Quantcast
Channel: Popular Science | RSS
Viewing all 20161 articles
Browse latest View live

This Is The World's Smallest Space Telescope

0
0
Today, scientists will launch two tiny satellites with telescopes on board.

Sometimes a bargain satellite is best. Engineers have been making cubesats--cheap cube-satellites that hitch a ride onto rockets and are jettisoned into orbit--for a decade now, and today, another team of engineers will launch two more. The difference is, these ones will be outfitted with tiny telescopes, and they're small enough to be the smallest space telescopes in existence.

The University of Toronto's Space Flight Laboratory designed the twin satellites, which are cubes measuring 20 centimeters per side, and similar to "a very, very heavy lunchbox," Manager of Aerospace Systems Cordell Grant says in the video above. The two satellites will be launch from a rocket in India and together they'll be the first to form a "constellation" of satellites observing the brightest objects in space. The mission is called the BRIght Target Explorer, or BRITE, mission.

We can't expect many amazing photos to come from these satellites; it's not really their function. The BRITE satellites will observe stars and record changes in their brightness over time, which could be caused some other celestial object blocking its view or a spot showing up on the star. That doesn't sound like much, but the tiny satellites could actually perform better than bigger and more expensive telescopes on earth, which have to account for weather and the obscuring effect of the atmosphere.

This sort of thing has been attractive to scientists for a while now. Not everyone has the cash--or the inclination--to plan a multi-million dollar experiment with a full-sized rocket. But these miniature missions make experiments cheap, and the better the technology we can stuff in a lunchbox, the better results we'll see from these projects.




7 Ways Sitting Will Kill You

0
0
Get Up, Stand UpDreamstime
Let's count the ways.

This is the one piece of bad news you shouldn't sit down for: Sitting for hours on end, every day, is bad for your health. Sitting at work is bad for you. Sitting after work is bad for you. Sitting is the new smoking, except that the furniture lobby probably isn't as powerful as the tobacco one.

A lot of research has appeared in the last few years as a testament to all that is unholy about our love of office chairs, La-Z Boys, couches and cushions. What's worse: Even a healthy amount of exercise can't save you.

If you work in an office setting, sitting is hard to avoid, unless you're an early adopter of the treadmill desk. You might laze around the house on your days off, but one study found that people spend more time sitting--and do less standing or walking--on work days compared to their leisure days.

You may have lost track of all of the ways that your office job can turn deadly. So as I sit hunched over in my rolling chair in a position that screams "live fast, die young," let's talk about what kind of damage all we, the over-sitters, are in for.


Click here to enter the gallery



Packing Up A Solar-Powered Plane That Will Fly Across America [Video]

0
0
Solar Impulse wants to go coast to coast, day and night.

Planes usually eat up a lot of fuel, but one team is trying to make a long flight without any fuel at all. Solar Impulse--a solar-powered plane with a 747-sized wingspan--runs entirely on solar power, and its inventors want to show its chops by sending it on a flight across the United States this year.

But first they had to pack it up and send it to its destination. Despite a big wingspan, the aircraft, called Solar Impulse, only weighs about as much as a family-sized car, which probably helped when the team disassembled it in Switzerland, loaded it onto an actual 747, and shipped it off to San Francisco for its flight from Moffett airfield. In total, the process took six people about 380 man hours. Check out the video of the process above.



The U.S. Army's New 84-Ton Tank Is Nearly IED-Proof

0
0
The Ground Combat VehicleU.S. Army
The new Ground Combat Vehicle weighs twice as much as the tank it's designed to replace, and it's massive enough to survive a roadside bomb.

Heavy does not even begin to describe the U.S. Army's new tank. At 84 tons, the Ground Combat Vehicle weighs more than twice as much as its predecessor, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Both vehicles are designed to carry a six-man squad (and three-man driving crew) into combat, provide covering fire, and damage enemy tanks. But the military has built the new GCV to withstand a kind of threat that didn't exist when the Bradley was deployed in the early 1980s: improvised explosive devices.

Part of logic behind the new tank's massive size is that soldiers inside a vehicle are more likely to survive an explosion if there's adequate space for them to wear armor while seated. The extra space also helps distribute pressure from the blast and thus lessens its impact. Another reason the GCV is so huge is that it's required to carry a larger gun than the Bradley does; the new tank will hold a 30mm cannon, probably the 344-pound Mk44 Bushmaster II. Finally, the GCV's extra weight means it will need to be manufactured from the start with a more powerful engine. (By contrast, the Bradley got heavier as the Army added armor to it in Iraq, and its original engine wasn't powerful enough to support the extra weight.)

The Ground Combat Vehicle is pretty much the opposite of the original plan to replace the Bradley. A high-concept proposal called Future Combat Systems aimed to make all U.S. Army vehicles lighter. But during the long ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (in which IEDs were the top cause of fatalities), it became clear clear that heavier, not lighter, was the better vehicle design. The U.S. canceled the Future Combat Systems program, and work on the GCV began in 2009. The Pentagon is scheduled to award the first contract to manufacture GCVs in 2019.



The Drama Over Project Encode, And Why Big Science And Small Science Are Different

0
0
Encode Project On the Cover of Nature The project published around 30 papers in three leading scientific journal groups. © Nature Sept. 6, 2012
In a novel form of peer review, a biologist has given an colorfully fiery critique of a genome research consortium. Here's why.

