Derek Amato stood above the shallow end of the swimming pool and called for his buddy in the Jacuzzi to toss him the football. Then he launched himself through the air, head first, arms outstretched. He figured he could roll onto one shoulder as he snagged the ball, then slide across the water. It was a grave miscalculation. The tips of Amato's fingers brushed the pigskin-then his head slammed into the pool's concrete floor with such bone-jarring force that it felt like an explosion. He pushed to the surface, clapping his hands to his head, convinced that the water streaming down his cheeks was blood gushing from his ears.

At the edge of the pool, Amato collapsed into the arms of his friends, Bill Peterson and Rick Sturm. It was 2006, and the 39-year-old sales trainer was visiting his hometown of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, from Colorado, where he lived. As his two high-school buddies drove Amato to his mother's home, he drifted in and out of consciousness, insisting that he was a professional baseball player late for spring training in Phoenix. Amato's mother rushed him to the emergency room, where doctors diagnosed Amato with a severe concussion. They sent him home with instructions to be woken every few hours.

It would be weeks before the full impact of Amato's head trauma became apparent: 35 percent hearing loss in one ear, headaches, memory loss. But the most dramatic consequence appeared just four days after his accident. Amato awoke hazy after near-continuous sleep and headed over to Sturm's house. As the two pals sat chatting in Sturm's makeshift music studio, Amato spotted a cheap electric keyboard.

Without thinking, he rose from his chair and sat in front of it. He had never played the piano-never had the slightest inclination to. Now his fingers seemed to find the keys by instinct and, to his astonishment, ripple across them. His right hand started low, climbing in lyrical chains of triads, skipping across melodic intervals and arpeggios, landing on the high notes, then starting low again and building back up. His left hand followed close behind, laying down bass, picking out harmony. Amato sped up, slowed down, let pensive tones hang in the air, then resolved them into rich chords as if he had been playing for years. When Amato finally looked up, Sturm's eyes were filled with tears.

Amato played for six hours, leaving Sturm's house early the next morning with an unshakable feeling of wonder. He searched the Internet for an explanation, typing in words like gifted and head trauma. The results astonished him.

Amato searched the internet for an explanation, typing in words like gifted and head trauma. the results astonished him.
He read about Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon in upstate New York who was struck by lightning while talking to his mother from a telephone booth. Cicoria then became obsessed with classical piano and taught himself how to play and compose music. After being hit in the head with a baseball at age 10, Orlando Serrell could name the day of the week for any given date. A bad fall at age three left Alonzo Clemons with permanent cognitive impairment, Amato learned, and a talent for sculpting intricate replicas of animals.

Finally Amato found the name Darold Treffert, a world-recognized expert on savant syndrome-a condition in which individuals who are typically mentally impaired demonstrate remarkable skills. Amato fired off an e-mail; soon he had answers. Treffert, now retired from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, diagnosed Amato with "acquired savant syndrome." In the 30 or so known cases, ordinary people who suffer brain trauma suddenly develop almost-superhuman new abilities: artistic brilliance, mathematical mastery, photographic memory. One acquired savant, a high-school dropout brutally beaten by muggers, is the only known person in the world able to draw complex geometric patterns called fractals; he also claims to have discovered a mistake in pi. A stroke transformed another from a mild-mannered chiropractor into a celebrated visual artist whose work has appeared in publications like The New Yorker and in gallery shows, and sells for thousands of dollars.

The neurological causes of acquired savant syndrome are poorly understood. But the Internet has made it easier for people like Amato to connect with researchers who study savants, and improved brain-imaging techniques have enabled those scientists to begin to probe the unique neural mechanisms at work. Some have even begun to design experiments that investigate an intriguing possibility: genius lies in all of us, just waiting to be unleashed.

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Bruce Miller directs the UCSF Memory and Aging Center in San Francisco, where as a behavioral neurologist he treats elderly people stricken with Alzheimer's disease and late-life psychosis. One day in the mid-1990s, the son of a patient pointed out his father's new obsession with painting. As his father's symptoms worsened, the man said, his paintings improved. Soon, Miller began to identify other patients who displayed unexpected new talents as their neurological degeneration continued. As dementia laid waste to brain regions associated with language, higher-order processing, and social norms, their artistic abilities exploded.

Though these symptoms defied conventional wisdom on brain disease in the elderly-artists afflicted with Alzheimer's typically lose artistic ability-Miller realized they were consistent with another population described in the literature: savants. That wasn't the only similarity. Savants often display an obsessive compulsion to perform their special skill, and they exhibit deficits in social and language behaviors, defects present in dementia patients. Miller wondered if there might be neurological similarities too. Although the exact mechanisms at work in the brains of savants have never been identified and can vary from case to case, several studies dating back to at least the 1970s have found left-hemispheric damage in autistic savants with prodigious artistic, mathematical, and memory skills.

Miller decided to find out precisely where in the left hemisphere of regular savants-whose skills usually become apparent at a very young age-these defects existed. He read the brain scan of a five-year-old autistic savant able to reproduce intricate scenes from memory on an Etch-a-Sketch. Single-photon-emission computed tomography (SPECT) showed abnormal inactivity in the anterior temporal lobes of the left hemisphere-exactly the results he found in his dementia patients.

In most cases, scientists attribute enhanced brain activity to neuroplasticity, the organ's ability to devote more cortical real estate to developing skills as they improve with practice. But Miller offered a wholly different hypothesis for the mechanisms at work in congenital and acquired savants. Savant skills, Miller argues, emerge because the areas ravaged by disease-those associated with logic, verbal communication, and comprehension-have actually been inhibiting latent artistic abilities present in those people all along. As the left brain goes dark, the circuits keeping the right brain in check disappear. The skills do not emerge as a result of newly acquired brain power; they emerge because for the first time, the areas of the right brain associated with creativity can operate unchecked.

The theory fits with the work of other neurologists, who are increasingly finding cases in which brain damage has spontaneously, and seemingly counterintuitively, led to positive changes-eliminating stuttering, enhancing memory in monkeys and rats, even restoring lost eyesight in animals. In a healthy brain, the ability of different neural circuits to both excite and inhibit one another plays a critical role in efficient function. But in the brains of dementia patients and some autistic savants, the lack of inhibition in areas associated with creativity led to keen artistic expression and an almost compulsive urge to create.

In the weeks after his accident, Amato's mind raced. And his fingers wanted to move. He found himself tapping out patterns, waking up from naps with his fingers drumming against his legs. He bought a keyboard. Without one, he felt anxious, overstimulated; once he was able to sit down and play, relief washed over him, followed by a deep sense of calm. He'd shut himself in, sometimes for as long as two to three days, just him and the piano, exploring his new talent, trying to understand it, letting the music pour out of him.


