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Can This App Put An End To New York's Controversial Stop And Frisk Searches?

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Stop & Frisk WatchNYCLU
The New York Civil Liberties Union wants everyone ready to record stop and frisk searches.

The New York Civil Liberties Union has released an app that lets bystanders document New York's stop and frisk searches. The Stop & Frisk Watch app has been out on Android since June, and now it's available for the iPhone.

Stop and frisk, the tactic of attempting to reduce crime by letting police search anyone on the street deemed suspicious, is deeply controversial in New York. A report released Monday by the NYPD showed that nearly nine out of 10 of people searched by police under the law were black or hispanic. Critics say unnecessary force is often used in those searches, but there's only a video here and there to back that up.

Stop & Frisk Watch has a pretty straightforward strategy for trying to hold officers more accountable. It has three functions: record, listen, and report. "Record" creates a video that's sent to the NYCLU. "Listen" uses GPS to look for people nearby who've activated the app, so you can find out where a search might be happening. "Report" opens a survey about the search that can be sent to the NYCLU, if you didn't happen to capture video (or if you were the person stopped). There's also a "Know Your Rights" section that lists what you're entitled to under law. (Yes, filming the police is legal if you don't get in the way.)

It's pretty clearly meant for bystanders more than the person being stopped--it's not going to be easy for someone to pull out his phone if he's getting frisked by a cop.

So, regardless of how you feel about New York's policy, is this going to do anything to battle it? Well, the NYCLU has gotten 5,000 videos since the launch of the Android app from the more than 20,000 people who've downloaded it, but only 200 of those videos were actually of police incidents, according to Mashable--the rest were mostly people testing out the app. That's a lot to sort through in search of an incident, but then again, it only takes one extreme video--like this now infamous one--to sway public opinion.

[NYCLU]




Scientists Reconstruct Scampering Common Ancestor Of All Us Placental Mammals

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The Placental Mammal's Common AncestorClick here to see a larger version.Carl Buell
A detailed tree of life maps out the evolution of placental mammals--a group that includes whales, bats, and humans--and traces the myriad forms of life to their shared parent.

After six years of collaboration between over twenty scientists from research institutions across the country, researchers have completed the most comprehensive picture of mammalian ancestry to date. Using a combination of physical and genetic data, the researchers reconstructed the family tree of placental mammals--a group that now comprises over 5,100 species--and traced its many branches back to a common ancestor.

The tree's huge wealth of anatomical data allowed the researchers to reconstruct what that common ancestor probably looked like:

It was mouse-size and grey-brown, with a furry tail. It ate insects. It gave live birth to naked, squirmy babies, and its descendants diversified to fill all the ecological vacancies left by the recently-departed dinosaurs. There were a lot of vacancies, and within just a few hundred thousand years--a blink of the evolutionary eye--the mammalian lineage branched into a wide array of creatures that, in time, would become the ancestors to every placental mammal--from whales to horses to bats to humans--living today.

Click here to see a larger version of the Tree of Life.



Iran Releases Video Supposedly Taken From Captured U.S. Drone

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Homesick Drone
More than a year after capturing one of our drones, Iran is still trying to taunt us with it.

Video extracted from a CIA spy drone that Iran captured in 2011 has been broadcast on the country's state television -- or that's what Iran says. The video was released in the midst of tightening U.S. sanctions to pressure Iran to limit its nuclear program and rein in institutions that are censoring free speech and political dissent.

Iran has claimed it has been able to reverse-engineer the drone, the RQ-170 Sentinel. Iran captured the drone in Iranian airspace near the Afghan border in late 2011.

This latest publicity stunt is one of many recent attention-grabbers touting Iran's technological advances. Over the weekend, Iran announced that it had produced a fighter jet with stealth capabilities, something aviation experts have called into question. In December, the country claimed to have captured a ScanEagle drone in Iranian airspace over the Persian gulf -- a claim U.S. officials say there's no evidence to support.

When news of the drone's capture first broke in 2011, the U.S. claimed the whole thing was an accident -- that the drone's controllers had lost contact with it and it had maybe wandered into Iranian airspace. Later, U.S. officials confirmed that in fact, the top secret drone had been monitoring military and nuclear facilities in Iran, but claimed that it had malfunctioned, not been brought down electronically. And then we asked for it back.

Unsurprisingly, Iran gave the United States the figurative middle finger and instead released images of Iranian officials examining our missing drone. (Check out the initial video here.)

