If you truly are what you eat you should definitely eat more Tartrazine Yellow and Allura Red, because man are they ever beautiful. Food colorings like these often make headlines when some study (or rumor of a study) suggests they are slowly killing us (remember back in the ‘90s when Yellow 5--that's Tartrazine--was allegedly making us all sterile?). But here, biochemist and experimental photographer Linden Gledhill has captured them in all their crystalline, microscopic grandeur.

Gledhill first discovered these beautiful crystal structures in the course of his day job while staining biological samples for microscopy. After developing some methods for producing the exact crystal shapes that he wanted he placed the dyes in microscope slides and let them dry out and crystalize from anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Gledhill then used a Canon EOS 5D Mark II mashed up with an Olympus BH-2 trinocular microscope, differential interference contrast optics, and special LED and high-speed flash systems to turn it all into art. Click through the gallery link to see just how stunning food coloring can be.

Click to launch the photo gallery

All images courtesy Linden Gledhill.

Trying to get high but don't want to go through the hassle of conducting monetary transactions with some friend of a friend who may or may not be giving you what you think you asked for? Try tapping the opiate-like painkillers that you already own. University of Michigan researchers have figured out how to use non-invasive transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to coax the brain into releasing its endogenous opioids--the most powerful natural painkillers that the human body keeps stashed onboard for only those worst-case scenarios.

Generally, those scenarios involve massive, life-threatening trauma of some kind (and hence you can't really kick back and enjoy the morphine-like ride). But via tDCS--which basically allows very small amounts of current applied precisely to the outside of your scalp to manipulate the neurons inside your brain--the researchers were able to trick the brain into releasing the opioids at will, no trauma necessary.

The research could do some serious good for those suffering from chronic pain and other ailments. Right now, the research team has demonstrated only limited success. In its study, the patient's threshold for pain increased by 36 percent, but what's known as clinical pain--like the pain caused by a migraine, for instance--was not actually alleviated. So the procedure currently treats the symptom more than the actual ailment, and that's okay. By using natural painkillers to manage pain, patients could avoid the side effects of manufactured opiates which include--among other things--powerful addiction. The next phase of the research will explore whether this method can be finessed to actually reduce clinical pain as well as boost pain tolerance.

[ExtremeTech]

It's not every day that we see a new mobile OS, even if it's not entirely new. Canonical, makers of Ubuntu, the largest distro of Linux, showed off a very-nearly-finished build of the Ubuntu mobile OS yesterday, and it actually looks pretty good!

So you can install Ubuntu on most Android devices--it's not an Android skin, it's a completely new OS, but since it's built on Linux, the same way Android is, Canonical says it'll be no problem to install on modern Android phones. They've been demonstrating it on a Galaxy Nexus. There may be native Ubuntu hardware in 2014, but nothing's been announced, so let's treat this as an alternate OS for Android devices for now.

The OS completely tosses out any permanent buttons, be they Home, Back, or anything else, in favor of a gesture-based system. You trigger different functions by swiping in from the sides or top of the screen, a bit like on Windows 8 (or on WebOS, if you go back a few years). Swipe in from the left and you'll get a sort of dock showing your most frequently used apps, while swiping in from the right cycles through recently used apps to function as an app switcher. Swipe down from the top to access messages and change settings. That last seems like a great idea, a bit like Android's notification shade but with even more options, since you can move left and right to access other menus. (Swipe down on the messages icon to see messages, but then move right to see connection options, move further right to see screen options, that kind of thing.) Swiping up from the bottom within an app gives you more options, like the Menu button in Android.

The app situation is a little up in the air; it'll have icons leading to both web apps and native apps. The latter is preferable, as it relies more on the power of the phone than on the speed of wireless connection, and can take greater advantage of the phone's hardware. Eventually there'll be some kind of app market.

Interestingly, this is a full version of Ubuntu, so there'll be a way to dock the phone so you can use Ubuntu with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse, just like you would a computer. That had been tried before by Motorola, with not very good results, but the Motorola version gave a glorified web browser and Ubuntu's is a full operating system, so hopefully it'll work a bit better.

Engadget says Ubuntu for the Galaxy Nexus "will be available for download within the next few weeks."

There's a major problem in health journalism: It's wildly unreliable. As David H. Freedman points out in an excellent critique in the January/ February issue of Columbia Journalism Review, the rate of "overall wrongness" in top medical journals is as much as two thirds--something even the most seasoned science reporters don't point out. The resulting information conveyed to lay readers, is, at best, confusing and, at worst, dead wrong.

