Julius Genachowski and his Federal Communications Commission have proposed a first-of-its-kind plan: create a freely accessible wireless internet service that would be available throughout the United States. Though it might take several years to roll out, it could potentially replace the home broadband connections we pay for, as well as facilitate other wireless-data technologies like free voice calls, networked medical devices, and driverless cars.

The "super-Wifi" would use a portion of the wireless spectrum currently used by television broadcasts, which has significantly more penetrative power than the current wi-fi spectrum. This would make it possible for the signal to travel greater distances and pass through buildings and other obstacles.

Companies that make their money from consumer telecommunications are not thrilled about the idea, as one might guess. According to the Washington Post, Verizon, Intel, AT&T, Cisco, and others have opined that the spectrum should be auctioned to businesses rather than used for the FCC's proposed plan. "We think that that spectrum would be most useful to the larger society and to broadband deployment if it were licensed," an Intel executive says.

But Google and Microsoft have weighed in on the side of the proposal, arguing that, in addition to its immediate benefit to users, free national internet access would make possible a nation of smart networked devices, "millions of devices that will compose the coming Internet of things."

[Washington Post]

Two species of worms have the same set of 20 neurons that control their foregut (a digestive organ located, naturally, near the front end of the worm. The way those neurons are wired, though, completely changes their behavior.

Caenorhabditis elegans eats bacteria, while its worm cousin Pristionchus pacificus, while able to subsist on bacteria, also eats other worms. While C. elegans uses a grinder to break up bacteria, P. pacificus develops teeth-like denticles to puncture its prey.

"These species are separated by 200 to 300 million years, but have the same cells," researcher Ralf Sommer told New Scientist. However, they found the synapses were wired vastly differently, leading to a substantial change in the way information flows through their neural system.

In P. pacificus, neural signals pass through more cells before reaching the muscles. That suggests that it's perfuming more complex motor functions, according to the European Molecular Biology Lab's Detlev Arendt.

The paper can be found in the January 17 issue of Cell.

Can't get enough worm-on-worm violence? You can watch how P. pacificus devours C. elegans in the video below:

[New Scientist]

The beefy arm on the Mars rover Curiosity is equipped with many tools, but none is more exciting to planetary geologists than its drill. Curiosity is the first robot ever sent to another world equipped to drill into that world, and find out its secrets. A long series of tests, culminating in a drill-punch over the weekend, is getting NASA ready for the first exciting boring operation.

Curiosity's drill bit slammed into the surface over the weekend, but it didn't rotate, so it wasn't really drilling. It just proved that it can breach a rock's surface and expose its interior. This is called a "drill-on-rock checkout," and it's designed to use the hammer part of the hammer-drill action. This will assure engineers that the percussion mechanism and all the controls work properly and are properly tuned, NASA says.

After that, the rover will make tiny drill holes to make sure the powder looks right. It will not drill deep enough to scoop anything up, but it will verify that the drill is making powder the way engineers expect.

If NASA deems the rock suitable, then the hammer drill will finally spring into action, boring deeper into rock to bring out powdered samples that the rover will swallow, bake and analyze. NASA will probably drill a bunch of test holes before a suitable science-hole is chosen.

The Spirit and Opportunity rovers were able to brush rocks and grind against them with a special abrasion tool, but they couldn't drill inside them. This unique ability will help Curiosity understand whether its home in Gale Crater could have ever been a hospitable home for life. You can read all about its ongoing mission here.

What do you do when someone exhibits no ability to feel fear? Much like when someone claims they aren't ticklish, the only possible reaction is to try to prove them wrong. Scare 'em, and scare 'em good. For science.

Previously, the amygdala, an almond shaped area of the brain, was thought to be the brain's main region for processing fear. But new research from the University of Iowa shows that it may be more complicated than that.

Scientists incited feelings of panic in three female patients with damaged amygdalae -- women who normally exhibit no signs of fear. This suggests that feelings of intense, overwhelming fear (panic) are located in a different part of the brain than normal fear.

Without a functioning amygdala, one extensively studied patient called S.M. feels no trepidation about things like snakes, spiders, scary movies or being held at knife and gun point. Since the rare Urbach-Wiethe disease struck her as an adolescent, damaging her amygdala, she doesn't act with any urgency in an emergency situation, and she cannot even recognize fearful faces.

S.M. and the other two amygdala-damaged patients, a set of identical twins, were asked to inhale a gas mixture of 35 percent carbon dioxide. Researchers didn't expect them to panic. Inhaling CO₂ stimulates breathing, as increasing the level of CO₂ in your bloodstream (like when you exercise) causes your respiratory system to increase the speed and depth of your breathing.

Inhaling CO₂ can also sometimes cause fear and panic attacks, especially if you already have panic disorder. Researchers assumed that the fear associated with not being able to breathe would be lessened for patients like S.M., who hasn't felt fear since contracting Urbach-Wiethe.