Now, a year later, Iranian state television has aired what they say is video from the drone -- aerial views of an airport said to be a U.S. drone base and a city reported to be Kandahar, Afghanistan. It shows images of the drone being transported and its disassembled parts.

The chief of the Revolutionary guard's airspace division also appears in the video. "We were able to definitively access the data of the drone, once we brought it down," he says. Iran has claimed it is now capable of producing its own version of the unmanned aircraft, the AP reports.

At this point, it's hard to evaluate claims made on Iranian state television. Remember the monkey?

[USA Today]



Mystery Animal Contest: Who Is This Feathered Oddball?

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Mystery Animal: Feb. 7, 2013TBA (It's a Mystery!)
Guess the species (either common or Linnaean) by tweeting at us--we're @PopSci--and get your name listed right here! Plus eternal glory, obviously.

So, here are the rules: To answer, follow us on Twitter and tweet at us with the hashtag #mysteryanimal. For example:

Hey @PopSci, is the #mysteryanimal a baboon?

And then I might say "if you think that's a baboon, perhaps you are the baboon!" But probably not, because this is a positive environment and all guesses are welcome and also this is not a very common animal so guess whatever you want!

The first person to get it right wins! We'll retweet the answer from @PopSci, and also update this post so your amazing animal knowledge will be permanently etched onto the internet. Show your kids! Your dumb kids who thought that was a baboon!



This Mind-Blowing, Horseshoe-Shaped Neon Hotel Can Light Up The Skyline

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Sheraton Huzhou Hot Spring ResortWeibo/designboom
A lakeside view from every angle

Sheraton is opening a bucket-load of hotels this year, including 15 in China, and we can only hope they all look as awesome as this one, designed by Beijing-based architect Ma Yansong of MAD Architects, the firm that also designed Canada's equally crazy Absolute World towers.

The $1.5 billion Sheraton Huzhou Hot Spring Resort is on the south bank of Taihu Lake in China's Zhejiang Province and, measuring 100 meters high by 116 meters wide, takes up about 75 acres of real estate. At night, it lights up in a variety of colors, like the pink shown here, which kinda makes it look like a frosted donut being dipped in coffee. The LEDs on its exterior can even be animated so they produce patterns.

The horseshoe shape makes it so everyone inside--regardless of which of the 321 rooms they're staying at--can take in the lakeside view, while people on nearby land, presumably, gawk at the building.

[designboom via Architizer]



Augmented Reality App Translates Newspaper Articles For Children

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Will the much-coveted 8-year-old market save the industry?

To help sustain a floundering business model, newspapers are reaching for new technology. We've seen augmented reality magazines before, and this new one from Japanese newspaper Tokyo Shimbun isn't that different, except for the intended audience: children.

Here's the idea: A kid waves a smartphone loaded with the AR App over the paper, and a cartoon character pops up on the screen to rewrite the old-person language, explain the text, and point the kid toward the most important words.

So, first of all, hooray for innovation! But, second of all, this spurs some questions. Like: If you already have the content, why not just post it online, Tokyo Shimbun? Will any kids actually want to use this? Aren't some newspapers already written so they can be digested by a fairly young audience? Aren't these children on Twitter or something? And so on.

But if it does work, then good way to indoctrinate the kids early. More years for subscriptions that way.

[BBC]



Giant Asteroid Impact Dated--Precisely--To Dinosaurs' End

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Asteroid ImpactNASA
New evidence settles a troubling discrepancy in the timeline of events that led to Earth's last great mass extinction.

A couple of years ago, an international team of researchers got together to decide, once and for all, whether or not an asteroid crashed into Earth 66 million years ago and, if so, whether the impact would have been catastrophic enough to end the age of the dinosaurs and wipe out 75 percent of all life on the planet.

After reviewing the evidence, which included radioisotope dates from the fossil record and scattered impact debris, as well as measurements of a 100-mile-wide crater in the Gulf of Mexico--the researchers concluded that the answer was yes, to both questions.

But that didn't settle the matter entirely. Some scientists pointed to evidence of volcanism, climate change, or other potential causes for the dinosaurs' demise; others weren't convinced that the two events--impact and extinction--really occurred around the same time.

In fact, the evidence itself didn't support the idea that the events were contemporaneous: debris from the impact dated the catastrophe to 180,000 years before the end of the dinosaurs.