Amato experienced other symptoms, many of them not good. Black and white squares appeared in his vision, as if a transparent filter had synthesized before his eyes, and moved in a circular pattern. He was also plagued with headaches. The first one hit three weeks after his accident, but soon Amato was having as many as five a day. They made his head pound, and light and noise were excruciating. One day, he collapsed in his brother's bathroom. On another, he almost passed out in Wal-Mart.

Still, Amato's feelings were unambiguous. He felt certain he had been given a gift, and it wasn't just the personal gratification of music: Amato's new condition, he quickly realized, had vast commercial potential. />

Cultural fascination with savants appears to date as far back as the condition itself. In the 19th century, "Blind Tom" Bethune became an international celebrity. A former slave who could reproduce any song on the piano, he played the White House at age 11, toured the world at 16, and over the course of his life earned well over $750,000-a fortune at the time. Dustin Hoffman introduced the savant to millions of theatergoers with his character in the 1988 movie Rain Man. Since then, prodigious savants have become staples of shows like 60 Minutes and Oprah. But acquired savants, especially, are perfect fodder for a society obsessed with self-improvement, reality television, and pop psychology.

Acquired savants are perfect fodder for a society obsessed with self-improvement, reality television, and pop psychology.

Jon Sarkin, the chiropractor turned artist, became the subject of profiles in GQ and Vanity Fair, a biography, and TV documentaries. Tom Cruise purchased the rights to his life story. "To be honest, I don't even mention it to my wife anymore when the media calls," Sarkin says. "It's part of life." Jason Padgett, the savant who can draw fractals, inked a book deal after he was featured on Nightline and in magazine and newspaper articles. Reached by phone, he complained that his agent no longer allowed him to give interviews. "It's very frustrating," he said. "I want to speak to you, but they won't let me."

To Amato, acquired savantism looked like the opportunity he'd been waiting for his entire life. Amato's mother had always told him he was extraordinary, that he was put on the planet to do great things. Yet a series of uninspiring jobs had followed high school-selling cars, delivering mail, doing public relations. He'd reached for the brass ring, to be sure, but it had always eluded him. He'd auditioned for the television show American Gladiators and failed the pull-up test. He'd opened a sports-management company, handling marketing and endorsements for mixed-martial-arts fighters; it went bust in 2001. Now he had a new path.

Amato began planning a marketing campaign. He wanted to be more than an artist, musician, and performer. He wanted to tell his story and inspire people. Amato also had another ambition, a goal lingering from his life before virtuosity, back when he had only his competitive drive. He wanted, more than anything, to be on Survivor. So when that first interviewer called from a local radio station, Amato was ready to talk.

Few people have followed the emergence of acquired savants with more interest than Allan Snyder, a neuroscientist at the University of Sydney in Australia. Since 1999, Snyder has focused his research on studying how their brains function. He's also pressed further into speculative territory than most neuroscientists feel comfortable: He is attempting to produce the same outstanding abilities in people with undamaged brains.

Last spring, Snyder published what many consider to be his most substantive work. He and his colleagues gave 28 volunteers a geometric puzzle that has stumped laboratory subjects for more than 50 years. The challenge: Connect nine dots, arrayed in three rows of three, using four straight lines without retracing a line or lifting the pen. None of the subjects could solve the problem. Then Snyder and his colleagues used a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to temporarily immobilize the same area of the brain destroyed by dementia in Miller's acquired savants. The noninvasive technique, which is commonly used to evaluate brain damage in stroke patients, delivers a weak electrical current to the scalp through electrodes, depolarizing or hyperpolarizing neural circuits until they have slowed to a crawl. After tDCS, more than 40 percent of the participants in Snyder's experiment solved the problem. (None of those in a control group given placebo tDCS identified the solution.)

The experiment, Snyder argues, supports the hypothesis that the abilities observed in acquired savants emerge once brain areas normally held in check have become unfettered. The crucial role of the left temporal lobe, he believes, is to filter what would otherwise be a dizzying flood of sensory stimuli, sorting them into previously learned concepts. These concepts, or what Snyder calls mind-sets, allow humans to see a tree instead of all its individual leaves and to recognize words instead of just the letters. "How could we possibly deal with the world if we had to analyze, to completely fathom, every new snapshot?" he says.

Savants can access raw sensory information, normally off-limits to the conscious mind, because the brain's perceptual region isn't functioning. To solve the nine-dot puzzle, one must extend the lines beyond the square formed by the dots, which requires casting aside preconceived notions of the parameters. "Our whole brain is geared to making predictions so we can function rapidly in this world," Snyder says. "If something naturally helps you get around the filters of these mind-sets, that is pretty powerful."/>

Treffert, for one, finds the results of the experiment compelling. "I was a little dubious of Snyder's earlier work, which often involved asking his subjects to draw pictures," he says. "It just seemed pretty subjective: How do you evaluate the change in them? But his recent study is useful."

Snyder thinks Amato's musical prodigy adds to mounting evidence that untapped human potential lies in everyone, accessible with the right tools. When the non-musician hears music, he perceives the big picture, melodies. Amato, Snyder says, has a "literal" experience of music-he hears individual notes. Miller's dementia patients have technical artistic skill because they are drawing what they see: details.

Berit Brogaard believes the left-brain, right-brain idea is an oversimplification. Brogaard is a neuroscientist and philosophy professor at the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She has another theory: When brain cells die, they release a barrage of neurotransmitters, and this deluge of potent chemicals may actually rewire parts of the brain, opening up new neural pathways into areas previously unavailable.

"Our hypothesis is that we have abilities that we cannot access," Brogaard says. "Because they are not conscious to us, we cannot manipulate them. Some reorganization takes place that makes it possible to consciously access information that was there, lying dormant."

In August, Brogaard published a paper exploring the implications of a battery of tests her lab ran on Jason Padgett. It revealed damage in the visual-cortex areas involved in detecting motion and boundaries. Areas of the parietal cortex associated with novel visual images, mathematics, and action planning were abnormally active. In Padgett's case, she says, the areas that have become supercharged are next to those that sustained the damage-placing them in the path of the neurotransmitters likely unleashed by the death of so many brain cells.

In Amato's case, she says, he learned bar chords on a guitar in high school and even played in a garage band. "Obviously he had some interest in music before, and his brain probably recoded some music unconsciously," she says. "He stored memories of music in his brain, but he didn't access them." Somehow the accident provoked a reorganization of neurons that brought them into his conscious mind, Brogaard speculates. It's a theory she hopes to explore with him in the lab.

On a beautiful Los Angeles day last October, I accompanied Amato and his agent, Melody Pinkerton, up to the penthouse roof deck of Santa Monica's Shangri-La Hotel. Far below us, a pier jutted into the ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway hugged the coastline. Pinkerton settled next to Amato on a couch, nodding warmly and blinking at him with a doe-eyed smile as three men with handheld cameras circled. They were gathering footage for the pilot of a reality-TV series about women trying to make it in Hollywood. Pinkerton is a former contestant on the VH1 reality show Frank the Entertainer and has posed for Playboy; if the series is green-lit, Amato will make regular appearances as one of her clients.

