Last year, the Austrian engineering firm IAT21 set out to construct a flying machine that floated like a hummingbird, traveled as fast as a jet, was as quiet as a hot-air balloon, and was simple enough that a car mechanic could repair it. The company's working prototype, called D-Dalus, is roughly five feet by three feet square and can lift about 100 pounds. But the size and lift are not what's most impressive. A flying machine with no airfoil, rotor or jet propulsion can travel where most cannot: in very tight spaces and through terrible weather.

ROTOR ASSEMBLIES

The craft's four rotors spin at 2,200 rpm, and six blades attached to carbon-fiber disks create directional thrust. The blades act as mini airfoils, their angle of attack constantly shifting in relation to rotation. For vertical lift, a blade's leading edge rises away from the center of the disk at the top of its rotation and toward the center of the disk at the bottom [pictured], creating a pressure differential.

FRICTIONLESS BEARINGS

Existing bearings were unable to withstand 1,000 Gs of force between the carbon-fiber disks and their blades and still deliver some degree of maneuverability. Engineers at IAT21 developed their own bearings, shaped like metal barrels, that hold up to the force better than spheres (think: arches) but can still roll enough for the blades to move.

AUTOMATIC STABILIZATION

Servo motors communicate with the rotor assemblies to automatically correct the craft's speed, position and balance by adjusting the blades' angle. If the pilot jerks the radio controls too hard in one direction, the craft will keep itself from pitching or yawing by increasing opposing thrust. The system can adjust for turbulence and heavy winds, too.

ADVANCED NAVIGATION

Radar, GPS and three multispectral cameras (visible, EHF-extremely high frequency- and infrared) act as the D-Dalus's eyes. Visual information is fed into the craft's collision-avoidance algorithm. The system is so sensitive that D-Dalus can fly within inches of power lines, hover above moving platforms (a ship's deck in rough seas, for example), or refuel another D-Dalus in flight.

Recently I had the opportunity to visit The Plant, Chicago's first vertical farm. This claim depends on your definition of vertical farm, of course, because The Plant isn't the sort of futuristic vegetation-filled skyscraper you might expect, and it isn't solely agricultural. While food will be grown there, the space will also house small food-related businesses, breweries and bakeries and the like, so it might be more accurate to classify it as a "food business incubator." Whatever you call it, The Plant is definitely an example of innovative green food production, with the ambitious goal of being net-zero energy and net-zero waste by 2015.

An anaerobic digester, the giant, mechanical version of your hippie neighbor's backyard compost pile, will consume all of the building's waste, as well as waste from nearby food manufacturers, and combine the materials' carbon with hydrogen to form methane which can then be burned as a gas to power The Plant's projects.

Click here for a closer look at the inside of The Plant.

I went to an event at The Plant put on by a group called the "Young Aggies." It was the sort of night that consisted mainly of standing around drinking cheap Mexican beer, eating beans and watching a documentary about colony collapse disorder, which, due to my irrational fear of bees, left me in a state of heightened anxiety for the duration of the film.

But before I watched people reenact my worst nightmares on-screen--a man brushing bees off a honeycomb with his mustache, for example--we got a tour of The Plant itself from one of the regular volunteers (The Plant's founder, John Edel, was not present). It's housed in an old meatpacking plant in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighborhood, so named because it's snuggled right up next to the old stockyards, in a creepy part of town that caused my roommate to posit that this would be a good place to lure young people with the promise of an urban agricultural event and then murder them.

A small staff of three employees and a team of volunteers have undertaken the daunting task of gutting the building and preparing it for its eventual net-zero glory. The input and output loops will all be closed, we're told, which means byproducts that would otherwise be wasted will instead be funneled into one of the building's many other processes.

We wandered on our tour from room to half-finished room, through sliding metal doors and past partly-demolished brick walls that look like Montresor from "The Cask of Amontillado" just gave up halfway. Not all the ghosts of the building's former purpose had been exorcised just yet--there were still tracks on the ceiling that used to carry dangling carcasses, empty shells of smokehouses and ammonia chilling tubes in a room our tour guide informed us used to be a refrigeration space. Without any heat, in the dead of Chicago winter, it still felt like one.