But one of those articles has to be the "right" article, doesn't it? One of them has to have the best information. Well, sure, but good luck trying to suss out which one it is in your newspaper or blog of choice when it's not even remotely clear in the medical journals.

And that's only part of the problem, Freedman argues. Science journalists can report flawlessly on a study, painting an accurate picture with multiple, credentialed sources, and still end up transmitting to readers an incomplete message--maybe even a flat-out wrong message--by not letting them in on a fundamental fact: that there is no one tidy answer.

With so much wrong information, scientists and journalists pick whichever wrong study helps them the most, Freedman says. Scientists want their studies to be published and picked up by the media, while journalists want a story that's clear and digestible. But science is messy, and a clear, digestible finding is often (to borrow from another kind of reporting that Freedman mentions) saying about as much as a politician at a press conference.

So there's the upshot: pull a personal health study out of a hat, and it's more likely than not to have major problems. But journalists aren't picking random studies--they're picking the clearest, most engaging, and thus the worst, studies. The system is broken, and this is Freedman's explanation on how to fix it:

A tall order, maybe, but good advice for readers: stay skeptical, and reconsider any life-changing decisions you're making based on studies, whether you read them in a respected journal or a newspaper or, sure, here at Popular Science.

But one last note on all of this. Freedman readily cites where he got his information on the wrongness of studies. He got it from studies. Even if health journalists and readers become more skeptical, there's an old piece of wisdom you can check out the published science on: change is hard.

[Columbia Journalism Review]

Indoor navigation is most certainly the holy grail for positioning system makers right now. Satellite-based location technologies like GPS work wonderfully out under the open sky, where signals bounced from satellites to receivers on the ground are unhindered by man-made structures or natural obstructions. Take that same technology into the subway or a large shopping mall, and the signal goes dead. But a new ground-based positioning system called Locata could soon replace or augment satnav using radio signals that are a million times stronger than GPS signals, indoors or out.

There have been copious attempts at providing indoor location services by dozens if not hundreds of companies, but nothing has yet proven effective enough to be rolled out on a commercial scale. Most technologies have short ranges and relatively wide margins of error (up to several yards). Even GPS, developed for the U.S. military and now standard on all kinds of consumer devices, suffers from weak signal strength as the entire scheme relies on a constellation of satellites parked in faraway orbits.

There's no telling if Locata will be the technology that breaks through the various obstacles that have hamstrung previous attempts at indoor positioning, but there are reasons to think it might. The U.S. military seems to think it holds serious promise--the Air Force has already tested Locata's technology and found it accurate down to less than eight inches, and the military last month signed a contract to conduct large-scale testing of the technology at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

Rather than working via satellites, Locata works off ground-based signal stations that generate a kind of localized "GPS hotspot." So Locata doesn't enjoy the benefit of being ubiquitous, always in the sky for anyone to use anywhere like GPS. But where deployed it is reportedly a good deal more accurate than GPS boasting far stronger signal strength, and it works in all those places that GPS signals can't go--inside sprawling buildings, in subterranean mines or caves, on factory floors, or on city streets where surrounding buildings interfere with standard GPS.

If the technology is up to military standards, it could be rolled out as an augmentation to conventional GPS with huge implications for the future of positioning technology. For the U.S. military, itself operating more and more in urban areas where grunts are either indoors or in "urban canyons" where GPS signals aren't at their strongest, the technology has obvious value. But, as New Scientist points out, the real killer application for indoor positioning and navigation could be in robotics.

Robots using something like Locata could navigate interior spaces with precision without relying on computer vision technologies and other complex navigation sensors. These robots could use Locata to help map interior spaces--in other words, they could use Locata to help make Locata an even more robust technology for both humans and other robots to use. Where the future of positioning technologies is concerned, that's a nice positive feedback loop to think about.

[New Scientist]

So much great science fiction takes place when Earth is either gone or forgotten. Having ruined the planet and other life on it, people have to leave and go elsewhere, only to return and encounter a changed place. Sometimes spacefaring people even "discover" a planet, only to find out it's actually Earth (see: Planet of the Apes, the forthcoming After Earth, etc.). Now a new study seems to fit this sad plot line exquisitely well: People traveling in space may be more likely to develop the memory-destroying scourge of Alzheimer's disease. We could leave Earth and then, late in life, forget it.