"My whole life has changed," Amato told her. "I've slowed down, even though I'm racing and producing at a pace that not many people understand, you know? If Beethoven scored 500 songs a year back in the day and was considered a pretty brilliant mind, and the doctors tell me I'm scoring 2,500 pieces a year, you can see that I'm a little busy."

Amato seemed comfortable with the cameras, despite the pressure. A spot on a reality show would represent a step forward in his career, but not a huge leap. Over the past six years, Amato has been featured in newspapers and television shows around the world. He was one of eight savants featured on a Discovery Channel special in 2010 called Ingenious Minds, and he was on PBS's NOVA this fall. He recently appeared on a talk show hosted by his idol, Jeff Probst, also the host of Survivor. In June, Amato appeared on the Today show.

Many savants exhibit exquisite computational or artistic capacities, but almost always at the expense of other things the brain does.
Musical renown (and a payday) has yet to follow. He released his first album in 2007. In 2008, he played in front of several thousand people in New Orleans with the famed jazz-fusion guitarist Stanley Jordan. He was asked to write the score for an independent Japanese documentary. But while Amato's musical prowess never fails to elicit amazement in the media, reviews of his music are mixed. "Some of the reaction is good, some of it's fair, some of it's not so good," he says. "I wouldn't say any of it's great. What I think's going to be great is working with other musicians now."

Still, as we strolled down Santa Monica Boulevard to a sushi restaurant after the filming, he hardly could have seemed happier. At the table, Amato smiled broadly, gestured manically with meaty forearms tattooed with musical notes, and poked the air with his chopsticks for emphasis.

"There's book stuff, there are appearances, performances, charity organizations," he said. "There are TV people, film people, commercial people, background stuff. Shoot, I know I missed about another half dozen. It's like I'm on a plane doing about 972 miles an hour! I'm enjoying every second of the ride!"

Amato hasn't exactly been coy about his desire for fame, mailing packets of material to reporters, sending Facebook requests to fellow acquired savants, and continuously updating his fan page-behavior that has raised some doubts among experts.

Rex Jung, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico, grew suspicious of Amato after reading about his history as an ultimate-fight promoter. "I couldn't be more skeptical," he says. Jung studies creativity and traumatic brain injuries, and he has spent time with Alonzo Clemons, the savant who sculpts animals. He believes acquired savantism is a legitimate condition. But he notes Amato does not display other symptoms one would expect.

Many savants, Jung says, exhibit "exquisite" computational or artistic capacities, but "almost always at the expense of other things the brain does." Clemons, for example, has severe developmental disabilities. "I am highly skeptical of savants that are able to tie their shoes and update their Facebook pages and do strong marketing campaigns to highlight their savant abilities all at the same time."/>

There is no way to definitively prove or disprove Amato's claims, but a number of credible scientists are willing to vouch for his authenticity. Andrew Reeves, a neurologist at the Mayo Clinic, conducted MRI scans of Amato's brain for Ingenious Minds. The tests revealed several white spots, which Reeves acknowledges could have been caused by previous concussions.

"We knew going in that it was unlikely to show any sort of signature change," Reeves says. But Amato's description of what he experiences "fits too well with how the brain is wired, in terms of what parts are adjacent to what parts, for him to have concocted it, in my opinion." Reeves believes the black and white squares in Amato's field of vision somehow connect to his motor system, indicating an atypical link between the visual and auditory regions of his brain.

As I drove through the streets of L.A. with Amato last fall, it seemed to me that there was something undeniably American about his efforts to seize on his accident-which struck when he was close to 40, staring into the abyss of middle-age mediocrity-and transform himself from an anonymous sales trainer into a commercial product, an inspirational symbol of human possibility for the legions of potential fans dreaming of grander things. Treffert, Snyder, and Brogaard all spoke enthusiastically about unraveling the phenomenon of acquired savantism, in order to one day enable everyone to explore their hidden talents. The Derek Amatos of the world provide a glimpse of that goal.

After parking on Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks from the storied rock-and-roll shrines of the Roxy and the Viper Room, Amato and I headed into the Standard Hotel and followed a bedraggled hipster with an Australian accent through the lobby to a dimly lit bar. In the center of the room sat a grand piano, its ivory keys gleaming. The chairs had been flipped upside down on the tables, and dishes clinked in a nearby kitchen. The club, closed to customers, was all ours. As Amato sat down, the tension seemed to drain from his shoulders.

He closed his eyes, placed his foot on one of the pedals, and began to play. The music that gushed forth was loungy, full of flowery trills, swelling and sweeping up and down the keys in waves of cascading notes-a sticky, emotional kind of music more appropriate for the romantic climax of a movie like From Here to Eternity than a gloomy nightclub down the street from the heart of the Sunset Strip. It seemed strangely out of character for a man whose sartorial choices bring to mind '80s hair-band icon Bret Michaels. Amato didn't strike me as prodigious, the kind of rare savant, like Blind Tom Bethune, whose skills would be impressive even in someone with years of training.

But it didn't seem to matter. There was expression, melody, and skill. And if they could emerge spontaneously in Amato, who's to say what spectacular abilities might lie dormant in the rest of us?

This article originally appeared in the March 2013 issue of the magazine.

With the War in Iraq over and the War in Afghanistan winding down, the Department of Homeland Security has the option to acquire hand-me-down aircraft from the Armed Forces to fill out Coast Guard and Border Patrol fleets. But with 8.2 percent budget cuts due in March, the department may lack the funding to repair and refurbish combat-battered planes.

Fortunately, the DHS has a cheaper option: adapt commercial aircraft for coast and border patrol. A new report from the public-policy think tank Lexington Institute explains that commercial airplanes come with a large civilian market and supply chain, making replacement parts much cheaper than their military equivalents and allowing the planes to be in service much longer than war-worn aircraft.

One promising commercial option is the Super King Air 350, which has already been adopted by several air forces, including that of the British Royal Navy. The Super King is notable for its fuel efficiency, ability to take off from relatively short runways, widespread commercial supply chain, and, importantly, 1,500-mile range. A fact sheet about the plane published by Customs and Border Patrol also describes a trio of sensors and radar that would make the Super King very useful for patrolling vast stretches of border and coast.

The budget realities facing the DHS, along with the recommendations in the Lexington Institute report, can tell us a bit about the desired future of Homeland Security aircraft use. That future may continue to include drones and surplus military helicopters and aircraft, but it is just as likely to feature cheaper, manned commercial planes with the same sensors doing similar patrols.

Last April, a minivan-sized chunk of leftover primordial planet punched through Earth's atmosphere at 64,000 miles per hour. The minivan-sized meteor weighed just under 100,000 pounds before it exploded high above northern California, disintegrating into rock dust and smaller meteoroids that fell onto suburban driveways in El Dorado County.

