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The words "brain cancer" are pretty evocative on their own, connoting fear, surgery, and possible death. But actually seeing a cancerous tumor, watching how its tentacles infiltrate white matter, is another thing entirely. Such deeper understanding is the goal of the International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by the journal Science and the National Science Foundation.

The 2012 winners were announced yesterday, and they include a map of brain cancer; a poster representation of how owls can turn their heads 270 degrees; a video of the electromechanical science of the heart; and much more. They are beautiful and captivating, but have a more profound meaning, said Monica M. Bradford, executive editor of Science: "They also draw you into the complex field of science in a simple and understandable way." We agree. Click through to the gallery for the winners.

As Super Bowl XLVII approaches, NFL fans are debating and predicting what will give the Baltimore Ravens the edge over the San Francisco 49ers, and vice versa. In the Ravens' corner: quarterback Joe Flacco, who might have the strongest arm in the NFL. In college, he won the distance throwing competition in ESPN's State Farm College Football All-Star Challenge with an improbably awesome 74-yard toss. He takes advantage of that ability, too: In October, he was tied in the NFL for number of deep passes thrown 20 yards or more. That just does't seem fair. Why does Flacco get the mutant-like throwing ability?

Don't be too jealous; a monster throw doesn't come easy. The forward football toss has been called "the most complex motor skill in all of sports." Every part of the body gets used in one chain of events, and one smidgen's difference in that chain can affect the throw. The ball has to make it to the receiver in a window of plus-or-minus one-tenth of a second, says Dr. Timothy Gay, University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor and author of Football Physics: The Science of the Game. Try to do that over 60 yards, as Flacco has before, and it's exponentially more difficult. All of that isn't even factoring in the defense (about 250 pounds of flesh each) barreling down to murder you.

Joe Flacco is most renowned for being able to fire the ball long distances. (His Super Bowl opponent, Colin Kaepernick, is good at that, too, but Kaepernick's longest pass play of the season was for 57 yards, compared to Flacco's 61.) Here's a highlight reel where you can see one of Flacco's space-bound Hail Marys at about 1:40.

After Gay watched the clip, he mentioned how Flacco's form looks different from that of most quarterbacks. Usually, a distance throw involves a full-body motion, stepping and rotating with the torso, and moving the arm across a full arc. You can tell Flacco has above-average arm strength based on the way he throws that bomb while focusing on just his arm. It's an unusual way to throw, but not necessarily a bad one. It's also worth pointing out that Flacco isn't an enormous, brutish player--to an outside observer, he might even look a little on the spindly side. Arm strength doesn't necessarily mean big muscles; it's an entire body working in sync that contributes to a certain style. Flacco has a build that happens to work well for a blunt throw that maximizes distance.

Of course, distance on its own isn't all that hard. A linebacker with a football can chuck a ball pretty far, Gay said, but it's accuracy over distance that's important. Different quarterbacks (with different musculatures) throw differently, and someone like Flacco probably errs closer to linebacker than lithe finesse thrower. He lets the ball go and sends it super-humanly far, but at the cost of accuracy. For example: Although Flacco attempts more deep passes than almost anyone else, as of October, his accuracy for those passes ranked 20th in the NFL. (Which is bad.)

A John Elway-type player and a Tom Brady-type player aren't the same, and what makes a good throw for them isn't identical.But that's a style engineered by Flacco and his coaches. At an elite level, what Gay calls "an acceptable variation in styles" is what separates one QB from the next, and a particular QB's musculature dictates which style works best. There's no 100-percent "correct" way to throw a football, Gay says, but at the very top of the football food-chain--like in, say, the NFL--everyone has pretty much mastered the do's and don'ts, and the wiggle room can nudge someone into greatness. A John Elway-type and a Tom Brady-type aren't the same, and what makes a good throw for them isn't identical. He mentions quarterback Terry Bradshaw, who used the alternate (but not necessarily better or worse) method of keeping a finger on the ball's point, giving his throws extra oomph. "It comes down to a specific technique," Gay says, "which is probably different for different quarterbacks."

For Flacco, that means a lot of deep passes. It's closer to how he was built to throw, and the style works well for him and the Ravens. We'll see Sunday if that helps them take the big game.

Laboratories receive research grants all the time, but not quite like this one: a consortium of companies and research labs (phone giant Nokia is carrying the flag for the electronics researchers in this group) has received a $1.35 billion (emphasis: that's a billion with a "b") grant from future technologies wing of the European Union to develop graphene for practical applications. That is, a bunch of European researchers just received a billion euros to develop the strongest material in the world.