However, all three patients with amygdala lesions had panic attacks after inhaling CO₂, in contrast to only three out of 12 of the control patients, a rate that's about normal for adults without a history of panic attacks. The test was repeated to ensure it was reproducible.

The "fearless" patients self-reported higher levels of fear and panic than the control group. They also exhibited greater physiological responses than the non-panickers, including higher rates of respiration.

But many patients with fully functioning amygdalae became nervous leading up to the test, breaking into a sweat and showing a rising heart rate just before inhaling the carbon dioxide. This bolsters previous research that contends that the amygdala deals with the fear response to external stimuli, whereas the CO₂-induced panic was internally produced.

"The higher rate of panic attacks in the amygdala-lesion patients suggests that an intact amygdala may normally inhibit panic," the researchers write. This suggests that "loss of amygdala function might contribute to the development of panic disorder."

Pinpointing the regions of the brain involved in panic could help develop new treatment for panic attacks and other anxiety-related conditions like post-traumatic stress disorder.

[The British Psychological Society]

3-D printers can produce gun parts, aircraft wings, food and a lot more, but this new 3-D printed product may be the craziest thing yet: human embryonic stem cells.

Using stem cells as the "ink" in a 3-D printer, researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a specific pattern.

The cells were floating in a "bio-ink," to use the terminology of the researchers who developed this technique. They were able to squeeze out tiny droplets, containing five cells or fewer per droplet, in a variety of shapes and sizes. To produce clumps of cells, the team printed out cells first and then overlaid those with cell-free bio-ink, resulting in larger droplets or spheroids of cells. The cells would group together inside these spheroids. Spheroid size is key, because stem cells need certain conditions to work properly. This is why very precisely controlled 3-D printing could be so valuable for stem cell research.

After being squeezed out of a thin valve, the cells were still alive and viable, and able to transform into any other cell in the body, the researchers say. It's the first time anyone has printed human embyronic stem cells, said lead researcher Will Wenmiao Shu, a professor at Heriot-Watt. But ... why?

Eventually, they could be used to print out new tissues, or as filler inside existing organs, which would be regenerated. It could even serve to limit animal testing for new drug compounds, allowing them to be tested on actual human tissue, said Jason King, business development manager at Roslin Cellab, one of the research partners. "In the longer term, [it could] provide organs for transplant on demand, without the need for donation and without the problems of immune suppression and potential organ rejection," he said in a statement.

The team took stem cells from an embryonic kidney and from a well-studied embryonic cell line, and grew them in culture. They had to build a custom reservoir--let's call it an inkwell--to safely house the delicate cells, and then they added some large-diameter nozzles. A pressurized air supply pumps the cells from the inkwell into the valves, which contain pressurized nozzles on the end. The team could control the amount of cells dispensed by changing any of the factors, including the pneumatic pressure, nozzle diameter or length of time the nozzle stayed open.

At first the researchers printed droplets, but ultimately, they were so precise that they made cell spheroids in a variety of shapes and sizes, like the university logo above. One interesting wrinkle: The cells also formed spheroids in the inkwells. More work needs to be done to explain that.

The researchers also took several steps to make sure the cells survived the printing process. Examining the results of several experiments, they found 99 percent of the cells were still viable after running through the valve-based printer. "This confirms that this printing process did not appear to damage the cells or affect the viability of the vast majority of dispensed cells," they write in their paper, which is being published in the IOP regenerative medicine journal Biofabrication.

Stem cells are powerful because they can develop into any cell in the body. Embryonic stem cells, which are taken from human embryos in the earliest stages of development, can be developed into stem cell lines that can be grown indefinitely. This is kind of controversial, especially in this country. But medical researchers think they could be hugely promising for a whole host of human ailments--stem cells could differentiate into neurons, potentially replacing the ones lost in degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's; or they could differentiate into pancreatic cells, curing diabetes; and so on.

Using a 3-D printer to produce gun parts has been pretty controversial, especially during the ongoing post-Connecticut-shooting gun debate. But that may be nothing compared to this.

THE PROBLEM

Many animals are still almost complete mysteries to science. According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, researchers don't know enough about 15 percent of mammals to even determine whether they're threatened by extinction. Researchers try to track them using footprints, dung, and motion-sensitive cameras, but it's difficult work, particularly in dense rainforests. Take the saola, nicknamed the Asian unicorn, a deerlike animal with two straight horns. Researchers first saw its horns in hunters' homes in 1992; since then, they've found remains in the forest, but no scientist has spotted one in the wild.