Last year, Paul Renne, a geologist at the Berkeley Geochronology Center (BGC), decided to get to the bottom of that discrepancy. The existing dates came from radio-isotope measurements that were 20 years old, so Renne teamed up with his colleagues at BGC and UC, Berkeley, as well as researchers in the UK and Netherlands, to re-sample the impact debris.

The researchers' measurements narrowed the asteroid strike to a range of 11 thousand years, between 66.03 and 66.04 million years ago, making it virtually simultaneous with the extinction.

There's still good evidence to suggest that the catastrophe was preceded by several sharp climatic swings, which probably put a hurt on much of the life on Earth, but the new evidence leaves little doubt that the asteroid impact was, indeed, the proverbial nail in the dinosaur's coffin.



Your Immune System 'Remembers' Microbes It's Never Fought Before, New Study Says

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Healthy Human T CellWikimedia Commons
Immune cells build up strength against common bugs we encounter everywhere, and this helps us resist more dangerous ones. Kids eating dirt: Maybe a good thing.

Immune cells are like the Hatfields and McCoys of our bodies--once wronged, they never, ever forget. This is how we gain immunity, and it's why vaccines work: Immune cells develop a memory of an invading pathogen, and they build an alert system to find and fight it should it ever return. But a new study by Stanford researchers adds a new wrinkle to this long-held immune theory. It turns out immune cells can develop this memory-like state even for pathogens they've never met. This may come from exposure to harmless microbes -- or the memories may actually be borrowed from other, more experienced cells.

The findings could help explain why babies and small children are so susceptible to infectious diseases. They haven't been exposed to enough ever-present, mostly harmless pathogens yet, and it's the constant scuffle with these bugs that gives adult T cells a sort of cellular precognition. "It may even provide an evolutionary clue about why kids eat dirt," said the study's lead author, Stanford microbiologist and immunologist Mark Davis. Kids are drawn to dirt because they've got to expose their fledgling immune systems to something, to help build up their defenses.

Davis and his coauthors studied a group of T cells called CD4 cells, which are the same ones targeted by HIV. CD4 cells hang out in our bloodstreams and stand sentinel, sounding the cellular alarm when they spot something that doesn't belong. There are two basic classes of CD4 cells: Naive cells, which haven't been exposed to a particular bug and might take a while to mount a response, and memory-type cells, which have done battle with a pathogen and are on the lookout for it again. The memory cells can prompt action within a few hours, while naive cells might take days or even weeks--meanwhile, we're sick.

Decades ago, Davis discovered that CD4 cells reshuffle their DNA when they divide, which basically creates an army of T cells that have very specific pathogen-recognizing abilities. According to this new paper, this ability might also help them recognize pathogens they haven't even seen yet.

The researchers looked at blood samples from 26 healthy adults and figured out which T cells were responsive to which pathogens. About half of the cells looked like they were in the memory state, meaning they would have encountered a particular pathogen in the past. But then Davis and his colleagues did some tests and found out those people were never exposed to those diseases. They also tried this on newborns, using umbilical cord blood, and found the babies' cells were naive.

To test this further, the researchers took two adults who hadn't had a flu shot in five years and gave them the vaccine. After this dead-virus invasion, which is designed to give CD4 cells a new memory, the patients' CD4 memory cells proliferated. But interestingly, some of them were awakened to "remember" different bacterial and protozoan cell structures, which had nothing to do with the flu.

How do naive cells accomplish this microbial memory generation? It's all about the environment. People are constantly exposed to countless bacteria, fungi and viruses, everywhere all of the time. T cells might act like they're reacting to something they've seen before--maybe the bacteria's proteins look similar to that of a harmless bug, and the cell is fooled. Or maybe the actual memory cells reshuffle their DNA when they replicate, which gives new cells specific properties.

"The pre-existing immune memory of dangerous pathogens our immune systems have never seen before might stem from our constant exposure to ubiquitous, mostly harmless micro-organisms, in soil and food and on our skin, our doorknobs, our telephones and our iPod earbuds," Davis explains.

So maybe drop that Purell habit and don't worry about the billions of bugs, most of which aren't harmful, that surround us all the time. They might be giving our immune systems a head start.

The research appears this week in Immunity.




How Mark Changizi Conquered Colorblindness With Glasses

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This article originally appeared on io9.

A pair of researchers from 2AI Labs have developed a wearable eyeglass device that effectively cures red-green color blindness. Called O2Amps, the technology works by leveraging our capacity to see the amount of oxygen in another person's blood by simply looking at the hue of their skin. Developer Mark Changizi came up with the unorthodox idea after considering the evolutionary underpinnings of color vision. His unique theory eventually led to the development of eyeglasses that enable wearers to perceive emotions and social cues more clearly - and, by unintended consequence, to solve the colorblindness problem. We contacted Changizi to learn more.

