the future is that those predictions are often based on present technology. When Jules Verne wrote the novel "Paris in the Twentieth Century" in 1863, he envisioned the Paris of 1960 filled with glass sky-scrapers, high-speed trains, petrol-fuelled cars and even a worldwide "telegraphic" communications network. However, the main character still writes with a feathered quill pen.

You can look at a lot of inventions from the 1980s that way: futuristic solutions to problems we just don't have today (and maybe never did). Herewith are 10 '80s technological innovations that never became as integral to our daily lives as their inventors surely would've liked, lifted from the pages of Popular Science.

David M. Green is a comedian, writer and game show host from Melbourne, Australia. His TV quiz show "31 Questions" airs on stations around Australia and New Zealand and is available on YouTube. Season 2 is currently in pre-production for debut in mid 2013. Follow him on Twitter.



Make Your Own DIY Solar Charger

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DIY Solar ChargerThe Big Book Of Hacks
Keep your gadgets powered even when you're off the grid.

MATERIALS
Plywood
Jigsaw
Drill
Nails
Hammer
Two 1-inch (2.5 cm) wood slats
5-watt, 12-volt solar panel
Hinge
Soldering iron and solder ¼-inch (6.35-mm) plastic mono plug
Cigarette-lighter Y adapter
12-volt 12AH rechargeable battery
Solar DC charger controller
4 feet (1.2 m) of 18-gauge wire
15-amp DC panel meter
Two female terminal disconnects

STEP 1
Check online to discover your home's latitude. This is the angle at which you'll mount your solar panel.

STEP 2
Cut six pieces of plywood for the box. The lid should be slightly larger than the solar panel. Trim the top edges of the side, front, and back pieces to the appropriate angle. Cut the bottom to fit.

STEP 3
Drill a hole in each side panel for airflow: one in the back panel for the controller and battery cords, and one in the lid for the solar panel's cord. Then nail the wooden slats to the lid and mount the solar panel to it. Assemble the box with a hinge for the lid.

STEP 4
Snip off the cigarette-lighter plug and solder the ¼-inch (6.35-mm) mono plug onto the Y adapter. Insert the mono plug into the controller's 12-volt output.

STEP 5
Connect all four power leads from the battery and the solar panel to the controller's input terminals. Hook up the 15-amp DC panel meter to the controller's input terminal for the panel.

STEP 6
Test all connections with the meter. Connect the red wire with a female-terminal disconnect to the battery's positive terminal, and connect the black wire to the negative terminal.

STEP 7
Place the station in the sun with the solar panel pointed south (north if you're in the southern hemisphere). Plug something in!

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.




Australian Firefighters Ingest Data-Transmitting Pills When They Go To Work

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Australian BushfireWikimedia Commons
A pill can monitor firefighters' vital signs on the job.

A new data-delivering pill could help firefighters monitor their reactions to heat stress, a new trial in Australia shows.

Heat stress can lead to various problems for firefighters working in hot environments, including unconsciousness and cardiac arrest, and the standard method of measuring core body temperature through the ear is not always effective enough. Firefighters working in extreme conditions during Australia's 2009 Black Sunday fires struggled with heat stress in spite of hydration procedures, signaling a need for greater research into how to manage it.

In a trial, 50 firefighters from Victoria's County Fire Authority swallowed an Equivital EQ02 LifeMonitor capsule to monitor their body's reaction during a training exercise.

While they evacuated 20 people from a burning building, a thermometer and a transmitter within the pill sent data to a device on the chest, which then transmitted vital data to an external computer on the firefighters' skin temperature, heart rate and respiration rate. If their core body temperature is increasing too quickly, firefighters can be removed from the fire to a rehabilitation area to cool down. After a few days, the pill is expelled from the body the good old fashioned way.

The same device was used to measure Felix Baumgartner's vital signs during his 23-mile skydive last fall. It's not the only data-transmitting pill Earlier this year, the FDA approved the Feedback System, a pill containing a chip that can relay information about the medication you've taken through your phone's Bluetooth.

Monitoring heat stress is especially important for Australian firefighters right now. Sydney broke its heat record today with a high of 45.8 degrees Celsius -- more than 114 degrees Fahrenheit -- and the country has been plagued by bushfires in recent weeks, with more than 120 fires currently burning.

The Equivital capsule will continue to be tested at higher temperatures between 100 to 600 degrees Celsius (about 200 to 1100 degrees Fahrenheit).

[News.com.au]



BeerSci: Why You Should Never Drink Beer From A Clear Glass Bottle

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Beersci LogoTodd Detweiler
Avoid gross-smelling drinks by protecting your brew from light.

The subject of Beer Gone Bad came up at the office the other day, and I gave my colleagues an impromptu lesson in why "skunking" in beer is very different from a lot of the other ways a beer can turn on you. (And there are many, many ways. We'll cover some of those in a later column.) I wasn't initially going to write about this particular topic because I thought that pretty much everyone who drank beer and was science-minded knew about the correlation between sunlight and a skunky beer. But it turns out that I was wrong -- it wasn't a well-known phenomenon, even among my colleagues -- so I'm going to do my beer-nerdulent duty and replicate the explanation here.

