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...@SilviaNadai, who correctly guessed that this is a maned wolf. Well, @SilviaNadai actually guessed "Lobo-guará," the Brazilian name for the animal, but as this animal lives in Brazil (as well as Paraguay, Bolivia, northern Argentina, and bits of Peru), it's only fair to award it. Congrats!

The maned wolf, though it looks much like a red fox, actually belongs to an entirely different genus than the foxes. In fact, it's not closely related to any living canid--despite its name, it is not a wolf, nor is it a fox, a jackal, a hyena, a coyote, or a dog. Its closest relatives, which are not very close, are the primitive bush dog of South America, and possibly the crab-eating fox and the recently extinct Falkland Islands Wolf. It has exceedingly, disproportionately long legs for its body--our best guess is that the legs help the maned wolf navigate through the tall grasslands of its native habitat.

The maned wolf is listed as "Vulnerable" by the Brazilian government, due to shrinking habitat and the fact that it is traditionally hunted in Brazil. But it reproduces well in captivity and the Vulnerable listing seems to have helped its population a bit. Hi maned wolf!

One of a few research teams hoping to find life in Antarctica seems to be a little closer to success. As Discover reports, the researchers at the subglacial Lake Whillans has taken a sample, and preliminary tests say they've found life!

Now for the caveat: It's important to focus on the word preliminary here. Nothing's conclusive just yet. DNA-sensitive dye made cells in a sample glow green when placed under a microscope, but we've seen that sort of thing before: Last year, other Antarctic researchers thought they had found life, only to discover that it was actually bacteria from their own kerosene supplies. Dead cells can show up in the researchers' test, too, so to make it official, they'll have to work through more time-intensive tests, where the cells grow.

If the team does discover life, it's big news for space exploration. The reason so many teams have been clamoring to find life in Antarctica is because the moons of Jupiter and Saturn are similar environments. If we know how to find life in our backyard, we might be able to find it in outer space.

[Discover]

Researchers at the University of Minnesota, St. Paul, have coaxed a species of bacteria into trading their usual diet of partially-oxidized iron for a small current of electricity--a trick that may eventually make the microorganisms useful producers of biofuels.

The bacterium involved in the study was Mariprofundus ferrooxydans, a species that makes its home around hydrothermal vents on the seafloor. Like other iron-oxidizing bacteria, M. ferrooxydans relies on a form of soluble iron, called ferrous iron, or FeII, as a source of the electrons it needs to breathe. When plenty of oxygen is present, ferrous iron readily gives up its extra electron to the oxygen, to become the more stable FeIII, or ferric iron--the kind of iron oxide we know of as rust. But in lower-oxygen environments, M. ferrooxydans' can do oxygen's job for it, thereby gaining energy from the extra electron.

Since previous studies had suggested that the electron-thieving microbes use proteins on the outside of their cells to carry out the heist, the Minnesota scientists decided to try feeding the electrons directly to the cell's surface.

In their experiment, the researchers deposited some M. ferrooxydans onto the surface of an electrode, which was tuned to release electrons at the same energy level that FeII would provide. To get the organisms started in their new habitat, the scientists also added some of the bacterium's natural food--FeII--to the mix.

After letting the microbes multiply over the surface of the electrode for four weeks, they scraped some away and started a new colony on an electrode with no FeII around. Amazingly, the bacteria continued to thrive, even after some were transplanted onward to a third electrode. Some nutrients were still provided to this colony, the study noted, but in amounts much too small to support the bacterium's apparent growth.

The results show that bacteria like M. ferrooxydans are capable of using electricity from electrodes to capture carbon dioxide and replicate. What makes this interesting, from an energy-hungry human perspective, is that, by taking in carbon dioxide and using it to create new cells, the bacteria are essentially using electricity to store carbon in a form humans could use as fuel.

Eventually, the researchers hope to scale up this method to produce a new kind of biofuel out of the microbes, using electricity from solar cells or other non-fossil sources. Such a feat would come in tremendously handy for a variety of purposes--for one, it would provide a way to store excess energy generated by wind and solar farms.

Of course, the challenges of "scaling up" pretty much any biofuel method are not lost on the researchers. As one scientist involved in the study told The American Society for Microbiology, who published the findings in their journal Mbio, "If there are 100 steps to making this work--this is step one."

Male sparrows do indeed get angry, especially when another male is intruding on his territory. Angry birds can fight to the death in whirling masses of feathers and beaks. But sometimes a bird would rather try to bluff and scare off a potential foe, using rude wing gestures to show it's ready to fight and welcomes the challenge (although it might not). To study this in more detail, scientists at Duke University stuffed some robotics equipment inside a dead bird.