THE SOLUTION

Tom Gilbert, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen, has found that leeches are a great way to track down rare creatures. He was inspired after a colleague monitoring rare tapirs in Malaysia was bitten by a terrestrial leech (a common annoyance in tropical rainforests) and wondered whether the blood inside it could be used for DNA analysis. Gilbert tested the idea by feeding 40 leeches goat blood. After he ground them into a paste, he found that every one contained goat DNA, even four months after its last meal. In 2010, Gilbert tried the method on 25 leeches that had been collected in Vietnam. "We kind of hit the jackpot," he says. Twenty-one leeches contained DNA from mammals, two of which were extremely rare. Although there was no evidence of the saola, Gilbert did find DNA from the Annamite striped rabbit. (Scientists first discovered the animal in a Laotian food market in 1995 but have hardly seen it since.) Gilbert is now analyzing the recent meals of leeches collected in countries including Indonesia, Malaysia, and Madagascar.

AND: Here's a look at some of zoology's most wanted rare species.

1) THYLACINE

The striped meat-eating Tasmanian tiger was a marsupial the size of a large dog. Though experts largely agree the last one died in a zoo in 1936, some people hold out hope.

2) JAVAN RHINO

This heavily hunted ungulate may be extinct, but up to 50 might survive on the western tip of Java.

3) SAOLA

Scientists estimate that between a few dozen and a few hundred of this deerlike animal live in the remote Annamite mountains of Vietnam and Laos. 

4) GREATER BAMBOO LEMUR

Despite its name, this primate weighs only five pounds. Researchers suspect that some 100 to 160 live in disappearing bamboo forests in Madagascar. 

5) ANNAMITE STRIPED RABBIT

Scientists believe that this rabbit (and its reddish rump) might be hiding in the same areas as the saola.

Chill, people. Beyoncé did not cause the power outage at Super Bowl XLVII. (Her gajillion-watt halftime show had a separate generator.)

What did contribute to the power outage--and the resulting 34-minute game delay--is not entirely clear. Entergy Corporation, the utility that provides power to the Superdome, and SMG, the managing company at the stadium, released a vague joint statement, saying "a piece of equipment that is designed to monitor electrical load sensed an abnormality." As a result, the equipment opened a circuit breaker, cutting power to parts of the Superdome to isolate the issue.

With investigation into the outage still underway, it's hard to say whether or not the whole fiasco could have been prevented, but smart grid technology certainly could have shortened the blackout period. Smart grid technology--sensors paired with two-way digital communication between the devices in the field and a central operations system--could have led to a very brief loss of power, lasting a few seconds or less. Spectators might've seen little more than a flicker of the lights.

Restoring power to the Superdome meant electricians had to manually check where the fault was before rebooting electricity to the stadium. A smart grid could have digitally tested the system within seconds because the software behind it enables constant communication between the sensors in the grid, says Rob Pratt, a thought leader in smart grid technology at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

As for cost: Pratt speculates that installing a smart grid in a venue like the Superdome would cost anywhere from $100,000 to $1 million. Not cheap. But it's still a lot less than what taxpayers have already spent on the Superdome: at least $471 million since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

When the common bed bug staged its comeback over a decade ago, scientists hadn't really studied the insect for about forty years. Once it was clear bed bugs weren't going away, researchers who wanted to learn how to thwart them first had to figure out how to keep thousands--or hundreds of thousands--alive in the lab. The first trick was to feed them. Bed bugs eat just one thing: blood.

But what kind of blood would work? And how to serve it?

It took a year or two for most labs to successfully raise enough bed bugs to run their experiments, and now they are able to test everything from basic behavior to pesticide efficacy. Here's how they did it in five not-so-simple steps.

Step 1: Pick a blood

Bed bugs specialize on human blood, although they'll bite other animals if given the chance. So, the easiest way to feed them is to offer an au naturel meal. Some researchers with small populations simply roll up their sleeves or pant legs and strap a container of bed bugs on, letting them feed through a layer of fine mesh that prevents escape.

Those looking to avoid lengthy IRB approval, or who are housing hundreds of thousands of bugs and just don't have enough arms and legs to go around, purchase animal blood that is more typically used in medical research. Most labs have tried everything from dog to rabbit to chicken blood, with varying success. To make it more palatable, it is often defibrinated, which involves removing a clotting protein called fibrin.

Step 2: Contain the blood

Where to put all this tasty defibrinated blood? In an artificial bed bug feeder, of course. Options for these run from expensive ready-made devices to crafty DIY projects. The former were originally designed to nourish mosquitoes and other blood-feeding insects, such as the Hemotek system, which costs several thousand dollars. Entomologists at the Ohio State University have adapted this set-up for bed bugs. The researchers turn six self-heating feeders sideways and then press bed-bug-filled Petri dishes with small screen-covered openings against them. This allows the bed bugs to feed while preventing blood leakage.

North Carolina State University entomologists use custom glass feeders designed with internal jackets to allow warm water to circulate around the blood to heat it without diluting it. The researchers place plastic bed bug containers with nylon screen tops on lab jacks and raise them up to individual feeders. Blood cells settle to the bottom of the container, so this makes them more accessible to the bugs.

Other feeders are far simpler. Bed bug experts at the University of Sheffield in the U.K. sandwich a few CDs together, seal the sides, and then fill the space inside with blood using a hypodermic needle. In order to explore bed bug behavior, the scientists place the feeder and the bed bugs in a large research arena that sits on a seven-watt aquarium heating mat to keep the blood warm.