If every new abstract read like Dan Graur's latest contribution, people wouldn't need any TLC reality shows--they could get all the drama they'd want from research papers. Graur's new paper, a takedown of a much-ballyhooed genomics project, contains some of the most fiery language ever to appear in the staid, typically decorous world of scientific literature.

On the phone, Graur is just as frank: "Their data analysis is obscene," he said. "It was horrible. This is not science."

Here's the story: The Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project was a five-year effort involving hundreds of people who sought to unravel the functions of so-called non-coding, or "junk," sections of the human genome. When it was published last September, scientists who led the project claimed it would upend decades of assumptions about how the genome works, causing textbooks to be rewritten. Most of the genome is biologically active, they said--it's functional. But many evolutionary biologists were peeved by this characterization and the loose definition of the word function.

"We agree, many textbooks dealing with marketing, mass-media hype, and public relations may well have to be rewritten," Graur and his colleagues write in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.

Graur, a professor of molecular evolutionary bioinformatics at the University of Houston, is the lead author of a seething response to a global consortium of genetics and bioinformatics researchers that provoked plenty of frustration from evolutionary biologists.

"Big science, like the Human Genome Project, should publish data. Small science should do the analysis."One of the key complaints: That Encode authors are computational scientists, not biological scientists. "They're computer jocks," as Graur put it. "Big science, like the Human Genome Project, should publish data. Small science should do the analysis."

In evolutionary biology, "function" is a loaded word--an organ, a piece of DNA or a cell can perform a function that's selected for, and a function that's causal. Selected functions are things that confer an evolutionary advantage, while causal functions don't, to put it very simply. In the paper, Graur uses an example of a human heart: Its evolutionary function is pumping blood through your body. A causal function is its capacity for making noise. Incidentally, that's useful to your doctor or personal trainer, but isn't the heart's primary function.

If you think of the human genome like a textbook, you can think of Encode as the footnotes, intended to provide insight into what all the nucleotides are doing. It annotates all of the 3.2 billion combined A, C, G and T nucleotides that make up genes and their regulatory sections. In doing this, Encode papers defined function in a loose way, to include all the things that DNA does. The research says the vast majority of our DNA participates in at least one "biochemical event" in at least one cell type, and considers this a function. But that definition is liberal at best, and it wasn't even the project's goal, said Mike White, a systems biologist at Washington University in St. Louis who has criticized Encode's hype but (unlike Graur) has praised its value to science. Rather, it was to comprehensively measure the biochemical features of the genome, and let scientists have a go with those measurements.

"Those features are going to help other scientists actually discover functional regions," he said.


Biochemical functions include a wide range of activities, like DNA sequences that are transcribed into RNA; regions that are bound up by regulatory proteins, which might switch genes on or off; regions that are not wrapped up tightly in chromatin, which packages DNA in a cell; and so on. (For a very detailed description of these biological functions activities, read this thorough analysis by chemist and blogger Ashutosh Jogalekar at Scientific American.) The point is, while it's true that these are "functions" in the sense that they're doing something, the thing they are doing is not necessarily meaningful.

Here is how Graur explained it on the phone: "Have you ever stepped on a piece of chewing gum? It binds to the sole of your shoe. But this is not the function of chewing gum, to bind to the shoe on a hot day."

White said these activities are useful to measure because they can be associated with functions--just not necessarily associated with them. Establishing function is difficult and requires a lot more work, he said.

In his own lab, White is studying a specific regulatory protein that binds to DNA in about 10,000 places on the genome, and helps switch a gene on or off. He is trying to determine whether that binding event has to do with the gene activation, and how the proteins find their way along the genome as they're floating around in a cell. Each of the 10,000 binding events might be functional, there might be non-specific "noisy" DNA binding as the protein takes a shotgun approach, or maybe something else is going on.

"For that question, the Encode data is useful. I have a list of regions of the genome that are bound by regulatory proteins, and I can test them and thereby gain some insight into, what is it about certain DNA features that enable them to activate genes, and don't lead others to activate genes?" he said. "Those are the kinds of discoveries that will come out of the Encode data."

Other biologists are also glad to use the data, though they still express frustration with how it was presented. Mick Watson, director of ARK-Genomics at the University of Edinburgh's Roslin Institute, wrote in a blog post that he disagrees with Encode's definitions.

"However, I do appreciate that science, like many other disciplines, requires, and benefits from, people with opposing views. Your view of functionality certainly opposes mine; however, at the very least, what you have achieved is to stimulate debate on the topic, which is of benefit to everyone," he wrote, adding that Graur's paper sets a bad example for young scientists.

Graur has several other problems with the research, not the least of which is its data analysis. He lamented that many of the analysts and researchers in Encode are computer scientists, not biologists. He said he felt like he had to speak up. Students, postdocs and other young researchers have since thanked him for publishing his paper, he said.

"Many people object to the tone, but actually the tone was the point. I'm a professor, I am tenured. ... Sometimes you need an old card like me to do that," he said. "Science is about presenting hypotheses and refuting them. A lot of the people who are dealing with data and analyzing data have forgotten about that."

White agreed that some contributors lack a background in evolutionary biology, and this may have contributed to the hype--scientists were overstating their findings. It also may have contributed to the backlash and ongoing resentment, he said.

"People resent that, when you have people coming in from a different field and they start making sweeping statements about your own field, and they don't know anything about it and the sweeping statements are wrong," he said.

