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Today On Mars: Opportunity Begins Its 10th Year Of Mars Roving

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Opportunity: A Simulated Self-PortraitNASA
Curiosity may get all the kudos these days, but the wizened Opportunity rover continues to log miles on the Martian surface.

Today on Mars the robotic rover Opportunity (that's right, Opportunity--remember when we all used to care about Opportunity?) is hitting a major milestone. The rover touched down on the surface of Mars Jan. 24, 2004, just three weeks after its sister rover Spirit landed elsewhere on the planet. That makes today the beginning of Opportunity's tenth year of Mars exploration--not bad for a machine that was designed for a three-month mission.

Spirit and Opportunity were sent to the Red Planet in search of signs of its hydrological history (and, therefore, potential past life). Spirit made perhaps its biggest contribution in 2007 when it uncovered a long-defunct hydrothermal system in Gusev crater, an indication that Mars was once home to both liquid water and an energy source, key ingredients for life as we understand it. But in 2010 it became stuck in a bed of soft sand and couldn't reorient its solar panels in a way that would allow it to survive the Martian winter. Attempts to revive it during the Mars spring of 2011 failed and it was pronounced dead.

Opportunity enjoyed its own brush with death back in April of 2005 when it too became stuck in a sand dune. NASA mission operators spent weeks doing simulations back on Earth before finally figuring out how to rock Opportunity free and get it moving across the surface again--and it continues to roll to this day. It is currently exploring the rim of Endeavour Crater, a geological environment rich in clay deposits that may have once been capable of supporting microbial life.

Both rovers, of course, far outlived their three-month design lives. Opportunity has now logged 22.03 miles on Mars since touching down, and with the exception of some expected wear and tear engineers say the rover is still in excellent shape. In fact, Opportunity very well may soon overtake the Soviet lunar rover Lunokhod 2 for the all-time record for most distance traveled on another planetary body (Lunokhod 2 traveled 23 miles across the moon in 1973). By comparison Mars Rover Curiosity, even with its tendency to dominate the headlines, still has a long way to go.

[SPACE]




A Geek's Guide To Fashion Week

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Haute Technology The 3-D printed cape of the future. Stratasys
Dutch designer Iris van Herpen uses 3-D printing to make out-of-this-world fashion.

Dutch designer Iris van Herpen has been known to use technology to push the fashion world into the future--a crazy future full of 3-D printed designs that look more like architecture than clothing.

Her latest collection brings 3-D printing to Paris Fashion Week. For VOLTAGE, van Herpen collaborated with 3-D printing manufacturers, an architect and a professor from MIT's Media Lab. Her multi-material skirt-and-cape combo and a lacy dress made using laser sintering launch high fashion into a whole new dimension.


Click here to enter the gallery



The Latest In Classroom Protection: A Handheld Bulletproof Whiteboard

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Bulletproof Whiteboards Next up: A calculator that's also a subcompact Glock? Hardwire
Perfect for differential equations, group vocabulary exercises, and stopping a 9mm round at close range.

File this under things we're not quite sure how to feel about: A Maryland armor manufacturer has developed a bulletproof whiteboard for use in school classrooms. Created in direct response to December's tragic schoolhouse shooting in Newtown, Conn., the 18-by-20-inch whiteboards are fitted with rubberized handles and forearm straps on the back so teachers can wield them as shields capable of stopping a handgun round fired at close range.

Hardwire, the company behind the whiteboards (as well as a 10-by-13-inch ballistic clipboard aimed at serving the same purpose), has experience with combat defense. The white board material is a derivative of the polyethylene-based textile known as Dynameer, which Hardwire developed for the Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles most notably seen in Afghanistan and Iraq. Hardwire CEO George Tunis told USA Today that he wanted to throw his company's expertise behind the problem of gun violence in schools and figure out an innovative solution.

The whiteboard is simply meant to help educators thrust into crisis situations to buy time, he explained, not to turn teachers into first responders or combatants. Let's hope that's the case.

[USA Today]



Why Do We Want To Squeeze Cute Things?

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Egbert Don't you just want to pinch his little hamster cheeks? Keith Pomakis via Wikimedia Commons
Studying how adorable animals can turn us aggressive

Seeing something cute actually does bring out aggression in us, according to a paper presented at Society for Personality and Social Psychology's annual meeting in New Orleans last Friday.

Researchers found 109 people to look at pictures of animals -- cute, funny and "neutral" photos of fluffy, fluffy puppies. The lucky participants then rated how they felt about the pictures: whether they agreed with the statement like "I just can't handle it!" (or perhaps "It's so fluffy I want to die!" whether they made them want to squeeze something or whether they were suddenly seized with the impulse to say something like "grr!" The cuter the animal, the more aggressive the response.

The study's researchers, led by Rebecca Dyer, a graduate student in psychology at Yale University, dubs the phenomenon "cute aggression."

"We think it's about high positive-affect, an approach orientation and almost a sense of lost control," she said. It's so adorable, it drives you crazy.

But for the sake of thoroughness, researchers did a second experiment to test whether the aggression was simply verbal, or whether people really did want to act out in response to wide-eyed kittens and cherubic babies. Volunteers were given bubble wrap and told they could pop as much of it as they wanted.

When faced with a slideshow of cute animals, people popped 120 bubbles, whereas people watching the funny and neutral slideshows popped 80 and 100 bubbles respectively.