The empty concrete shells we passed through are some of the cheapest industrial space in the city. One of them will eventually be home to the New Chicago Beer Company. Boiled grains from beer production only lose 20 percent of their nutrients, so The Plant will reuse them in a variety of ways, notably feeding them into the anaerobic digester. On Jan. 19, The Plant announced that they had signed a contract with the Eisenmann Corporation to produce the anaerobic digester, which should be ready by summer 2013.

The real action on this tour was in the basement, where we got to see some of the much-discussed closed input and output loops in action. There was a hydroponics bed filled with leafy greens hooked up to tanks of tilapia referred to by our tour guide as "love nests." The nutrients in the tilapia's waste water get filtered out by the plants, and the fresh, clean water is sent back up to the fish. Compared to the rest of the building, the room was downright toasty (warmed by just one heating coil, we were told) and the glowing purple lights and tanks teeming with fish gave a small glimpse into what The Plant will be capable of once the rest of the building is finished in 2015.

Life put together a gallery of the photographs of Fritz Goro, a German-born photographer for Life as well as Scientific American. Goro died in 1986, but was once called "the most influential photographer that science journalism (and science in general) has ever known." The photos are pretty amazing, for their subject matter and for their pure aesthetics. Check out the gallery over at Life.

There's an inescapable showmanship inherent in pouring liquid nitrogen into a champagne flute while a cloud of vapor billows from the -321°F fluid and puffs across the bar. But the show isn't the point at Booker & Dax, a brand-new New York cocktail bar in the back of David Chang's much-loved Momofuku Ssäm Bar, where supercold nitrogen, a laboratory centrifuge, and the like are used primarily to make drinks more delicious, and secondarily to create and serve them more efficiently. Only as an occasional side effect does a swell of fog or ceiling-high gout of flame provide entertainment to a customer.

Gin and Juice

Take the Gin and Juice. At one million bars around the world, you can have a bartender combine grapefruit juice, gin, and a splash of soda over ice, using basically the same technique that's worked ever since humans first mixed one liquid with another. Booker & Dax, though, under the drinksmanship of friend-of-PopSci Dave Arnold, takes a more streamlined approach. Freshly squeezed grapefruit juice is clarified, using pectinase enzyme and a pair of chemical clearing agents borrowed from the wine industry, chitosan and kieselsol, in conjunction with a fast ride in the bar's centrifuge. The opaque solids fall to the bottom, and the result is a pale liquid as clear as white wine.

Behind the scenes, the staff (or yours truly if they need an extra hand) mixes the juice with gin, sugar, and a precise weight of crushed ice or plain water, to bring it to the precise desired alcoholic strength and chilly temperature. The complete beverage is then bottled in liter bottles, carbonated at the bar's CO₂ hose, and kept chilled until it's served.

When you sit at the bar and order a Gin & Juice, the bartender sets a champagne flute on the bar and swirls a splash of liquid nitrogen into it, bringing the glass down to delicious subzero temperatures amid the aforementioned dramatic puff of vapor. Then, with the nitro boiled off, the ice-cold carbonated cocktail is poured from the liter bottle into the glass and graciously served.

The Red-Hot Poker

Back in 1700 or thereabouts, if you wanted a hot drink, you asked your tavernkeeper to mix it up in a mug and then thrust a red-hot poker into it. The method lacked a bit of subtlety, though, and between that and the fact that modern bars rarely have blazing fires with iron pokers in them, that method of heating drinks has fallen out of fashion. Which is a shame, Dave Arnold points out, because it did more for the drink than merely making it warm -- it caramelizes sugars and ignites alcohol vapors, changing the flavor of a beverage significantly. Your winter hot toddy gets its warmth from boiling water, which does the basic job, but has no flavor-enhancing effects.

So Dave has brought back the poker. His is made from a high-temperature industrial heating rod, which is cranked up to some 1500°F with electrical resistance. It sits in a handy holster behind the bar, and then, when a customer at Booker & Dax orders a hot drink, the bartender grabs the poker's handle and plunges it into a glass of liquor. The result: instant boiling, flames flaring from the surface of the alcohol, and a caramely odor filling the air. Then the piping-hot drink is served, transformed by ages-old technology made new.