One of the more fascinating aspects to this breakthrough is how it came about. Changizi, author of Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man, has a long history of investigating the various ways humans think, feel, and see. He has posited original insights as to why letters are shaped they way they are, how language emerged, and recently, why humans and other primates have color vision.

The ‘Color Vision Is for Sensing Emotions and States' Theory

"Most mammals - your dog, horse, bunny - have two dimensions of color," he told io9, "a yellow-blue dimension, and a grayscale (or brightness) dimension. Some of us primates, however, have an extra dimension of color vision: The red-green dimension."

The going theory, says Changizi, is that color vision evolved to help primates find fruits in the forests. The trouble with this idea, however, is that primate diets are widely variable among those who have the same kind of three-dimensional color vision that we have - and yet we all have the same variety of color vision.

"I wondered whether, instead, our color vision was for sensing others of our own primate kind, to sense the blushes and other signals we display on our faces, rumps and genitalia," he told us. If this is the case, says Changizi, then it should be that the primates with color vision have naked spots.

And sure enough, this is precisely the case: Primates with color vision are the ones who feature bare faces, bare rumps, and sometimes bare spots elsewhere, like on the chest. Most other primates have the typical, mammal-like, furry, non-naked faces and bodies.

"Also, if my color-is-for-sensing-emotions-and-states theory is true, then the mechanism behind our kind of color vision should be peculiarly sensitive to the blood signals in the skin that underlie our skin's ability to signal."

Indeed, one of the principal ways in which our blood changes in order to signal is that it varies in its level of oxygenation. And for us to be sensitive to this within the visible spectrum, it turns out that we need to possess the peculiar cone sensitivities found in our M and L cones.

"They're peculiar," says Changizi, "because they have very similar wavelength sensitivities, which is at first glance a terrible design. Like your camera's three uniformly-spaced color filters, R, G and B, you'd expect our cone sensitivities to be uniformly spaced over the spectrum. Yet, we primates have our M and L cones abutting up against one another. That's only a bad idea, however, until you realize it needs to be like that in order to ably sense the blood's variations in oxygenation."/>

From Theory to Practice

Working with theoretical computer scientist Tim Barber, Changizi took his theory on color vision and applied it to the eyewear device. Specifically, the duo created a filter technology that further amplified the eyes' ability to see blood under the skin. It essentially works by removing "visual noise" from the blood signal.

Initially, they intended to use the device for practical general use. "After all, seeing these signals is what our everyday color vision is for," he told us.

"But it occurred to us that our technology may also provide benefits for the colorblind - and it's even mentioned in our patent - but that wasn't our main driving thought at the time. But, as we demoed the filters more and more, we received feedback from users who were colorblind claiming that one of our technologies blew them away in its ability to 'cure' their colorblindness."

Intrigued, Changizi and Barber reached out to more colorblind patients hoping to get more feedback and information about their experience. Once they made the connection between the cones and the spectral modulations that blood undergoes, they realized they could do even better.

"Our Oxy-Amp is the centerpiece of our technology - there are two others, Oxy-Iso and Hemo-Iso - and it blocks narrow bands of light which amount to noise in regard to oxygenation signals. By doing so, the Oxy-Amp further amplifies our ability to sense variations in oxygenation in the skin of others, just what our red-green perception evolved to sense. And there's little or no cost, because the blocked bands are so narrow," he says.

How It Works

In addition to Oxy-Amp, Changizi and Barber developed two specialized technologies that correspond to two dimensions of blood changes that our eyes can sense.

One of the variations is in the concentration of blood - what you see when you look at your palm, squeeze tightly, and let go. These are largely variations along the yellow-blue dimension. The Hemo-Iso filter isolates and amplifies this signal so that it's extremely exaggerated, but at the expense of seeing variations in oxygenation.

The other way in which blood changes in color is on account of variations in oxygenation - which we see, for example, in our veins. These are red-green variations. The Oxy-Iso filter isolates and amplifies this signal so that it's also exaggerated, but now at the expense of seeing the variations in the concentration of blood.

"It's this last one - the Oxy-Iso - that provides the benefits to colorblind people," Changizi told io9. "We weren't too surprised, because it ‘brute-force amplifies' the oxygenation signal - and does so at the expense of the other dimension - exactly the dimension that red-green deficient colorblind folk can't see."