Step 3: Add fake skin

Bed bugs can't lap up pooled blood: they have to pierce skin and suck. Artificial feeders, then, require a thin layer of a material that is penetrable to the pinprick of a bed bug bite, but that doesn't leak. For this purpose, researchers seal their feeders with everything from permeable film to silicon liquid applied to thin mesh to condoms.

Step 4: Get them hungry

Bed bugs find a host by picking up on exhaled carbon dioxide and body heat. In addition to the heat sources used for each artificial feeder, which bring the blood roughly to human body temperature, researchers sometimes blow on a bed bug container pre-feeding, which acts as a dinner bell.

Step 5: Feed them

Feeding bed bugs can be a full time job, and labs employ technicians whose main task is to feed and raise the bugs. Some researchers test new batches of blood on a few bed bugs before feeding their entire population to make sure the blood is safe. In at least two cases, a batch of chicken blood tainted with an insecticide-a preventative mite treatment sprayed on the live birds-killed off hundreds of bed bugs intended for research.

Brooke Borel is a contributing editor at Popular Science and is writing a book about bed bugs for the University of Chicago Press. Follow her on Twitter @brookeborel.

In most pop-zombie lore, zombies have been infected with a contagion that turns them into mindless, soulless monsters on the hunt for human flesh. Even if a reanimated corpse used to be your mother/father/brother/girlfriend/BFF, now it's a zombie, and it has to die. End of story.

But the latest film in the zombie lexicon, Warm Bodies, turns that convention on its head. An over-thinking zombie falls in love. He thinks and feels.

Which raises an interesting philosophical question: Are zombies hopeless automatons who should be killed without hesitation? Or do zombies experience consciousness?

Well, do they? Would zombies be conscious beings?

It's possible. They're just sick people, argues Steven Schlozman, author of The Zombie Autopsies and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. "We would never say that somebody that is sick with another kind of disease isn't conscious."

In Schlozman's view, zombies are much like a crocodile. They may not be conscious in the same way humans are, but they are aware of their surroundings and respond to their environment.

From the philosophical standpoint of consciousness, if zombies can recognize "qualia" -- instances of consciousness, sensing things like pain, color, smell or temperature -- then they must be conscious.

"The damage that's been done has changed their behavior in other ways, but if they can smell fresh meat -- a person -- and if they can see them and they could distinguish between colors or something I would argue that they really are conscious, in a more restricted way than we are," says philosopher Paul Skokowski, the executive director of the Center For Explanation of Consciousness at Stanford University. This year the center is running a series of interdisciplinary workshops on zombies and consciousness.

How can we be really sure, though?

Even if we thought zombies were just sick people, an infection that reanimates corpses isn't a normal disease, so we'd probably want to double check. Just to be sure. Using the same methods we employ to probe whether or not animals are conscious, we could test whether or not zombies think on a higher level.

If a zombie could recognize himself in the mirror, we'd have to assume that zombie had self awareness.
"We can establish -- as we largely have done already -- which parts of the human brain are critical for the kinds of consciousness that we have and see if they are intact in a zombie," says Daniel Bor, a scientist at the University of Sussex's Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science. "If we could ever get a zombie in a brain scanner."

If we could see that they didn't have a thalamus, for example, scientists would agree that zombies probably wouldn't be conscious. If there were a lot of complex interactions between regions of their zombie brain, that would imply a high level of consciousness.

But it might be tough to wrestle a zombie into an MRI. One way we test for consciousness in animals is by having them take a good look in the mirror. Most primates, dolphins, elephants and even magpies can recognize their own reflection.

"If a zombie could recognize themselves in the mirror, if it was to pass that test, we'd have to assume that zombie had self awareness, which is an advanced form of consciousness," Bor says.

We could also test whether zombies were capable of what's called meta-cognition -- if they were aware of their own thoughts. When testing for advanced forms of consciousness, scientists give animals perceptual tasks, like picking which dot is slightly bigger in a set or choosing which picture they've already been shown. Then the zombie would be asked to gamble on their answer.

Great apes, monkeys and possibly even rats seem to be able to track their own accuracy -- betting high on answers they are confident about. If zombies were to do the same, it would suggest that they are conscious beings.

In Warm Bodies, zombies start to regain their humanity. Is that possible? Or are zombies really just gone, as every other zombie movie tells us?

They could probably be cured. Zombies go from being able to talk and interact to losing much of their normal function beyond base desires like hunger. (Basically like a drunk crocodile taking a walk, as Schlozman puts it.) They're in a kind of vegetative state.

Yet there's evidence that the brain heals itself, albeit slowly.

Schlozman says the brain could potentially regenerate through neurogenesis, the creation of neurons, and neuroplasticity, the changes in neural pathways and synapses after injury.