This video shows the Fire-Breathing Dragon, a concoction of centrifuge-clarified orange juice, tea, and rum, invented by Dave in honor of the lunar new year.

Booker & Dax is in the old Milk Bar location at the back of Momofuku Ssäm Bar, at 207 Second Avenue in Manhattan.

Video edited by Nate DeYoung

This week's image roundup is a particularly good one: the best "blue marble" picture we've ever seen, a video of the aurora resulting from the biggest solar storm in seven years, a foldable car, a stunning green-energy art installation, blah, blah, blah. All great. But what we really want to talk about is that ultra-creepy snub-nosed monkey, or, as we've christened it, the Hell-Monkey of Doom. Feel free to describe in detail exactly how much this picture (and a Google image search for the snub-nosed monkey) gave you the shivers.

Click to launch our guide to the upcoming year in science.

Ed Adams, an engineering professor at Montana State University, used to study avalanches from inside a fortified shack. He would attach his shack to a boulder on a mountain, set small explosives in the snowpack, and trigger an avalanche, surrounding the shack.

"Once snow gets on the ground, it's in an ongoing state of change," Adams says. That changeability makes the snowpack dangerously unpredictable. Scientists such as Adams know a lot about avalanches in general but very little about their inner workings.

Adams has since moved from his shack into the Subzero Research Facility at Montana State, where he now studies snow by growing it in "cold rooms" (about -5°F). In the room, he blows air over a small water reservoir that he keeps at 65°. He then channels water vapor up a chimney and into a cat's cradle of strings, where the vapor crystallizes. When he plucks the strings, snowflakes fall. Adams collects his snow in a box and carries it into a different room, one with a refrigerated ceiling, simulating what snow experiences outdoors under a cold winter sky. He is interested in radiation recrystallization, a phenomenon that occurs as snow deeper in the pack becomes warmer than that at the top. Once he has warmed the snow with lamps, he adds more, cuts the frosty layers in half, paints spots onto the side of the snow, and sets up a camera. A computer program records the movement of the paint specks while Adams top-loads and stress-tests the snowpack. "We track the deformation of the snow until failure," he says, and he works with forecasters to help find the same kind of unstable spots on mountains.

MEASURING STABILITY

Arthur Tyndall, an engineer in New Zealand, designed a snow probe that reveals unstable layers of snow. The probe is a small vane mounted in a long steel rod. Users spin the vane and drill the rod into the snowpack. As the device rotates, it measures resistance based on how freely the vane spins.

Chris Borstad, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, designed a handheld blade with force sensors that measure the resistance the blade encounters when it is driven into the snow. With that measurement, scientists can better understand the stability of the snowpack.

Look, world's longest ongoing experiment. You're impressive. We won't deny that. But the fact that nobody has ever seen your tar pitch actually drip in person, after 85 years, is infuriating. Just ask this trio of impatient folks: Ms. Hawk, Admiral F-35, and Dr. Whiskeybottle are all waiting for something, anything, to happen.

Want to win this impatient 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 their 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:

• In Its First Night Flight, the F-35 Soars at Sundown
• The Maximum Airspeed Above Which Birds And Drones Are Bound to Crash
• FYI: How Long-Running Is the Longest-Running Lab Experiment?
• Tested: A Chemical Time Machine Makes Whiskey Taste Older, Faster

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

• Video: Mixing 21st-Century Cocktails with Dave Arnold at Booker & Dax
• The Goods: January 2012's Hottest Gadgets
• How Men Can Decode Women's Menstrual Cycles
• The Most Amazing Science Images of the Week, January 23-27, 2012
• Building a Vertical Farm in an Old Chicago Meatpacking Plant
• The Moon Should Be the 51st State, and Other Space Dreams From Newt Gingrich
• Judge Rules Americans Can Be Forced to Decrypt Personal Data - What Does That Mean For You?
• World's Most Powerful X-Ray Laser Super-Heats Aluminum Foil to 3.6 Million Degrees
• A Dozen Science and Tech Stories to Expect in 2012
• A New Moratorium on Research Into Engineered Avian Flu: What It Means for Science
• Physicists Hope to Catch Neutrons in the Act of Jumping from Our Universe to Another

Extolling the many virtues of spider silk is something of a trend these days, as the fine yet remarkably hardy material continues to best even the strongest synthetic materials (a good spider silk weave is supposedly four times stronger than Kevlar). But this latest application makes transgenic, spider silk-producing goats seem simple by comparison: A bioengineered skin so tough that it stops a speeding bullet from penetrating.