"I'm a little surprised that a paper this angry got through without changes--it was a little over the top in terms of its outright inflammatory statements--but on the other hand, I understand the anger. A lot of us were really angry," he said. "Now we have to see, is the data going to be useful? Are they going to start publishing real studies with this? We'll see."



Analysis: Russian Meteorite Was An Everyday Space Rock, Common Throughout The Solar System

0
0
Space Rock FragmentsUral Federal University
But it was still notable for its size, and its well-recorded demise in the atmosphere.

The giant space rock that exploded above Russia earlier this month spent about 4.5 billion years cruising around the solar system before its fiery arrival in Earth's atmosphere. It was just an average asteroid, albeit a big one at roughly 10,000 tons. Scientists who have been analyzing it at the Urals Federal University say it was a chondrite, the most widespread space rock in our neighborhood.

Over the weekend, teams of volunteer skiers covered about 31 miles of the meteorite's "strewing field," which is the name for the elliptical shape in which meteorite debris can be found. Researchers gathered more than 100 fragments in their latest expedition to the Chelyabinsk region, according to university officials who spoke to Russian media. The largest recovered so far weighs in around a kilogram, or about 2.2 pounds, although more precise measurements still have to be made.

Now that scientists are beginning to get a handle on what the rock was made of, they can start to piece together more information about its history.

The rock, which will likely be dubbed the Chebarkul meteorite, can be further classified as an aerolite, according to UrFU. Scientists have already detected strange minerals like olivine, pyroxene, troilite, kamacite and taenite, according to Viktor Grokhovsky, an associate professor of physics and technology who is leading the meteorite-hunting expeditions. The meteorite is stony and contains about 10 percent iron. Here's a video with some images--it's in Russian, so we have no idea what they're saying, but there are lots of nice meteorite samples you can look at:

An earlier excursion returned about 50 meteorite pieces that were found near a hole on Lake Chebarkul. Those pieces were smaller than a centimeter.

Helicopters have also been aiding in the search, and so have amateur meteorite hunters who have started hawking their wares on eBay and other places. Meanwhile, things are getting back to normal in the Chelyabinsk region -- one-third of people who were hospitalized were released on Friday, and more than 4,000 out of 5,000 damaged buildings have been provided with new windows, according to the Interfax news agency.



Wristband Tracks Your Muscle Movements For Super-Precise Gesture Controls

0
0
Swipe the air to pause. Wave to fly drone.

Most gesture-control systems require some kind of external sensors that "see" you, with optical sensors or depth sensors or cameras. They're on the outside, measuring your movements the same way human eyes do. And that's fine, but a new wristband advertises itself as a system that's more internal--it's directly controlled by you.

MYO, from Kitchener, Ontario-based startup Thalmic Labs, is a new gesture-control system that works a bit differently from the Kinect, Wii, or Leap. You make gestures similar to the ones you'd use on an Apple trackpad, except in the air: you'd wave a couple fingers to rewind or pause a video, scroll through pages, that kind of thing. It's compatible with Windows and Mac OS X to start, but since it connects via Bluetooth, it could conceivably connect to just about any mobile device as well: smartphones, tablets, or even drones.

This is how the creators explain it:

The MYO senses gestures and movements in two ways: 1) muscle activity, and 2) motion sensing. When sensing the muscle movements of the user, the device can detect changes in hand gesture right down to each individual finger. When tracking the positioning in space of the arm and hand, the device can detect subtle movements all directions.

That muscle-sensing system seems like the really innovative part--sort of like an EEG control for your arm. If the wristband is sensitive enough to pick up on muscle activity and accurately distinguish between different movements, it'll definitely be an interesting new entry to the gesture-control field (even if it's just as a toy, for a little while).

Exactly how the wristband works is not totally clear; their website explains that it "is able to measure electrical activity in your muscles instantly," then translate that to gesture controls, but offers few details on its inner workings. We'd like to know just a little more on how effective this is before dropping $150 to pre-order our wizard powers, but it definitely seems like a promising and interesting new tech.



Enjoy These Amazing High-Def Nature GIFs

0
0
We've picked out a few favorites from Head Like An Orange, home of hundreds of amazing nature GIFs.



Marinus is a 28-year-old from the Netherlands, and he makes GIFs. But not just any GIFs: his Tumblr, Head Like An Orange, is a collection of some of nature's most stunning, weirdest, sweetest, and funniest moments. At least, they are the best moments captured on film, put into TV shows, and edited down into short, spellbinding loops.

Are the ones we've picked out here the best GIFs on Marinus's blog? We don't know--there are hundreds to choose from, and they are all wonderful. But here are a few of the highlights:

A mountain gorilla (Africa - BBC)























A black-capped kingfisher (Neil Fifer)




A jellyfish (Rafa Herrero Massieu)







Quants V. Critics: Who Was Better At Predicting The Oscars?

0
0
OscarAntoine Taveneaux
In our small sample, math models won out slightly over expert critics in predicting Oscar wins in our 10 favorite categories.


It looks like you can mathematically predict the Oscars, after all--but you won't do much better than traditional critics.

Last week, I spotlighted four quantitative Oscar predictions that left expertise and intuition entirely out of the equation. (Since I wrote that post, stats demigod Nate Silver came out with his statistical predictions, too.) I spent this morning comparing all those predictions to the predictions of traditional critics from a few major news outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, Next Movie and the New York Times (which also hosts Nate Silver's blog, so I guess the Grey Lady is hedging her bets).