Earth's magnetic fields deflect cosmic and solar rays, protecting those of us living on the planet and in orbit just above it. But astronauts traveling to Mars, or living in deep space for the long haul, will live in a constant barrage of cosmic radiation from which there is no escape. The prevailing concern is the risk of cancer, caused by high-energy protons interfering with space travelers' DNA. There is, however, also a clear risk of neurological damage, which would stem from inflammation in the central nervous system. Chronic neuroinflammation is thought to play a role in the development of Alzheimer's disease.

Led by Dr. M. Kerry O'Banion, a neurobiology professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center, a team of researchers set out to determine the cognitive changes that may result from exposure to cosmic radiation. They took 29 male and 20 female mice that were genetically modified to express a suite of conditions that predispose them to Alzheimer's, and exposed them to varying levels of radiation using the Space Radiation Laboratory equipment at Brookhaven National Laboratory.

For their space radiation analogue, the team went with highly energetic heavy iron ions, which could come from distant supernovae. They would also be more dangerous than other highly energetic particles because they'd easily penetrate most shielding equipment. "One would have to essentially wrap a spacecraft in a six-foot block of lead or concrete," O'Banion said in a statement.

The mice got zapped, eight at a time, through styrofoam tubes. A control group sat next to the tubes but didn't get a beam of iron ions. The doses were designed to mimic high levels of charged particles that would accumulate during a long-term mission. Then, the mice were shipped back to Rochester, where O'Banion and his colleagues performed a series of tests. Mice had to recall objects, specific locations, or events, and the ones that were exposed to radiation could not do it very well.

This was one indication that radiation impaired their cognitive function, so to see whether they suffered physiological Alzheimer-like effects, O'Banion and the team had to examine their brains. It turned out the male mice in particular developed high levels of beta amyloid, the protein "plaque" that accumulates in the brain in Alzheimer's. This is the first time any researchers have seen enhanced plaque due to radiation exposure.

"These findings clearly suggest that exposure to radiation in space has the potential to accelerate the development of Alzheimer's disease," O'Banion said. "This is yet another factor that NASA, which is clearly concerned about the health risks to its astronauts, will need to take into account as it plans future missions."

There is one key difference between this study and the real-life experience of long-distance travelers, and that's time. The mice were subjected to high doses of radiation that were meant to mimic the levels a person would experience in long-duration flight, such as the two-year minimum travel time to and from Mars. What's more, the mice in question were models of Alzheimer's, meaning they were predisposed to the disease--and astronauts would likely not be. Still, it shows that space travelers could have a "heightened chance of debilitating dementia occurring long after the mission is over," the authors write in their paper, published this week in PLoS One.

And that's where it sets up the cruelest irony: Space travelers who venture beyond our planet will go because it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience, something they'd never forget. But because of the trip, they will.

A young river otter has been christened Sutro Sam after he moved into the Sutro Baths, an abandoned ruin of a 19th-century spa complex on San Francisco's Pacific coast, just north of Golden Gate Park. Sutro Sam is San Francisco's only river otter; the theory is that he swam down south from Marin County, where there are larger populations of river otters, and stayed because the Sutro Baths are an excellent hangout spot for an otter. He's got fresh water in the baths, salt water in the ocean, and lots of giant goldfish people have placed into the Baths, which Sam apparently "eats like potato chips." He'll probably stay until the food's gone, or until he feels like leaving. [SFGate]

As young stars form, they hoover up dust and gas around them, and the remaining material spins into a flat, rotating disk. Planets start out as small clumps in that disk, and those clumps collide with other small clumps, eventually adding to their masses. As a result, baby star systems often appear as a dot in the middle, surrounded by a dark gap and then a dusty disk. But somehow, as this process unfolds, the stars continue to grow too. This is hard to explain--how, if the planets are gathering up the stuff around them, is any of the stuff getting to the star?

The ALMA telescope, the largest radio telescope on the planet, is providing some answers. New observations of a young star system about 450 light years away show the planets and stars sharing gas, with bridges stretching from the dusty gas disk all the way to the star.

The disk itself is made up of two portions, an inner section near the star and an outer section where planets are forming. If this were our solar system, the inner section would stretch to roughly the orbit of Saturn. The outer disk starts 14 times farther away and is roughly two light-days across. The ultra-distant Voyager 1 probe--just about to leave the boundary of our sun's influence--would be near the inner edge of that disk.

ALMA first detected thin traces of carbon dioxide in the gap between the disks. There wasn't any dust in the gap, which conforms to planetary formation theory, but ALMA's high sensitivity was able to detect the CO2. Then ALMA also saw some streamers, connecting the disk to the star like spokes on a wheel. These streamers are formed by the planets' gravitational pull; they are drinking in gas from the outer portions of the disk. But most of the gas overshoots the planets, allowing the star to take it back and continue growing. These are the first direct observations of these streams, whose presence has been inferred by computer models.