To be perfectly fair up front, the bullet in the first clip in the video below is moving at half speed. Repeated with a round moving at a full 1,080 feet per second, the skin gives way. But both half-speed and full-speed tests were also conducted with real human skin and human skin augmented with regular silkworm silk, as well as with piglet skin. In all cases, the bullet won out. The only exception was the bioengineered spider silk tissue.

Which begs the question: Is it possible to someday augment human skin to make it tougher--possibly even bulletproof? Probably not, and even if so that certainly wouldn't make the human body impervious to the other factors involved in being struck by a bullet (like the sheer bone-breaking, potentially heart-stopping impact).

Regardless, chalk it up as another potential application for nature's toughest fiber, one that's getting closer and closer to mass-production and integration into a range of materials that need strengthening.

[New Scientist]

Your favorite hip-hop artist could save a life someday - or at least control a person's bladder - through the power of heavy bass beats, according to new research. Acoustic waves from rap music shudder through your body with ease, and can readily power a new implantable medical device.

Researchers at Purdue University developed a small pressure sensor that can be implanted to monitor pressure in places like the bladder or a blood vessel damaged by an aneurysm. The problem is providing power to such an implant without a battery, which will drain, or an induction device somewhere on the patient's body. Purdue biomedical engineering professor Babak Ziaie turned to a cantilever-powered capacitor.

He built a 2-centimeter-long piezoelectric cantilever beam from lead zirconate titanate, or PZT. When the cantilever vibrates, it generates electricity that can be stored in a capacitor embedded in the pressure sensor. Acoustic waves between 200-500 hertz will make it vibrate. One could use a plain tone within that frequency range, but that's annoying, Ziaie explained in a Purdue news release: "We thought it would be novel and also more aesthetically pleasing to use music."

Ziaie and fellow researchers placed the device in a water-filled balloon and tested it with rap, blues, jazz and rock music. We do not know which songs they played, sadly. But hip hop worked the best, Ziaie said.

"It contains a lot of low frequency sound, notably the bass," Ziaie said.

When the frequency falls outside the required range, the cantilever stops vibrating, and the sensor takes a pressure reading and transmits data as radio signals. Ziaie said this type of measurement could be taken for a couple minutes every hour or so to monitor a person's bladder or blood pressure.

A paper describing the rap sensor is slated to be presented at an IEEE MEMS conference this week in Paris.

[via Science Daily]

On March 31, 2009, a panel of scientists and civil servants met to assess the risk presented by a recent series of tremors in the Abruzzo region of Italy. They concluded that a major seismic event was unlikely. Soon thereafter, Bernardo De Bernardinis, the vice-director of Italy's Department of Civil Protection, the organization that put together the panel, told reporters that citizens should not worry, and even agreed with a journalist who suggested that people should relax with a glass of wine.

Six days later, a major earthquake struck L'Aquila, a city in Abruzzo, killing more than 300 people. Soon after, citizens requested an investigation into the panelists' findings, and the public prosecutor obliged. De Bernardinis and the panelists were charged with manslaughter and now face up to 15 years in prison. The L'Aquila judge who determined that the case could go to court said the defendants provided "imprecise, incomplete and contradictory information" and effectively "thwarted the activities designed to protect the public."