Video cameras and weather radar captured the space rock, later nicknamed the Sutter's Mill meteorite, as it streaked through the sky. Thanks to these detailed observations, scientists were able to reconstruct its entire life history. They hope to do the same thing for the massive meteor that exploded above Russia on Friday.

Russian drivers, skywatchers and pedestrians captured voluminous video tracking Friday's meteoroid, so scientists will have plenty of evidence to reconstruct its trajectory, astronomers said.

"We would need observations from at least three different locations, and then you can calculate the pre-atmospheric orbit," said Philipp Heck, assistant curator of Meteoritics and Polar Studies at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Among the more than 45,000 officially recognized meteorites, scientists have been able to reconstruct trajectories, orbits and life histories for just 18. "So this is really a big thing if one can do that," he said.

Heck was part of the collaboration that published the history of the Sutter's Mill meteorite last December. It came from the asteroid belt near Jupiter, flying toward the sun and passing by both Mercury and Venus before heading out to Earth. The vast majority of meteorites are from that region--some are from Mars, and very few come from the moon. But for Sutter's Mill, researchers were able to pinpoint a specific debris field within the asteroid belt that they believe gave birth to the meteorite.

Many small asteroids become near-Earth objects and (rarely) meteors after a kind of asteroid-belt billiards, said Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer at the SETI Institute and lead author of the Sutter's Mill paper.

Collisions among space rocks send them bouncing in different directions and sometimes, these impacts shear off hunks of rock that become new mini-asteroids. Light from the distant sun warms their sun-facing sides, and they quickly shed this warmth in the frozen vacuum of space. Gradually, this heat exchange starts them spinning, further feeding the thermal cycle--this is known as the Yarkovsky effect. Over time, this effect grows so pronounced that it changes the asteroid's orbit around the sun, Jenniskens said.

This ever-changing orbital instability is heightened by the gravitational effects of the sun, Jupiter and the other planets. Eventually, the asteroid pieces are pulled toward the sun--and toward us.

"At some point, the object can hit the Earth. That's how we are getting our meteorites," Jenniskens said. "What we are getting doesn't necessarily reflect what the near-Earth objects are; they reflect what objects in the asteroid belt are producing these pieces. We think we have a number of discrete places in the asteroid belt that are sending us these pieces."

In the case of Sutter's Mill, Jenniskens and colleagues were able to determine the asteroid family that birthed the fragment that hit Earth. They crawled on the asphalt in Henningsen Lotus Park in El Dorado County, hunting for meteor shards to study. They figured out how long these fragments had been exposed to cosmic rays in the solar system, which can be used to deduce how long ago it split from the rest of the family. They determined it was pretty recently in solar system history.

"There is a known debris field that could be the source for this," Jenniskens said.

There's still plenty of work to do before anyone can determine where Friday's meteorite came from, but scientists are certain it did not come from the same part of the asteroid belt as 2012 DA14, which harmlessly whizzed past Earth a few hours after the meteorite impact. That rock came from the opposite direction, said Laurie Leshin, dean of science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and former research director of the Center for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University.

As they determine the meteorite's path, astronomers might realize they could have seen it coming. On Friday, several astronomers said the massive meteor was certainly large enough to have shown up in sky surveys, and the fact that no one saw it is somewhat curious. Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said he is planning to check his data to determine whether survey teams did actually see something. Once astronomers determine its orbit, he will know where to look, he said. Spahr sent an email from Vienna, where he was attending an extraordinarily well-timed UN conference discussing near-Earth objects.

"If the object came from the nighttime sky, we have a shot at [finding] it up to a few days from impact," he said. "But about half of the objects will approach the Earth from the sunlit side of the sky, and no survey will ever detect these. This is one reason we wish to find all the impactors well before the last approach."

Along with reconstructing its past via video evidence, scientists are scrambling to find fragments they can examine to unravel the meteor's makeup. The odds are pretty good that it's a run-of-the-mill stony chondrite--95 percent of the stony meteorites that fall to Earth fit into this category. Incidentally, Sutter's Mill was a carbonaceous chondrite and therefore much more unique. Whatever it is, scientists would like to get their hands on it--and so would members of the public, as evidenced by reports of people trudging onto a lake near the meteorite impact to find fragments. There are already eBay listings, too.

While they shared concern for the hundreds of people who were injured, many researchers said the meteorite fall was spectacular for science. Hundreds of observations from a wide range of locations will provide plenty of data to reconstruct its trajectory, and from there, its orbit around the sun.

"At the moment, it's a blank canvas," Jenniskens said. "But eventually, this rock will get an identity and we will know more about it."

We've seen fun drawing/doodling inventions before, but this one, put on Kickstarter today and already more than $50,000 past its $30,000 goal, takes it to a whole new level. As you doodle in the air, the 3Doodler extrudes a plastic version of your doodle.

The pen is thick, about 7 inches by 1 inch, weighs about 7 ounces, and bulges slightly at the center. A small point extends out from the bottom, where the plastic is released. Colorful spools of plastic are fed through the pen and, as you draw, the plastic coming out of the pen solidifies into a string that can be manipulated into shapes. (There are some pretty neat examples of portraits and even an Eiffel Tower on the Kickstarter.)

Awesome! Although this, unlike full-scale 3-D printers, sounds like it's mostly a toy. (Recommended for ages 12 and up, the inventors write.) But there is definitely room for some artists to run with the gadget, and the inventors are working with a set of wire artists to see what they come up with. And since it's already funded, maybe some of the early adopters will think up some unexpected uses.

[Kickstarter]

Today at a simultaneous announcement in New York City and London, HTC announced the HTC One, the company's new flagship phone. It's an Android device, but barely looks like it. That's because HTC's Sense, a user-interface overhaul, has also gotten a huge update, and it doesn't resemble regular, stock Android (which, as we saw in the Google Nexus 4, is pretty fantastic) so much as Windows Phone or even the popular app Flipboard.

Instead of presenting you with a typical homescreen--apps, widgets, that kind of thing--you get a modified grid of images, which are pulled from your tweets, Facebook updates, notifications, news outlets, and all kinds of other information. It's an attempt to move away from a more "computer-y" style, of files and icons and folders, and into a more "mobile" sort of operation, with a stream of information. HTC's calling it "Blink Feed."

Really, what it is is Flipboard--you tell it what categories you're interested in (design, tech, news, sports) and it auto-populates your homescreen with the appropriate content. But unlike Flipboard, you can't manually add your own RSS feeds. Popular Science will probably show up in the tech/science feeds, but if you like more niche publications like, say, The Awl? You're out of luck. I'm not sure why that feature isn't included; Flipboard lets you add custom RSS feeds and it works beautifully. HTC did tell me that they're constantly "adding partners," but I'd prefer they let me add them myself rather than waiting.

The homescreen also has some limitations as regards notifications. Android has always been fantastic at notifications, and the traditional swipe-down-from-the-top notification shade is still there, but I'd like to see stuff like emails, social networking interactions, text messages, and phone calls in the Blink Feed. You can get some stuff--calendar, Twitter, and Facebook were all included--but not text messages? Weird. And there doesn't seem to be a way to organize your Blink Feed items by moving them around; in the demo unit I played with, there was a calendar notification, but it was way down at the bottom, and I couldn't figure out how to make it more prominent up top.