Though not a new material by any means, graphene has yet to really come into its moment. The term "graphene" was around going back to the 1980s, and the material existed in the lab in some forms at least a decade before that, but it wasn't until the mid-2000s that researchers really started to manipulate and produce it in ways that began to unlock its potential (this research netted the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, by the way). It is a 2-D pure carbon material, a single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms arranged in a particular hexagonal pattern that makes it somewhat similar to graphite, if graphite was a good deal more awesome. It is extremely light, an excellent conductor with some interesting optical properties that haven't been fully explored yet, and is something like 300 times stronger than steel.

It's an amazing material, is the point. But as noted above, researchers haven't quite tapped graphene's full potential and that's exactly what this one billion euro investment from the EU hopes to do. Most researchers don't see graphene as replacing most of our conventional materials or radically altering the devices and objects that populate our lives, but it has vast potential to enhance a wide, wide range of materials and products that are already out there. Like iron or plastic or silicon, a lot of materials scientists think graphene is going to be one of those things that quite literally launches an era, like the Industrial Revolution or the Digital Age.

That's why this grant is significant, but don't expect the graphene epoch to kick off overnight. This is a lot of money, but it's also a ten-year research project involving more than 100 research groups. This kind of large-scale collaboration can make for excess bureaucracy and slow going on the research front (particularly at first), but the aim here is holistic. The EU doesn't want to fund just one avenue of research or explore one potential application, but to unlock graphene's potential across industries and economies.

United States Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner and fierce proponent of alternative energy, announced today that he will resign his governmental position and return to academia. Chu was the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley when appointed Energy Secretary. He is well-known for his advocacy of alternative energy as a method of correction against climate change, and has speculated on future energy possibilities based on high-glucose tropical plants. During his time as Secretary, renewable energy use in the US doubled. Chu says he will return to academia in California. [via CNN]

It's not rare for volcanoes to erupt on Kamchatka, the far-eastern Russian peninsula that juts out into the Pacific Ocean. The density of active volcanoes there is so outstanding UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site.

Since late November, though, four different volcanoes within 110 miles of each other on Kamchatka have been active simultaneously. Experts believe the volcanoes are fed by different sources of magma, making this even more unusual. In mid-January, eruptions from Plosky Tolbachik, one of the volcanoes, began forming a lava lake on the peninsula at its base.

AirPano, a group of Russian panoramic photographers, set out to document the geological excitement in 3-D aerial panoramas. They spent three days flying around Plosky Tolbachik capturing the shooting lava.

The results are nothing short of awesome. The high-def views virtual tour, though occasionally dizzying, is probably the closest most of us will come to the remote region, much less an erupting volcano. Against the snowy Russian backdrop -- Kamchatka is located at about the same latitude as Great Britain, but between arctic Siberian winds and the cold sea current, it's essentially covered in snow from October through May -- the fire and brimstone stands out especially dramatically.

Take a gander at the whole thing here.

[Spiegel.de]

The best way to understand something--such as life--is to build it yourself. That's why, determined to understand the way groups move, a team of New York University physicists set out to create particles that could imitate the way flocks of birds, schools of fish and even colonies of bacteria organize and move together.

What they ended up with, described in Science magazine yesterday, were two-dimensional "living crystals" that form, break, explode and re-form themselves elsewhere.

The researchers developed self-propelled particles that would turn on in response to blue light. When the light is on, the randomly swimming particles collide and cluster. A chemical reaction set off by the light causes the particles to crystalize. When the light turns off, the particles stop and split apart.

The crystals have metabolism and mobility, two of the general requirements for classifying something as life, according to Paul Chaikin, one of the paper's authors, but they lack the ability to reproduce. By one count, there are a total of seven requirements that an organism should exhibit to be considered life.

"Here we show that with a simple, synthetic active system, we can reproduce some features of living systems," lead author Jeremie Palacci told Wired. "I do not think this makes our systems alive, but it stresses the fact that the limit between the two is somewhat arbitrary."

Palacci and Chaikin are now working on a particle that has a metabolism and can self-replicate, but lacks mobility.

[Wired]

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It might feel like our communications systems have evolved past the point where we'd need tons of cables, but it couldn't be further from the truth--undersea cables are an integral part of the internet's backbone, as we investigated here. But where are they, exactly, and which cable links which hubs?

TeleGeography makes these great four-color graphics every year that show exactly that--definitely worth a look. Check out this year's map here.

DISPATCHES FROM THE ARCTIC

This series explores the science and implications of global warming in the North Atlantic Arctic. This is the final installment from Boulder-based writer Susan Moran.

On Monday, Iranian state television announced that the country had successfully launched a monkey into space and received him back safely, an event the world regarded with a mild dose of skepticism. The country has been known to embellish in the past, as we pointed out on Monday.