Many seismologists around the world say that criminalizing the Italian panel's assessments will have a chilling effect on science. Sheila Jasanoff, a professor at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government who studies the role of science and expertise in politics and the law, told me that, though the Italian trial is an extreme example, public scrutiny of how scientists convey low-probability, high-danger situations is not in itself unreasonable. Nor is it unprecedented. Jasanoff said the trial in L'Aquila called to mind the fallout caused by research about bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, in the U.K. In 1989 a scientific advisory group reported that it was unlikely that BSE could be transmitted to humans. Through the early 1990s, government ministries reassured the public that it was safe to eat homegrown beef. As it happened, BSE was transmissible to humans. After dozens died from BSE, the British government launched an inquiry, rather than prosecute, Italian-style. The inquiry's report, released in 2000, criticized scientists and civil servants alike for not adequately communicating that what's unlikely is not impossible-for failing to admit openly that they could not rule out the risk of transmission.

Just as scientists in Britain did not yet know whether BSE would jump to humans, seismologists in Italy could not predict whether a major earthquake would occur. The through-line from mad cow to the Italian earthquake is not science-good, bad, or otherwise; it is the decision to placate the public by tempering scientific findings with (in hindsight, misplaced) reassurances. If months from now, a court finds the scientists guilty, that would be unfair for them and set a dangerous precedent for panelists on future advisory committees, who might feel reluctant to offer any opinion at all. The ongoing trial should draw researchers' attention to the benefits of declaiming their own uncertainty, and it should remind the rest of us of the chasm between factual evidence and practical advice.

Prepare your tinfoil hats: A man in Dorset, UK, was showered with tiny spheres of blue goo that rained down from the sky during a hailstorm last week. The tiny, one-inch gelatinous spheres are odorless, are not sticky, and are not meteorological, British authorities say. Basically, no one has any real clue what they are. Somebody get PopSci chief space correspondent Newt Gingrich on the line.

Former aircraft engineer Steve Hornsby noticed roughly a dozen of the tiny blue balls scattered around his yard during a fast-breaking hailstorm and had the foresight to grab a jar and a spoon before collecting the objects, which he flicked into the jar with said spoon.

Hornsby kept the spheres in his refrigerator, though that was later deemed unnecessary, as the balls of blue goo don't appear to melt at room temperature. British meteorological authorities say they are not the result of some kind of weather event, though there is speculation that they could be "marine invertebrate eggs" that stuck to a bird's feet and were carried into the air. Such eggs have been attributed to previous "strange goo" incidents, which apparently happen from time to time. In fact, according to the BBC, transmission of marine eggs via birds' feet is something that is well documented. But we smell something fishy.

[BBC]

In 2010, engineers in the U.S. dismantled 60 dams, helping to reclaim rivers for wildlife. Most of these dams were small, though; removing large ones poses a much bigger challenge. In September, the National Park Service started the largest-ever dam-removal project in the U.S., on the 210-foot (the tallest ever removed) and 108-foot dams on the Elwha River in Olympic National Park in Washington State.

Click to launch the photo gallery.

For nearly a century, the dams have prevented salmon from swimming upstream to spawn. Blasting them with dynamite would do the job quickly, but it would also send 78 million cubic yards of water downstream at once, causing floods and damaging the ecosystem. Instead, crews will break down the structures over three years, releasing the water in the reservoirs at a rate that's more manageable for the animals and the people who live in the area. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Army Corps of Engineers and the EPA are all watching closely.

KEEPING COMMERCE FLOWING

Tearing down dams may help fish move more freely, but construction can slow down the barges and boats that carry nearly 80 percent of the freight in the U.S. When it came time to replace the 1920s-era Olmsted Locks and Dam on the Ohio River, the country's busiest inland passage, the Army Corps of Engineers got creative.

Rather than draining the waterway to build on the riverbed, as usual, engineers are constructing the new dam's 36 sections on land and then moving them into place. The Corps built the largest super gantry crane in the world (140 feet high and 160 feet wide) to lift the dam sections (some up-to-3,700-tons) onto a barge and is piecing them together in the water. Transporting each section takes about three weeks. At that pace, the dam could be complete by 2016.-Justin McLachlan

Millions of security cameras capture constant video at businesses and retail locations throughout the U.S., but for the most part their footage is only useful if someone shoplifts and cops need to check it out. But there's a wealth of data buried in that video, from customer density to crowd shopping preferences. A new startup can analyze surveillance video to help business owners see what their customers do, in the way websites can easily track online shoppers' browsing habits.