Hardware: The hardware is great. Probably the best-feeling phone this side of the iPhone 5. It's super-thin aluminum, available in either silver or black, and it feels just fantastic. The One has a 4.7-inch full HD screen (that's a 1920 x 1080 resolution), which in a dark noisy cavern on Manhattan's west side, full of flashing red lights and parkour performers, looked excellent. I'm looking forward to trying it out in a less weird environment.

The phone also has some nice audio bonuses--it's branded with Beats By Dre, though that doesn't really mean much other than you'll get a bass-heavy equalizer if you want it. But I love that the phone has big, front-facing dual stereo speakers, one above and one below the screen. It was hard to get a sense for their quality in this noisy room, but it definitely sounds promising. (Note: HTC said "People don't hear in mono. We hear in stereo." This is a good science fact.)

And HTC is taking a stand with the camera--"we don't care about megapixels." The HTC One has a 4.3-megapixel camera. Yeah, I know. But HTC is absolutely correct in noting that megapixel count is essentially a boondoggle, and that the size of the pixels is much more important. You can think of pixels as buckets which catch light. More buckets doesn't necessarily mean more light, especially if those buckets are increasingly tiny. But having big, or just better buckets, is a much better indication that the camera is catching more light. When you have a few million buckets, you'll end up with more "noise" in the photo because so many of those pixels will be catching no light at all. But with fewer buckets in the same space, you won't have that problem.

Also, really high-end advanced compacts like the Canon S110 and Sony RX100 have comparatively low megapixel counts, at only around 10. Considering the HTC One's sensor is significantly smaller than the sensors in those cameras--like, less than half the size--it makes sense to have half or less than half the megapixel count.

That said, in my brief tests with the One, I didn't see a huge difference over the iPhone 5 or the current low-light photography king, the Nokia Lumia 920. The photos certainly look good, but you can keep your DSLR (or advanced compact, or ILC).

The HTC One will be available worldwide in late March. In the US, it'll be on AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint--but not Verizon, which is the country's biggest carrier. Lame. You can snag it in 32GB or 64GB versions, in black or silver. Price hasn't been announced, but HTC did announce a pretty cool trade-in program--if you sign up on their website before the end of February, you'll be able to trade in your old phone for about $100. Considering how disastrous phones are for the environment if tossed in the garbage, and how much of a pain they are to dispose of properly, this seems like a pretty great option.

Humans have been fermenting alcoholic beverages since as early as 10,000 B.C., but we've probably enjoyed the effects of natural fermentation much longer than that. Our ability to digest alcohol might have sprung from a primate ancestor that ate fermenting fruits, a new theory suggests.

Humans metabolize the ethanol in alcoholic drinks thanks to enzymes called alcohol dehydrogenase 4, or ADH4. Other primates have ADH4 enzymes, but not all can metabolize ethanol. To analyze how ethanol digestion changed over time, Steven Benner, a chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution, built enzymes in the lab that estimated how extinct primates metabolized alcohol.

Benner and his colleagues looked at the DNA stretches responsible for ADH4 in 27 modern primates. Using lemurs, monkeys, apes and humans, they mapped the DNA sequences on an evolutionary family tree for primates going back 60 million years, estimating what genes could have looked like for extinct primate ancestors. Then they resurrected these ancient ADH4 proteins in the lab.

They found that for most of our ancient ancestors, ADH4s were inactive against ethanol, although they could metabolize other alcohols, like those found in the leaves of plants.

Ten million years ago, though, a common ancestor of gorillas, chimps and humans emerged with an enzyme that could digest alcohol 50 times more efficiently than earlier incarnations. Benner proposes that this ancestor became more terrestrial, rather than primarily tree-dwelling. He introduced his theory at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on February 15.

With the availability of fermented fallen fruit on the ground, those forest-dwellers with the ability to digest alcohol would have had an evolutionary leg up. Species like orangutans, which primarily live in trees, didn't evolve to metabolize ethanol, perhaps because they wouldn't have run into fermented fruit living above-ground.

However, it's still up for debate whether or not the last common ancestor of humans, chimps and gorillas actually spent time on the ground or lived entirely in trees. "We'll be able to evaluate it with better evidence as we find more fossils from that time period," biological anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva told Science News.

Still, this is a good enough excuse to add drinking back into your Paleolithic diet.

[Science News]

During an update to flight computers earlier this morning, the International Space Station lost communications with ground controllers in Houston, but now everything is back up, according to NASA. The blackout lasted about three hours, during which time the station was able to communicate with ground control in Moscow.

Flight controllers were updating the station's flight software Tuesday morning when the ISS' data relay stations malfunctioned around 9:45 a.m. Eastern time. While the station flew above Russia about an hour later, mission control in Houston was able to check on the crew--they're fine--and instruct them to connect a backup computer to restore communications. That happened around 12:30 p.m. Eastern time, NASA said.

The problem stemmed from a computer that would not let the station talk to NASA's Tracking and Data Relay Satellites. The ISS does have a ham radio on board for emergency communications, but that wasn't necessary today.

Commander Chris Hadfield apparently may have seen this whole thing coming. The best news is that now he can start tweeting again.

A new nanostructured enzyme complex can lower blood alcohol levels in intoxicated mice, according to a new study. The nano-pill, which assembles and encapsulates three types of enzymes, could work as a type of alcohol antidote. It also suggests that this unique protein-tailoring method could be used for lots of ailments.

Enzymes are proteins that spark a whole host of biological processes, but many can only work when they are in specific places in a cell, or when they are accompanied by other enzymes. Proper positioning speeds up chemical reactions, and it mitigates the potentially nasty byproducts of some of those reactions. Researchers have been trying to use enzymes as drugs for a long time, but it has been difficult to produce the right combinations, meaning they might not function properly or they might be rejected by the body.

After you drink alcohol, it loiters in your bloodstream until enzymes produced in the liver can break it down. But this takes the liver some time, and meanwhile, you're intoxicated. This new enzyme injection does the same job much quicker, helping the liver break down alcohol and thus sobering up a tipsy mouse in a hurry. This also helps protect the hard-working liver from damage.

Researchers in California packed up complementary enzymes in a nano-capsule, producing what basically amounts to a tiny enzyme pill. The capsule coating, made of a superthin polymer, keeps the enzymes together and protects them from breaking down in the body.

Led by Yunfeng Lu, a chemical and biomolecular engineering professor at UCLA, researchers injected mice with three enzymes related to the breakdown of sugars, and after this worked, they tried it with two enzymes related to the breakdown of alcohol, alcohol oxidase (AOx) and catalase. They wanted to test the enzymes as both an intoxication preventive and a treatment.

