If someone has never used a Chromebook, it's hard to explain why it's actually a good idea. Chromebooks look like laptops, but instead of running Windows or Mac OS or Linux or, hell, even Android, they run Google's Chrome OS. Chrome OS is just Google Chrome. Yeah, the browser. That's it, pretty much. It's just a browser, with some little extras like 16GB of storage and a rudimentary file browser. It sounds insane, it sounds unnecessarily limiting, and it sounds like a joke.

Google just unveiled the Chromebook Pixel, which is...not what I expected.But it's not! Matter of fact, I'm typing this on a Samsung Chromebook right now, because not three hours ago my four-year-old MacBook Pro made a noise like a bug zapper killing a mosquito and then turned off in the middle of a post. (I'm not sure what's wrong with it.) And I haven't lost a step. For casual computing use, a Chromebook is far more capable than, say, an iPad--it has a real trackpad, a real keyboard, it can play Flash and basically everything else on the internet, it has good web apps for easy stuff like instant messaging and Twitter and Evernote all the way up to complex stuff like image editing, I can get my music and video from web sources like Rdio and Hulu, I do my office-type stuff on Google Docs, and, basically, there's very little that a low- to mid-intensity user would want to do that it can't do. It's quicker and thinner and more power-efficient than those crappy 10-inch netbooks everyone used a few years ago, because it's so streamlined in function. And more to the point, the Samsung Chromebook costs $250.

I often use it as a secondary machine; I have, or had, until this morning, a more powerful computer at home, and then I can use the very small and light 11.6-inch Chromebook when I'm out and about. I've covered tech events with it and found it super capable of doing just about everything I needed it to do. And at $250, I don't really care if I drop it or if it gets scuffed. It'd even be a totally adequate primary machine for someone who doesn't do much besides browse the web anyway.

Up until now, I've really liked the direction Google has been going with the Chromebook line. Early Chromebooks used Intel Atom processors, a low-power laptop chip, and cost anywhere from $350 to $550--not that cheap, really. But the one I'm using now, the newest Samsung, uses a high-end mobile chip, like what you'd find in a nice tablet. That gives it better battery life, a smaller footprint, and, surprisingly, not really much noticeable loss in power. Plus, it can be cheaper, which is how the Samsung costs only $250.

That's the right direction for these computers--they are definitely more limited than a computer with Windows or Mac OS, so keep the price super low, make them thin and light and keep hammering away to get the most power with those priorities. I expected the next Chromebook to cost either $250 or maybe even $199, to have a higher-resolution screen, maybe double the storage to 32GB, and to have the next-gen mobile processor. I was wrong, apparently.

Google just unveiled the Chromebook Pixel, which is...not what I expected. That's not to say it doesn't look nice; it has a very premium, industrial look to it (maybe even too industrial), a far better screen, and 32GB of onboard storage (plus a full terabyte of online cloud storage). So far so good! But Google went a little nuts with the hardware here; the screen, a 13-incher, is among the best in the entire market, with a 2560x1700 resolution at 231 pixels per inch--that's crazy, like nearly as good as Apple's ultra-expensive Retina displays. If that strikes you as an odd resolution, you'd be right; it has a 3:2 display instead of the typical 16:9. That makes it much taller and squarer than a regular laptop: the same ratio as an iPad.

The screen is touch-enabled, for no reason I can tell. Touch interfaces really only work when the software is designed from the ground up to be finger-friendly. Chrome OS is just regular Chrome. Try tapping on your browser right now. That's how this'll work. And The Verge notes that the screen isn't exactly as smooth as an iPad or a Windows 8 device.

Even weirder, the thing has an Intel Core i5 processor. That's a very powerful, totally modern chip, the same one Apple uses for its 13-inch MacBook Pro--which is a laptop with much higher power needs than a laptop like a Chromebook.

The Chromebook Pixel is a supercharged Chromebook. But why does anyone need a supercharged Chromebook?

The worst thing: the cheapest version of the new Chromebook, which comes with 32GB of storage and no mobile wireless (more expensive versions are compatible with Verizon's 4G LTE network, much like more expensive versions of tablets like the iPad), costs $1,300. That's significantly more than great Windows 8 computers like the Microsoft Surface Pro and Lenovo Yoga 13, and even more expensive than the smaller and much, much more capable 11-inch Apple MacBook Air.

Even for someone like me who likes Chromebooks a lot, I can't imagine paying $1,300 for one. Chrome OS is stripped down and basic; it's most tempting when the price and hardware is also stripped down as far as it can go. Nobody asked for a crazy-powerful Chromebook and I have a hard time coming up with an example of a single person who'd buy the Pixel.