Prism Skylabs, based in San Francisco, installs software on computers linked to existing security cameras. The program uses computational photography - sort of like the Lytro light field camera - to produce images with higher resolutions than the original grainy CCTV video, and then edits out people's identities for privacy's sake. Humans appear as ghostly figures or are edited away completely, leaving colorful discs in their place that depict a crowd's size and density.

The goal is to monitor traffic, to shed light on how people move around a store and even to gauge the public's interest in certain products, by studying where people gravitate and linger in a business. "It's like Google Analytics for the real world," Steve Russell, cofounder and CEO of Prism, told Technology Review.

It could also be used to help the public, too, by showing crowd sizes in real time at a gym or a restaurant, according to Tech Review. Video can work better than photos to give a sense of place - in some ways it's surprising no one else has tried this before.

[via Technology Review]

Working with support of the Bill & Medlinda Gates Foundation's Grand Challenge to develop field-worthy point-of-care diagnostics for the developing world, a couple of Cornell researchers are mashing up their individual inventions to create a handheld pathogen detector that can quickly diagnose pathogens ranging from chlamydia and tuberculosis to HIV.

The portable device is a blend of a synthetic DNA tagging technology developed by Cornell biological and environmental engineering prof Dan Luo and a CMOS chip developed by Edwin Kan, an electrical and computer engineering professor. Luo's technology does the actual detecting, while Kan's chip is able to identify and respond to the amplified signals generated by the sensor. The result: a handheld disease targeting machine that can diagnose pathogens in half an hour rather than days.

The sensor works via Y-shaped segments of synthetic DNA that Luo's research group devised. At the bottom of the Y the team installed antibody designed to target and lock onto a certain pathogen. On one of the upper arms it placed a molecule that will link up with other similar molecules in the presence of UV light. In practice, two slightly different Y-structures are introduced to a sample, where they attach themselves to opposite sides of any target pathogen molecule they come in contact with. But tiny strands of Y-shaped DNA attaching themselves to a single molecule doesn't send a very strong signal--the entire combined structure is still so small that only highly tuned and very precise sensors or microscopes could detect that the DNA had attached itself to the pathogen at all.

But if you have a bunch of DNA structures attached to a bunch of pathogen molecules, the signal is clearly amplified. As such, the handheld sensor will bathe samples in UV light causing the DNA structures to begin binding together in a chain that is far easier to detect than a single pathogen molecule or a single DNA structure. Kan's sensor chip can then measure both the mass and charge of molecules that come in contact with it. From those measurements, the chip can tell whether the synthetic DNA chain is towing pathogen particles along with it--and thus if they are present in the sample or not.

Add some nanofluidics and a power source to the mix, and you basically have an inexpensive handheld diagnostic device ready to go to work far from the convenience of hospitals and well-stocked medical labs. Further tests will ensure that the system is durable enough to take a beating out in the field and still return valid diagnostic results. More via Cornell.

A new paint made of power plant waste and carbon nanotubes can automatically detect structural faults, alerting authorities before damage occurs. It could be a cheaper, easier way to monitor facilities like bridges, mines and even wind turbines.

It's made from aligned carbon nanotubes, which can carry an electric current, and fly ash, which is a byproduct of coal burning. The paint can be sprayed onto any surface, and electrodes are attached to it, according to developers at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. If the nanotubes bend, their conductivity will change, which will be detected by the electrodes. Small wireless transmitters placed throughout the structure would receive data from the electrodes. If they detect a change in conductivity, this would be considered a sign of a defect in the structure. Then the system could conceivably alert the company or government body responsible for maintaining said structure.

This would be much cheaper and simpler than current monitoring methods, Strathclyde scientists said - currently, wind turbine foundations are inspected visually, and bridges and tunnels only have monitoring networks in certain areas, not throughout the whole structure. Early defect detection could be cheaper to repair, not to mention safer.