When mice were fed a diet of alcohol and the nano-capsule at the same time, their blood alcohol concentrations were greatly reduced within 30-minute increments, compared to mice that were fed just alcohol or alcohol plus one of the enzymes. The team also tested it on drunk mice, and found the treatment greatly lowered yet another enzyme, alanine transaminase, which is a biomarker for liver damage.

"Nanocomplexes containing alcohol oxidase and catalase could reduce blood alcohol levels in intoxicated mice, offering an alternative antidote and [preventive treatment] for alcohol intoxication," the authors write. The paper appears in Nature Nanotechnology.

Your average American porn star, it turns out, is likely to be a brown-haired California-born woman named Nikki Lee. That's the conclusion from writer and researcher Jon Millward's study of 10,000 actors' entries in the Internet Adult Film Database.

Overall, Millward's number-crunching offers a profile of an industry that's much like Joe and Jane America, except blonder and thinner:

• The racial breakdown of people in porn closely matches that of people all over the U.S.
  American porn actors have the same average height as the general American population, but they weigh much less. Male actors weigh 14 percent less than the average American man, while actresses weigh a whopping 29 percent less than the average American woman.
• The most common stated actress bra size is 34B, while American women now average something in the D-cup range.
• The greatest number of porn actresses have brown hair, followed by blonde, then black, then red. Blondes, though not the majority, still seem greatly overrepresented, as 32.7 percent of actresses in porn have blonde hair.
• A third of porn actresses say they were born in California. (3,000 of the actors Millward included in his analysis were men, but he talks a lot more about the women in his blog post.)
• Millward's listing of the 10 most common actors' first and last names is mostly unremarkable. Women do seem to use some more uncommon last names, such as Love, Star/Starr, Fox/Foxx and Sweet. The ninth most common male last name is Steel/Steele.
• Millward covers what sex acts and roles, such as "MILF" or "coed," are most common in films, but we'll leave that for you to explore on your own.

The accuracy of all this depends on two things: 1. Whether the information in the Internet Adult Film Database is accurate and 2. The strength of Millward's statistical analysis. Millward doesn't offer many details about his methods in his blog post about his study. He says he will publish a more detailed report in the future.

As for the accuracy of the database, the site says it's maintained by volunteer editors. Readers and those representing actors may send in corrections, about which the editors have final say. Considering that much porn--and indeed many Hollywood movies--trade on skewed body types, we'd guess there's a significant amount of lying about people's ages and weights--among other things.

Yesterday, the password for Burger King's official Twitter account was stolen, and whoever was behind it began doing some kinda funny things, like pretending Burger King had been bought by McDonald's, or insisting BK employees "sniff percocets" in the bathrooms, or tweeting at journalists who wrote about the hack. Today, all hell has broken loose; Jeep's account is displaying a similar streak of weirdness ("bought by Cadillac"), and just now, @MTV began behaving weirdly.

But! Given the difference in tone between the MTV account and the Jeep and Burger King accounts, we would venture to guess that the MTV "hack" is actually fake; the original hack repeatedly referenced Hitler, and overall seemed much more anarchic than MTV. We suspect this is MTV trying to capitalize on this wacky hacking: MTV's "hackers" insist it has been bought by BET (which is owned by Viacom, the same parent company as MTV) and links to in-site stories, which of course MTV would want to do, but hackers would have no interest in doing. We'll update when we learn more.

Scientists have known for almost five years now that the moon is watery--or at least that lots of water molecules are trapped in its crust and its permanently dark, frozen craters. The prevailing theory is that this water comes from molecules in the solar system. But maybe the moon has had water all along, according to a new study of Apollo moon rocks.

Hejiu Hui of Notre Dame, Youxue Zhang of the University of Michigan and their colleagues studied several rocks from the lunar highlands, recovered during the late Apollo missions. One rock was nicknamed the "genesis rock" after Apollo 15 astronauts recovered it on a crater rim. The rock was thought to have come from the moon's primordial crust.

The researchers used infrared spectroscopy to peer inside the rocks without disturbing them, and were able to analyze the rocks' water content. It's not really water, per se, but the related chemical known as hydroxyl, which contains one atom each of oxygen and hydrogen.

Recent missions have found a whole lot of this on the moon. In the fall of 2009, the Lunar Crater Observating and Sensing Satellite, LCROSS, slammed into a permanently dark crater and found rich deposits of water ice. Around the same time, instruments on India's Chandrayaan-1 probe found evidence of water molecules in the moon's soil. And since then, follow-up observations have yielded plenty of other water evidence.

These vast quantities of water have mostly been explained by micrometeoroid bombardment, or even free molecules deposited by the solar wind. But Hui and Zhang say otherwise. The hydroxyl content of the rocks they examined suggests the lunar interior contained a whole lot of water when the moon was still young and molten, before the crust solidified.

That poses a bit of a problem, however. Most moon-formation theories hold that a Mars-sized object whacked the Earth and sheared off a giant hunk of rock that became our moon. Recent computer simulations show how this could have happened. But if it really did, all the water on that chunk would have instantly vaporized as the rock superheated. So why is it still there?

"Because these are some of the oldest rocks from the moon, the water is inferred to have been in the moon when it formed," Zhang said in a statement. So maybe the moon didn't form that way after all, or maybe this inference is incorrect somehow. More work now needs to be done to figure this out. The paper appears in Nature Geoscience.

One month into the great European horse meat scandal, two primary facts have emerged: first, it's become clear that some Europeans have been unwittingly consuming the flesh of their equine friends in products including, but not limited to, supermarket "beef" and frozen Nestlé pasta dinners; second, the scandal's perpetrators are as hard to trace--if not as ubiquitous--as the horse meat they've been hawking.

In an attempt to shed some light on the scandal, The Guardian created an interactive map showing imports and exports of "meat of horses, asses, mules or hinnies" by country.

The upshot? Belguim appears to be Europe's chief horsemeat supplier, while Italy is its biggest consumer (or, at least, it's biggest buyer--retailers within the country could be packaging the stuff in various products and shipping it back out again).

The graphic shows exports in kilograms. Belgium's total exports equal about 48 million pounds, while Poland--the second-largest exporter--shipped about 23 million:

Italy imported over 50 million pounds of horse meat last year, more than twice as much as France, the second-largest importer.

Check out The Guardian's full infographic here.

This morning, private cybersecurity firm Mandiant released a report tying 141 computer attacks since 2007 to a single 12-story office building in Shanghai. That building is believed to be the headquarters of Chinese Army Unit 61398. The New York Times commissioned the report and posted a detailed article about the findings last night.

Because it reveals to attackers exactly what the defense knows, the publication of this kind of security report is very rare--especially when the report addresses the computer security of private businesses like The New York Times (which announced January 30 that it had been the victim of cyberattacks over the past four months). Such reports also make it harder to detect the same kind of attacks in the future, as hostile hackers adapt around defenses. In this case, however, both The New York Times and Mandiant felt it was important to publicize the style, national origins, and magnitude of these attacks. They hope to alert the private sector to its shared vulnerabilities, as well as to highlight the single source (the Chinese military) launching the attacks.