One of the oddest moments of last night's PlayStation 4 announcement came when developer David Cage explained why the new console would blow everything else out of the water. He's worked on quite a few games over the years, and, you see, those games had polygons, and this new console used not 500, or even 15,000, but 30,000 polygons.

Someone in the balcony clapped. No one seemed to understand if or why that was important.

Because it really wasn't. Truth is, this was the first major Xbox or PlayStation announcement that didn't feature graphics that were retina-popping for the time. That meant a lot of talk about other functions: social applications, streaming, and the number of polygons the games use, whatever that means.

That part isn't Sony's fault. The leaps between consoles is a process of diminishing returns. As creators inch closer to making truly photo-realistic games, graphics will start to peak. The PlayStation 4 isn't any different.

Here's an example. Sony announced a new entry in the Killzone series at the event. These are entries from the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4 versions.

The latest entry looks the best, sure, but only a smidgen better than the latest PS3 title. Which explains why we only saw an abstract glimpse at what the console can really do. Enough games were demoed, but speakers demonstrated the console's power by (bizarrely) showing a rendered old man and a storm of blue geometric shapes raining on the ground. Not much that the PS3 couldn't do.

That's an issue, because graphics have mattered more to PlayStation than any other console. Nintendo has never looked to compete on the same level graphics-wise; they've been mostly happy creating games, and legacy series like the Mario franchise, with a more cartoonish sensibility, then experimenting with hardware a la the Wii. Microsoft's Xbox did try to compete with the PlayStation in graphics, but also diverted resources into extra gadgets like the motion-sensitive Kinect and other functions that could turn their console into a complete living-room entertainment center. Sony had to spend some time relying on the games they already had, and what they looked like, before they caught up.

Without truly new and beautiful games to focus on last night, the majority of the announcement shifted to everything else about the system. It streams games! You'll have a Facebook-style profile! Your friends can watch along as you play! The games themselves were mostly sequels from already established series and developers. All of that information made the end, when it became clear Sony wouldn't be showing the actual console, even worse.

So we didn't learn a whole lot about the PlayStation. And part of that's because the graphics couldn't speak for themselves.

Mars is so associated with red--its very name is after the bloody god of war--that it's weird to think about it in any other color. Rocks, dust, and even the atmosphere appear in hues of cinnamon, rust and orange in images from all the machines that have ever visited the Red Planet. But it turns out there is not much verisimilitude in this vermillion vision. Not beyond the surface, anyway. Underneath, Mars is a bluish shade of gray, as the Mars rover Curiosity's first drilled sample shows.

It looks red because the dust and rocks on the surface are oxidized, the same process that forms rust on Earth. Over eons, oxygen in water and charged oxygen molecules in the atmosphere combined with iron atoms to form rust. The first tablespoon of dust from a ground-up Mars rock is intriguingly pale, however, and scientists working with Curiosity are excited about it.

"The tailings from our drill operation aren't the typical rusty red we associate with just about everything on Mars," said Joel Hurowitz, Curiosity sampling system scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "You can probably bet that when things turn orange, it's because there's a rusting process of some kind going on that oxidizes the iron in the rock. The fact that these rocks aren't that color means they didn't go through that process that turns things to rust on Mars."

Scientists don't yet know what the rock contains--answers to that question will come in a few days, when the rover sifts the rock dust and transfers it to two instruments in its belly. The CheMin (for Chemistry and Mineralogy) and SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) instruments will determine the rock's chemical composition, and help determine how it formed.

The rock in question, dubbed "John Klein" after a mission scientist who died in 2011, is an exposed slab of bedrock that scientists believe is a time capsule into Mars' past. "Going beyond that surface of the rock gets us behind, or under, all the environmental exposure that the rest of the top layers of Mars have been seeing," said Louise Jandura, sample system chief engineer at JPL.

The rock looks like soapstone or mudstone, which is just the geologic name derived from the size of particles scientists can see. Even Curiosity's 17 high-resolution cameras can't resolve rock grains, suggesting they are very fine, scientists said. On Earth, rocks like John Klein could have formed in a variety of environments, but most of them involve water, Hurowitz said.

"It could be particulates settled out of suspension from a water body. That might be the quiescent part of a stream, a standing body of water; it could just as well be ash falling out of the air, or something like a glacial rust deposit where you have rock flour being deposited," he said. "The contextual evidence we have from the other rocks we've looked at in the area leads us to hypothesize the most likely setting for this is subaqueous--one where water was involved."

Verifying that John Klein formed in water would be a boon for the mission, which is trying to characterize whether Curiosity's home in Gale Crater could ever have been hospitable for life. The lack of rust is also a potential good sign, said John Grotzinger, Curiosity's principal investigator.

"All things being equal, it's better to have gray color rather than red color, just because oxidation ... we know destroys organic compounds," Grotzinger said.