Duke undergrad David Piech assembled a miniature processor and some servos and put it into a taxidermied sparrow. Then biologist Rindy Anderson and colleagues took it into a swamp sparrow breeding ground in Pennsylvania. The team rigged a speaker beneath a robo-bird perch, so the dummy sparrow would seem to be "singing" to alert other male birds of his presence. It also could move a wing, in a bird version of raising your fists. Then the team watched what happened.

The live birds responded aggressively toward the wing-waving robobird, Anderson said. They were so aggressive that they killed it--one bird ripped off robobird's head during a true fight to the death. Further experiments are halted indefinitely.

The team also used a stuffed bird that could twist from side to side and not wave its wing, and the real birds attacked this one, too, but were not as aggressive about it. Anderson's team thought the real birds might match the wing signals of the robobird, and they did, with each bird demonstrating different levels of aggression. The study is a step toward understanding how birds communicate using visual displays, as well as tweets and song, the researchers say. It's published in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

Johnny Zhu from the Modernist Cuisine kitchen shares a seasonal recipe. The layers are: pressure-cooked pork carnitas; pressure-cooked refried beans; cheese emulsified with sodium citrate; and startlingly traditional top strata of salsa, avocado, sour cream, and scallions. See the recipe here.

The question remains, though: why seven layers? What is the numerological significance?

Maybe you're tired of brewing your cups of joe in an old coffee pot. Maybe you're ready to try something a little tastier. But where to start?

Well, the appropriately named designer Jay Mug has made this chart breaking down the contents of just about every popular espresso beverage. This is also good stuff to know if you find yourself at a chichi espresso bar, utterly confused about the menu. A flat white? A one-to-two ratio of espresso and steamed milk (duh). Mocha breve? Equal parts mocha, half and half, and chocolate.

Try them all! (Just not in one sitting.)

[Jay Mug]

Click to launch the photo gallery

This week, Iran claimed it finally succeeded in its long-fought effort to launch a monkey into space. The poor creature did not appear to enjoy the preparations, according to the pained, slightly constipated expression in photographs of him in his safety seat. That got us thinking about the many other animals to have ventured into space before him. A veritable zoo of creatures, from dogs and cats to apes and amoebas, has visited space on our behalf.

Many of them were lost or sacrificed in the name of research, but several had happy endings, returning safely to Earth and living out their days in zoos. Without their sacrifice and the biomedical research it enabled, humans may have been in greater danger when we first tried to visit space. Check out our gallery to see some of the greatest spacefaring creatures.

New York City's Second Avenue subway line was the greatest project the city never built -- until 2007, almost 90 years after its initial proposal, when the city finally broke ground on it. When completed, the $4.45 billion project will provide New Yorkers with two more miles of commutable subway tunnels on Manhattan's East Side.

Photos released on the MTA's Flickr page show a few pieces of the new route in-progress--and just how hard it is to dig a miles-long tunnel under a densely-populated island city.

Click here to enter the gallery

This is the view from the tallest man-made structure in the world, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Photographer Gerald Donovan set up a tripod at the top (2,722 feet) and took 48 panoramic images, each with an 80-megapixel resolution. The images were stitched together to create one seamless image, and presto: arguably one of the most amazing views ever, in a full 360 degrees.

You can rotate and zoom to explore Dubai in the shot. Unfortunately, you can't see people very easily. (Forget "the people look like ants from up here": some other buildings look like ants from this view.) And if that zooming gives you vertigo, just be thankful you weren't the photographer.

Check out the full panorama here.

[HIPA via Gizmodo]

You can now see North Korea without ever leaving your living room. New data added to Google Maps has made it possible to virtually explore this notoriously isolated country.

Until recently, most of North Korea had largely appeared as blank white space on the maps service. But using Google Map Maker, "citizen cartographers"--ordinary people, mostly from outside North Korea--added roads, names and details to the North Korean map, according to Google Maps blog.

They contributed labels for prison camps and nuclear research sites along with schools, government buildings and theaters.

You can even burrow all the way down to Street View in some places to catch a ground-level glimpse of buildings, playgrounds, subway stations and propaganda billboards. The photos aren't always recent (one was time-stamped in 2008) but -- baby steps, right?

Google Map Maker, the company's crowd-sourced cartographer, has been around since 2008 and has previously built maps for countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. User-submitted data is fact-checked by Google before it ends up on Google Maps. In the case of North Korea, data was checked against satellite images.