My limited sampling found that the quants did better than the film critics, but only by a little. On average, the models I found were correct 78 percent of the time, while the critics were correct 73 percent of the time. Overall, such numbers pale in comparison to the accuracy of Nate Silver's political predictions for the 2012 election season. It seems the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a bit more inscrutable than the American public.

You can find the whole table of comparisons here. I apologize; it's pretty ugly, but I hope it does the job. For a stunningly thorough comparison of the quants versus the critics, see the right sidebar at Farsite Forecast, the Oscar-predicting website of a consulting company that did the best among the models I checked.



Flapping Robotic Wing Helps Biologists Uncover Secrets Of Bat Flight

0
0
Robat Wing A robotic bat wing lets researchers measure forces, joint movements, and flight parameters - and learn more about how the real thing operates in nature. Breuer and Swartz labs/Brown University
This Robat is designed to work like a real fruit-bat wing.

A new 3-D printed robotic bat wing can emulate the flapping motion of a real bat, helping biologists simulate how the mammals fly and helping aerodynamics researchers study new flapping-wing aircraft. In the process of building and modifying the robotic wing, researchers at Brown University stumbled upon some structural fixes that provide insight into how bat bodies evolved for flight.

Bat wings are incredibly complex mechanisms, producing lift and thrust to help the flying mammals quickly chase their insect prey, fly long distances, and nimbly move through dense clouds of their compatriots. A bat's wings span almost its entire body, supported by two arm bones and five finger-like digits covered in an elastic skin that can stretch up to 400 percent of its original size. Small aircraft based on bat designs could be efficient little flapping drones, but researchers would need to understand how bats work.

Studying real animals poses a bit of a challenge, however, explains Joseph Bahlman, a graduate student at Brown who led the project. "We can't ask a bat to flap at a frequency of eight hertz then raise it to nine hertz so we can see what difference that makes," Bahlman said. "They don't really cooperate that way."

Researchers build a "robatic" bat wing from Brown University on Vimeo.

Instead, Bahlman and his team printed plastic bat bones and stretched a silicone elastomer "wing membrane" over it. The bones are connected to cables, which serve as tendons, and these are activated by built-in servo motors. The team could put the wing in a wind tunnel and test a bunch of parameters, like wing flap-frequency, related energy requirements, lift and drag, and so on. It's based on the wing of a lesser dog-faced fruit bat.

Flapping wing aircraft (and animals) generate lift by flapping down and by folding their wings back a bit; think of hunching your shoulders forward and back, or rotating your wrist. Some of the downstroke lift is wiped out by the drag created on the upstroke. To avoid this, birds and bats fold their wings in a bit on the upstroke. By using the robot, Bahlman and colleagues found that wing folding increases net lift by almost 50 percent--a useful insight into how flapping-wing flight works.

But this research might be even more interesting for its insights into bat biology. During wing tests, a groove joint on the wing's "elbow" kept breaking, for instance. Bahlman eventually wrapped it in some steel cable to keep it intact, just like ligaments holding joints together in real animals. The team also realized that real bats have a large set of muscles right at the elbow joint, and this may have evolved to prevent the elbow from bending to a breaking point, according to the researchers.

Then in further tests, the membrane started ripping on its leading edge. Bahlman reinforced that, too, using elastic threads. According to a Brown news release, the fix ended up resembling the tendons and musculature that reinforce real bat wings.

This underscores the importance of those wing structures--and could help explain why bats are so badly harmed by a debilitating fungus called Geomyces destructans, which coats their faces and wings. The fungus causes a deadly disease known as white-nose syndrome, and one of its characteristic symptoms is a badly infected and damaged wing membrane, preventing the bats from flying.

The robotic bat wing will help answer further questions about bat flight especially after the team starts tweaking its composition, according to Brown. The researchers want to change some materials to study bone flexibility, weight and other characteristics. Meanwhile, their initial research appears in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.



Homemade Jetpack Designed To Reach An Altitude Of 25,000 Feet

0
0
Jetpacks For EveryoneCourtesy Skyflash
But, uh, how do you land?

It's 2013, so we've all been wondering: Where's my jetpack? The future won't have truly arrived until we can strap into a backpack and fly ourselves around town. And while that's not exactly here, it's getting a whole lot closer.

Fritz Unger's Skyflash is a homemade jetpack designed to eventually reach a maximum height of 25,000 feet. Unger and his friend have been working on the project since 2007, but have started running piloted tests on the engines and the wing mechanism in the last few months.

Unlike many other jet wings, Skyflash is designed to take off from the ground, rather than being dropped from a helicopter or plane (perhaps because the name Skyfall has already been taken).

Inspired by the wings of a condor, the largest flying bird in the western hemisphere, what the Skyflash creators call "the ultimate flying backpack" has a wingspan of about 11 feet and is powered by two turbo jets. The team's Facebook page ambitiously says it will be capable of speeds of 200 miles per hour, but for now Giz Mag is reporting that it has a cruising speed of 78 miles per hour at heights of up to 11,800 feet.

"I wanted to fly free as a bird. I wanted to get rid of the air frame and everything you typically need," Unger told the Discovery Channel.

For the first road test with a pilot, Unger tried his prototype with just one of the engines, getting up to 30 miles per hour on the ground.

Later they tested it with both engines and no wings, dubbing it the "World's Craziest Snow Blower."