This is what ALMA saw:

The dust in the outer portion of the disk is shown in red. Dense HCO+ gas, or Formyl, is shown in green, and diffuse gas in the central gap is shown in blue. The gas filaments can be seen at the three o'clock and ten o'clock positions, flowing from the outer disc towards the center.

Simon Casassus of the University of Chile and the Millennium Nucleus for Protoplanetary Disks led an international team of astronomers who observed this system, called HD 142527. Without the streamers, the inner disk would be depleted within a year, they found. But with the streamers, there's enough gas moving around to maintain the inner disk, and to feed the hungry growing star.

The planets are inside the dense streams of gas falling toward the star, which also obscures them from view. They are likely several times larger than Jupiter. The paper describing these findings publishes today in Nature.

[NRAO]

A creamsicle-colored set of mugs will make your hot chocolate taste and smell sweeter than it would taste served in plain white or stark red, according to European scientists. This adds to the growing set of studies that claim the vessel in which our food is served can have a dramatic effect on the way our senses perceive the food.

In what may have been the easiest volunteer experiment ever, 57 people had to drink hot chocolate served in four different types of cups. They were all plastic and the same size, but were either white, cream, red or orange with white inside. The tasters reported the chocolate tasted better in the cream-colored and orange cups.

The color had nothing to do with this difference, neither physically nor chemically, but apparently the drinkers' brains thought they detected a difference, according to Betina Piqueras-Fiszman, a researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain. The study references other similar findings--like the perception that yellow packaging improves lemon flavor, or that blue drinks appear to be more thirst-quenching than red ones.

This is useful information for chefs and food-packing professionals, because it shows presentation does matter. And while that may seem obvious, there could be scientific benefits, too--especially for researchers who study sensory perception and how the senses integrate.

One of the few good things about persistent cold weather is the excuse to drink hot chocolate. But you'd better be careful how you sip it.

When our sun first got going, some 4.5 billion years ago, it wasn't the same blazing star we know today--its warmth and brightness grew gradually as more and more of its fuel ignited. So, for Earth's first two billion years, our planet was bathed in a light 25 percent dimmer than it receives today.

If the sun dropped back down to that magnitude today, our planet would plunge into an ice age dramatic enough to bury the continents in miles-thick ice sheets and freeze the oceans solid. But according to the geological evidence, ancient Earth was not frozen: It was covered in vast liquid oceans and dotted over with arcs of island chains that sprouted up from undersea volcanoes and then wore back down again in the rain.

Scientists have been working to resolve this troubling paradox for decades: how, they have asked, could a faint young sun have kept Earth out of an ice age for two billion years, when several ice ages have come and gone in more recent times, under a much brighter star?

The answer, they reasoned, must lie in the planet's early atmosphere--the air must have been packed with enough heat-trapping greenhouse gas to compensate for the lack of sunlight. But which greenhouse gas was it? Evidence from ancient soils suggested that carbon dioxide levels weren't high enough to do the job alone, and theories pointing to methane as ancient Earth's chief atmospheric insulator fell apart under close scientific scrutiny. (Water vapor--today's biggest greenhouse gas--was out from the beginning, because air needs to be warm to begin with to hold large amounts of the stuff).

Now, researchers at the University of Chicago have come up with a new theory: the greenhouse gases that provided Earth with extra warmth weren't CO₂ or methane or any of the usual suspects--they were nitrogen and hydrogen. Though H₂ and N₂ don't normally soak up the sun's light, collisions between the molecules can energize them, prompting them to absorb infrared energy.

Based on computer simulations, the researchers found that, if the early atmosphere were composed of 10 percent hydrogen, the warming effect from those molecular collisions could have been enough to raise the planet's temperature by as much as 60 degrees fahrenheit--enough to keep liquid water falling on the young, dimly-lit planet during the first part of its life.

Science and technology have utterly transformed human life in the past few generations, and forecasts of the future used to be measured in decades. But big changes arrive faster and faster these days. So here we've shifted our forecast to the near-term, because we're right on the verge of some extraordinary stuff. These are the trends and events to watch out for in 2013. See them all here.

The warning from climate scientists has been clear and consistent for decades: Man-made greenhouse-gas emissions, which increase every year, are causing the planet to warm, and that will have dire consequences-the specifics of which (timing, intensity, location) aren't completely understood right now.