During his visit to North Korea earlier this month, Google chairman Eric Schmidt urged North Korean officials to open up the country's tightly controlled Internet. Many of the contributors to North Korea's map were from South Korea, according to the BBC. Only a few hundred people in North Korea are allowed Internet access.

[BBC]

Dr. Oz comes off almost--almost--charming at first in a New Yorker profile out this week. But of course he does: it's one of the reasons he has a gigantic audience regularly tuning in to "The Dr. Oz Show." Michael Specter, the New Yorker writer, asks why someone like Oz, with Harvard credentials, would promote treatments that are flat-out wrong.

After that, we go deep into The Land of Oz, where the doctor makes some truly bizarre claims. He says he wants to toe the line in the "civil war" between conventional medicine (i.e., medicine that works) and alternative treatments. He's not one of those bossy doctors; he wants "no more barriers between patient and medicine." You know, like back in the good old days, when we relied on superstition and our average life expectancy was about 25.

It gets a little murkier, too, when Oz's wife, Lisa Oz, is introduced. She refuses to have their children vaccinated (!) and Oz, though he disagrees, capitulates.

But it's his show, of course, where pseudo-scientific claims are given the most play. Oz has endorsed some products without much scientific evidence to back them up. He's gone on-air to preach the merits of Reiki, a spiritual healing practice; green coffee beans; and red palm oil--none of which have been proven effective. Oz doesn't let the criticisms irk him.

He's right about one thing: data isn't clean, and medical studies are frequently wrong. Oz knows that; he points out the hundreds of peer-reviewed studies he's authored. But for the world's most visible health professional to brush off the scientific method? The closest-held belief in science? You're damn right that's chilling.

You can, and should, read the whole New Yorker piece here.

[New Yorker]

There's a big BlackBerry event going on this morning--maybe the biggest BlackBerry event ever--and it's the company's last-ditch effort to keep from being plowed over in the smartphone game by Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Here's what you need to know.

1. BlackBerry is now called BlackBerry. The company used to be called Research in Motion, or RIM, which most people did not know and was confusing. Now it's BlackBerry.

2. There are two new phones, running one new operating system. The operating system is called BlackBerry 10, and it's completely new--has basically nothing in common with any old BlackBerry system besides a few features (BBM is still around). The first phone, probably the flagship, is the Z10, an all-touchscreen device with a 4.2-inch, very high-resolution screen (at 356 pixels-per-inch, it should have the clarity of the iPhone or any high-end Android phone), a dual-core processor, and all the sensors you'd expect. It'll have 16GB of storage built-in, though you can expand that with a microSD card, and it'll be available on all of the four major networks (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile) for $199. Interestingly, it has only one button, a power/hold trigger on the top of the phone--you navigate with taps and gestures rather than buttons.

The other phone is the Q10, which looks more like a typical BlackBerry--meaning, it has a hardware keyboard. We don't know much about it, really; we know it also has a dual-core processor, that the screen is a 3.1-inch AMOLED (which should give it nice vivid colors), that the keyboard is the widest BlackBerry keyboard ever, that the battery is the biggest BlackBerry battery ever, and that it has 4G. That's about it!

3. BlackBerry 10 is completely new, making BlackBerry the latest in a long line of historically strong companies to completely toss out their smartphone platform in order to compete with iOS and Android (see: Palm, Microsoft). And it looks pretty nice! It has a few key ideas that inform the way you use the phones. The first is gestures. There's no home button at all: you swipe up from the bottom to access your "home screen," such as it is. That'll give you access to your eight most recently used apps, your favorite apps, and a list of all apps.

BlackBerry 10 also groups all of your messages together. And that means alllllll of your messages. Like, email, sure, but all of your email accounts, plus text messages, plus BlackBerry Messages, plus Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare and lord knows what else. It's an interesting idea, having a completely unified inbox--I imagine whether that's a better system will depend on the particular user. It's called BlackBerry Hub.

4. TimeShift is this new camera thing BlackBerry is very excited about. It's basically a burst mode: instead of taking one picture, the camera will take a whole bunch of pictures, and then you can pick which frame is the best/most flattering shot. Samsung has about 16 different apps that do variations of this, but the interface (a little ring that you scroll around) seems nice.

5. It has lots of apps! BlackBerry says it'll have 70,000 at launch, but the dirty secret about big numbers like that is that 99.9% of all apps are garbage that nobody uses. That said, BlackBerry does have some key ones lined up: Facebook, Twitter, Angry Birds, Rdio, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Evernote, that kind of thing. But it doesn't have Instagram or Snapchat or Vine, and its game selection will probably be limited.