Dyer's suggests that one reason we have so much pent-up aggression over cute pictures is that seeing something cute, like a baby, drives us to want to take care of it. But we can't reach through a photograph to cuddle it, so we get frustrated -- and then aggressive.

Another possibility is that it's just too much of a good thing -- sometimes we portray an onslaught of positive emotion in a negative way, like when you're so happy you cry. Dyer speculates that giving positive emotions a negative spin might help us regulate that high energy.

So the next time an aunt moves in to pinch your cheeks, just think -- you can't help being cute. And if there are any follow up studies, I'd happily volunteer to look at some puppies -- kittens and bunnies are within my expertise, too.

[LiveScience]



The Weather Outside Today Affects Your Stance On Climate Change

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Calved Iceberg An iceberg in or just outside the Ilulissat fjord that likely calved from Jakobshavn Isbrae, the fastest glacier in west Greenland. It is rumored that it was an iceberg from this glacier that sank the Titanic. Courtesy of Ian Joughin
Unseasonably warm? Global warming! Unseasonably cold? No global warming!

Republicans and Democrats stick with their (polarized) attitudes on climate change, more or less. It's the independent voters who are more easily swayed. So easily, in fact, that an unseasonably warm or cold day is enough to change some opinions.

Researchers from the University of New Hampshire correlated meteorological data with 5,000 random-sample telephone interviews. Respondents were asked whether they a) thought climate change was real and caused by humans or b) was either not happening at all or wasn't caused by humans. If the day before or day of the interview was unseasonably warm or cold, the respondents' overall attitude about climate change, well, changed. When it was warm, the interviewees were more likely to believe in anthropogenic climate change. When it was cold, they weren't.

But it wasn't the Democrats or Republicans who were swinging the data: it was the independents. And their opinions changed quite a bit. On the coldest days, less than 40 percent of independents surveyed recognized climate change. On the warmest days, that number jumped to more than 70 percent.

The interviews were only conducted within New Hampshire, so it might technically be more accurate to say New Hampshire independents change their opinions about climate change based on the weather. But the researchers point out that the state's demographics are pretty similar to nationwide ones. There might be other factors contributing besides the weather, too, but researchers did correct for factors like education, age, and sex.

Maybe we can start scheduling elections for the mildest days, just to keep the playing field even.



New Gene Therapy Braces T Cells Against HIV

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HIV-1 Budding From Cultured LymphocyteCDC
It's not a cure, but researchers hope inserting a few genes into T cell receptors can keep HIV cells at bay.

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and their collaborators elsewhere have opened up a new front in the war on HIV/AIDS. Using the tools of the geneticist to insert a series of HIV-resistant genes into T cells--the body's immune cells that are actively targeted by HIV and AIDS--researchers have a found a potent means of fending off HIV cells that would otherwise inhabit and destroy the cells.

HIV and AIDS are usually treated through a cocktail of antiretroviral drugs that essentially attack the viruses at various phases of their replication processes. Because the lifecycle of HIV/AIDS is so short (just a few days, if that) it can mutate quickly as it replicates, so this kind of therapy usually involves a complex combination of drugs--many of which carry undesirable side effects.

This new gene therapy attempts to choke off HIV replication at the point the virus tries to infiltrate a healthy T cell, keeping that T cell healthy and denying the virus its chance to replicate--at least via that particular T cell. The virus usually gains access to the T cell by attaching itself to surface proteins known as CCR5 and CXCR4 (different strains of the virus target different surface proteins). Researchers have previously been able to deactivate the receptor protein CCR5 by developing a special protein that attaches to it and smashes its receptor gene, rendering it inactive for HIV's purposes.

The Stanford team's technique does the same thing but also goes a step further. It uses the same protein to target the DNA that lends the CCR5 its receptor status. But rather than simply smashing that DNA, this protein breaks the DNA sequence and inserts a few new genes in there that are known to express resistance to HIV. This technique of placing certain genes within the genome is known as "stacking," and it's the secret sauce in the Stanford team's anti-HIV recipe.

In lab tests in which T cells carrying these modified genes were introduced to HIV, this method blocked HIV infection via CCR5 and CXCR4 with surprising efficacy, providing 1,200-fold protection against HIV carrying the CCR5 receptor and 1,700-fold protection against those carrying the CXCR4 receptor. The control group of T cells all succumbed to HIV in less than one month.

It's important to note that this isn't a cure or a vaccine. But it is a way to insert a group of healthy, resistant T cells into an HIV/AIDS patient to stave off immune system collapse--and do so without a heavy regimen of antiretrovirals. There are certainly potential drawbacks--tinkering with genomes always carries the risk that something could go wrong, leading to cellular aberrations (like cancer). And it's not necessarily easy to ensure that the protein delivers the resistant genes to the right place in the genome.

Nonetheless, the team plans to keep working on its technique, and the hope is to get into clinical trials within five years. We haven't quite arrived at a cure, but we're certainly getting closer.

[Stanford School of Medicine]



Does Lightning Cause Headaches?

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Head CaseWikimedia Commons
A new study finds a link between lightning and migraines.

Some people say they can feel storms coming. New research indicates chronic headache suffers might be able to sense lightning.

In a study online today in the journal Cephalalgia, University of Cincinnati researchers say that there's a increased chance of headaches when lightning is nearby.

Participants recruited based on the criteria for International Headache Society-defined migraines were instructed to record their headaches in a diary every day for three to six months. For chronic headache sufferers, the study found that the risk of headache increased 31 percent when lightning struck within 25 miles of participants' homes, and the risk of migraine increased 28 percent.