But the existence of a potential rocket launch worried other countries, as the technology used to propel an adorable primate into suborbital space could also be used for nuclear weapons. Now The Telegraph is reporting that the monkey held up to the media as a successful space traveller looks nothing like the one shown prior to launch.

For one thing, there's the case of the missing mole: The monkey shown strapped into a rocket in photos had a red mole over his right eye, but the "returning" monkey did not. The original monkey also appeared to have lighter hair.

The founder of Space Israel, a non-profit organization determined to send an unmanned Israeli space ship to the moon, hypothesized that the actual space-faring monkey might have died of a heart attack or "that the experiment didn't go that well."

According to The Telegraph, international observers have decided either the poor guy died in space, or the launch never occurred at all. However, what is undoubtedly true is that there is now video of a monkey wearing a tuxedo at a press conference.

[The Telegraph]

Want to win this caffeinated Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the T-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

• FYI: What Is Deer Antler Spray, And Why Would A Football Player Use It?
• A Field Guide To Caffeinating Yourself Into Oblivion [Infographic]
• Family's Pet Tortoise Found Alive, After 30 Years, In Locked Storeroom
• The Genius Who Plays For A Living

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

• Popular Science Is Building The Telepresent Robotic Boss Of The Future
• One Small Pawprint: Meet The Astro-Animals That Went Before Iran's Space Monkey
• Mercedes' New Safety Tech Aims To End Wrong-Way Driving
• FYI: Do Men Really Fall Apart When A Female Soldier Gets Killed?
• Gray Matter: How To Make Cheap Fake Gold
• Remembering The Brightest Lessons From NASA's Darkest Days
• How To Save The Electrical Grid
• Researchers Capture A Zebrafish's Thought Process On Video
• Popular Science Q&A: How NASA Selected The 2013 Class Of Astronauts
• Jackets Grown From Bacteria And 10 More Feats Of Bio-Engineering
• A Shark In The Hallway And Other Amazing Images From This Week
• FYI: What Gives Ravens Quarterback Joe Flacco His Mutant-Like Arm?
• 9 Amazing Images That Turn Science Into Art
• Are We Running Out Of Scientific Geniuses?
• By The Numbers: The U.S.'s Warmest Year Yet [Infographic]
• NASA Will Launch A 13,000-Square-Foot Solar Sail Next Year

The mother of invention may be necessity, but French telecom engineer Clément Storck learned his father can play that role too. To remind his forgetful dad to close the garage door, Storck rigged it with a switch that triggers an iPhone alert-a home-automation hack that joined his repertoire of self-closing shutters and a tweeting cat door (see @PepitoTheCat). But Storck's greatest hack yet is a webcam that e-mails a photo of anyone who rings the doorbell. Follow these steps to build your own-and end speculation over whether it's UPS at the door or a prankster with a flaming paper bag.

Time: 1 hour
Cost: $100 or less
Difficulty: 2 out of 5

1) Set Up A Webcam
Aim a webcam at the welcome mat (wireless models are the easiest to install). Configure the camera to constantly refresh an image to a dedicated Web host.

2) Give The Bell A Brain
To imbue your doorbell with artificial intelligence, set up an Ethernet-enabled Arduino microcontroller nearby. Then grab the source code from here (Storck and two friends made the service specifically for this and other home-to-Web hacks).

3) Create Web Notifications
Navigate to My Scenarios on PushingBox.com, click Add a Scenario, and configure the entry to e-mail yourself photos. Be sure to include the webcam's URL, click Test to verify the configuration, and copy the 16-character DeviceID.

4) Program The Arduino
Paste the DeviceID into the downloaded Arduino code in the quotation marks after the line "char DEVID1[]=" and upload the code to the microcontroller.

5) Test Your Spy Cam
Every push of the doorbell completes an electrical circuit, which tells the Arduino to download the latest webcam image and send it to your chosen e-mail address. Your doorstep self-portrait should arrive in a few seconds.

For more detailed instructions on how to make the doorbell spy cam, check out this PDF.

[Make: Projects]

This February, drive up into the mountains with the help of Thule's 12-second-install tire chains, then rocket back down on a carbon-fiber sled. When you get home, warm up and jam out at the same time under Kohler's speaker-equipped showerhead. After that, relax with one of our e-gadget picks of the month.

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Humans have always built defenses to match the prevailing threat of the day, from medieval castles to Cold War fallout shelters. In his Shura City concept, Asher J. Kohn speculates on what it would take to drone-proof a city. He envisions several features:

Buildings
Based on Habitat '67--architect Moshe Safdie's experimental housing complex in Montreal--the buildings will have no consistent external layout, making it difficult to map the city and track residents' movements.