The project has gone through three prototype wings. Right now the model is made of plywood, but the next step will involve fiberglass construction and even more powerful engines. Without a pilot, it currently weighs 25 kilograms, a little more than 50 pounds. It's controlled by a throttle and an 8-inch display strapped to the pilot's wrist, which connects to a computer within the central wing body.

Giz Mag explains more:

Climbing and steering are achieved by the pilot shifting his body weight. The heat-proof boots worn aren't just a precaution, but a design feature because the jets' thrust angle is controlled by dipping the boots into the exhaust like the control vanes on a V2 rocket. To turn, the pilot stretches out an arm and climbing is done by bending the knees.

The Skyflash team is planning a full test flight sometime in the middle of this year, which hopefully means they'll actually get up into the air. Before you get too excited, though -- they may not have figured out a way to land it yet. They say a safe landing is achieved "the same way you took off." In case of an emergency, the wings have a quick release option and the body contains a parachute, but it's unclear what a non-emergency landing would look like. Since the test videos largely involve the pilot laying on his stomach on the ground, a parachute seems like a preferable landing method right now.

[Giz Mag]



NYPD: Murder Is Down Because Of Our Facebook Surveillance

0
0
NYPD CarWikimedia Commons
Tools of the 21st-century police department

Last year was a record low for murders in New York City, with only 414 (eep) counted. Part of the reason for that number? Facebook, apparently.

According to the New York Post, the NYPD monitored social media to hit teen gang members with conspiracy charges by watching sites for "taunts and threats," then making "Mafia-style" cases against them. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told the Post: "In each initiative, the teams help us monitor social media and we gather information we can use on these groups."

That process started in October, and the murder rate is down another 33 percent in 2013. Apparently, a gang member threatening another gang member on Facebook can lead to a conspiracy charge. (Although why are two rival gang members friends on Facebook?)

This will nicely complement the iPhone-theft squad recently installed in the department.

[New York Post]



FYI: How Do You Ship A Dinosaur Halfway Around The World?

0
0
Tarbosaurus bataar A mounted Tarbosaurus bataar fossil on display at the CosmoCaixa museum in Spain Photo by Jordi Payà on Flickr
A large Mongolian dinosaur fossil, subject of a legal battle last year, is now finally free to return to its home country. How will it get there?

Tarbosaurus bataar is going home. And the journey, though long, won't be that bad--especially for a 70 million-year-old like him (or her).

The 8-foot-tall, fully mounted Tyrannosaurus rex relative first found itself in the news last May, when it went to auction in New York. In an unusual move, the Mongolian government decided to sue, saying that the Tarbosaurus must have come from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, as that's the only place Tarbosaurs have ever been found. (Like several other countries, though not the U.S., Mongolia considers fossils to be a part of its national heritage, and it's illegal to sell Mongolian fossils privately.) Private fossils dealer Eric Prokopi pleaded guilty to smuggling the bones in December. On February 13, a ruling from a U.S. district judge found the fossil legally free to return to Mongolia, as no other claimants stepped up after Prokopi's plea.

The story got us wondering: What's it like to ship such a large and precious specimen halfway across the globe?

Turns out it's typically pretty easy, several paleontologists we contacted say. But the geopolitical circumstances surrounding Tarbosaurus bataar might make this case more challenging than most.

Here's what usually happens: "You'd take all the bones apart, and all the bones go in individual cases," Kenneth Lacovara, a Drexel University paleontologist, says. Researchers can easily build made-to-measure plywood cases for the bone pieces, cushioning the fossils with foam. "We use packing peanuts. We use foam that is meant for home insulation," Lacovara says. "Sometimes we use the foam that you'll see in, like, expensive camera cases." What foam he and his lab members use depends on the size of the bone, he says.

A few paleontologists rely on a company that specializes in shipping for rock bands.The Tarbosaur is currently mounted in an open-mouthed, predatory run. It will probably be broken down into a few dozen parts, Lacovara says. He guesses the entire fossil could weigh 1,000 to 2,000 pounds, although many variables about how the specimen fossilized and how it was prepared may change its weight.

Once packed, dinosaurs, like timber, olive oil, care packages or any other cargo, may go by air or by sea.

"We ship a Tyrannosaurus skull back and forth, usually air freight, but sometimes on a ship," says Jack Horner, a Montana State University paleontologist who does field work in Mongolia. He and his students often ship specimens between the U.S. and Japan for traveling shows. "Shipping is easy these days!" he wrote in an email.

A few paleontologists rely on a Chicago-based company, called Rocket Cargo, that specializes in shipping for rock bands. "They're used to shipping big things, and they're used to dealing with odd cargo," Lacovara says.

The Mongolian Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism will be responsible for shipping the Tarbosaur, but the ministry doesn't yet know where it'll get funding, whether the T. bataar will go by air or by sea, or many other details, says Minister Tsedevdamba Oyungerel. "Logistical talks just started but nothing is clearly cemented yet," she wrote in an email.

The talks include hammering out when and where to hold a handover ceremony in New York City. The fossil is now with law enforcement in New York.

Oyungerel expects the Tarbosaur to land in Mongolia in mid to late May, about a year after it first found itself in a marked lot at an auction house in New York's Chelsea neighborhood.

"I'm happy how the case turned out. I hope this is a real good model they can use in the future to have Mongolian dinosaurs returned to the country," says Bolortsetseg Minjin, a paleontologist who first saw a TV report about the Tarbosaur's auction and alerted the Mongolian government. Minjin splits her time between Mongolia and New York and founded the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs in 2007.