The way weather affects headaches isn't precisely known. The study's authors used mathematical models to account for other factors that could be contributing to an increase in the frequency of headaches. Yet even taking into account related effects like barometric pressure and humidity, their results showed a 19 percent increased risk for headaches on lightning days. Greater instances of negatively charged lightning currents also led to a higher chance of headache.

Vincent Martin, one of the study's lead authors, is a University of Cincinnati professor who studies migraines. He explains a few different ways that lightning might trigger headaches.

"Electromagnetic waves emitted from lightning could trigger headaches," he says. "In addition, lightning produces increases in air pollutants like ozone and can cause release of fungal spores that might lead to migraine."

However, they say further research is needed to determine the exact tie between a pounding head and meteorological factors.



Breakthrough Study That Found Consciousness In Vegetative Patients Was Flawed

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Electroencephalography, or EEGPetter Kallioinen via Wikimedia
A reanalysis by a second research group suggests a 2011 study that used EEG to detect consciousness in three vegetative patients was fooled by randomness.

In late 2011, a University of Western Ontario study rocked the neuroscience community by reporting that inexpensive and portable handheld electroencephalogram (EEG) scanners had detected signs of consciousness in three people thought to be in persistent vegetative states. Now a team of researchers from Weill Cornell Medical College (that's Cornell University's medical school in NYC) is saying "not so fast." In this week's issue of the journal Lancet, the Weill Cornell team says the study suffers from statistical errors. More to the point, the Western Ontario researchers misinterpreted noise in the data.

In the original study, researchers took EEG readings of 16 patients in persistent vegetative states while asking them to perform simple physical tasks, like wiggling their toes. Of those, the study claimed, three showed neural activity when given the command that is consistent with understanding and responding to aforementioned command. The findings were huge, or so it seemed at the time. Not only did they demonstrate that it's possible to perceive consciousness in those thought to be in vegetative states, but it's possible to do so with a cheap, bedside diagnostic.

The reanalysis team from Weill Cornell is careful to note that it did not set out to refute the earlier study, but rather to confirm it. And while it doesn't criticize the idea of using bedside EEG for consciousness detection, it does criticize the statistical methods the Western Ontario researchers used to arrive at their conclusions. The Western Ontario team failed to account for noise in the data, the reanalysis says, like "contamination of EEG signals with muscle activity and the random characteristics of the EEG over extended periods of time." The report goes on to note that the signals the original researchers pointed to as proof of conscious thought don't look the same as the signals that were observed in the control group.

Of course, the parameters of consciousness are very important to the people they most effect. Families often have to make life-and-death decisions based on a doctor's opinion of whether loved ones in persistent vegetative states can regain consciousness or not.

While this is a setback for the original study findings and perhaps for the U. of Western Ontario team, it's not necessarily a setback for neuroscience at large. This is how peer review works, and the occasional refutation of scientific claims proves exactly that--that it works.




IBM's Warmth-Activated Gel Can Break Up Tough Bacterial Biofilms And Kill Superbugs

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Busting A Biofilm On the left is a mature and healthy MRSA biofilm. After the hydrogel is applied, the biofilm is destroyed, as seen on the right. The small portion of remaining cells have drastically disrupted membranes, preventing resistance. This type of biofilm disruption has not been reported in other antimicrobial hydrogels or synthetic polymers. IBN/IBM
And it is not vulnerable to evolved resistance.

Drug-resistant bacteria present a couple types of problems--they don't die when attacked with typical antibiotics, and they form slimy, hard-to-remove colonies called biofilms, meaning they literally stick around after you've tried to wash them off. New treatments to prevent their spread have to take a different approach from other antimicrobial products. Researchers at IBM have a new idea, and they say it could work in hospitals, countertops and on your skin.

The new antimicrobial hydrogel, made of 90 percent water, gloops together spontaneously when warmed to body temperature. It can bust through biofilms and kill a whole host of bacterial types, from small bugs like E. coli to large bugs like methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The hydrogel is comprised of specially designed polymers, which are biodegradable and positively charged. When mixed with water and warmed up, the polymers self-assemble into chains, and the result is a thick gel.

The research team, led by Yi-Yan Yang at the Singapore-based Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, says the gel can be incorporated into creams, thin-film coatings for medical instruments, wound treatments, and plenty of other uses.

Their key breakthrough is the way the material hunts down and kills its quarry. Rather than interfering with DNA or selectively binding to a bacterial cell wall, like antibiotics do, the polymers grab on to the cell wall and rip it open, letting the contents leak out. This is possible because of their positive charge--matching the negatively charged cell wall of a microbe--and their hydrophobicity, or avoidance of water. Bacteria stand no chance, and they can't evolve resistance to this method of attack the way they could evolve resistance to the proteins found in drugs. It's a physical attack.

Right now, the researchers don't even know how the biofilm disruption works--they just know it does, said James Hedrick, an advanced organic materials scientist at IBM Research. "It is clearly interacting in a favorable way that allows this stuff to be eradicated," he said. "It can remove this extracellular matrix of proteins, rip them up, and eradicate the microbes below. We found this to be very exciting."

The team first came up with this concoction a couple years ago, but back then the treatment involved biodegradable nanoparticles that could only target large bacteria, like MRSA. By refining their methods and crafting a hydrogel instead, the team was able to broaden the range of microbes it can tackle.