Smart Windows
Made of multicolored glass, these windows will make it difficult to see in and easy to see out. They will also feature internal machines, which normally operate blinds, but could detonate if a scanning drone is detected nearby.

Uniform heat signature
The shared roof over an internal courtyard will take advantage of modern heating and cooling systems to keep the whole city at a similar temperature, so that a distinct, personal heat signature can't be detected. Similarly, a latticework of shadows will blur lines between people moving during the day.

Towers
The city will use multiple minarets to make it dangerous for drones to fly low overhead.

Windcatchers
Passive cooling towers, windcatchers allow for electricity-free basement refrigeration, and again hide both heat signatures and human activity.

There is a unmistakable logic to this system of defense. While walls and towers are classic features of medieval defenses, they were made obsolete by increasingly stronger cannons and artillery. In Shura City, walls are not meant to keep people out so much as they are designed to hide people from cameras. It's design for the warfare of our time, in which the United States favors sending robots, over people, to hunt down small groups or individuals. Interestingly, Shura City has no real defenses designed to deter drones (except, maybe, for those detonating machines). It simply tries to build a community of obscurity, where drone operators cannot isolate a target.

Kohn is a law student first, and he says the idea for "an architectural defense against drone warfare came from the realization that law had no response to drone warfare." If the concept works as Kohn hopes, drones will be unable to target people in the city, which probably means police would have to search for suspects by foot.

And, one imagines, would then have to haul them before a court of law.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared earlier today that he's ready to launch into space, helping Iran's fledgling space program by risking his own life as he nears the end of his final term as president.

"I am ready to be the first human to be sent to space by Iranian scientists," Ahmadinejad told a group of those scientists in Tehran. The state-run Mehr news agency reported the news this morning. "Sending living things into space is the result of Iranian efforts and the dedication of thousands of Iranian scientists," he reportedly continued.

The announcement came at an event marking the anniversary of the 1979 Islamic revolution, and a few days after Iran claimed to have successfully sent a monkey into space. That achievement was met with skepticism from many (including us), especially after Israeli nonprofit Space Israel pointed out that the supposed space monkey may have been a hoax. Pre-launch pictures looked different from the tuxedoed primate paraded before camera crews, they said.

The Guardian notes that within a few moments of Ahmadinejad's announcement, a Facebook group sprung up called "In Support of Sending Ahmadinejad Into Space." It's in Persian, but you can like it here. One commenter already said "we'll accompany him to the platform, we will even pay for the shuttle's fuel costs."

Ahmadinejad tries to promote Iran's prominence in future technologies, appearing on stage with Iran's weird dancing humanoid robot and bragging about the RQ-170 stealth drone it supposedly shot down. But these displays are often utterly ridiculous--like, for instance, the Iranian Flying Saucer of 2011.

Still, this is a pretty bold raising of the stakes. In the space monkey aftermath, Space Israel and other international observers have said they believe the monkey either never launched at all, or died in space. So this is a big risk for Iran's president.

But Ahmadinejad's second and final term ends in June, and as the Guardian further notes, he's fallen out of favor with both parliament and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. So maybe he figures he's got nothing to lose. When there are pictures of Ahmadinejad wearing a space suit, we will definitely share them.

[Reuters]

A couple of decades before he founded Popular Science, Edward Livingston Youmans published a book called Youmans' Atlas of Chemistry. Youmans was not a chemist, but he was a good writer whose singular passion in life was to learn everything there was to know about everything, and his textbook was probably the most readable thing anyone had ever published on the subject.

But what made Youmans's Atlas really stand out were the illustrations--a series of simple, beautiful diagrams that give form and substance to the invisible world of atomic chemistry. Clearly, Youmans understood--in a way today's textbook writers don't seem to--the difficulty students might have trying to understand things they couldn't see. Which makes sense, actually: Youmans spent much of his life, including his years studying chemistry, in a state of near-total darkness. Who could know the importance of visualization better than a blind man?

In a short biography of Youmans's life, published in the March 1887 issue of PopSci, Youmans's sister Eliza Ann writes of an eye disease that struck Edward at the age of 13. Probably, it was the sort of infection that modern antibiotics could easily cure, but in Youmans' time there was nothing for it, and Edward suffered from episodic bouts of painful inflammation and impaired vision for the rest of his life. When he was 20 years old, Youmans left his family home in rural New York State and went to the city in search of a cure, but shortly afterward his sight deteriorated completely; it was twelve years before he could see well enough to read.