Skunked beer smells just how it sounds: You crack open a bottle and an unmistakeably mustelid pong hits your nostrils. This can happen in any beer, but skunking seems most prominent in lagers due to their otherwise-mellow aroma profiles. Further, many of these self-same lagers (think Corona, Heineken, etc) are also shipped in clear or light green bottles.

The industry term for skunking is "lightstruck," and it's a beer fault that has been written about since about 1875. By the 1960s, scientists had narrowed the culprits down to a triple-threat of hops, a sulfur compound and a molecule known as a flavin. But despite more than a hundred years in the literature, the mechanism and chemical reactions that caused skunking were only elucidated in 2001 with the paper Mechanism for Formation of the Lightstruck Flavor in Beer Revealed by Time-Resolved Electron Paramagnetic Resonance by Burns et al. in Chemistry--A European Journal. In it, researchers used a special kind of spectroscopy, the aforementioned time-resolved electron paramagnetic resonance (TREPR), to look at how certain compounds in beer behaved as they were irradiated with light. TREPR is similar to what happens when you get an MRI, except that in MRI the technician is looking for the spins of atomic nuclei, while TREPR is looking for spins of unpaired electrons. This is important because most photochemical reactions, at some point in the pathway, create unpaired electrons. Following where those go, and to which molecules they are attached, is key to understanding the entire reaction mechanism.

What those researchers found is that there are two distinct pathways to getting skunky-smelling compounds in your beer. The two main actors is this tale of woe: hop alpha acids and light. Not heat. Not oxygen. Light.

The bittering agent generated from hops while boiling beer wort is a compound called isohumulone. Ultraviolet light can degrade isohumulone all by itself. But it turns out that visible light can also induce isohumulone degradation -- it just needs a helper molecule, in the form of riboflavin. Once the proverbial ball starts rolling (or, in this case, the electrons start hopping), a series of reactions take place that eventually produce the compound 3-methylbut-2-ene-1-thiol. That mouthful, known colloquially as 3-MBT, is your skunk. In fact, 3-MBT is chemically very similar to one of the three main compounds found in a skunk's defense spray.

All beers that have been bittered with hops can suffer skunking: As an experiment, get a draft beer poured into a clear glass and then let it sit in the sun for 10 minutes or so. Compare that beer to one fresh from the tap. You should definitely detect some skunk in the lightstruck beer. With clear, green or blue bottles, the glass doesn't filter out the ultraviolet and blue wavelengths that start the skunking reaction. Brown bottles are much better at keeping those wavelengths out of your beer.

In recent years, "advanced hop products" such as dihydroisohumulones (basically, chemically modified hop extracts) have proven to be "light stable." I don't know for sure if the likes of Heineken or Corona use these things in their beers. But recent work by scientists in Belgium indicates that even these ostensibly light-impervious hop extracts still generate off-flavors from exposure to light, including an "onion-like" compound 2-sulphanyl-3-methylbutanol -- just not to the degree that raw hops do.

In the end, if you want to avoid the skunk entirely, just buy a beer that has been packaged in a keg, cask or can. Those beers can (and do) develop bad flavors, but you'll never get one that has been skunked.



Study: Viagra Helps Mice Burn Fat Faster

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Viagra
Will a drug already popular among athletes suddenly become a hit with the couch potato crowd? We hope not.

We've heard about athletes using Viagra to gain a (modest/debatable) competitive edge. Now, researchers are reporting another potential perk of the little blue pill, one that might appeal to people on the other end of the physical spectrum: the drug may help burn away excess fat.

The key to the drug's fat-burning potential lies in its apparent ability to help convert one kind of fat--"white adipose tissue," the kind most people have in abundance--to another kind, called "brown adipose tissue." The difference is described nicely in a blog post by biologist Jalees Rehman:

Brown fat cells are packed with many small fat droplets and mitochondria, which is why they appear "brown" under the microscope. Their mitochondria contain high levels of the protein UCP-1 (uncoupling protein 1), which "uncouples" fat metabolism from the generation of chemical energy molecules (ATP) for the cell. Instead, brown fat cells release the energy contained in the fat in the form of heat. This explains why brown fat is primarily found in hibernating animals or in newborns that need to generate heat.

In the new study, scientists administered Viagra to mice and monitored the levels of UCP-1 in the rodents' fat. Over the course of a week, they found, levels of UCP-1 increased dramatically, and the formerly white fat began turning beige.

In his blog post, Rehman--who was not involved with the study--goes on to say that scientists have been trying lots of methods for "browning" fat, with the aim of combating obesity. But, he warns, "overweight people should not expect that "Super-Size" orders at their favorite fast food joint will come with a Viagra pill." The science is young, and doctors don't even know yet if brown fat is really healthier than white fat.