The rock is also criss-crossed with veins, nodules and other interesting formations. Its setting on the floor of Gale Crater looks like a flagstone patio, with little dust rivulets separating flat shards of bedrock. Scientists aren't sure how it broke up to form that pattern--it could have been the result of hydraulic fracturing, or maybe a drying-out process that caused the rocks to shrivel up like caked mud in a dry desert. But what they do know is that inside, John Klein is not red at all.

"It's pretty exciting to us that you sort of brush beneath this surface veneer and the rocks are a completely different color," Hurowitz said.

People, primates and dogs all react negatively when others get a better reward for doing the same work. Now a small study has found that crows and ravens dislike unfairness, too--the first time research has shown non-mammals react to inequity. Knowing which animals do and don't seem to notice unfairness (cleaner fish, for example, don't notice) helps scientists figure out how a sense of fairness evolved.

For the study, published February 20 in the journal PLoS ONE, a pair of biologists at the University of Vienna trained six carrion crows and four ravens to exchange pebble tokens for food. The researchers then created same-species pairs for a series of experiments. When the birds saw their partners getting food for free, without having to exchange tokens, they tended to exchange tokens less often. Sometimes the birds that got the short shrift even gave away tokens, but refused to take their reward.

Other research has suggested that a sense of equity evolved several times in unrelated animals, the University of Vienna researchers write. Knowing what's fair is linked to cooperative behavior in species, they say, and that makes sense with crows and ravens, which form alliances and share food and information.

A paranoid soul might take this as evidence that crows are totally capable of forming a The Birds-style rebellion. Members of the Corvus genus have previously been shown to form hooked tools, use a tool on another tool to get a piece of meat, watch other birds caching foods in order to steal that food later, cache in private (wouldn't you if you were surrounded by thieves?), and reach meat tied to the end of a string.

Watch out, UW Bothell.

That old book smell may be loveable, but it's also a sign of books' decay. Now the British Library is working with a chemical detection company to quantify that smell for book preservation.

Ultimately, the library and company, Owlstone Nanotech, want to see if a mechanical sniffer is able to identify the types of fibers in a book's pages, as well as the "mode and degree of degradation" of a book. Could a device detect, for example, whether a book is undergoing acid hydrolysis or oxidation? The library is also interested in whether books made with acidic paper release acids that affect nearby books printed on non-acidic paper.

The British Library is testing Owlstone Nanotech's Lonestar Portable Analyzer, which Owlstone--a company known for its bomb-detecting technology--advertises as portable, easy for non-specialists to use and faster than other chemical techniques such as gas chromatography.

Much of the chemistry of the old book smell is already well known. A 2009 studycharacterized the scent as "a combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness." (Sexy.) One company has distilled it into a perfume. According to the British Library, "more than 100 different compounds, including acids, aldehydes, alcohols, ketones, alkanes and terpenes, have been identified in books and paper, so the challenge is to identify those which are most significant."

[Library Journal]

Oceana, an organization dedicated to ocean conservation, has bought over 1,200 samples of fish from restaurants and stores around the country, and submitted them to DNA testing to identify their species.

The final report, released today, shows that almost all fish labeled as snapper is not snapper; "white tuna" is really escolar (which is banned in Italy and Japan for its gastric volatility but is in fact rich and delicious); and in general, a third of all fish is sold under false names.

Kansas City is one of the only locations where a fish labeled snapper was actually a snapper. Other national highlights: In Texas, 49 percent of fish was mislabeled; in Chicago, a fish labeled Alaskan cod was actually the unusual threadfin slickhead; and not a single New York sushi restaurant had all its fish correctly labeled.

Critics have applauded the realism of the film Zero Dark Thirty, an Oscar favorite that claims to re-create the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But some have protested an early scene in which intelligence officers torture a man, then use the threat of further torture to persuade him to reveal a crucial bit of evidence. The New York Times called the controversy "a national Rorschach test on the divisive subject of torture."

In 2009, two Harvard psychologists, Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner, published the results of a more scientific test. The researchers seemed to cause a subject pain (by dipping her hand in ice water), then asked volunteers if she was answering a series of questions truthfully. In fact, the "subject" was acting, and the questions and answers were scripted. What Gray and Wegner really wanted to know was whether the volunteers (the "audience," so to speak) would judge guilt differently according to their distance from the person being tortured. They found that, on balance, people listening in the room next door thought the actor was guilty, but those listening to a recording of the interrogation assumed she was innocent.

People in the next room thought the subject was guilty, but people listening to an audio recording assumed she was innocent.
I asked Gray, now at the University of North Carolina, what accounted for the reactions of the people who were closer. "It's just cognitive dissonance," he said. When you're up close, "you feel really terrible about this person's suffering, and you think there must be a reason for it." When you listen to the tape, however, you're more likely to engage in "moral typecasting," linking suffering to innocence. "Put a little physical distance in there and you get a complete reversal of the effects."