IBM is in talks with several possible companies to sell the hydrogel as a new antimicrobial product, Hedrick said. Meanwhile, he and the other researchers are setting their sights on another target. "Now that we understand the mode of action, we are starting to move in and think about viruses," he said. "That is high on our priority list--we're looking at tuberculosis, dengue fever, things that there aren't a lot of solutions for. Those are areas we are looking to move towards."

A paper describing the new hydrogel appears in the new issue of Angewandte Chemie.



Interactive Floor Lets You Play Games With Your Upside-Down Self

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Play soccer, knock over some dominoes, and more activities you and Mirror You can enjoy.


"Smart" floors that monitor your movements might not be practical for a while yet, but this one seems like a lot of fun. The GravitySpace floor monitors your weight, and beams a mirror image of yourself back. After that, the image can do some neat activities, like play soccer. It could even perform customized functions just for you, like turning on your favorite TV show when you sit down on the couch, or monitor itself for unfamiliar footsteps, keeping you safe from intruders.

The glass floor is surrounded by infrared LEDs covered with pressure-sensitive film. Below the glass floor is a camera and projector. When someone steps down on the film, it stops the infrared beams. The camera notices that, and the projector can beam up an image (or move a soccer ball) in response. Presto: quality time with your mirror self.

[New Scientist]



In An Era Of Climate Change, Where Will The Fish, And The Money, Go?

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How fish adapt to a warming world is top of mind for governments eager to profit off of a robust fishing industry. Will climate change rule in their favor? Like the American pika and some other land-based creatures, fish are on the move as they try to adapt to a changing climate. One place this is happening is the seas surrounding the Arctic Ocean. But precisely how fast, in what direction, and to what effect the fish will migrate from their home turf is a big unknown.

DISPATCHES FROM THE ARCTIC


This series explores the science and implications of global warming in the North Atlantic Arctic. Boulder-based writer Susan Moran is filing live reports from the Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø, Norway.

Marine biologists and climate-modeling scientists are following their trail seeking answers. That trail emits a scent of money to fisheries operators. Although no commercial fisheries exist yet in the Arctic Ocean and adjacent continental shelf seas, operators know that could change. (Commercial fishing is currently concentrated on the sub-Arctic seas surrounding the Arctic Ocean.) Naturally, they want the potential bounty. So do nations inhabiting or otherwise potentially fishing in the Arctic. In fact, it's one reason (along with its interest in fossil fuel and mineral extraction) why China is trying to secure observer status on the Arctic Council, a committee of eight Arctic states that together shape policy for the region.

The seas around the Arctic Ocean are estimated to host at least 20 percent of all the fish in the world's seas. Aside from their economic promise the northern seas could also play a big role in contributing to global food security. "The world's growing population means need more access to food resources," Lisbeth Berg Hansen, Norway's Minister of Fisheries and Coastal Affairs, told the Arctic Frontiers conference I'm attending this week in the northern Norwegian city of Tromso. Norway exports more seafood than any other nation. Its cod and other commercial fisheries are concentrated in the Lofoten Islands in the Norwegian Sea, which boast the largest cod stock in the world.

Predicting future patterns of fish distribution and migration is difficult in part because the surface water termperatures in the Arctic waters are as warm as they have ever been, leaving no historical comparison points. Further, scientific models used to estimate marine primary productivity--namely the availability of phytoplankton that are the key ingredient in the diet of zooplankton and fish--are still quite crude and lack data. "There are huge discrepancies between them... something like a two orders of magnitude," said Benjamin Planque, a senior scientist at the Institute of Marine Research here in Tromso. The Institute conducts research related to fisheries and makes recommendations to the fisheries industry.

Fish migration map
Fish migration map2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, Clifford Grabhorn

What is as clear as the pristine seas north of Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland, Denmark (including Greenland), Russia, the United States, Canada is that fish will only travel where they can find enough food. That's why many marine scientists are trying to better understand current and future primary productivity there. "We are talking about some of the most productive ecosystems found in the waters adjacent to the Arctic Ocean," said Paul Wassmann, an Arctic biologist at the University of Tromso. These waters are brimming with Greenland halibut, cod, capelin, Kamchatka king crab, along which those higher up in the food web--whales, seals and other marine mammals. He cautioned, however, that it is "an open question" how shifts in primary productivity in various locations will translate into fish stocks.

Here's a snapshot of how some commercial fish species appear to be shifting:

-Cod are moving relatively slowly northward. Thanks to sound fisheries management practices among Norwegian and Russian operators and other factors, cod stock in the Barents Sea, located north of Norway and Russia, is at an all-time high, according to the Institute of Marine Research. Cod are nothing if not resourceful; they'll eat each other (younger kin) when the pickings are slim.

-Mackerel have already expanded their distribution area to the north and west over the last few years, stretching well into Faroese and Icelandic waters. In fact, it's a bone of contention between Iceland and Norway (I'll leave geopolitics for another day). And they may be heading to Russia, which Dr. Wassmann calls the "climate change winner."

-Capelin abhor super deep waters, so they are not expected to migrate into the Arctic Ocean itself.

Back to the fish diet. Primary production relies on a slew of elements, including sunlight, water and air temperature, currents, wind patterns, salinity, and sea ice cover and extent. All of these are moving targets in the Arctic under climate change. Arctic air temperature is expected to increase 6 to 10 degrees higher than global average by 2100, according to estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Arctic Council. And over the last 30 years the ice volume in Arctic has shrunk by at least 70 percent.