What I'd like to know is whether this fat browning technique could someday be used to warm up people who are perpetually cold--people who may, in fact, be wearing their winter jacket indoors while typing this post. People whose hands--according to a co-worker's thermal scanner--are currently 76 degrees. I never thought I would ask this question, but here it is: Could Viagra cure me of Raynaud's?

[via SciLogs]

Mystery Animal Contest: Who Is This Fluffy Beastie?

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Mystery Animal: January 18, 2013TBA (after winner is announced)
Guess the species (either common or Linnaean) by tweeting at us--we're @PopSci--and get your name listed right here! Plus eternal glory, obviously. Update: we have a winner!

So, here are the rules: To answer, follow us on Twitter and tweet at us with the hashtag #mysteryanimal. For example:

Hey @PopSci, is the #mysteryanimal a baboon?

And then I might say "if you think that's a baboon, perhaps you are the baboon!" But probably not, because this is a positive environment and all guesses are welcome and also this is not a very common animal so guess whatever you want!

The first person to get it right wins! We'll retweet the answer from @PopSci, and also update this post so your amazing animal knowledge will be permanently etched onto the internet. Show your kids! Your dumb kids who thought that was a baboon!

Update: And the winner is...@xylem_n_phloem, who correctly guessed that this little fellow is a colugo, also known as a flying lemur. Specifically, this one is a Sunda flying lemur. Colugos are very fascinating creatures--they're gliders, like a flying squirrel or sugar glider, but aren't rodents or possums. Instead, they're the sole members of their entire family, because they are so unlike any other animal. We think they're an early branch of, believe it or not, the primates, which is why they're sometimes called "flying lemurs," though they are not, strictly speaking, lemurs. They're the most capable gliding mammals on the planet, able to glide over 200 feet with minimal loss in altitude. The Sunda flying lemur is found in southeast Asia.



FYI: Why Would Someone Create A Fake Internet Girlfriend?

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Manti Te'oUS Presswire
Put some people in front of a screen, and they won't always reveal the most truthful information.

This week, Deadspin broke the news that Notre Dame football star Manti Te'o's dead girlfriend--one of the most heartbreaking sports stories of last year--was a hoax. The fake girlfriend was created by a 22-year-old guy named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo. Turns out, Tuiasosopo might've engineered other false personalities, too. We had to ask: What would make someone do that?

The short answer is, some people look at the internet and, subconsciously, see a chance to experiment with identities, free of consequences. Those people can be shy or outgoing, cheerleader or geek, but there seems to be some kind of personality type that changes when given a megaphone and the shelter of anonymity. We don't know who, exactly, will be the ones to open up--it's even debatable if it's an "opening up" or a chance to act out of character--but for some reason, there's a small segment of the population that's prone to deception, given the right forum.

Sure, everyone lies a little. Technology has--and has always--helped us fudge the truth. Jeremy Birnholtz, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, studies so-called "butler lies," small fibs created by the ambiguity of technology or gadgets in the vein of a butler telling a visitor the master isn't available. Running late? Tell your friend his text didn't go through; he's got no way to pin it on you, anyway. A face-to-face conversation takes away some of that ambiguity.

If we wanted to extrapolate to bigger lies, we can look at a related, widely cited theory about anonymity: the online disinhibition effect. It's worth reading the entire article, but the short version says giving people a platform--especially one where they're invisible--is enough to make them act out. What we can't say for sure is who's going to exhibit the effect. The paper's author, John Suler of Rider University, explains why:

Personality styles [vary] greatly in the strength of defense mechanisms and tendencies towards inhibition or expression. People with histrionic styles tend to be very open and emotional, whereas compulsive people are more restrained. The online disinhibition effect will interact with these personality variables, in some cases resulting in a small deviation from the person's baseline (offline) behavior, while in other cases causing dramatic changes. Future research can focus on which people, under what circumstances, are more predisposed to the various elements of online disinhibition.

One of the pillars of Suler's theory is the "minimization of status and authority," the idea that everyone is equal in front of a screen.One of the pillars of his theory is the "minimization of status and authority," the idea that everyone is equal in front of a screen, and it makes sense that someone less concerned with authority might be more likely to lie.

What's more, Birnholtz explains, social media has made lies more viable by changing our expectations for truth. He says the leading theory of online identity used to be reminiscent of the old New Yorker cartoon: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." In other words: people use the web to try out a different identity.

But recent research shows that's not what's happening, Birnholtz says. People, for the most part, just want to be themselves online. In fact, the truth is the rule, not the exception, for the most popular forms of social media.

That guy with a throw-away account in the comments section or on Reddit could be a doctor, sure, but most people aren't banking on that. Take Facebook. It's a supremely self-correcting ecosystem. You can lie, but the expectation for truth is high enough that the lie will be pointed out. In other words, so many people aren't lying that users are primed to expect the truth. All of those fake share-this-to-donate-money links on the social web keep getting shared for a reason.

It's a tangled web we weave: Yes, (some) people are more likely to act out, and deceive, on the internet. Today's internet is more widely self-correcting, but at the same time, a subconscious expectation of truth might make us less prepared when a lie does come. Might not be such a bad idea to always assume you're talking with a dog.



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