The Oxy-Amp, on the other hand, is an amplifier of oxygenation, but a ‘less brutish' one, he says.

It's important to note that Oxy-Iso can only work on red-green colorblind people who have some of each of their M and L cones. If someone is entirely devoid of one of these cones, then there's nothing to amplify.

And when the Oxy-Iso does work at helping color-blind persons see red-green differences, it also simultaneously handicaps them in their existing yellow-blue perception. "In a sense, it distributes their handicap more uniformly around the spectrum," says Changizi.

A Medical Imaging Technology

Outside of the application to colorblindness, the two "Iso" filters - Oxy-Iso and Hemo-Iso - are principally intended for medical applications.

In fact, they can be seen as a medical imaging technology - but one in which the "camera" is the patient's own eye, thus allowing them to directly see properties of the blood and vasculature under the skin and into the tissue. The devices can be used in the form of eyewear, or in the form of filters in front of illuminants, bathing the room in the blood-amplifying light.

The Oxy-Amp - the unit which blocks narrow bands of noise coming from hemoglobin - has many wider uses beyond (but still including) medicine. It amplifies exactly those things that our primate color vision evolved for - leading Changizi to argue that it's not just for specialists, but for anyone.

"We're moving to put the technology into prescription eyewear, as well as into sunwear, and into general-purpose lighting," he says. "For example, when you put on sunglasses to reduce glare on a sunny day, you simultaneously hinder your ability to see people. But sunglasses equipped with our Oxy-Amp technology provide the shade one wants, while also amplifying our ability to see other people."

They're also considering its application in cosmetic lighting. "It's not at first glance obvious, but one of the reasons youthful skin looks youthful is because the skin is more transparent, and so one can see the vasculature below it more easily," says Changizi.

"Well, what our Oxy-Amp does is make the vasculature below the skin more salient, and that's just to say that skin appears more transparent - more youthful."

io9 is a website about the future, exploring the science and science fiction that will take us there.



Coming Soon To The Coolest Classrooms: A Box Full Of Robots

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RobotsLab BOX The box comes equipped with an AR.drone, a Sphero robot ball, a Mobot modular two-wheeler, and a robotic arm. RobotsLab
A new teacher's kit designed to make it easy and affordable (relatively speaking) to bring robots to school.

Learning algebra with a robot sounds way better than learning it with flashcards, right? I know I would have had a better time learning quadratic equations if I was using them to do something actually interesting, like figure out a quadcopter's viewing area. That's the goal of this new robot-filled box made by a company called RobotsLab.

The Box--that's its name--comes with four robots, many of which are familiar: The fun AR.drone, the Sphero robot ball, a Mobot two-wheeler, and a robotic arm. You also get a teacher tablet full of apps and videos that contain the lessons, a teacher's book, quizzes and printable student assignments.

To answer the questions, students will have to solve equations, understand scientific forces and think like an investigator. In other words, they have to learn math and science.

It's a cool concept for a better science, technology, engineering and math curriculum. The only catch seems to be that robots aren't cheap: The Box will set a teacher back $3,500. As IEEE points out, you can buy the 'bots and a tablet off the shelf for about $2,000. The included lessons are obviously of value, but it would be up to a teacher to decide just how valuable. It launches this week at the Texas Computer Education Association conference.

[via IEEE Spectrum]



These LED Bulbs Can Shine With A Color You Select From Any Photo

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Philips HueSam Kaplan
And do other neat tricks. Smart lighting that's as easy as screwing in a bulb.

Smart lighting systems allow homeowners to control any bulb in their house, set timers, and dim lights-all from a single control panel. The systems aren't perfect: They're pricey, and setup often requires wiring fixtures, which also means professional installation. Philips's Hue LED bulbs do away with physical networks. Each one has its own radio chip, allowing the bulbs to create a wireless network in mere minutes.

The system consists of up to 50 bulbs, a networking hub, and a smartphone app. After screwing in the bulbs, users connect the hub to their router via an Ethernet cable. The hub communicates with the bulbs through the ZigBee wireless transmission standard and with the owner's phone over Wi-Fi. The hub sends signals from the app to turn lights on and off, set timers, and control brightness and color. The bulbs can also relay signals to one another, which extends the hub's initial 200-foot range to cover an entire home.