Gray's research suggests that torture's very repugnancy is what causes some of us to defend its use-we feel terrible about it, so we think there must be a reason for it. In movies the effect may be more pronounced: The giant screen brings us even "closer" to
an interrogation. We condone the torture be­cause the cinematic intimacy causes us, the audience, to feel complicit. This proximity bias-a variation of confirmation bias we might call the Zero Effect-is relevant for scientists engaged in all kinds of observational research. It is also a crucial consideration for those of us watching interrogators at work, onscreen or in life.

Luke Mitchell covers constraint and creativity each issue. Reach him here.

Last year, researchers in Sweden published a study linking suicide attempts to higher-than-usual levels of quinolinic acid, a neurotransmitter associated with inflammation.

Now, a team of scientists in Australia is using that finding to develop a blood test to measure levels of quinolinic acid in the blood.

Ostensibly, the test would function as a diagnostic tool to help doctors gauge a depressed person's mental state--the higher the levels of the chemical, the more likely a patient is to attempt suicide.

But would a test like that actually help doctors prevent people from killing themselves? Maybe, but knowing that a patient may be prone to attempting suicide is not the same thing as preventing it from happening.

Arguably, the test will be more useful as a research tool than a diagnostic one--scientists could use it to probe the relationship between the body's immune system and depression, and to further investigate the role of quinolinic acid in brain diseases like Alzheimer's disease, autism and schizophrenia.

[Australian Associated Press]

When The New York Times announced in January that it had been the target of four months of cyberattacks, the media giant joined a small but growing chorus of big industry names to come forward as hacking victims. Twitter, Facebook, and Apple have all recently admitted to cybersecurity breaches, and both the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal followed The New York Times with hacking announcements of their own. These admissions are a significant break from the standard post-hacking practice of keeping quiet about vulnerabilities to avoid shareholder panic.

But the taboo against going public seems to be lifting. This is important, because the persistence, scale, and breadth of the attacks mean that plenty of companies have already been compromised. The common weak link? Humans.

The New York Times suspects that hackers gained access to its computers through "spear-phishing," a technique in which a malicious link or attachment is emailed to a specific user. Jeremy Wendt, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories who focuses on identifying attackers in cyberspace, says spear-phishing "is scary because as long as you have people using computers, they might be fooled into opening something they shouldn't." Another Sandia Labs researcher is working to reduce human-caused vulnerabilities by investigating how hackers choose targets for spear-phishing attacks.

But there is a kind of password that a hacker can't access through a compromised computer. With quantum cryptography--the science of using light rather than bits and bytes to send secure messages between machines--computers communicate coded information to each other in the form of unique patterns of photons. Those patterns are basically unhackable passwords, because photons are weird: If you observe them, they change (as the double slit experiment has famously demonstrated), thus making it impossible for an outsider to break in and take over a connection.

This is especially important for vulnerable but data-rich parts of national infrastructure, like our power grid. Because the power grid depends on a constant and automatic adjusting of feedback, its computers need a way to communicate with each other securely. Quantum cryptography makes that possible. Los Alamos National Laboratory recently tested a quantum device for just this purpose, and other recent demonstrations show that quantum cryptography can be used for both broadband and fiber optic cables.

While quantum cryptography can't protect against human error, it does offer a way to secure systems that rely more on machine, rather than human, communication.

There are some high-level initiatives to fix the human side of the equation, like the new cyberdefense program proposed by the Obama administration. And then there are some very simple, low-level initiatives, like reminding employees to stop opening all those sketchy email attachments.

These days, fingerprint scanners are used, but not very widely outside of Tom Cruise movies. But a small South Dakota college is doing a trial run of a scanner that has you swipe a finger to make a transaction.

The School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City has put the tech into two shops on campus. Purchasers type their birthday into a pad, swipe their finger in a machine, and get a receipt delivered by email. The scanner checks the buyer's unique print to identify him or her, and it also checks for living hemoglobin in the finger, preventing any unsavory characters from trying to use a severed digit.

The 2,400-student campus is filled with only mechanical engineering or hard science majors, which is why they were picked for the pilot program run by Hanscan Indentity Management and one of its subsidiaries, Nexus USA. About 50 students volunteered to try it out.

There are privacy issues involved with these scanners--you have to offer up your fingerprint before it can be identified as you--but it's a give and take. You give your fingerprint, and a thief, presumably, can't impersonate you as easily. Although once these get more widely used, it'll become more worthwhile for someone to figure out how to beat it.