So, we're optimistic about BlackBerry 10, because any competition is good competition, and first reactions to the Z10 seem very positive. We'll hopefully get a review unit soon so we can really dive into the hardware and software and see how it is to use on a daily basis.

In what might be considered a chemically-fueled middle finger aimed at its neighbors to the North, South Korea has successfully launched a rocket into spaceand placed a satellite into orbit, officially inaugurating itself into the global club of spacefaring nations with a satellite fielding capability. This of course follows on the heels of December's successful space launch and unsuccessful satellite deployment by North Korea, whose space program is largely viewed as a thinly-veiled ballistic missile test initiative.

Satellite Launch Vehicle-1 (known as Naro) lifted off at 4 p.m. local time from South Korea's southwestern coast and successfully separated from its satellite 540 seconds later. Although a transmitter on the satellite failed during launch, the satellite achieved a stable orbit that was within an acceptable margin of error, making it a success in the eyes of independent scientists and the international space community.

Pressure had been mounting on South Korea to one-up its northern rival since the mid-December launch of the DPRK's Unha-3 launch vehicle, which also successfully separated from its payload but sent it tumbling into an unstable and deteriorating orbit. North Korean mission handlers have reportedly not been able to communicate with it since. The successful attempt marks South Korea's third go at satellite orbiting--the first two, in 2009 and 2010, ended in failure, and the third try had been delayed twice, in October and November of last year, due to hardware and software problems discovered at launch time.

And so South Korea's successful rocket launch has been greeted by most of the world as a great and welcome achievement, while North Korea's was met with condemnations and U.N. sanctions--the latter of which has prompted the DPRK's leaders to vow that it will test more satellites and long-range rockets that are aimed at the destruction of the United States, "the archenemy of the Korean people." That may not sound fair exactly, but then again, how about trying a little honey instead of vinegar, DPRK?

[LA Times]

The Almeidas' story starts out a lot like the usual pet-disappearance saga: Someone left the front door open, and Manuela, the family tortoise, went missing. We can probably guess what happened next: a long, fruitless search, tears shed, possible fates guessed at, implausible but comforting legends born and clung to and perhaps retold for decades... But that's not where this tortoise's story ends. According to The Telegraph, this tortoise has been found, after 30 years, in a box in the Almeidas' storeroom. Alive.

[via The Telegraph]

The last time the Pentagon took an active interest in airborne laser weapons it resulted in a massive fail, literally. The hulking Boeing 747 housing the Missile Defense Agency's Airborne Laser Test Bed missile killer--a 1 megawatt laser designed to knock boosting ICBMs out of the sky--was killed after billions of dollars in development yielded an unreliable (at best) defensive capability. But now the DoD is looking into fielding much smaller airborne lasers aimed at shooting down much smaller missiles, and they could go into testing as soon as 2014.

The 150-kilowatt lasers DARPA is considering testing as part of its High Energy Liquid Laser Area Defense System (HELLADS) program are ten times smaller and lighter than even those of similar power today--which means some kind of technology leap is in the offing that DARPA thinks is realistic. The Agency has contracted General Atomics (makers of the Reaper and Predator drones) to have two laser weapons ready to go by 2014 so both the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy can try them out.

The USAF's interest in this technology is pretty clear-cut. Mounted on a fighter jet or bomber, these scaled down 150-kilowatt lasers would be capable of shooting down air-to-air missiles or surface-to-air rockets that normally might deny access to airspace or endanger pilots infiltrating enemy territory. For the Navy's air wing the same is true, but its interest also likely extends to close-in ship defense operations as well.

As the Navy has learned the hard way (see: U.S.S. Cole) even America's mighty Arleigh-Burke class AEGIS destroyers and other sophisticated surface warships are vulnerable to small boats operating up close. The Navy has in the past tested laser weapons that can shoot down small aerial drones and incapacitate small surface boats. If the Navy can find a laser countermeasure technology that works equally well protecting both its F/A-18 jets and its surface fleet, it would simplify both systems in terms of maintenance and operational know-how.

But keep expectations tempered. If there's anything we know about laser weapons it's that they're finicky, fragile, and affected by just about everything from the weather to water (and the Navy operates in some very wet and weather-y places). The tests slated for 2014 are ground tests only, and its likely to be awhile before we see laser defenses deployed on operational aircraft. On the bright side, by the time DARPA has HELLADS ready for the battle theater the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter might actually be ready to carry it.