Philips plans to release the Hue's code to developers, who could program the system to automate even further. For example, the app could adjust lighting to sync with the mood of a user's music or to send e-mail alerts when the lights have been left on. One update already set for release: The app will monitor an owner's location though his phone's GPS, so the lights will turn on when he gets home.

PHILIPS HUE

Max Lumens: 600
Incandescent Equivalent: 50 watts
Price: $199 (three bulbs and hub); $59 (additional bulbs)



Linux-Powered Pen Calls You Out For Crappy Grammar

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The Future Of WritingCourtesy Lernstift
The training wheels of penmanship.

In the digital age, we have barely any use for the common pen. What good is something that doesn't even have WiFi? Luckily, a European startup is creating a "learning pen" to drag penmanship lessons into the 21st century.

The Lernstift digital pen vibrates to warn you that your handwriting is becoming illegible or that you've made a grammatical error. Its goal is to help teach kids to write using instantaneous feedback.

Though it has an actual ballpoint pen inside, it also recognizes writing done in the air, so it can be used on any surface or no surface at all. In case you need a virtual whiteboard, perhaps.

In "Calligraphy Mode," the pen vibrates once every time you write a letter illegibly or incorrectly. In "Orthography Mode" it will vibrate once for a spelling error, twice for a grammatical error. The German invention is Linux-powered, with what is essentially a pared-down smartphone inside.

"It combines a time-tested writing utensil with state of the art technology and thereby gives writing by hand new relevance and appeal in the age of iPad & Co," the company says on its website.

Future versions will have other high-tech features like a dynamic pressure sensor (to let kids know that they're pressing too hard) and a WiFi connection to send data from the pen to other devices. One day you could even use it to write out text messages and send them to your phone.

The startup is still in the process of raising seed money, but expects that the first stage product -- with motion sensors and a word recognition software but without a pressure sensor -- will be available in August. They don't say how much the final product will cost, but the smartphone electronics within it run about €50 to €80 (between $67 and $108, roughly).

You can watch the prototype video below in German. Wunderbar!

[GizMag]



Alaska Brewery Uses Beer To Make More Beer

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DraffJinx
The Alaskan Brewing Company burns its own spent grain for fuel.

The Associated Press has the story of Juneau's Alaskan Brewing Company, which has installed a pleasingly sustainable new boiler system that takes grain that's been used in the brewing process and burns it to power the brewery. Other breweries, such as Newcastle in the UK, have been burning spent grain for fuel before, but mixed with wood or other fuels; Alaskan claims to be the first brewery with an energy system powered solely by spent grain.

What is spent grain exactly? We asked BeerSci: "When brewers make beer, they crush and soak the barley kernels in hot water to extract a large percentage of the sugars found in them. Once the water is drained off, the sugar-depleted kernels are called spent grain."

What to do with mounds of this stuff has always been a question brewers have to deal with. It's not worth very much. Livestock like eating it, so you can pay a farmer to haul it away and serve it to cattle. Magic Hat, in Vermont, teamed up with a company called PurposeEnergy to build a biodigester that turns grain into natural gas. Sierra Nevada has a HotRot-brand composting system that turns spent grain and other waste into delicious compost, which the brewery uses to grow its own hops.

Coors gets ethanol out of their spent grain (which means it's not fully spent, right?); you can pump Coors ethanol into your tank in Denver. And other breweries turn used grain into bread, dog biscuits, biodegradable plastics, and more.

Spent grain is also known as "draff."

[Associated Press, Anchorage Daily News]



Kickstarter For An Open-Source Death Star Has Raised More Than $300,000

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Death Star KickstarterKickstarter

White House officials have already shot down a proposal for a Death Star, but who needs 'em? A new Kickstarter campaign is bringing the Death Star to the people, and in four days they've raised more than £200,000 (about $300,000) out of the £20 million they're looking for. Choose your amount wisely: Biggest donors get first dibs on choice of planet to annihilate.



Kids Are Still Drawing 1900s Idea Of What Dinosaurs Looked Like

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T-Rex With Incorrect Posture An incorrect historical image of the T-rex, with inaccurate posture and skull shape. Wikimedia Commons
Draw a Tyrannosaurus rex from memory, right now. It's probably wrong in a very significant way.

An article over at the Cornell Chronicle looks into the issue of "cultural inertia" in our understanding of dinosaurs. When asked to draw a T. rex, perhaps the most well-known (in popular culture) of all dinosaurs, both young children and college students will draw an upright, small-armed, tail-dragging creature that looks like a slimmed-down Barney or a less-plasticky Rex from Toy Story.