Unfortunately, the steadiness of that message is also its undoing in the media; more often, the rare scientific dissenter gets the limelight. "Because it's been pretty much the same for 25 years, it almost never gets reported," says Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Two statements of scientific consensus forthcoming in 2013 will provide an opportunity to set the record straight: the National Climate Assessment, which lays out observed and anticipated trends in the U.S., and the Fifth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a global evaluation of the peer-reviewed literature conducted by thousands of researchers.

Journalists will still be looking for catchy news pegs, particularly in the IPCC report. They'll find only nuanced differences from the last assessment in 2007, Schmidt says. Yet many will stretch those fine distinctions into exaggerated and overwrought headlines, which can lead to public confusion.

That's what happened when the U.K.'s climate-monitoring organization, the Met Office, released an update to its global-temperature data set in October. Despite British scientists' explanation that it showed multi-decadal warming, outlets such as the Daily Mail cherry-picked the data to support the headline: "Global Warming Stopped 16 Years Ago." The Met Office called the coverage "misleading," but it was widely reprinted by other media outlets.

That's not to say that good science can't break through the sound bites. As any scientist searching for the climate-change signal among reams of weather data will tell you, it just takes practice to filter out the noise.

Absolute zero--that's zero degrees Kelvin, or -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit--is understood by textbook definition to be the absolute coldest anything can be, a temperature threshold at which atoms actually lose all of their kinetic energy and stop moving completely (or at which entropy reaches its lowest value). There can be nothing stiller than completely still, and hence absolute zero is as low-energy as something can go. Right? But researchers have discovered that's not exactly the case. By messing with the distribution of high- and low-energy atoms within a system, a team of physicists at the University of Munich in Germany has created what it defines as a negative temperature system--one that has a temperature south of absolute zero.

The researchers describe their system in terms of hills and valleys (picture this). At absolute zero, a group of atoms has no energy and is motionless, and thus all atoms are at the bottom of the valley. As the temperature rises above absolute zero that changes, but not all at once--some particles gain a lot of energy, and some gain just a little, so now the atoms have different energies and are spread along the slope of the hill, stretching from valley to hilltop. Physics says the most disordered state of this system occurs when there are an equal number of particles at every point along the slope, and that's the top of the positive temperature scale--increase the energy any further and the particles would no longer be evenly spread, lowering the system's entropy (for a more detailed description of all this, click through to New Scientist's write-up).

The point is, you're in the positive temperature scale when you have some number of high-energy particles atop the energy hill and some larger number of particles in the valley. So to reach their theoretical negative temperature scale the U. of Munich researchers forced that model to flip, placing more high-energy particles atop the hill than in the valley. Says New Scientist:

The resulting thermometer is mind-bending, with a scale that starts at zero, ramps up to plus infinity, then jumps to minus infinity before increasing through the negative numbers until it reaches negative absolute zero, which corresponds to all particles sitting at the top of the energy hill.

Suffice it to say that this isn't something that tends to occur naturally on Earth. The researchers pushed their way into the negative temperature realm by placing atoms in a vacuum at just above absolute zero with most particles in the low-energy state and then used lasers to push the majority of them up the energy hill into higher-energy states. This inverse energy distribution is, on paper, a negative temperature system.

This is of interest not just because it seems we've drilled through temperature's lower limit, but because negative temperature systems could assist physicists in experimenting with quantum interactions not possible in the positive temperature realm. And going negative is always interesting, especially if you're into certain cosmological theories that posit that for every particle there is an anti-particle (a positive and a negative). For instance, there's the universe we can see and then there's the dark universe, whose dark energy is thought to apply negative pressure on the cosmos. Maybe that mysterious stuff exhibits negative temperature as well.

[New Scientist]

What if there were a machine-a beautiful, shiny machine-and all it did, with almost no work from you, was make you beer? Such was the dream that drove former PopSci photographer John Carnett to build what he calls "the Device": a stainless-steel, two-cart brewing system that starts by boiling extract (concentrated wort, or pre-fermented beer) and ends with a chilled pint.

In most home-brewing setups, each step in the process requires moving the beer to a new container by hand, which increases the chance of contamination and requires lifting. Carnett's machine keeps everything in the carts' closed system-he only has to swap a few CO2-pressurized hoses to move the liquid along.