Zombies are like a drunk crocodile taking a walk.
For people in a vegetative state, deep brain stimulation can in some cases help them go from not being able to do anything to being able to talk and feed themselves. Electrodes implanted into the skull stimulate regions of the brain like the thalamus so that the neurons fire repeatedly.

For a zombie, deep brain stimulation could kickstart brain function and stem cells could facilitate rehabilitation, Schlozman says, making it possible to retrain the brain to perform the same functions as before. People who have lost function in one part of their brain sometimes learn to use a different part of the brain for the same function.

Whether a zombie would still be the person he or she was before is another question. Much of what we think of as consciousness has to do with our sense of self. If the brain is degraded, that sense of self could be lost. Even if parts of the brain could be regenerated post-zombification, it's debatable whether they'd hold the same memories.

Floating 127,000 feet above frozen Antarctica, a weather balloon spent a record 55 days being bombarded with cosmic rays before heading home over the weekend. Called Super-TIGER, it has traveled longer than any comparable balloon yet, and it will help astronomers understand more about the heavy particles that are constantly pummeling our planet.

The balloon might look delicate, but it's big enough to hold 200 Goodyear blimps, and it can carry 6,000 pounds of scientific cargo. That's about the size of a large sports utility vehicle, as NASA points out--not a light load for something that's just full of helium. Many balloon-borne experiments in Antarctica fall to Earth in the first few weeks, but Super-TIGER had more stamina.

Super-TIGER stands for Trans-Iron Galactic Element Recorder, and it was looking for rare, heavier-than-iron elements coming toward Earth. The planet is subject to a constant flux of high-energy cosmic rays from around the galaxy, and they can be harmful to astronauts and life on Earth. Scientists want to know where these cosmic rays are coming from and how they achieve such high energies, but they are difficult to study because Earth's atmosphere mostly blocks them. They might come from distant exploding stars, or maybe other cosmic sources. Super-TIGER, which detected at least 50 million cosmic rays, will help scientists figure this out.

Researchers on the mission kept a blog about their experiment, and explained in a weekend post how the balloon comes down. First helium is vented, and then a specially designed tool slashes the balloon so it rips. The payload starts to fall, and then a parachute deploys to land it safely. After it hits the ground, the chute detaches, and the instrument is left on the ground for possible later recovery. Super-TIGER landed at 5:17 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, but recovery is pretty unlikely this year.

It had launched Dec. 8 from the Long Duration Balloon site near McMurdo Station. It was able to stay aloft so long because of the weird atmospheric behavior at the south pole. Prevailing wind patterns move the opposite way they do elsewhere on Earth--from east to west, instead of west to east. The launch site takes advantage of these anticyclonic winds, and air circulation makes it possible for the balloon to stay aloft above 100,000 feet. For perspective, Super-TIGER's altitude took it about four times higher than the cruising altitude of a commercial airliner.

The science team will need about two years to fully analyze all of its data.

Amazon mostly soaks up cash for real world stuff, but as they move further into the Kindle and Android worlds, the company is getting more and more digital. Now the retail giant wants users to buy their Android virtual stuff with a new currency--"Amazon Coins." The currency, if successful, could allow Amazon to build loyalty in their Android ecosystem.

In May, Amazon will give "tens of millions" of free Amazon Coins to Kindle Fire customers in the US for apps and in-app purchases, which include stuff like Farmville chicken coops. The move will help butter up customers and get them used to the idea. No word on how Amazon will choose to divvy the coins among the Kindle Fire crowd of roughly five million.

Amazon Coins joins a few other virtual currency minting operations like Bitcoin, Second Life's Linden Dollar, Facebook Credits, Microsoft Points, and Nintendo Points. But some of those, while pinned to the US dollar, had bizarre exchange rates, leading to confusion. So Amazon kept it simple: one Amazon Coin is worth one penny. Developer payouts remain unchanged; devs earn 70 percent of the take, but new apps will need to be approved by April 25 to get in on the Amazon Coins flood.

It's a smart move by Amazon to more easily capture micro-payments and disguise the pain of spending real money--theoretically, you might just think "Oh, it's just a few Amazon Coins." Of course, it's Amazon's way to rake in the long tail of transactions. All those pennies add up (unless you ban them) to real dollars.

While it's a win for Amazon and developers, for customers, it's hard to see any added value in the new Amazon Coins world. It's not difficult to purchase digital items with regular dollars, and it's not clear why users would bother converting money in this way. On the bright side, it's a chance for you to gift someone with 1,000 Amazon Coins and not feel like a cheapo.

We see in stereo -- our eyes, both on the same plane, see at the same time. This helps us see in 3-D. Whereas most fish have eyes on either side of their head and thus see a different image in each eye. A new study suggests moles, which live underground and are almost blind, can smell in stereo. Even though their nostrils are close together, they can differentiate between smell intensities from different directions to find food.

Eastern American moles don't see or hear very well, even compared to the rest of molekind. Skin and fur hide their tiny eyes, and their ears are only tuned to low frequencies. But they locate their earthworm prey with surprising speed and accuracy.