Climate affects all levels of food, especially those at the bottom of the food chain, phytoplankton. Other creatures that rely on phytoplankton, from zooplankton to fish to sea birds and whales, respond to climate indirectly, as Harald Loeng, research director of the Institute of Marine Research (IMR), noted at the conference.

While the Arctic seas are extremely productive, they are also very stratified, meaning there's not much vertical mixing of nutrients in the ocean. Warming surface water temperature and melting ice result in stratification. As warming and thawing continue scientists expect the water column to be more stratified, which will prevent nutrients from percolating up to the surface.

That process means there won't be enough food in the Arctic Ocean, at least not enough to lure a commercially harvestable amount of them. "It's unlikely, even if surface water is exposed to winds (which transport nutrients from the bottom toward the top of the water column) [that it] will be enough to erode that stratification," said Jean-Eric Tremblay, a biologist at Laval University in Quebec.

Sunset over TromsoSusan Moran

Susan Moran is a freelance journalist based in Boulder, Colo., covering energy development, climate science, agriculture, environmental health and other issues. She writes for the New York Times, The Economist, Nature and other publications. And she co-hosts a weekly science show on KGNU community radio, called "How On Earth."



Dung Beetles Navigate By The Stars

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Straight RollingWikimedia Commons
Views of the Milky Way provide more than just ambiance for the fecal-foraging insect.

Celestial navigation has guided man around the world for several thousand years. A new study suggests it could also be guiding dung beetles.

Marie Dacke, a zoologist at Sweden's Lund University, studies the way animals navigate. In a study online this week in Current Biology, she and a team of researchers looked into the surprisingly sophisticated navigational habits of the dung beetle, finding that they too have their eyes on the skies.

Here's how it works: Dung beetles like to maintain straight lines as they run. As they're going about their beetle business, when a pile of droppings catches their eye, they roll it into a ball and, walking backward, push it somewhere safe to eat. A straight course ensures they don't return to the fierce competition back at the dung pile.

Researchers placed African ball-rolling dung beetles in a planetarium, and found they could navigate just as easily with only the Milky Way visible as with a full starlit sky. Under overcast conditions, the beetles lost their way.

Dacke's previous research has shown that dung beetles use the sun, the moon and celestial polarization patterns to keep them moving in a straight line. Yet nocturnal beetles can stay their course even on moonless nights, guided by the stars.

Birds and seals have also been known to use the stars for navigation, but this is the first time insects have been found to use them for the same purpose. It's also the first documentation of animals using the Milky Way specifically.

Dacke is currently in the process of researching why dung beetles dance on top of their poo-ball prey. Previous research has indicated that it may be a cooling method for hot days, but it may also be an orientation device.



GameSci: How To Preserve A Game You Can't Pick Up And Hold

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The Art Of Videogames Exhibit At The Smithsonian American Art MuseumBlake Patterson/Wikimedia Commons
The hardware will die so the software can live.

In March, the Museum of Modern Art will be showing off a new exhibit dedicated to videogames. You can check out the 14 games in the collection here--they've got picks from Pac-Man to Portal--but there's one in particular that caught my eye: Canabalt.

Canabalt is a browser and mobile game where you control a character being flung across urban rooftops. You jump and try not to fall down any chasms for as long as you can, evading furniture, jumping through glass, and watching for crash-landing spaceships. It's fun, and as an example of modern quick-and-dirty games, probably worthy of a spot in the MoMA collection.

There's just one weird thing about it. Canabalt only exists in ones and zeroes.

You download Canabalt to your iPad or open it up in a new browser tab. You don't buy a copy of it, wrap it, and put it under the tree for Christmas. So how do we preserve, and exhibit, games like Canabalt?

To answer that, it helps to know a little about how hard it is to exhibit and preserve physical games. Because whether we're talking about games for the iPad or the arcade, the goal is to put the code above everything else.

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Try to broaden one player's experience too much and you end up getting away from what's affecting about a game.It's debatable how best to show off a game. Curators can sit an audience down and have them "watch" as the game is played in front of them, but that doesn't really capture the full experience of living-room exploration, where the controller's in the player's hands. That, after all, is one of the best features of games: the experience is never the same from player to player. Try to broaden one player's experience too much and you end up getting away from what's affecting about a game. It's the equivalent of reading the screenplay for a movie you won't see. Games are about interactivity--in preserving a game for future generations, playability is paramount.

There are hardware issues, too. It's impractical to reproduce everything about a game that came out 30-plus years ago, but at the same time, you could argue, it's part of the experience. (Are you really playing Pong if you're not doing it on the original machine?) And that's just speaking philosophically. There are some serious technical difficulties that come along with reproducing old games with new technology. Jason Scott has done a lot of the leg- and brainwork in a great post on vintage game emulations, but the (very, very, overly) brief version is: New equipment shows games differently, if almost imperceptibly, than old equipment.

So games aren't going to be exhibited exactly as they were when they were on the market. Kate Carmody, a curatorial assistant at MoMA working on the exhibit, puts it this way: "A designer can put a chair in there but it's not really a chair until someone sits in it." You can add in a placard emphasizing the cultural and historical importance of said chair, Carmody says, but it's not really performing its intended function. Same with a car put on display but never driven, same with an architect's design for a building no one will walk through, and same with videogames that aren't being played, either in their original context or at all.