The Chinese government has denied responsibility for the attacks, but the hacking focused on information technology, high-end electronics, biotechnology, and transportation--all industries that China has previously identified as national priorities.

Government-linked hackers and attacks against companies like The New York Times are the future of espionage. Fortunately, the Obama administration seems to recognize that: The President announced a new cyber defense initiative aimed at better coordinating information about cyber attacks between intelligence and business, and US Cyber Command is on a major hiring spree.

But before treating this as some form of cyberwar, let's keep in mind that the goal was information theft, not property destruction. This is espionage, not sabotage. By publishing their security report, Mandiant and The New York Times are trying to deny government-linked hackers the safe cover of national deniability.

It's Nicolaus Copernicus's 540th birthday today. He is widely considered the father of modern astronomy and is best known for arguing that the Earth revolves around the sun--a controversial stance until the mid-17th century. Before he found his calling in heliocentrism, however, Copernicus was a versatile scholar who studied several unrelated fields, including church law and medicine. And while it's implanted in our heads that the Catholic Church skewered anyone who espoused heliocentrism, Copernicus actually had a fine relationship with the Church. At the beginning of his career, he was elected canon, a position just below bishop. He dialed down his church work before pursuing astronomy, and afterward found both supporters and detractors in the Church.

Sound surprising? Here are eight more surprising facts from Copernicus's long life (70 years) and career:

He never earned a bachelor's degree.
He went to a lot of college, but there's no record of him ever earning a bachelor's degree. He attended the University of Cracow, the University of Bologna and the University of Padua. At the time, men didn't need to get a bachelor's for a church career or to study for a higher degree, so Copernicus's career path wasn't unusual, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

He practiced medicine. Without a medical degree.
Copernicus's father died when he was about 11, so his uncle, a bishop, took him and his three siblings under his protection. When the uncle became elderly and fell ill, Copernicus acted as his physician. Copernicus was also a physician for the bishop who succeeded his uncle and for members of his church chapter. He never received a medical degree.

He was an economist. Sort of.
Before he got into astronomy, he wrote essays about stabilizing the value of currency that "were consulted by the leaders of both Prussia and Poland," according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

He didn't actually think the earth revolves around the sun.
In his theory, the Earth and planets revolved around a center that was near, but wasn't exactly, the sun. The Christian Science Monitor outlines his other important axioms.

Give some of the other guys credit, too.
Copernicus wasn't the first to think that perhaps not everything in the sky revolved around the Earth. Pythagoreans thought the Earth revolved around a central fire that wasn't the sun, while ancient Greek astronomer Aristarchus of Samos proposed the Earth rotated 360 degrees a day and orbited the sun.

Copernicus was less hated than you think.
Not all signs pointed to disaster for heliocentrism and the medieval Catholic Church. Copernicus sent manuscripts about his theory to other astronomers and scholars, a few of whom mentioned that his ideas seemed to conflict with the Bible, but most of whom encouraged him.

No, really.
Georg Joachim Rheticus, a mathematics professor, published and circulated an introduction to Copernicus' heliocentric ideas to little reaction. That's why Copernicus decided to publish his seminal "On the Revolutions," which posited that the Earth revolved around a point near the sun.

Copernicus was much luckier than Galileo.
Copernicus died soon after publishing his ideas formally. Decades later, Galileo would be brought before the Inquisition and placed under house arrest for doing math to prove Copernicanism, but during his own life, Copernicus had both admirers and detractors of his theory.

Our thanks especially to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a great online biography of Copernicus.

A robot with an artificial brain is learning languages--even heavily accented ones--by stringing together words and sentences. Peter Ford Dominey and his colleagues at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research taught an iCub toddler-bot to learn speech patterns, and it can think before it speaks.

Our brains process spoken words in real time and anticipate what's next, which allows us to hold meaningful conversations (mostly) without awkward pauses to stop and think. This is possible because of connections between the frontal cortex and a brain region called the striatum. Dominey and colleagues built an artificial version--a neural network with a series of recurring loops that can transmit information. They incorporated this into an iCub open-source robot, which is designed to look like a 3-year-old human.

As you can see below, a researcher asks the iCub to point to a "guitar," depicted in blue, and then move a "violin," depicted in red. Like a weird E-Trade ad from the future, the iCub's babylike head speaks with an adult guy's voice to ensure it has understood and is doing the task correctly. Then it checks after it's finished, just to be sure.

This could actually help researchers studying the brain, by validating pathways thought to be important in processing language. But more importantly, it could help robots learn more efficiently, according to Dominey. "At present, engineers are simply unable to program all of the knowledge required in a robot," he said in a statement. "We now know that the way in which robots acquire their knowledge of the world could be partially achieved through a learning process - in the same way as children." Creepy, creepy robot children.

[via ScienceDaily]

Volvo, the Swedish carmaker known for its safety engineering (a Volvo engineer invented the modern 3-point seat belt), has turned their focus to keeping those outside the car safe too. Starting with their Volvo V40, they've introduced the first car airbag for pedestrians.

First introduced at the Geneva Motor Show in March, the 2013 V40 has now gone on sale in Australia, though it likely won't be sold in the U.S.

Though the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that total traffic fatalities are decreasing, American pedestrian and cyclist fatalities have been on the upswing. Of the 32,367 traffic fatalities in 2012, 16 percent were not inside the car. Volvo is not the first automaker to try to design cars that are safer both inside and out.

In response to European Union pedestrian safety laws passed in the early 2000s, Jaguar began making some of its international models with a Pedestrian Contact Sensing System. It launches open the car's hood if it senses pedestrian contact, hopefully softening the impact of a collision and preventing them from hitting their head on the engine below.

In November 2012, TNO, a Dutch company, debuted an airbag prototype designed to cushion bikers at the International Cycling Safety Congress.

Volvo's system combines this type of technology with an automatic Pedestrian Detection system that can apply the brakes if a driver doesn't respond in time to a person stepping in front of their car.

Radar within the grille of the car detects the distance between an object in front of the car, while a camera in the rear-view window determines what the object is. The system is programmed to warn a driver with sound and a flashing light if a pedestrian is likely to step out in front of the car. If the driver doesn't respond and the system recognizes an imminent crash, it brakes the car automatically. It can also brake to prevent collisions with another vehicle.

The auto-detection system is designed for urban areas, and can stop a car at speeds up to about 21 miles per hour, or can slow it down at higher speeds. If it can't prevent a crash, it deploys a pedestrian airbag outside the car. The pedestrian airbag system is active between speeds of 20 to 50 km per hour, or about 12 to 30 per hour -- the speeds at which most pedestrian accidents occur.