According to Kenneth Catania, a professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt University who studies the sensory systems of animals, this is because they can distinguish subtle differences in smells between their different nostrils.

Five seconds after it sniffed the air, moles were able to zero in on earthworm pieces placed randomly in a Plexiglass chamber. If one of its nostrils was blocked, the mole went in the direction of its clear nostril. When Catania inserted small plastic tubes to cross the mole's nostrils so that smells on the right would come to the left nostril and vice versa, the mole got confused and wandered back and forth.

Even with their nostrils crossed or blocked, the moles were able to find the food eventually, so they probably are using more than just their stereoscopic sense of smell.

In a previous study, rats were trained to identify the direction a smell was coming from. Ants smell in stereo, sensing smells from two different directions at a time to help navigate. A 2010 study even suggested humans might be able to smell in stereo, if pushed to do it, although Catania himself remains skeptical.

Watch the mole hobble toward his snack below:

[National Geographic]

The NFL has announced it will partner with General Electric to develop better technology for detecting concussions and protecting the brain, The New York Times reports. The four-year initiative, with $50 million in funding, will begin in March. It'll focus on improving imaging equipment as well as crowd-sourcing safety equipment ideas.

Athletes in the U.S. suffer from 3.8 million sports-related concussions a year. In our January issue, we discussed the possibility of a helmet that could save football.

The first part of the NFL/GE partnership will provide at least $30 million to develop better imaging equipment tailored toward detecting head trauma.

The second half of the project sets aside $20 million an innovation challenge for new and improved safety equipment. The most promising ideas from the challenge would be financed and brought to market.

[The New York Times]

With 10,000 miles separating them, two makers designed and built a customizable 3-D-printed prosthetic hand for a 5-year old boy named Liam in South Africa for $150 in parts. No power necessary.

The idea for Liam's hand started out as Rich Van As's nightmare accident. When Van As, an artisan carpenter, chopped off four of his fingers with a table saw, he vowed to get mechanical replacements. So Van As, in South Africa, researched for months. But only found the X-finger, which costs thousands of dollars. That's when Van As stumbled on a YouTube video of a velociraptor-like claw made by Ian Owen, a mechanical special effects artist in Bellingham, WA. Van As tried to replicate the design, but soon realized he needed Owen to "lend me a hand." And the two swapped ideas over email, a blog, Skype sessions, and finally in person at Van As's workshop in South Africa over four days in November, 2012.

There are other open source prosthetic ideas, but none quite as developed. The result is a way to blend low-tech mechanics and fast prototyping with 46 parts - sixteen 3-D-printed pieces, 28 off the shelf (which included nylon cord, nuts and bolts, elastic, and rubber thimbles). The 3-D parts were made possible by Makerbot, which donated two 3-D printers, one each for Van As and Owen so they could swap CAD files as they refined the designs.

Two custom-ordered thermoplastic components personalize the fit, so anyone can take the open-source plans and build their own fingers.

"The devices we have made are body powered using whatever function the person has," Owen wrote in an email to PopSci. Van As's prosthetic is controlled by pulling on a cam system with what's left of his original digits to contract the artificial finger.

And that's how Van As and Owen gave Liam, who was born without fingers on one side, a new right hand in January on Liam's birthday. Liam can hold a basketball, and even pick up small things like coins by activating his new lightweight hand with a bend of his wrist. The duo wants to raise funds to further develop the Robohand. Owen said the strength of the plastic exceeds human exertion, which means Liam can grow into the Robohand, which in turn can scale larger.

Liam's mother, Yolandi, wrote to Van As and Owen, that Liam's "not shy at all to show all his Robohand. His little school he goes to was a huge hit all the teacher's & kiddies were in awe..."

This is the Halley VI Antarctic research station, and today it officially opens as home to up to 52 (very cold) scientists working as part of the British Antarctic Survey.

The Seuss-like $40.6 million facility, designed by Hugh Broughton Architects, is built to withstand the elements on the floating Brunt Ice Shelf. Stationary buildings can get buried under the 3 feet of ice that piles up annually here. So the Halley VI architects cleverly added hydraulic legs to the bottom of the building. The legs can be maneuvered so that the structure climbs out of the built-up snow.

As Gizmag points out, giant skis attached to the bottom of the legs solve another problem: Stationary buildings on the ice shelf risk being caught on a broken-off piece of ice. But by towing these buildings away from danger, the scientists can continue their work on dry, icy land.

The building is largely made up of blue pods that'll act as research rooms or living rooms (complete with a bedside lamp that can simulate sunrise during around-the-clock-dark winters). A red pod in the middle of the blue pods works as a communal living space, acting as the go-to spot for eating and recreation.

The Halley VI Antarctic research station is, as the name implies, the sixth in a line of Halley facilities that date all the way back to the late 1950s. Data from Halley led to the discovery of the hole in the o-zone layer, so we're expecting big things when this version's fully operational in the coming weeks.