[Huffington Post]

The Mars rover Curiosity is already expecting a robotic pal in 2020--but could humans make it there first? A new mysterious nonprofit organization called the Inspiration Mars Foundation is holding a press conference next week to announce a round trip to the Red Planet. The "Mission For America" would launch in January 2018, and go to Mars and back in 501 days.

"It is intended to encourage all Americans to believe again, in doing the hard things that make our nation great, while inspiring youth through science, technology, engineering and mathematics education and motivation," the announcement reads. "The Inspiration Mars Foundation is committed to accelerating America's human exploration of space as a critical catalyst for future growth, national prosperity, new knowledge and global leadership."

It's funded by millionaire and space tourism pioneer Dennis Tito, who became the first private tourist in space back in 2001. Tito worked on Mars missions for NASA during the 1960s. Full details will be announced at a press conference Feb. 27 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

The mission would launch in 2018 to take advantage of a convenient alignment between Earth and Mars, which happens roughly every two years plus two months. The next one is in November of this year, followed by early 2016. During these events, the planets' orbital alignments are situated so an Earth-departing spacecraft would require less energy to make the 350-million-mile-plus journey. The Mars rover Curiosity, for instance, took 253 days from Nov. 26, 2011 to Aug. 6, 2012 to cover 352 million miles.

Over at NBC's Cosmic Log, Alan Boyle (no relation) digs up some information from a forthcoming presentation by Tito at the IEEE Aerospace Conference next month. Apparently the plan is for two astronauts to ride in a modified SpaceX Dragon capsule, swinging past Mars and coming right back by using the planets' alignment for a free trajectory home. So no landing appears in the cards.

This isn't really surprising, because staying in Mars orbit--or just flying by--would be far simpler, safer and cheaper than dropping cargo. Delivering the car-sized Curiosity rover onto the surface was an enormous technological feat, but doesn't even approach the challenge of safely delivering (and retrieving!) human visitors.

The trip there and back is actually pretty feasible, however. European Space Agency and Russian Roscosmos agency already tested what it would be like to live in closed quarters for that long--albeit with Earth's gravity, so it wasn't a totally realistic simulation. But the Mars500 experiment showed it's possible to live in tight quarters with only a few people for nearly a year and a half.

Still, major as-yet-unaddressed challenges would be protecting the astronauts from solar and cosmic radiation, and building a rocket and spaceship that could get them safely there and back.

We expect several more details at the announcement next week--stay tuned.

About 10 years ago, Mark Changizi started to develop research on human vision and how it could see changes in skin color. Like many academics, Changizi, an accomplished neurobiologist, went on to pen a book. The Vision Revolution challenged prevailing theories--no, we don't see red only to spot berries and fruits amid the vegetation--and detailed the amazing capabilities of why we see the way we do.

If it were up to academia, Changizi's story might have ended there. "I started out in math and physics, trying to understand the beauty in these fields," he says, "You are taught, or come to believe, that applying something useful is inherently not interesting."

Not only did Changizi manage to beat that impulse out of himself, but he and Tim Barber, a friend from middle school, teamed up several years ago to form a joint research institute. 2AI Labs allows the pair to focus on research into cognition and perception in humans and machines, and then to commercialize it. The most recent project? A pair of glasses with filters that just happen to cure colorblindness.

Changizi and Barber didn't set out to cure colorblindness. Changizi just put forth the idea that humans' ability to see colors evolved to detect oxygenation and hemoglobin changes in the skin so they could tell if someone was scared, uncomfortable or unhealthy. "We as humans blush and blanche, regardless of overall skin tone," Barber explains, "We associate color with emotion. People turn purple with anger in every culture." Once Changizi fully understood the connection between color vision and blood physiology, Changizi determined it would be possible to build filters that aimed to enhance the ability to see those subtle changes by making veins more or less distinct--by sharpening the ability to see the red-green or blue-yellow parts of the spectrum. He and Barber then began the process of patenting their invention.

When they started thinking about commercial applications, Changizi and Barber both admit their minds went straight to television cameras. Changizi was fascinated by the possibilities of infusing an already-enhanced HDTV experience with the capacity to see colors even more clearly.

"We looked into cameras photo receptors and decided that producing a filter for a camera would be too difficult and expensive," Barber says. The easiest possible approach was not electronic at all, he says. Instead, they worked to develop a lens that adjusts the color signal that hits the human eye and the O2Amp was born./>

The patented lens technology simply perfects what the eye does naturally: it read the changes in skin tone brought on by a flush, bruise, or blanch. The filters can be used in a range of products from indoor lighting (especially for hospital trauma centers) to windows, to perhaps eventually face cream. For now, one of the most promising applications is in glasses that correct colorblindness.