A network of electrode-embedded nanotubes doesn't sound inexpensive, but the researchers say it would be cheap - one percent the cost of alternative inspection methods - in part because of the fly ash component. Fly ash is a byproduct of coal combustion and it's generally stored at power plants and landfills or it's recycled. The nanotube paint could be one new use for it. It also lends the paint some added durability, which means it could last in a wide range of environmental conditions.

For now, the electrode transmitters would be powered by batteries, but other designs could incorporate solar panels, piezoelectrics or other energy-harvesting technology, the researchers say. Strathclyde Ph.D candidate David McGahon and civil engineering professor Mohamed Saafi have built a prototype and it was shown to be effective, according to a Strathclyde news release. They plan to carry out larger-scale tests in Glasgow in the future.

[via Science Daily]

Viral marketing agency Thinkmodo has been bringing sci-fi to life in the skies over New York City for the past couple of weeks, so if you thought you saw something out of the ordinary in the past few days--like perhaps a few people lazily looping around the skyline like superheroes--no need to adjust your medication. To promote an upcoming film, the agency custom built three remote controlled aircraft shaped like humans and put them in the air over New York and New Jersey.

The three main characters in 20th Century Fox's upcoming film Chronicle have the ability to fly, so Thinkmodo thought the best was to build hype around the film would be to create some "flying people" sightings around NYC. So far, so good. Local news stations picked up the story, and a video the team released documenting the campaign (see it below) has garnered well more than half a million hits as of this writing.

Viral marketing can be so absolutely boring, but a gnarly RC airplane hack for the sake of sci-fi? Consider our hats tipped.

[YouTube]

As you listened to your colleagues' conversations at work today, or to a podcast on the train home, or to your personal trainer shouting lift, your brain completed some complex tasks. The frequencies of syllables and whole words were decoded and given meaning, and you could make sense of the language-filled world we live in without actively thinking about it. Now a team of researchers from the University of California at Berkeley has figured out how to map some of these cortical computations. It's a major step toward understanding how we hear - and a possible step toward hearing what we think.

By decoding patterns of activity in the brain, doctors may one day be able to play back the imagined conversations in our heads, or to communicate with a person who can think and hear but cannot speak.

Brian Pasley and colleagues at UCB worked with 15 volunteer patients who were being treated for epilepsy. The team also included researchers from UCB, UC San Francisco, the University of Maryland and The Johns Hopkins University. To diagnose the seizures' places of origin, surgeons implanted electrodes directly onto the patients' brains, providing a rare opportunity to study electrical signals in various brain regions. Pasley said the research team visited patients in their hospital rooms and played them recorded words while monitoring activity in the superior temporal gyrus, a region of the auditory cortex.

"We're looking at which brain sites become active. Because we can determine some association between those brain sites and different frequencies, we can watch what brain sites are turning on and off for these recordings, and that lets us map back to the sound," he said.

Since neurologists can know the frequencies of certain phonemes - specific language sounds - this cortical spectroscopy can decode which sounds, and then perhaps which words, a person is hearing. Pasley compared it to piano playing: "If you're an expert pianist, you know what musical notes are associated with each piano key, and you understand that relationship between the key and the sound," he said. "If you turn the sound off, and have the pianist watch which piano keys are being pressed, this expert would have an idea what sound is being played even though they can't hear anything."

The patients would hear a single word or a single sentence that would fall in the range of normal speech, between 1 and 8,000 Hz, Pasley said. Words were spoken by people of both genders and a wide range of voice frequencies. As they listened, the patients' brain activity was recorded. Then Pasley developed two computational models that crunched the electrode recordings and would predict the word being heard. One of the two methods could create a reproduced sound so close to the original word that Pasley and his colleagues could guess what it was 90 percent of the time, he said.

"It's not intelligible, but you can identify some similarities," he said. Watch the video below to hear what he means.

Neuroscientists have long been trying to decode the inner workings of the brain, associating neurons in the sensory cortices with stimuli that fire up those neurons. But the newest research, along with this paper, peers more deeply into the recesses of our minds, promising to illuminate thoughts so they can be seen and shared with others.