[Gizmag via Architectural Record]

The Microsoft Surface Pro is easily the most interesting laptop to cross my desk in the past few years. Not the best, but certainly the ballsiest and most unusual. And it is a laptop; this isn't a tablet, like its confusing sibling, the Surface RT, which looks nearly identical and was released late last year for half the price of this one. Instead it's an experimental ultraportable, like Lenovo's Yoga 13 (our favorite early Windows 8 laptop), which innovates with form and aesthetics while remaining, distinctly, a laptop.

What's Good

The size, shape, and build quality are all great. This is a tiny laptop, with a mere 10-inch screen, weighing in at only two pounds. The smallest laptops on the market with this kind of power are 11 inches, and even those are rare--12- and 13-inch laptops tend to be the small ones, and those usually weight at least 25 percent more than the Surface Pro. Though it looks more like an iPad than anything else, it's not a tablet in that sense--it doesn't use a mobile operating system like the iPad, and so in fact, it's a MacBook Air competitor, though it's significantly smaller. It's a smooth, angled tablet onto which you can magnetically attach one of several covers (two of which have keyboards on them). There's a kickstand on the back that flips out solidly and securely to rest the screen on a table. When you attach a cover, flip out the kickstand, and sit the Surface Pro down on a table, it looks like a laptop. A laptop with a weird giant flip-out kickstand and a super-thin detachable keyboard. Then you can fold it all up and it looks like a tablet. A tablet with a USB port and a Core i5 processor and the ability to run any Windows program.

The screen is fantastic--not quite as sharp as a retina display on a MacBook Pro, but remember that this machine starts at $900, and the cheapest retina MacBook starts at $1,700. And that's no knock against the screen, either; it's incredibly sharp and vibrant, and the bold, colorful Windows 8 interface looks awesome on it. As a touchscreen, it's definitely the most responsive of any Windows 8 devices I've tried--the Yoga 13 sometimes missed gestures, especially the swipe-from-the-side gesture that brings up a few settings, and the Surface Pro never suffered that problem.

It has minimal ports, but I didn't find that a problem--if you're buying what's probably the smallest and most portable full-figured computer out there, you can't expect it to have six USB ports and five ways to output video. There's a magnetic power jack that shamelessly rips off Apple's design, a MiniDisplayPort for connecting to an external display, one USB 3.0 port, and both front- and rear-facing webcams. I found the ports sort of tight when trying to plug in accessories, but I suppose that means they're secure.

On the bottom edge of the Surface Pro is a very strong little magnet so you can clip on a cover. Microsoft gave me two, the Type Cover and the Touch Cover, and within just a few minutes it was clear which is the better accessory. The Type Cover is a real keyboard--it has regular keys, just like on any other keyboard. The Touch Cover, which is the one Microsoft has been advertising more heavily, is something very different--it's just a piece of fabric with raised sections for the "keys." There's no actual "typing" to be done on the Touch Cover--you just tap the fabric.

The Type Cover stayed on my Surface during almost the entire testing period. It's about the same size as the touch cover, but provides an actual keyboard with actual keys that move up and down as you press them. It's small, but I had no problem at all jumping in and typing long posts on it, including this one--it has full-sized backspace and shift keys, arrow keys, setting controls on the top bar (play/pause, search, home, volume), and even a little trackpad. The trackpad is cramped, and for any serious computing you'll want a real mouse, but in a pinch I was impressed with how well it worked. The Type Cover as a whole is fantastic, much better than the more publicized Touch Cover.

I still have mixed feelings about Windows 8's schizophrenic tablet/laptop dueling interfaces, but there's no denying it has potential. Here's what that means, in a nutshell: Windows 8 has two distinct interfaces, one designed for touch and one designed for keyboard/mouse. You can think of them as "tablet mode" and "laptop mode." Tablet mode needs entirely new apps, while laptop mode uses any of the bazillion bits of software already available for the bazillions of older Windows computers. The (few) Windows 8-specific apps are often lovely, especially the video apps like Netflix and Hulu Plus. And because this is a real x86 laptop, you can run any old Windows software, reaching back decades. I called up my old Windows friends instantly--Pidgin, VLC, Chrome, Photoshop, Tweetdeck--and they all work just fine.

Battery life was just fine--I was getting about six hours of heavy use before having to recharge, which is on par with other ultraportables.

And I think the price is totally fair. You get more for your money with the Surface Pro than the MacBook Air, including double the storage (128GB vs. 64GB at the $1,000 price point) and a nicer display, plus a flashier interface and a smaller physical footprint.

What's Bad

The tablet-plus-detachable-keyboard design is definitely novel, but I'm not convinced it's a better solution than a convertible (aka a screen that flips around) like the Lenovo Yoga 13. For one thing, it's near-impossible to use it on your lap; the kickstand is really only capable on a hard, flat surface, which my crotch is not. Also, the screen's angle isn't adjustable. The angle isn't awful but I found myself wanting to tilt it backwards more than once. I never quite found the use case that really had me thinking "oh, that's why it makes sense to have a detachable keyboard," partly because I was never really without the Type Cover--it was protecting the Surface, after all!