During that time, Eliza Ann went to care for her brother in the city, and found a chemistry professor who would admit her (a woman) into his courses; she passed everything she learned on to Edward. "After this we could manage the subject fairly well together," she writes, "but, unable as he was to observe the characteristic behavior of chemical substances, he could not readily individualize them. His ideas about them, therefore, were easily confused, and he was constantly striving to make them more definite."

After years of acquiring second-hand knowledge of chemistry, it occurred to Youmans that he was not entirely alone--sure, most people could mix acids and bases together and watch the results, but much of chemistry dealt with things on a much smaller scale. When it came down to the atoms and molecules whose reactions lay behind all the fizzing and burning and exploding ingredients, all the other students were just as blind as he.

According to Eliza Ann, it was this realization that inspired Youmans to invent "a scheme for picturing atoms and their combinations that would bring the eye of the student into more effectual service." These lovely illustrations are the result:

[h/t Brainpickings]

A new study from the psychology department of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden sought to discover whether alcohol consumption really does lessen your ability to observe and remember. There's already an interesting theory about this--it's called alcoholic myopia theory, and it posits that when under the influence of alcohol, people actually pay more attention to environmental cues judged to be salient, and less attention to environmental cues that aren't salient.

But the findings actually contradicted this theory. Three groups of testers were chosen, and given either plain orange juice, orange juice with enough vodka to reach a 0.04 percent blood alcohol concentration, or orange juice with enough vodka to reach a 0.07 percent blood alcohol level (the latter being just under the legal driving limit in the US and UK, which means these are not really drunk people--just tipsy). Then each group was shown a short video, from a witness's perspective, of a kidnapping at a bus station.

After a week, the participants were brought back and asked to look at an eight-person lineup in which, randomly, the kidnapper from the video may or may not be. The participants were then asked if the kidnapper was in the lineup, and if so, to identify him.

Interestingly, the participants with the highest blood alcohol level actually scored higher than either of the other two groups (though not significantly). That said, none of the scores were particularly good; even the best group was only slightly better than chance. Still, it's a really interesting study. Read more about it here.

Britain's most reviled king, the short-lived monarch Richard III--last of the House of York, last of the Plantagenet dynasty, final loser of the Wars of the Roses, and benefactor of Cambridge University--has finally been identified. He lay buried beneath a nondescript English parking lot until September, when the remains were exhumed. Today, researchers at Leicester University confirmed that the bones they found are indeed the remains of Richard III, the last English king to die in battle.

DNA analysis matched the skeleton to two of Richard III's modern descendants, according to the researchers. One is a Canadian-born furniture maker named Michael Ibsen and the other person wants to remain anonymous. Based on this and incredibly strong circumstantial evidence, the researchers at Leicester said they concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that the remains were in fact Richard III's.

"Rarely have the conclusions of academic research been so eagerly awaited," said Richard Buckley, the lead archaeologist on the project. The team also used radiocarbon dating, genealogical evidence and historical sources to improve their record.

The bones were exhumed from a city council parking lot in September, which covers the grounds of an ancient priory called Grey Friars Church. Historical legend held that Richard was buried there after his death, at age 32, in the Battle of Bosworth. A new documentary, "Richard III: King in the Car Park," chronicles the dig and premieres tonight in the UK.

Richard III has long been reviled, thanks in no small measure to Shakespeare's unflattering account of his life. The playwright casts him as a devilish hunchback hellbent on power -- he reads lines like "March on, join bravely, let us to't pell-mell; If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell" -- whose demise, ending the Wars of the Roses, ended the Middle Ages in England and paved the path for the Elizabethan age. His reputation is certainly a result of his own actions (like locking his nephews in the Tower of London) though it's also at least partly due to a slander campaign by the Tudors, his successors. But he did support measures to help the poor, and he and his wife, Anne, also endowed King's College and Queen's College at Cambridge, according to the Times.

The skeleton and its clear evidence of wounds are strikingly similar to legends of Richard III. There are 10 wounds in all, 8 of them in the skull and at least a few of them possibly inflicted after death for the purpose of humiliation. He had severe scoliosis, or curvature of the spine, which you can see in the skeleton.

Historical accounts say he perished when his horse got stuck in the mud at Bosworth Field, exposing him to his attackers--A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse! Shakespeare wrote. Legend says a Welshman struck the death blow with a halberd, and the blows were reportedly so violent that the king's helmet was driven into his skull. Leicester forensic pathologists say trauma to the skull indicates he died after one of two significant wounds to the back of the skull--one a possible halberd blow, and one from a sword.

"Taken as a whole, the skeletal evidence provides a highly convincing case for identification as Richard III," said osteoarchaeologist Jo Appleby.