As a veteran entrepreneur, founding Clickbank and Keynetics among other ventures, Barber wasn't interested in chasing the perfect color filter for a demo pair of glasses. "If you look for perfection you could spend a million dollars. And it is just a waste of time," he says. A bunch of prototypes were created, and rejected. Some were too shiny, others too iridescent. "We finally found something that worked to get the tone spectrum we wanted and to produce a more interesting view of the world."

What they got was about 90 percent of the way to total color enhancement across three different types of lenses: Oxy-Iso, Hemo-Iso, and Oxy-Amp. While the Amp, which boosts the wearer's general perception of blood oxygenation under the skin (your own vision, but better), is the centerpiece of the technology, it was the Oxy-Iso, the lens that isolates and enhances the red-green part of the spectrum, that generated some unexpected feedback from users. Changizi says the testers told them that the Oxy-Iso lens appeared to "cure" their colorblindness.

Changizi knew this was a possibility, as the filter concentrates enhancement exactly where red-green colorblind people have a block. Professor Daniel Bor, a red-green colorblind neuroscientist at the University of Sussex tried them and was practically giddy with the results. Changizi published Bor's testimony on his blog: "When I first put one of them on [the Oxy-Iso,], I got a shiver of excitement at how vibrant and red lips, clothes and other objects around me seemed. I've just done a quick 8 plate Ishihara colour blindness test. I scored 0/8 without the specs (so obviously colour blind), but 8/8 with them on (normal colour vision)!"

Despite these early testimonials, the pair thought that the O2Amp glasses would be primarily picked up by hospitals. The Hemo-Iso filter enhances variations along the yellow-blue dimension, which makes it easier for healthcare providers to see veins. "It's a little scary to think about people drawing blood who can't see see the veins," Barber says. EMT workers were enthusiastic users thanks to the Hemo-Iso's capability of making bruising more visible. />

From there, Barber and Changizi embarked on a two-year odyssey to find a manufacturer to make the eyewear that would enable them to sell commercially. Through 2AI Labs, they were able push their discoveries into mainstream applications without having to rely on grants; any funding they earn from their inventions is reinvested. They also forewent some of the traditional development steps. "We bootstrapped the bench testing and we didn't do any market research," Barber says.

Plenty of cold calling to potential manufacturers ensued. "As scientists talking to manufacturers, it seemed like we were speaking a different language," Barber says. Not to mention looking strange as they walked around wearing the purple and green-tinted glasses at trade shows. Changizi says they finally got lucky last year and found a few manufacturers able to produce the specialized specs. All are available on Amazon for just under $300.

Changizi and Barber aren't done yet. In addition to overseeing sales reps who are trying to get the glasses into the hands of more buyers, the two are in talks with companies such as Oakley and Ray-Ban to put the technology into sunglasses. Imagine, says Changizi, if you could more easily see if you are getting a sunburn at the beach despite the glare. They're testing a mirrored O2Amp lens specially for poker players (think: all the better to see the flush of a bluffer). Changizi says they are also working with cosmetics companies to embed the technology in creams that would enhance the skin's vasculature. Move over Hope in a Jar. Barber says it's not clear how profitable any of this will be yet: "We just want the technology to be used."

Can't quite tell the difference between a Speyside Scotch malt and an Islay? Want to sound sophisticated comparing the flavor profiles of a proper Kentucky bourbon versus a Tennessee whiskey?

Enter Sean Seidell, a Philadelphia-based graphic designer who has a knack for visualizing the the many flavors of our favorite foodstuffs. He's previously taught us all we need to know about cheese, beer and coffee. Now he's taken on the taste of whiskeys, from Irish single malt to blended Scotch to American corn.

So it appears that the difference in flavor you get in a rye whiskey, which can come from either the U.S. or Canada, and a Scotch, which are made from malt or grain (or a blend) and has to be aged for at least three years, is that ryes tend to be a little spicy, while Scotches have a bit more of a honey flavor. Irish whiskies are generally sweet and oaky, and a good Canadian single malt should have a vanilla taste.

Plus, now we know which whiskeys to stay away from to avoid that peaty taste (Highland and Islay Scotch, though the latter is the only option with hints of bacon fat). Most varieties share an oaky flavor, since many are aged in oak casks, and many have a buttery taste. But have you been detecting the slight eau de biscuit in Canadian rye?

The only thing better than winning an Oscar would be winning one made of solid gold.

On Sunday night we will see our favorite stars and cheer for our favorite movies. We will laugh at the gags and guess how long the recipients have until they are played off stage. More than twenty times we will see some lucky winner bounce up to the microphone and stare into that golden statuette.

The classic Oscar statuette stands a little over a foot tall and weighs eight and a half pounds-about as much as a gallon of milk. Sadly, the weight doesn't come from a solid chunk of gold; it comes from a tin and copper core. The gold statuette is merely gold-plated. But in the spirit of "Oscar gold," what if we do some alchemy and transform all the Oscars you will see on Sunday into 100% pure gold?