Before the airbag deploys, seven sensors on the front of the car determine if a human leg comes into contact with the bumper. An airbag raises the hood of the car 10 cm and extends to cover part of the windshield, deploying in less than a second. The extra space between the hood and the engine compartment allows the hood to dent and cushions the pedestrian's impact.

[Inhabitat]

On Monday night, an estimated $50 million worth of diamonds--both cut and uncut--were stolen from a tarmac in Belgium. We have very few facts about what actually happened in this heist; we know that a van and a Mercedes sedan drove onto the tarmac with screaming blue police lights on their roofs. We know that a group of about eight heavily armed men leapt out and took control of the sizable shipment of diamonds. We know they did not fire a single shot, and that nobody was hurt. We know that they then turned around, sped off, burned the van, and that, as yet, their whereabouts are unknown. A Belgian police force member called the job "highly professional."

That's one way to heist a crapload of diamonds. Here are some others.

1. Smash And Grab

The Pink Panthers are probably the most successful jewel thieves working today, having stolen upwards of $500 million in jewels--although they are sometimes caught, there seem to always be more of them waiting to swipe more jewels. The group consists of dozens or perhaps hundreds of thieves, mostly of Serbian and Montenegran descent, pulling jobs all over western Europe as well as Japan and Dubai (the latter of which is the second-most-important city in the world for the diamond trade, after Antwerp). The Pink Panthers did not name themselves; after jewels were hidden in a jar of face cream, just like in the movie The Return of the Pink Panther, Interpol gave them their name.

It's not a gang in any kind of real sense, just a loosely connected network of thieves, many of which are ex-military and some of which are violent. There doesn't seem to be much of a centralized organization, either.

The Pink Panthers are smash-and-grab artists. They have been known to lob tear gas canisters through doors, drive limousines through walls, and more seemingly amateurish techniques. But the group is much smarter than they appear; given modern security, a sudden and aggressive show of force is often the best way to surprise and overcome security. And the Panthers do sometimes show a bit of finesse. In Biarritz, a Panther-affiliated team painted a nearby bench with a particularly good viewing angle of their entry point, so as to stop anyone from taking a seat. The New Yorker published an amazing story about the Panthers a few years back--highly recommended reading.

2. Rob The Stupid

The Pink Panthers seem clumsy and stupid, with their quick and violent tactics, but are actually quite clever. The Bling Ring, a group of thieves in the Los Angeles area in 2008 and 2009, were the opposite--they seemed like competent, talented crooks, but actually turned out to be a group of dumb teens.

The Bling Ring was a group of teenagers from the San Fernando Valley, a suburban area near Los Angeles. Over the course of nearly a year, they stole about $3 million in jewels, clothes, and cash from celebrities including Paris Hilton, Rachel Bilson, Orlando Bloom, Lindsay Lohan, and Audrina Patridge. The alleged ringleader was one Rachel Lee, who was allegedly obsessed with reality TV. Lee and a gang of friends repeatedly burglarized celebrity homes, stealing just about anything they could--though in the case of Paris Hilton's house, they tried to tone it down so they could make repeat visits (and in fact, Hilton didn't notice until she had been burglarized a few times).

Stealing from private homes is much easier than stealing from the diamond exchange or a jewelry store; the Bling Ring thefts only seemed competent until we learned just how simple it was. The Bling Ring found out where the celebrity targets lived via the internet and Star Maps, and simply lurked around until they found unlocked doors or a sloppily hidden key (under the doormat, that kind of thing). They were eventually caught due to impressive stupidity: two were clearly visible on security cameras, and a few of the girls actually wore jewelry and clothes they had stolen to school.

The Bling Ring is the subject of two notable accounts. Pretty Wild a reality show, aired for one season on E! (and can now be seen in its entirety on Netflix), focusing on one of the more minor thieves in the ring. Sofia Coppola is currently set to direct a film called The Bling Ring, starring Emma Watson and Leslie Mann.

3. Learn To Parachute

Gerald Blanchard, a Canadian national, once parachuted onto the roof of an Austrian palace and replaced the famous Star of Empress Sisi, a diamond-and-pearl piece of jewelry, with a cheap replica he had bought in the palace's gift store the day before. The theft wasn't even discovered until weeks later; when the (now fake) Star was unveiled the day after the theft, Blanchard was there to see guests gasp in amazement. Then he tucked the Star inside a scuba respirator and flew home to Canada.

Blanchard also stole $500,000 from a CIBC bank in Winnipeg and several other financial institutions. He's described as an unassuming man who happened to be "uncommonly gifted" at what he does--a savant who saw the tiniest flaws in any security system and was able to exploit them. In the Star of Empress Sisi theft, Blanchard could tell by sight that the motion detectors were flexible and would not sound the alarm if he moved very, very slowly--so that's exactly what he did. Blanchard was the subject of a great profile in Wired.

4. Mimic The Movies

Many heists aren't quite as elegantly planned and executed as in the movies. None of the Pink Panther thefts would make for much of a story individually; they're typically not any more complex than a brick and a gun. But sometimes, the truth really is that extravagant. Take the Antwerp Diamond Heist, valued at $100 million--one of the biggest in history.

Antwerp is the world center of the diamond trade, and the Antwerp Diamond Center houses much of the actual gems. In 2003, one Leonardo Notarbartolo and his crew stripped the Center of diamonds, gold, and other jewelry to the tune of $100 million. Notarbartolo planned the heist for years, renting a small room, passing himself off as a regular jewelry dealer, earning the trust of everyone at the Diamond Center. The heist was executed perfectly, and given that the team had to overcome a ridiculously complex, alarmed vault door, plus heat and pressure sensors and cameras, that's no small task.

You can read the depiction of the entire crime here, but it involved an aerosol can of ladies' hairspray, a careful and mysterious print of a foot-long key, heat-blocking polyester shields, a custom-made magnetic alarm disabler, re-routed electrical alarm pulses, and, oddly enough, a salami sandwich. An example: to overcome those thermal sensors, Notarbartolo sprayed them with regular women's hairspray. The oil in the spray served as a temporary mask of body heat--providing just enough wiggle room to pull off the heist.

After the double-whammy of a meteorite hitting Russia and a near-miss with an asteroid, some scientists have been thinking over how to deal with space rocks. A team of California scientists is offering up an answer that sounds a little, uh, familiar.

UC Santa Barbara physicist Philip M. Lubin and California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo researcher Gary B. Hughes have unveiled plans for DE-STAR (cough, cough), or Directed Energy Solar Targeting of Asteroids and exploRation. The system, they say, could slowly vaporize earth-bound rocks over the course of as much as a year. From a UC Santa Barbara news release (emphasis mine):

The scientists went through several plans for a potential asteroid-zapper, all of varying sizes, including one about the size of the International Space Station, called DE-STAR 2, which could start to "nudge" an asteroid in a different direction. DE-STAR 4, at about 100 times the size of the ISS, could vaporize a 500-meter asteroid in a year. Here's the description for DE-STAR 6:

Interesting proposal. But the White House will never go for it.