At MoMA, she says, the games will be displayed based on what format will work best for the specific game, which is pretty much the only thing you can do when you're including as many genres as MoMA is. They've got bases covered in arcade (Tetris), online sci-fi (EVE Online), and more. For the shorter games, the curators plan on creating some sort of area where visitors can play through games in their entirety, or at least sample games like Pac-Man enough to get the gist of them. The original hardware, like a Pac-Man machine, won't be used. Those older games, with more fragile hardware, will be played through an emulator, a modern reproduction of the original game. And instead of the original hardware, like a Pac-Man arcade machine or Commodore 64 loaded with Tetris, the curators are opting for uniform controllers and televisions, as a way to get past a nostalgia bias, Carmody says.

The more complicated the game, the more involved the exhibit. Online games like EVE and Dwarf Fortress are games based on thousands of players, Carmody says, and bottling that for museum-strollers isn't easy. Although it wasn't set in stone when I spoke to her, Carmody says the online games will probably be produced through a guided tour, while longer, more modern games like flOw and Portal will be displayed through some kind of video demo that explains the game to visitors.

Canabalt will have the opposite problem of most games. It'll need to have the hardware added to make it work. MoMA will be compensating for that by introducing some sort of computer and mouse system that replicates the feel of the game. (No plans for introducing an iPad just yet.) But there's not going to be anything tangible about Canabalt. It exists in code--that's it. For as long as the code lasts, so will the game. The only preservation happening is of the storage devices it's loaded on to.

* * *

It's a race to preserve games' code so they can live past the expiration date on their hardware.Games that do have hardware are going in the opposite direction: It's a race to preserve their code so they can live past the expiration date on their hardware. MoMA curators will be collecting as much of the original hardware and code as they can, and the Library of Congress might start preserving their stock of games the same way, if they can convince the industry to hand it over.

There was a time when game companies looking to copyright their work used to send a few minutes of gameplay and (no joke) a printed version of the first and last 25 pages of source code to the Library. A few years ago, game companies started filing physical discs. (Films, by contrast, file through the Library with a 35-millimeter print.) David Gibson, a technician at the Library of Congress, says the full source code is the ultimate way to preserve a game--but it's not what they get. "Ideally, we would get all the source code ... that's the goal, or the holy grail," he says. "But the game companies aren't any kind of a hurry to do that, even to a cultural institution."

In lieu of that, the Library shelters the physical copies of the games. Meanwhile, Gibson is hoping to find some way to get digital copies stored for preservation, in the same way films get a digital treatment. That might not do much to preserve the hardware, but at least the digital soul of the game stays intact. In the future, then, when researchers want to dissect Space Invaders, they can, even if they're not doing it on an original arcade machine.

That's the upshot here. The arcade machine and other vintage systems are dead. Their era is over. And the Pac-Man machines and Super Nintendos aren't going to last forever. But their games will live on in digital form, and we can simulate the original hardware if we want to. Even if we lose a little piece of what made us fall in love with them.



FDA Approves First Robot For Hospital Use

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Robo-DoctorBusiness Wire
Because you've always wanted to see your doctor through an iPad.

Robots are taking over the world. Robo-nurses have been around for a while, but in the quest to make healthcare more efficient, another medical robot could soon be coming to a hospital near you.

The FDA has just cleared RP-VITA, a telemedicine robot that can navigate autonomously, for hospital use. The doc-bot allows a doctor to consult with patients and hospital staff remotely through an iPad interface.

Built by InTouch Health and iRobot (creator of everyone's favorite robot vacuum, the Roomba), RP-VITA can move independently around a busy ICU without bumping into other people or objects. It can be directed by tapping hospital locations on an iPad, and features electronic health record integration. It also has data ports to connect digital stethoscopes, ultrasounds and otoscopes, Fast Company reports.

The FDA has given RP-VITA clearance to work in hospitals, so it's now approved to monitor patients before, after and during surgery and during various types of examinations and assessments.

Welcome to the future, where your doctor can Skype into your surgery. Let's hope he's wearing pants.



BeerSci: What Is The Difference Between A Lager And An Ale?

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Beersci LogoTodd Detwiler
Hint: it has nothing to do with the beer's flavor.

For the average beer drinker, the difference between an ale and a lager comes down to how the beer looks, smells, and tastes. Ales tend to be fruity-estery, while lagers are clean-tasting and frequently described as "crisp." But to a brewer, the difference is more fundamental than that. It's not color, or flavor, or aroma, or hop/grain/malt varietals or even water hardness that separates a lager from an ale. Simply put, lagers use an entirely different type of yeast during fermentation. All of the knock-on effects -- from different flavors and aromas to decreased fermentation temperatures -- arise from this difference. You'll hear some beer pedants describe the difference as "top-fermenting" (ale) vs. "bottom-fermenting" (lager) yeast, which is generally accurate, but useless to those who have no interest or experience with brewing.

Lagers are relatively new to the brewing scene. They first arose in Bavarian breweries in the late 15th or early 16th century, then eventually spread to the rest of Europe (most famously to Plzeň, the birthplace of pilsner) and eventually to the rest of the world. All of those beers you think of as "national" brands -- Heineken, Tsing Tao, Sapporo, Kingfisher, Budweiser to name just a few -- those are all lagers. Lager yeast, Saccharomyces pastorianus, was first isolated and described in 1904 by the Danish mycologist Emil Christian Hansen while working at the Carlsberg brewery in Denmark. He discovered another lager strain in 1908, which he named Saccharomyces carlsbergensis. These two have since been determined to be the same yeast, now called by the oldest name given, S. pastorianus. (I only mention this because you'll run across people talking about S. carlsbergensis occasionally, and I want to make it clear that the name is now synonymous with S. pastorianus.)