[TechNewsDaily]

They say good health is its own reward, but your good health may be a reward for your doctor, too. When doctors felt they were helping relieve a patient's pain, their brain activity mirrored that of a patient experiencing a placebo effect, according to a study published online yesterday in Molecular Psychiatry.

A team of Harvard researchers tricked 18 physicians into thinking they were either relieving patients in pain or letting them suffer. This all took place within an fMRI scanner, where researcher could measure the doctors' brain activity.

The participating doctors were told they were using an electronic device that relieved pain. To make this believable, researchers first gave the doctors a dose of thermal pain, then used the fake machine to treat them (while lowering the heat). The doctors' brain activity was monitored by fMRI scans so that researchers could pinpoint the brain regions affected by the pain.

The physicians were then asked to perform a routine examination on a patient and answer a questionnaire about their own empathetic abilities. Finally, the doctors went into the fMRI scanner, where mirrors allowed them to make eye contact with their patient outside. They were either told to treat the patient's pain using the device, or press a control button that wouldn't impact the pain one way or another.

Doctors saw their patient express pain when they didn't activate the relief treatment and maintain a relaxed face when they did. When doctors administered the treatment and watched the patient relax, a region of their brain previously associated with the placebo effect was activated. Physicians that self reported more empathetic skills often showed more activity in a brain region associated with reward when their patient felt relief.

Neurologically, the doctors expected patients to get better when they administered the treatment, and then their brains processed the outcome like a reward, and the more empathy they could feel with the patient, the greater the reward.

Previous research has shown both of these regions are active when patients experience the placebo effect, but this is the first study to suggest doctors feel the same.

[Harvard Gazette]

We've posted visualizations from Facebook's Data Science Team before, but I think it's safe to say that their newest effort--a county-level map of NFL fandom across the U.S.--is their most admirable yet. Based on the team page Likes and locations of over 35 million account holders, it's probably the most accurate, precise geography of sports fandom ever.

Deadspin has a nice run-down of the take-aways, to which I would add only one question: Does anyone know what that blob of Steelers fans is doing in southern Oregon?

Click here to see a larger version of the map.

[via Deadspin]

Meet RASSOR, NASA's newest mini-space explorer. What you're looking at is a prototype. But one day, NASA plans to send something similar to moon.

RASSOR--pronounced "razer" and short for Regolith Advanced Surface Systems Operations Robot--checks in at 2.5 feet tall and looks a little bulkier than past generations of rovers. That's by design, NASA says: The robot is built to work through the day, and to last for years doing it.

The job at hand: collecting resources. RASSOR will be tasked with digging up lunar soil and dumping it back into another machine on the moon's surface. That second machine then separates water and ice from detritus to make breathable air or rocket fuel. Usually, a significant portion of a rocket's mass is fuel. So if NASA can make fuel on-site with help from RASSOR, it'll mean NASA can send a lot more cargo on the mission. The same process could work on Mars, too.

Not that it's an easy job for RASSOR. Even speeding along at up to 20 meters per second--five times Curiosity's top speed--and grabbing about 40 pounds of soil at a time, it'll need to operate 16 hours a day for five years to harvest enough soil for the mission. (Poor guy.) RASSOR itself will weigh about 100 pounds.

One step closer to a fully sustainable lunar base? Maybe! Either way, RASSOR won't be in action for a while. A RASSOR 2 is already being developed, but won't start testing until early 2014.

[NASA]

A new report from Sports Illustrated connects Baltimore Ravens player Ray Lewis with deer antler spray, also known as deer antler velvet, one of the oddest-sounding performance enhancers we've ever heard of. (Lewis and the team, by the way, deny he did anything wrong.) So what is this stuff?

Well, it's pretty close to what it sounds like: It's a spray or pill with an active ingredient, IGF-1, extracted from deer antlers. Christopher Key, one person in the two-person company SWATS (Sports With Alternatives To Steroids), which sells the spray and pills, gave this quote in the Sports Illustrated report:

SWATS isn't the only company, either. You can even pick up a bottle on Amazon.

IGF-1, a naturally occurring chemical, can (supposedly) stimulate muscle growth in above-average quantities. It's been compared to the better-known human growth hormone, or HGH. But, as the International Business Times points out, we're not even completely sure how well, if at all, the substance works with humans, although at least one major study did find increased performance in athletes who used it.

So maybe consider the fact that it's unproven (and also consider the poor deer) before you try that out.