The Type Cover, while surprisingly good, is still not as good as a real keyboard would have been. And the Touch Cover, the touch-only fabric keyboard cover Microsoft's been advertising the hell out of, didn't do it for me at all. It has no travel at all--it's just a piece of fabric, so the keys don't move when you type on them. Bend down and tap your fingers on a short dense carpet. That's what it feels like. Not good! With practice it would probably be faster than an on-screen keyboard--it has some very fancy tech in it, like sensors that can tell if you're "typing" or just resting your hands on the keys, and of course you don't have to worry about a virtual touch-keyboard taking up half your screen space, but I did not find it to be a particularly good typing solution. I made frequent mistakes with it and never really found my rhythm to get comfortable with it. Microsoft spent years in R&D on this thing and I can't imagine why. Forget the Touch Cover. The Type Cover is great, get that.

My review unit came with a Wedge Mouse, a tiny half-sized mouse that's kind of like a regular-sized mouse that's been chopped in half so it's only about an inch longer than its buttons. Microsoft actually makes some of the best mice out there, but, um, this one's a miss. It's uncomfortable to grip and the scrolling is jerky and unreliable. Skip it.

(The stylus, on the other hand, is pretty nice. Cheaply made, but very effective and accurate, and doesn't require any external power.)

The screen size and keyboard size is going to be an issue for some people. It's very, very small, which is great for portability but not so hot when you're trying to get a bunch of work done. Specs-wise, the Surface Pro is powerful, thanks to the Core i5 processor and quick SSD drive, but the tiny screen definitely hurt my ability to multitask. I worked for two full days on the Surface Pro, and my work day is demanding for any computer--I always have at least 15 tabs open in my web browser, editing, writing, doing light photo and video editing, using several chat rooms and IM programs, listening to music, constantly monitoring TweetDeck--and I found, power-wise, that the Surface Pro was capable. But doing all that on a 10-inch screen, with a minuscule trackpad, was much more difficult than on my typical 13-inch machine.

Windows 8 has also its issues. I went into them more deeply on the Lenovo Yoga 13 review, and things haven't changed since then, so it still has a distinct lack of new apps and a definite sense of confusion. Which app do I use, the touch version of Internet Explorer or the desktop version? Do I download an app for instant messaging or just use something like Pidgin, an old Windows app?

And the touch apps are limited in number as well as quality; the Twitter apps are awful, for example, and it's lacking Facebook, Spotify, Rdio, Simplenote, Instapaper, most photo sharing apps (Flickr, Snapchat, Vine)...the list goes on. Microsoft hasn't had much success getting top-quality apps to Windows Phone, so hopefully they make a major push for Windows 8.

But what was almost more interesting about the Surface Pro is that during my workday, I completely ignored all of the new fancy apps and interface. To really get work done, I stuck in "desktop" mode, which is where all the traditional apps are, and barely felt like I was using Windows 8 at all. I hardly ever used the new apps, even the good ones--sure, the Netflix app is nice, but I can just go to Netflix.com and use a real keyboard for searching and a real mouse for navigating. Sure, MetroTwit, the most popular Windows 8 Twitter app, is beautiful, but it's also functionally sparse compared to the old Windows version of TweetDeck. I'm just not seeing a compelling reason to use the new apps.

And that's kind of a problem, too--I immediately ran into all of the old Windows issues ("why do I have to install the .net 2.0 framework? What the hell even is that? Why did the Surface freak out and crash when I connected an external monitor?" etc.) that any old Windows 7 PC has. The new apps are pretty, but when you give me the significant power of an Intel Core i5 processor, why would I use software that's designed specifically so it's easy to run on low-powered hardware?

The Price

Starting at $900, which is reasonable, considering the size advantages and impressive build quality of the device. That one comes with 64GB of solid-state storage, but if you've decided on a Surface Pro, I'd recommend making the jump to the 128GB model, which'll cost an extra $100. The operating system takes up a lot of room, so you want all the space you can get.

The Verdict

I like the Surface Pro a lot! I have a ton of admiration for Microsoft for really putting themselves out there and making a weird little product that mostly delivers on its promises. The build quality is amazing--this is the first laptop I've tested that really feels as unique and premium as the MacBook Air. And the thing is very powerful and capable.

But the tiny screen size, lack of apps, and general sense of confusion around Windows 8 makes me hesitate in recommending it over the Air, which I would consider the best ultraportable on the market. After a day of work, I just found the Air to be a more comfortable computing experience--fewer error messages, a more spacious and feature-filled keyboard and trackpad, a clearer vision as regards software. The Surface Pro is cool as hell, but if you gave me a thousand dollars and had me buy a laptop? I'd get the Air.