The Mongolian government is now working to build a new museum to hold the Tarbosaur, as the country's existing natural history museum is in disrepair. Oyungerel's ministry has also put out a call for companies to bid to build three more dinosaur parks across the country. In spite of the Gobi Desert's rich fossil resources, many Mongolians are unaware of paleontology, Minjin told the Guardian.

When the time comes, Oyungerel hopes for some outside advice on bringing T. bataar home. "We hope we'll receive some assistance from concerned organizations and companies in these matters," she said. "It is quite a challenging task for us."



New Research Sheds Light On How Dogs Became Dogs

0
0
Dog SkeletonWikipedia
Isolation from wolves seems to be the crucial step to the evolution of the modern domesticated dog.

At first blush, the emergence of man's best friend is pretty straightforward. The first dogs descended from wolves in Europe about 14,000 years ago. Then humans domesticated those proto-dogs until the eventual animal known as a "dog" had many of the traits we associated with the animal today. That much of the evolutionary history of the modern dog has been clearly understood. But further research suggests that that European dog is not the ancestor of all our dogs; instead, every modern Western dog hails from a Southeast Asian progenitor lineage. Why? Why did some upstart Southeast Asian lineage triumph, even in Europe, instead of the endemic European one? Turns out, it might have to do with your pet dog's affinity for Cheetos.

According to research conducted by Ben Sacks from the University of California at Davis and his colleagues, the Southeast Asian dogs prospered because, after they were brought south of the Yangtze River some 6,000 years ago, the dogs were isolated from their wolf forebears. Without that proximity, the Southeast Asian dogs could no longer interbreed with wolves, and thus followed their own evolutionary path. In contrast, northern Asian and European dogs still had contact with, and interbred with, the native wolf populations. Put more clearly, if dogs and wolves interbreed, as they did in Europe, they ended up in an evolutionary cul-de-sac. Isolated from one another, traits that benefited the newly emergent dog lineage flourished.

Another slice of data, published in January in Nature by Erik Axelsson of Uppsala University, suggests that one of the main differences between dogs and wolves is their ability to digest starch. As dogs continued their co-existence with humans -- who were, at the same time, mastering agriculture and switching to a grain-based diet -- those individuals who could eat starch would be better suited to a domesticated lifestyle than those who had to constantly hunt. Sacks and Axelsson disagree on when that switch took place: Axelsson says that it happened before humans switched from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a farming one; Sacks says that the mutation occurred once rice cultivation in Southeast Asia was well underway.

Further work will be required to pinpoint just when the modern dog eventually emerged and to clarify where other canids, such as dingoes, fit into this evolutionary picture. In the interim, sit back and marvel at the process that eventually produced the donut-stealing canine scamps
we know and love today.



DARPA Wants To Invent An Aircraft That Hovers Like A Helicopter But Flies Like A Plane

0
0
The government research agency says it will spend $150 million to develop a fast airplane that can take off and land like a helicopter.

The most useful aircraft in the world would take off, hover, and land like a helicopter but fly as fast as a plane. Decades of research toward this goal have resulted in very few usable, effective designs. Of those, the V-22 Osprey is the most (in)famous: After early years marred by fatal crashes, costs rose to $36.5 billion and development dragged on from 1989 to 2007.

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced it wants to go back to the drawing board for a new Vertical Take-Off and Landing project, called the VTOL X-Plane. The new program is DARPA's plan to kick-start private industury into creating a completely new type of aircraft. Project head Ashish Bagai says he wants nothing less than to spark a paradigm shift.

DARPA, which plans to put $150 million toward development of the X-Plane, is leaving the particulars of the aircraft's design wide open. Bagai says the new plane could be manned or unmanned and should have applications beyond just military. The agency expects to see a test flight in 42 months and hopes the chosen design will have demonstrated additional capabilities in 52 months.

Many of the uses envisioned for the VTOL X-Plane are tasks currently performed by helicopters: search and rescue, transportation of troops, surveillance, and delivery of special operations forces. The major added feature of the X-Plane will be the ability to go from take-off to arrival much, much faster: The project has set a performance standard at greater than 300 knots, or almost twice as fast as a state-of-the-art helicopter can go today.

Improved speed is the main goal for the X-Plane, but it's hardly the only one. DARPA also wants greater hover and cruise efficiency than existing helicopters. The final major design criterion is a useful load of over 40 percent of the aircraft's total weight. Not only should the new aircraft be faster than a helicopter, it should be more powerful, more efficient, and lighter, too.

Reaching these goals is not guaranteed; during a DARPA conference call last week, one reporter brought up a whole wheel of attempted and failed VTOL concepts, referring to it as the "Wheel of Shame." Bagai countered that it could also be seen as a wheel of fortune or opportunity, noting that many technologies in earlier eras have been redeveloped in modern times (though as airship enthusiasts will note, this hasn't always met with success.)




Smartphone-Powered Satellite Blasts Into Space

0
0
The STRaND-1 satellite in December 2012 The little porthole is for the smartphone's camera. SSTL/SSC
Here's looking at you.


Got an Android phone? It's now got a cousin in space. A Google Nexus One-powered nano-satellite got rocketed into orbit this morning.