In December, Boston University researchers published research explaining how they stimulated patients' visual cortices and induced brain patterns to create a learned behavior, even when the subjects did not know what they were supposed to be learning. Last fall, Jack Gallant - also at UCB - published a paper describing the reconstruction of video images by tapping the visual cortices of people who watched the videos.

This form of mind-reading, which neurologists prefer to call "decoding," is a long way from everyday use. And there are clearly some ethical questions surrounding its use (although it would be hard to implant electrodes to peep in on an unwilling person). But there are some practical, medically motivated reasons to do these things, like communicating with locked-in patients, or those who have lost the ability to speak because of a stroke or a degenerative muscle disease. That depends on some other vagaries of the brain that are still not well understood, Pasley said. Development of neural prostheses depends on the assumption that brain activity is the same during real experiences and imagined ones.

"There is some evidence that when people imagine visual stimuli or sound stimuli, some of the same brain areas do seem to activate as when you are actually looking at something or hearing something," he said. "But we didn't have a good idea at all, even if the same areas are activating, if they are processing the same way, and using the same rules, as during perception."

In this study, the researchers only focused on English words and phonemes, but Pasley would like to study other languages too, he said. The paper appears in the journal PLoS Biology.

In this economy, a job is a job. And while we await the day that we can hire our robot companions to handle our household duties, humanoid semi-celeb Geminoid-F is exploring other possibilities at a Takashimaya department store in Tokyo. Here, Geminoid is blazing a trail for androids everywhere by taking a job in a storefront window to see how the humans passing by respond.

The idea, according to Geminoid-F's creator, is to see how people respond to an android in the window rather than the usual mannequin. Mannequins, after all, are static and don't show off clothing in a real-world, kinetic way. Ideally a store would have live models in their displays, but that's simply impractical. But he thinks androids can fill that role admirably, interacting with passersby while showing off clothing worn by a real human analog.

So Geminoid-F sits there coyly, acting as though she's waiting for a friend. She's programmed with emotions and 65 different actions triggered by her sensor data. She doesn't speak to anyone, but occasionally she will look up at viewers, and perhaps return a friendly smile. But mostly she just ignores you and stares at her mobile device. These robots are getting more and more realistic all the time.

[DigInfo News]

Since unveiling the 911 Carrera in 1963, Porsche has built many dozens of variations, ranging from convertibles to racing editions to subtly tweaked versions distinguishable only to board members of the Porsche Club of America. Full-blown generational revamps have been rarer. When the seventh Porsche 911 arrives this month, 90 percent of the vehicle's components will be new or redesigned. The result is a car that corners more evenly and consumes less gas, yet is substantially quicker than its predecessors.

LIGHTER BODY

Designers cut 100 pounds by using a higher proportion of lightweight aluminum- steel composite in the body. As the car travels faster, an adaptive rear spoiler shifts position, applying as much as 200 pounds of downforce to the rear wheels and increasing stability.

MORE-EFFICIENT ENGINE

The standard 3.4-liter, 350-horsepower flat-six boxer engine is 16 percent more efficient than the outgoing engine yet more powerful by five horsepower. The pricier 911 S comes with a 400-horsepower, 3.8-liter flat-six and runs from 0 to 60 in as little as 3.9 seconds.

FUEL-SAVING TRICKS

Both new 911s come with a stop-start system that powers down the engine at stoplights and fires it back up once the driver touches the accelerator. When coasting, the car's "sailing" mode automatically idles the engine for further fuel savings.

SEVEN-SPEED STICK

After years of pushing "automated manual" transmissions, Porsche does stick-shift fans a favor by offering the new 911 with the first seven-speed manual transmission. A shift lock prevents drivers from selecting the highway-speed overdrive gear prematurely.

COMPUTER ASSISTANCE

A torque-vectoring system slows down the inside rear wheel to pivot the 911 more quickly around corners. Anti-roll assist (Porsche Dynamic Chassis Control) senses cornering forces and adjusts the suspension to keep the body flat through turns.

ENGINE: 3.4-liter flat-six (3.8-liter flat-six in 911 S)
TOP SPEED: 178 mph (187 mph for 911 S)
PRICE: From $83,050