But in fact, we've known for decades that the T. rex did not stand upright, but that its posture was much more horizontal. Even in Jurassic Park, the T. rex was portrayed reasonably in line with current scientific understanding of the animal.

And yet our perception of the dinosaur is still stuck, similar to what was thought of it in the early 20th century, well before the "dinosaur boom" of the 1960s and '70s. Cornell suggests that this is due to improper imprinting--Toy Story and Barney both get to kids early, leaving their ingrained understanding of dinosaurs incorrect. Read more over at Cornell.




A Map Of Where Drones Are Allowed In The U.S.

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The FAA's Drone ListEFF
The Electronic Frontier Foundation releases the Federal Aviation Administration's drone authorization list. See who's allowed to fly drones in your neighborhood!

If you want to fly more than a hobbyist's drone in the United States, you have to get permission from the Federal Aviation Administration. We've know for a while about some drones--the ones keeping an eye on the U.S.-Mexico border, for example--but this list of applications through October 2012, obtained and mapped by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is the most up-to-date look at domestic-drone permissions we've got.

The list is broken down by "entities," places like colleges or local sheriff's offices that have applied to the FAA for a license to use drones. The 81 entities on the list, 20 more than on the first list we saw from the EFF, are mixed: a lot of drones are going to government agencies like police departments, a lot to universities and colleges, others to drone manufacturers, and one to an Indian tribal agency. For some reason, Ohio seems to have been granted a lot of permits in this round.

On this interactive map, you can find out what type of drones many applicants were authorized to use: We know the Nellis Air Force base in Nevada has a license to use an MQ-1 Predator drone, and the University of Colorado, Boulder, has a license to use a NexSTAR miniature UAS drone to do experiments into weather and wireless networks. But we don't know what everyone's allowed to use. The U.S. Army, for instance, has, permission to fly drones in the "general location" of the Pentagon. Type of drone? "Unknown."

What this list also doesn't tell us is how many drones are flying around or how many drones each entity is flying. Like, does the U.S. Army have some gigantic fleet of drones at the Pentagon? This doesn't say.

It's enough to make you downright paranoid, but the "stated objectives" included for some of the license applicants might ease your mind a little. Cornell University once used a home-brew drone for a science experiment, while California Fire Services formerly had permission to use drones for fighting wildfires.

But yeah, that whole Pentagon thing.

Check out the list here.

[EFF]



BeerSci: A Decade-Old Beer Is Gross, Right?

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Beersci LogoTodd Detwiler
Not necessarily! The chemistry behind aging ales, wet-cardboard taste, and what you can do about it.

BeerSci Note: From the outset, I decided that I'd occasionally run stories by guest writers in BeerSci. After all, I'm not the only nerd on the planet who likes beer. This week's column was pitched to a fellow PopSci editor, who passed it to me. -- Martha

Beer producers make a big deal about drinking beer fresh. Stone Brewery produces an IPA with a drink-by date. Russian River Brewing Company implores their customers right on the bottle label to drink Pliny the Elder fresh. And most other beer producers print the brewing date on the can or bottle so the customer knows he or she isn't getting old beer. While it's true that many (and perhaps most) beers taste better when fresh, it's a fallacy that old beer always equals bad beer. Some breweries specifically make beer that needs to be aged for ten years or longer before it tastes right.

If you're hesitant to drink a decade-old beer, you have good reason. Oxygen is most responsible for causing beer flavors to go awry over a long period of time. Charles Bamforth, a professor of Food Science and Technology at UC Davis, explains that oxygen causes the fatty acids in the beer to oxidize and form a multitude of chemicals, including nonenal, one of the main chemicals that contribute to the wet-cardboard flavor of beer past its prime. Nonenal isn't the only culprit though. According to Bamforth, "Tens, if not hundreds, of types of molecules will contribute to the aging process."

Brewers have done a good job at keeping oxygen out of their bottles. They apply a vacuum to each bottle and flush it with carbon dioxide in order to remove as much oxygen as possible before filling it with beer. Yet they still have other contaminants to worry about. "Traces of iron and copper can be picked up from the beer's raw materials or the brewing equipment and can activate oxygen species as well," says Bamforth.

One of the best lines of defense against these bad flavors is a high alcohol content. Thomas Hardy's Ale, at nearly 12% ABV, can be stored for 25 years before opening. The high alcohol, as well as the strong flavor components in these types of beers, mask any trace of nonenal and the other compounds that make an old beer taste stale. On American shores, Stone Brewing Co. of Escondido, CA (near San Diego) brewed their own line of aged beers: the Vertical Epic Ales.