The satellite, called STRaND-1 for Surrey Training, Research, and Nanosatellite Demonstrator, will use its phone's computing power to collect scientific data, take pictures of Earth and perform some of its operations once it's in orbit. This is the first smartphone-powered satellite to go into space.

Smartphones' GPS stop working at around 60,000 feet, so STRaND-1 uses a small GPS unit designed for space, according to the STRaND website. The phone is able to upload apps while it's in space.

STRaND-1 went up with several other satellites and rockets, including an ocean-monitoring satellite from the Indian Space Research Organisation and French Space Agency; the Near-Earth Object Surveillance Satellite, which will look for large asteroids whose orbits might bring them in contact with Earth; and the world's smallest telescope missions. Everybody got bundled into the Indian Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle and blasted off at 7:31 am Eastern today from Sriharikota, India.

[Space.com, BBC]



MasterCard's New Digital Wallet Service Will Let You Skip The Checkout Line

0
0
MasterCard MasterPassMasterCard
On the other hand, it'll look like you're shoplifting.

You know how convenient it is when you buy something on Amazon with one click? You find what you want, you click one button, and, because it has all your info stored, you can speed right through the checkout process. MasterCard has a new system called MasterPass that aims to do the same thing, and then give that power to anyone who wants it.

The idea is that wherever you are, you can purchase something with one click, because all your MasterCard data is in the MasterPass smartphone app. That's packaged with a few nice other options--it'll support NFC (more about that here), so you'll be able to tap to trigger a transaction, but it'll also support barcode and QR code scanning. So if you're in a store, you can snap the barcode with your phone, which'll purchase it right away, and then you can walk right on out the door. (If the store's security tries to stop you, you'll be able to show them a proof of purchase.)

MasterPass is due to launch this summer. It sounds like a nice, convenient tool--though we're still waiting for the day when we can do everything with our phones and hurl these dumb wallets in the garbage.

[via ABC]



DNA Testing Case Goes To The Supreme Court

0
0
The Supreme Court is hearing a DNA rights case todayPhoto by Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States
Can police take a DNA sample from you after you've been arrested, but haven't yet been tried? The Supreme Court will hear arguments today.


The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing a case today about whether police may sample the DNA of people who have been arrested, but haven't been convicted of a crime.

Advocates for DNA testing say that it helps solve cold cases and that it's not much different from fingerprinting and many other procedures imposed upon people who are, after all, presumed innocent-even after they've been arrested, but haven't undergone trial.

Opponents call the DNA testing an invasion of privacy and a violation of the Fourth Amendment, which forbids unreasonable searches.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments from both sides at 10 AM Eastern today. Interested in following along? The SCOTUSblog will liveblog the event.

The case that sparked the debate is fascinating. (We used Associated Press and NPR coverage for the following summary. Both offer great background, if you want to read more.)

Ten years ago, a man broke into the home of a 53-year-old woman in Salisbury, Md., and robbed her and raped her while holding a gun to her head. Police never solved the case, at least not until 2009, when some Maryland police officers arrested Alonzo King on felony assault charges. Following state law, the police swabbed the inside of King's cheek for DNA and submitted the swab to a federal database. That's when they found a match to the 2003 rape case.

King was convicted and was supposed to serve life in prison for the crime. But then the Maryland Court of Appeals threw out the sentence. King pleaded guilty to misdemeanor, not felony, assault, and Maryland law says police may take DNA samples only in cases of felonies. The Maryland court said performing a DNA test on King based only on his arrest counted as a "warrantless, suspicionless search."

The case now at the Supreme Court is Maryland v. King. The court is expected to make a decision before the summer, the AP reported.



Why You Can't Stop Eating Cheetos

0
0
Betcha Can't Eat Just OneEvan-Amos, via Wikimedia
A recent article in the New York Times Magazine delves into the science of junk-food craving.

In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, food scientist Steven Witherly describes Cheetos as "one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure."

The cheese puffs' greatest quality, Witherly says in the article, is its ability to melt in your mouth. "It's called vanishing caloric density...If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks that there's no calories in it...you can just keep eating it forever."

This deception, writer Michael Moss tells us, isn't accidental: snack food companies do a lot of research in order to design foods that fool your mind and bewitch your taste buds into a constant state of craving--a state industry insiders call "the bliss point." To achieve this "bliss point," Moss writes, food designers pay close attention to something called "sensory-specific satiety."

"In lay terms," Moss says, sensory-specific satiety "is the tendency for big, distinct flavors to overwhelm the brain, which responds by depressing your desire to have more." To avoid this, successful junk food products like Coca-Cola and Doritos consist of "complex formulas that pique the taste buds enough to be alluring but don't have a distinct, overriding single flavor that tells the brain to stop eating."

The problem, of course, is that eating a lot of junk food has consequences. The act of eating Cheetos may be purely pleasurable, but the feeling you get when you realize you've just eaten an entire bag of cheesy orange puffs is less so.

And that's just the short-short-term: though Moss doesn't say how much the junk food industry may contribute to obesity today, it's clear that America has an obesity problem, and that problem has grown with the rise of the industry: Over the last three decades, obesity rates among American adults have more than doubled, from 15 percent in 1980 to 36 percent in 2010. During the same period, rates of obesity among elementary-school-age kids and teenagers have risen even more sharply, from about 5 percent to 6 percent to more than 18 percent.