Here's the thing about the lager yeast genome. It possesses many similarities to that of ale yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae -- it in fact has whole stretches that are identical to S. cerevisiae (as you'll find out, there's a reason for this). But lager yeast behaves in a profoundly different manner than ale yeast. The most obvious difference is that lager yeast works best in cold temperatures -- temperatures that would make an ale yeast go dormant. Further, unlike ale yeast, no "wild-type" lager yeast has ever been found in Europe and lager yeast need humans to continue its propagation. Finally, ale yeast usually spends its life as a diploid organism. Lager yeast is what biologists call "allotetraploid": it has four copies of its genome, which is made up of genomes from two different species.

So, where the hell did lager yeast S. pastorianus come from? And why did it only show up in the 1500s, thousands of years after humans figured out how to brew with S. cerevisiae? The answer came in 2011, with the publication of "Microbe domestication and the identification of the wild genetic stock of lager-brewing yeast" by Libkind et al in Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences. In it, the researchers analyzed 6 yeast genomes: S. pastorianus, S. cerevisiae, two contaminant Saccharomyces species found in breweries, S. bayanus and S. uvarum, and two wild strains. The scientists knew through prior research that Saccharomyces species thrive on oak trees in Europe. After collecting samples from forests all over the world, they isolated two cold-tolerant yeast strains from the forests of Patagonia in Argentina.

After analyzing the genomes of these cold-tolerant strains, the researchers discovered that they were members of an entirely new species of Saccharomyces yeast, which they named Saccharomyces eubayanus. The "eubayanus" part is interesting, because what the scientists also determined in this study is that the contaminant strain S. bayanus found in the European brewing environment isn't, as previously thought, actually its own species. It is a domesticated hybrid strain of this Patagonian yeast. The "eu" part of "eubayanus" is to indicate that the Patagonian strain is the pure progenitor species.

Think of it as a Thunderdome of yeast taxonomy: Two species enter; one species leaves. Followup research, which I dug out of a Powerpoint presentation by the lead author from November 2012, indicates that many distinct strains of S. eubayanus exist in South America, which strengthens the argument that the strain is indigenous to the area.

But what of lager yeast? Well, once the researchers compared the genomes of S. cerevisiae, S. eubayanus and S. pastorianus, it became clear that S. pastorianus -- lager yeast -- is a hybrid of S. cerevisiae and S. eubayanus. Basically, that lager yeast allotetraploidy I spoke of earlier? Two sets of lager yeast chromosomes are from ale yeast, and two are from this wild Patagonian species. The Patagonian species is what gives lager yeast its interesting cold-tolerant and sulfite-metabolizing characteristics--characteristics that manifest in the distinctive flavor and character of lager beer. Lager beer is fermented and then "lagered" (stored) in caves for a period of weeks or months at temperatures hovering in the 40s Fahrenheit. This low-and-slow fermentation means that lagers taste "clean" and lack the fruity esters characteristic of ales. Further, because of the sulfite metabolism, lager beers usually smell a lot like rotten eggs during fermentation (this is normal), and a very (VERY) slight bit of dimethylsulfide (DMS) character in the end beer is considered proper for the style.

Those who remember their history will already know the answer to why lagers have only been around for a few hundred years. Yes, the discovery of the New World and the establishment of trans-Atlantic trade happened at the same time. While nobody actually knows how S. eubayanus got to Europe -- it could have hitched a ride on a fruit fly or a piece of wood -- the researchers speculate that hitch a ride it did during the early years of trans-Atlantic trade, then eventually ended up in the cold-fermenting vats of Bavarian beers. There, S. eubayanus fused with S. cerevisiae to form a hybrid strain, which then evolved in the brewing environment by dropping some genes here and there -- the cold and high-alcohol environment of a brewing vat made sure to kill off any unfit mutants -- to the new brewing strain S. pastorianus: the modern lager yeast. Which then, via trade or early corporate espionage, traveled to breweries across continental Europe and beyond. And, like ale yeast, each time S. pastorianus arrived at a new brewery, it quickly adapted to its environment, forming the various lager strains available today.

What about poor, demoted S. bayanus? Well, the researchers figured out that this strain actually arose when the newly minted S. pastorianus fused with European-endemic contaminant species S. uvarum in the same brewing vats. So, S. bayanus is a hybrid of a pure species and a hybrid of S. eubayanus and S. cerevisiae? Yes, this reads like some horrible unicellular soap opera, and that's OK. Biology and brewing are both messy practices that frequently produce something entirely unexpected. In the case of all of those cold-tolerant S. eubayanus strains being isolated in Patagonia, who know? Maybe with some tweaking so they can tolerate the products of fermentation, they'll eventually produce an entirely new kind of lager yeast.




Researchers Make Super-Realistic Artificial Lung Tissue By Levitating Cells

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3D Reconstruction Of LungsAndreas Heinemann/Wikimedia Commons
A new way to give 3-D structural integrity to vat-grown tissue.

Traditionally, cell cultures have been made in a 2-D petri dish. Problem is, cells cultured flat don't act quite the same as cells made in 3-D cultures. So instead, researchers from Rice University and Nano3D Biosciences started using magnetic levitation to get a 3-D culture. And now, using that tech, they've arranged four types of cells into super-realistic lung tissue. [Perfect timing! -ed.]