The first in the series was released on February 2nd, 2002, or 02.02.02. Over the next decade, they continued to release beers exactly one year and one day apart, on 03.03.03, 04.04.04, all the way to 12.12.12. Greg Koch, CEO and cofounder of Stone Brewing, said that he intended for drinkers to refrain from opening them until the last entry was released, and then to sample them all together.

One of Koch's tricks for keeping the Vertical Epic Ales' shelf life in check? Bottle conditioning. In addition to the finished product, the filling machines added some fresh yeast and unfermented beer to each and every bottle before it was capped. "You get a second fermentation," says Koch. "You increase carbonation and also scavenge atmospheric oxygen that got in during the bottling process. It helps with the longevity." Not all breweries bottle-condition, but those that do (such as Sierra Nevada and Allagash) reap the benefits of a longer shelf life and better flavors.

That doesn't mean that the beers are idiotproof. Buyers still need to store them properly. Koch recommends putting the Vertical Epic Ales in a dark room at cellar temperature, approximately 50-55 degrees Fahrenheit. "You can store them in the same conditions that you would wine bottles."

Not all beers will benefit from aging, though. Lighter-flavored beers, such as lagers, blonde ales, and the like are generally low-alcohol brews that don't have potent flavors to mask aging. According to Bamforth, to prevent lighter beers from smelling like "straw, hay, or tomcat urine," drinkers should store them in the fridge at 39 degrees Fahrenheit. But the best way to avoid these awful flavors and aromas is to just drink the beer as fresh as you can. Better an empty fridge than cat-pee beer in your glass.

Jon M. Chang is a freelance science writer in Brooklyn.



What Climate Change Sounds Like

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Melting Ice Don't call me an ice cube. christine zenino
A musicologist and a climatologist create a soundtrack for glacier melt.

A climatologist has teamed up with a musicologist to translate data from decades of glacial ice melt in Greenland into music.

City College of New York music professor Jonathan Perl partnered with CUNY earth and atmospheric science professor Marco Tedesco to represent albedo ratio data as sound. The albedo ratio is a measure of how reflective or white a surface is (albedo means ‘white' in latin). In this case, more snow cover means a higher albedo. So Perl took different albedo measures and transformed them into specific instruments and sounds - bells, droplets, etc.- to give glacier activity a voice. In one sonification, a choir sounds almost angelic singing in a high airy tone, but as the albedo level drops--mirroring ice melt over the years--the choir starts to sound like an evil chanting cult. Take a listen:

Perl hopes that his collaboration with Tedesco will touch a more emotional nerve among listeners. Could the glacier songs melt hearts with their mournful melody?

[Mother Jones]



What Does Cheese Really Taste Like? [Infographic]

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Awesome, that's what.

Once you go beyond the types of cheese that can be ordered on a Subway not-quite-footlong sandwich, the world of fancy cheeses can be a baffling one, full of strange names and hints of obscure flavors.

Using a paper from the Journal of Sensory Studies, graphic designer Sean Seidell put together this infographic exploring the wonderful world of cheese.

In the paper from 2010, researchers looked into how using simpler language can help communicate complicated sensory descriptions. They found that using "high identity traits" made it easier to identify similarities and differences between cheese samples.

In graphic form, the study's findings provide a cheat sheet for those of us who can spend hours browsing at the cheese counter on a quest for that perfect nutty cheese we tried that one time. Wondering what the difference is between a longhorn cheddar and a New York variant? Wondering how feta relates to provolone? To the cheese wheel!

16 Flavors of Cheese: Flavor Traits & Related Cheeses

Click here to see this amazing image even larger.

The splotches extending out from each cheese correspond to one or more flavors on the wheel. Gruyere, for example, seems to have a bit of a pineapple flavor going on, while feta has hints of sauerkraut. I wonder what beer flavor that could pair with?

You can see more of Seidell's work on his blog.

[visua.ly]



BigPic: Northeastern U.S., Meet Nemo

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Nemo, February 8, 2013NASA
Like Sandy, but colder

Sandy was a colossal storm that formed when two giant low-pressure systems merged over the northeastern U.S. in early November. Nemo, on the other hand, is a colossal storm that formed when two giant low-pressure systems merged over the northeastern U.S. in February. But from space, the two storms look awfully similar:



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