A long-term study of the weight and eating habits of 120,877 men and women in 2011 found that the biggest weight-inducing food was the potato chip:

The coating of salt, the fat content that rewards the brain with instant feelings of pleasure, the sugar that exists not as an additive but in the starch of the potato itself - all of this combines to make it the perfect addictive food.


Can Science Solve France's Twin Rape Mystery?

0
0
Twins Even identical twins aren't exactly identical Dreamstime
DNA evidence suggests at least one of two identical twins is guilty of rape in France. Is the science of DNA testing far enough along to help prosecutors nab the culprit?

A pair of identical twins is currently being detained in the French city of Marseille for six rapes committed in the past six months. Victims have identified the twins' face, and DNA evidence from one of the crime scenes confirmed that at least one of them is guilty. But because the twins, identified only as Yohan and Elwin, share almost the same DNA, prosecutors say they have no way of determining which brother is the rapist, or if they were both involved. Shouldn't science be able to solve this kind of mystery?

Theoretically, yes.

Monozygotic twins, such as Yohan and Elwin, are created from one egg fertilized by one sperm. Until recently, it was believed that their DNA was 100% identical. But rare mutations occur as the fetuses develop, so while both genomes start out the same, they end up being different.

The problem is that those mutations can't be found in all tissues, which means that looking for genetic differences between twins is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

In a similar rape case involving identical twins in Michigan in 2004, a forensic laboratory called Orchid Cellmark tried to find DNA mutations that might reveal which brother's semen was the one found at the crime scene. At the time, scientists targeted about 500,000 common genetic variations that might differ between brothers. (Those are called single nucleotide polymorphysms, SNPs, and are genetic variations present in at least 1 percent of the population.) But they weren't able to identify any differences with certainty, and prosecutors didn't convict anyone.

Research on identical twins has progressed since then, but it usually focuses on the origins of diseases (looking at the genetic differences between one twin with Parkinson's and one without, for instance), not on distinguishing twins' genomes for rape trials.

A major breakthrough occurred in 2008, when geneticists at the University of Alabama found more genetic variations between twins than previously thought. They reached that conclusion by looking not at SNPs, but at Copy Number Variations, a type of mutation that few researchers had studied at the time. The team led by Carl Bruder and Jan Dumanski compared 19 pairs of identical twins, and found CNVs (which happen when genes are deleted or inserted in the DNA) in all the twins, meaning that they were all distinguishable.

The rub: the technique for distinguishing between identical twins' DNA is not ready to be used in court.This fall, researchers from McGill University in Montreal also announced they were able to distinguish between identical twins' DNA, this time by looking at "single base mutations," mutations where a single letter in the genome is changed to another letter. "We have produced evidence that in some sets of identical twins, the identity of each twin can be discerned through DNA testing," Brent Richards, an assistant professor of medicine and human genetics at McGill, told Popular Science.

However, out of the 33 pairs of twins studied, researchers were only able to distinguish between two pairs of identical twins. Richards points out that the results could be more accurate if they decide to target more mutations in their study. "We assessed only about 500,000 genetic variants. However, one can easily genotype up to 1.5 million genetic variants, which would increase the probability of identifying the correct twin pair by approximately 3-fold."/>

Here's the rub: the technique for distinguishing between identical twins' DNA is not ready to be used in court, says Greg Hampikian, a professor of biology and criminal justice at Boise State University. "No one has done it in a forensic case, and it will likely be a while before it reaches general consensus and will be acceptable under the Daubert Standard in a U.S. court," he told Popular Science. According to this standard, scientific expertise is acceptable only if the technique it relies on has been tested, subjected to peer review, has a known error rate and is widely accepted in the scientific community.

Having a twin can be an easy way out for suspects.
In the French press, experts commenting on the Marseille twin case were quoted saying that the DNA technology required would be too costly: hundreds of thousand of euros, even millions were some of the numbers mentioned. Hampikian and Richards both disagree, saying it would be in the tens of thousands of dollars. In these cases, labs can't rely on standard FBI DNA tests, because the regions those tests evaluate would be identical for monozygotic twins. They would need to do a whole genome sequencing, says Hampikian, which now costs about $10,000. Hampikian adds that for better results, this would have to be combined with a study of methylation, chemical marks on the DNA that change with the environment (after birth, twins are exposed to different environmental conditions). However, there are no guarantees that differences will be found.

Hampikian explains that one problem is that you would have to study a great number of different tissues to say for sure that you could tell the twins apart, because the mutations are so rare.

Michael Baird, the laboratory director of the DNA Diagnostics Center (DDC) in Ohio told Popular Science that in the case of the identical twins he recently studied, a mutation could be found in a cheek sample, while the DNA from blood and fingernail samples was identical between brothers. "There are mutations but it is hard to determine where they occur," he says. Furthermore, Baird adds that a whole genome sequencing requires a larger quantity of DNA than is usually found on a crime scene.

To be sure they are convicting the right man, investigators in Marseille will need to rely on other elements, such as alibis, confessions and criminal history. They could also look at fingerprints, which are different between monozygotic twins, one of the hypotheses being that fingerprints differ because twins occupy different positions in the womb and move differently.

If none of this is available, having a twin can be an easy way out for suspects. In 2009 in Berlin, identical twin brothers were released following a spectacular department-store burglary. Only DNA was found that night, and the German court could not conclusively say to which twin it belonged and, as a result, couldn't risk putting an innocent man in jail. "We are proud of the German legal system," the twins had declared at the time.



Viewing all 20161 articles
Browse latest View live




Latest Images