This is how the levitation works. Inert, magnetic nanoparticles are inserted into the cells, and researchers can manipulate them by using magnets--in this case, a magnetic "pen." That ability to tinker with the cells opens the door for more complicated cultures. The four-layered replication, of the lung's bronchiole tissue, is made from endothelial cells, smooth muscle cells, fibroblasts, and epithelial cells. Arranging those cells in the same way as lung tissue has never been done before, and the researchers say it's the closest anyone's gotten to real bronchiole tissue.

As for practical applications: since the culture can be manipulated, researchers can better simulate how toxins would enter actual lungs, exposing certain layers to a toxin as they would be in the human body. Those better simulations could eventually lead to better treatments.

[Rice]



Watch This Stretchable Wire Heal Itself

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Inventors: do this to gadget chargers immediately.

One of the biggest problem with wires? They break. Enter these self-healing wires from North Carolina State University.

The wires have a liquid-metal core and polymer sheath and can reconnect at the molecular level after being severed. Like NCSU's earlier wires, the liquid core makes them stretchable, which makes them perfect for use in dangerous environments. (Or any environment where you don't want something to break.)

To make the wires, the researchers first dug out tiny tunnels from a self-healing polymer, then filled it with a liquid metal combination of indium and gallium. The core oxidizes when it's cut up, forming a barrier that keeps the liquid metal from falling out of the polymer sheath. But when the severed ends are put back together, it reconnects, giving you a functional wire.

Useful! A request: Put this in all of our gadgets so we can stop worrying about warranties.

[North Carolina State University]



A History Of Spacesuits, In Pictures

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Space Race Mars-ready spacesuits, as imagined in 1954. Fred Freeman
Brett Gooden 's Spacesuit: A History through Fact and Fiction traces the evolution of early spacewear.

We've been working on fashion for the final frontier since the 19th century, when Jules Verne suggested in Around The Moon that space travel might require some sort of suit, like those worn by divers.

Since then, space travel has gone from science fiction to tweetable real-life experience. With that, our designs for protective gear--both real and imagined--have gone from impractical to immobilizing to workable.


Click here to enter the gallery

In Spacesuit: A History through Fact and Fiction, Brett Gooden traces the development of astronaut outwear in both fact and fiction from the first hot air balloon flight in the late 1700s to the present. Along the way, you get an inside look at suit innovation during the Cold War space race.

The modern space suit mildly resembles a high-tech snow onesie (eeee), but hey, things could have been worse; early prototypes for lunar suits featured a rigid "canned" design, and others would go skintight in an emergency to try to keep your body parts from boiling.



A Robot Lumberjack And Other Amazing Photos From This Week

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Robot Lumberjack This robot not only chops wood, but chops wood into hand-crafted (steel-crafted? arm-crafted?) stools. Read about it here. Tom Pawlofsky and Tibor Weissmahr via Co.Design
Including a beautiful photo made by a beer can, BMW's slick new bobsled, and more


Click to enter the gallery



A Map Of The Internet Universe [Infographic]

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You Are HereInternet Universe/E. Elert
If the biggest 350,000 web sites on the internet were real places, this is what the map would look like

As of last year, there were something like 650 million active web sites on the Internet. That number is growing fast, but even if it weren't--even if it stopped dead in its tracks right now--you could spend the next 50 years surfing the web at a pace of five sites per minute, 12 hours a day, 365 days per year, and you'd still only visit (briefly) 10% of the Internet Universe.

Unlike the actual Universe, however, the Internet's places do not exist in physical space--there's no such thing as one website being "close" or "far" from another one; the two are either linked or they are not.

While those links don't correspond directly to any kind of distance or direction, they do suggest a relationship. If, for example, someone built a personal website, and linked to their website through their Facebook page, people would really only arrive at the website via the Facebook page. Most likely, that would mean that not too many people visited the website; the website would be a tiny little out-of-the-way place in the Universe of the Internet.

That's pretty much the logic employed by the architects of this interactive map of the Internet Universe.

The circles on the map represent over 350,000 web sites from 196 countries around the world:

Every site is a circle on the map, and its size is determined by website traffic, the larger the amount of traffic, the bigger the circle. Users' switching between websites forms links, and the stronger the link, the closer the websites tend to arrange themselves to each other.

If you're already checking it out, you've probably noticed that those basic organizational rule gives rise to a few major patterns:

First, countries--represented in different colors--tend to form clusters, since people in any given country tend to move between their own country's websites. Those clusters dominate regions of the internet universe: US websites abound in the middle in light blue, China occupies the mustard-colored region on the bottom left, Japan, in purple, dominates the bottom-right, and Russian websites, in red, are strewn across the top.

But you can also see how the popularity of a few websites and a couple topics disrupt the nation-based clustering. Indeed, the basic structure of the Internet Universe seems to be determined by the three biggest sites, Google, Facebook, and Youtube, which form a core at the center of the map, with countries radiating outward. (Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the Big Three do not appear to exert much gravity on China's galaxy cluster, which sprawls out like a universe on its own.)

The most fascinating example of topical organization has to be the vast galactic cluster of porn near the bottom right, comprised (mostly) of U.S. websites, sandwiched between Japan and Brazil:

Click here to see a larger version of this image.

A few other points of interest:

1. Blogspot's apparent popularity in Iran. Also, the way Iran is almost exclusively surrounded by China, South Korea, and Thailand

2. The way that so many of those weird sites that you can't imagine anyone actually deciding to make lie huddled around popular social networking sites, sort of like little parasites.

3. The way that Wordpress is super isolated and alone out on the fringes of the Universe. Why is that?



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