The price of gold has been fluctuating for years, but it's still extremely valuable. Just an ounce of the stuff today would cost you around $1,600. Given the weight of an Oscar statuette, one made out of solid gold would be worth $219,000. That twinkle in a winner's eye would be more than just a realization that he or she is a decent actor; it would be the joy of holding a chunk of metal worth a new Lamborghini.

Since 1929, the Academy has given out around 2,800 Oscars. If they were gold statuettes, that would be a cool $637,000,000 in gold-more than the total GDP of American Samoa in 2007.

In fact, just handing out twenty or so solid gold statuettes on Sunday would cost the Academy more than the theater in which they hand them out cost to construct.

Let's take it even further. A fair estimate says that there have been 10 billion ounces of gold pulled from the ground since we started coveting the shiny stuff. Hammering all the gold ever mined into Oscar statuettes would produce an army of 74 million awards, worth (at today's prices) 16 trillion dollars. If all these awards stayed in the US, after we used them to celebrate our actors we could melt them down to pay for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars 16 times over. Hooray, fictional capitalism!

But for all the loveliness of gold, it's hardly the most precious material out there. If we really wanted to celebrate acting, we could make our Oscar statuettes out of antimatter.

The Annihilation of Daniel Day-Lewis

Created by smashing particles together, the production of antimatter-like regular matter but with an opposite charge-is insanely costly. To make basic antimatter, you combine anti-protons with positrons (electrons with a positive charge) to form anti-hydrogen. Sounds straightforward, but you need massive particle accelerators to get the job done. Not only do you need the largest machines on Earth, you also need to overcome serious inefficiencies. For every 1,000 anti-protons created in a particle accelerator, 999 escape.

Physicists in 2010 claimed that at maximum production they could make ten million anti-protons per minute. But even if the conversion from anti-proton to anti-hydrogen were 100% efficient, it would take 100 billion years to make just one gram of the stuff. All things considered, obtaining this elusive material would cost62.5 trillion dollars per gram.

The monetary value of an antimatter Oscar statuette would be a stack of dollar bills so high that it would take light nine and a half days to reach the end of it.

Imagine what would happen if we obtained enough anti-hydrogen to forge an antimatter Oscar with the same mass as a real one (an anti-hydrogen Oscar would be much larger than a gold and copper one, because of the low density of anti-hydrogen). An eight-and-a half-pound Oscar statuette made of antimatter would cost two hundred and forty one thousand trillion dollars (that's fifteen zeroes!). There literally isn't anything on Earth to compare this cost to, so what would this much money look like? Well, according to the tried-and-true stacking-dollar-bills analogy, the monetary value of an antimatter Oscar statuette would be a stack of dollar bills so high that it would take light nine and a half days to reach the end of it.

The more pressing problem for an antimatter Oscar statuette would be handling it. Once the statuette touches any real matter, even air, it will annihilate, or release all the energy contained within the atoms of a corresponding mass. If eight and a half pounds of antimatter statuette touched the outstretched hand of Daniel Day-Lewis, for example, it would release an unfathomable amount of energy. According to E=mc², the annihilation of Daniel Day-Lewis would yield a fiery explosion of light and energy equivalent to seven times that unleashed by the eruption of Mount St. Helens.

The catastrophe would level Los Angeles, leaving a gaping hole not just in the city, but also in the talent pool of Hollywood. Generations would go by before we had the high-caliber actors and directors capable of making the next Jaws or Casablanca or The Dark Knight. Economies relying on movie production and sales would crumble. Throngs of people would migrate from the devastated Los Angeles to a new location, burdening the local population with impossible energy and food demands.

If I were Daniel Day-Lewis, I'd avoid the antimatter Oscar.

Kyle Hill is a freelance science writer who has been featured in Wired, Scientific American, and Nature Education, where he overthinks everything. You can follow him on Twitter as @Sci_Phile or at his website.

The remora, also known as a suckerfish, attaches itself to sharks, whales, turtles and any other sea creature it can grab onto with its suction disk, feeding off its hosts' parasites and leftover meals and in generally enjoying the comforts of a free ride. The name remora means "delay" in Latin, because ancient sea farers believed the fish held up their ships.

Now, scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology are studying the structure that allows the remora to latch on to its host, and plan to develop a new reversible adhesive inspired by the system. Their research was presented at the Materials Research Society's fall meeting and has been published in the society's proceedings.

Bio-inspired adhesives have previously taken cues from some of nature's other strong stickers, from geckos to tree frogs to mussels.

Mussels' ability to cling fast to rocks and other objects under water have inspired waterproof adhesives and coatings, including a biomedical glue that could be used to seal fetal membranes. A product called "Geckskin" that imitates a gecko's ability to climb up vertical and backward tilting surfaces can hold up to 700 pounds on a smooth wall.

The remora's ability to attach comes from a modified dorsal fin on the top of their head. The shoe-grip-like disk acts like a suction cup, creating a seal between the remora and its host, one that's possibly even strengthened by drag in the water. The ridges, called lamellae (which also help geckos gain traction) have perpendicular rows of tooth-like spinules for extra grip.

Remoras can get a stronger grip on shark skin than on any other surface, possibly because of similar spacing between their spinules and a shark's scales.

The suction is passive, making it a good candidate for a mimetic adhesive. Muscles that raise or lower the lamellae and let remoras attach and detach from their host at will, but it appears that the maintaining the attachment doesn't require any extra energy.

Researchers don't foresee creating an exact replica of the remora's suction disk, but do want to continue identifying the main features that help it stick to create a new reversible adhesive that could be used in attach sensors to objects underwater, help robots climb or create bandages that peel off without pain or residue.

[Phys.org]

A bizarre fire ignited in a Portland hospital earlier this month, causing second- and third-degree burns in 11-year-old cancer survivor Ireland Lane. A state fire marshal report released Wednesday suggests that the blaze was started, in part, by something many of us use every day: hand sanitizer.

Is it time to toss the Purell?

In a word, no. With the Lane tragedy, an inauspicious mix of hand sanitizer, static electricity, and olive oil was to blame, the report says. Though similar incidents have been recorded--in hospital settings no less--it is highly unlikely you'll set off a fire the next time you slap on some hand sanitizer and go dragging your feet across a carpet. In any case, hand sanitizer has far more benefits than risks.

Here's what allegedly happened to Lane: In a room in Doernbecher Children's Hospital, Lane used olive oil to remove glue used during an EEG test from her scalp. EEGs are common procedures for understanding electrical activity in the brain, and olive oil is commonly used to remove the EEG glue--especially when patients are allergic to the compound traditionally used to break down EEG glue. The oil dripped from her head to her shirt, and Lane likely wiped some of it on her shirt, too. Later, Lane cleaned her hospital bed and the attached tray with hand sanitizer. The sanitizer likely rubbed off onto her shirt and body. Then Lane started playing with her bed sheets, creating static electricity. The static electricity ignited the hand sanitizer, and the olive oil probably fed the flames, the report says.

Lane's story, while incredibly rare, isn't unique. A 2002 report from Center for Disease Control on hand hygiene in hospitals describes one incident in which a health care worker ignited the vapor from hand sanitizer with the static electricity she created from removing a gown and then touching a metal door. In 2006, a similar incident occurred, when a nurse's hand--wet with sanitizer--caught fire as she changed a dial in an oxygen-enriched environment. A spark of static electricity can set hand sanitizer ablaze, but it's extremely uncommon. "[The Lane case] was an outlier as far as I can tell," says Mark Bruley, of ECRI Institute, non-profit focused on improving health care safety.

What are not outliers are hospital infections. In the United States every year, nearly 2 million hospital patients--about one in 20--experience infections. In this context, it is clear that the benefits of using alcohol-based sanitizer, like the Oregon hospital's sanitizer 3M Avagard, which kills 99 percent of pathogens within 15 seconds, outweigh the risks.

There are precautions you can take with hand sanitizer. Use the minimal amount, Bruley says. Take a dime-sized portion and rub your hands until the gel or liquid evaporates. And whatever you do, don't mess around with olive oil and staticky bed sheets.

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

• 7 Reasons Why Coffee Is Good For You
• Who Has The Best Mathematical Models For Predicting The Oscars?
• How To Steal A Diamond
• When Did Primates Learn To Metabolize Alcohol? A Chemist Reenacts Drunk History

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

• When Brain Damage Unlocks The Genius Within
• Hands On: HTC's New Flagship Phone Comes With A Totally New Interface
• How Neuroscience Will Fight Five Age-Old Afflictions
• What If Oscars Were Made Of Solid Gold?
• Stop Calling It The Drone Memo
• The Amazing Story Of The $300 Glasses That Correct Colorblindness
• The Science Of 'Zero Dark Thirty': When We Can Condone Torture
• FYI: Now We've Looked Below The Surface, Why Isn't Mars Red On The Inside?
• PlayStation's Pitch: Forget The Graphics
• Why I Love Chromebook, And Why The Ultra-Premium Chromebook Pixel Makes No Sense
• 7 Of The Creepiest Cold War Fallout Shelters
• Sony PlayStation 4 Liveblog: The Future Of Videogames?
• The 4 Best Conspiracy Theories About The Russian Meteorite