The delicious brew's journey begins in the boil keg, where concentrated wort extract is heated by a propane burner for 90 minutes. The beer then travels through a heat exchanger-which cools the mix to about 55˚F (13˚C)-on its way to the fermenting keg. Here, a network of Freon-chilled copper tubes pumps cool water around the keg when the temperature gets too high. After two weeks, the Device pumps the beer into a settling keg, where a CO2 tank adds carbonation. When you pull the tap, the beer travels through the cold plate, so it's chilled on the way to your glass. That's right: The Device is always ready with a cold pour and consumes no power when it's not actively serving or fermenting.

This project was excerpted from The Big Book Of Hacks: 264 Amazing DIY Tech Projects, a compendium of ingenious and hilarious projects for aspiring makers. Buy it here. And for more amazing hacks, go here.

2013 is definitely going to be the year you honor your New Year's resolution to diet and exercise more. Definitely! But before you spend money on work-out devices or weight-loss supplements, check out these seven old ads from the Popular Science archive, and remember that if something seems too good to be true, it's probably going to embarrass you later. (Or it might be a scary amphetamine; see slide 6.)

Bonus: An ad for weight-gain tablets that promises to help "thousands of thin, tired, nervous people" pack on the pounds. Because everyone knows that "no skinny man has an ounce of sex appeal!"

Click here to enter the gallery

DARPA solicitation days are like Christmas morning for technology nerds, occasions whose bounty defense tech geeks look forward to precisely because we have no idea what we are going to get. And in case you thought DARPA might scale back its far-out R&D ambitions in light of impending defense budget cuts, be advised: the DoD's blue-sky researchers fear no fiscal cliff (in fact, it has likely already developed a self-assembling hypersonic vehicle that will automatically scramjet the agency to safety should any cliff, fiscal or otherwise, be autonomously detected). So what does DARPA want in 2013? Read on.

Portable Brain Recording Device (With App!): "The effort will develop a portable, inexpensive, and easy-to-use electroencephalography (EEG) device and corresponding mobile application (app) for use by nontraditional audiences," the solicitations says. Who is this audience? Why, it's me and you.

According to DARPA, there are plenty of DoD-based reasons for wanting a cheap ($30) and easy to use EEG device that runs off a smartphone--like being able to diagnose neural trauma in the field--but that's not DARPA's primary driver for funding this. Rather, given EEGs great potential, it's just something we need. Having EEGs in every classroom would be a boon to STEM education, the solicitation says, and current commercial EEG setups are too expensive, plagued by problems, and difficult to use. DARPA wants a better phone-based brain reader.

A Way To Beat The Bends: Deep-sea diving is dangerous. Ascend or descend too quickly or without taking the proper precautions, and you could end up with the "bends" or various other conditions caused by inhaling gasses at high pressure or by the differences in pressure at different depths. Divers generally get around this by breathing static gas mixtures at prescribed intervals and durations throughout ascent and descent, as dictated by textbook standards developed over decades and decades of diving.

But every body's physiology is different--so shouldn't this process be tailored to the person? DARPA wants a dynamic diving system that simultaneously monitors a diver's physiology and delivers the necessary gas mixtures at the necessary pressures automatically, making descent and ascent both safer and likely faster (see the military application here?). The agency wants an entire system--both the chip-scaled instruments for measuring the body's indicators and a system for delivering things like nitric oxide into the air supply at optimal times to keep the diver's body firing on all cylinders during deep diving operations. In other words, a dive suit and air supply that is also a robotic dive coach and deep-sea doctor.

Self-Healing Software: Everything is networked now--our control systems (everything from our home security systems to building fire-suppression schemes to nuclear power plants), our communications infrastructure, our vehicles, our weaponized drones--and it's tough to keep tabs on every system all the time. That means the convenience of a networked world also introduces a very vulnerable one as well. In other words, people keep hacking us and DARPA is getting annoyed.

To keep our embedded networked systems from being compromised, "DARPA seeks to develop novel technology for automatically detecting and automatically patching vulnerabilities in networked, embedded systems." The DoD leaves the door wide open here, without specifying exactly how this technology should look or work, only that it should be widely applicable and versatile. And, presumably, un-hackable.

Electro-Gravity Vision: Most of America's enemies use electricity and all of them use gravity, making those two attractive means by which to try to detect them when they're trying to stay concealed. But the signatures that arise from electrical power systems (like portable generators or power distribution systems) and gravity (or, in this case, a lack of mass in the form of a tunnel or underground bunker) decay rapidly over distance. DARPA wants something that can see these signatures from afar.

That means no systems that require sensor placement near the target or payloads aboard low-flying aircraft. DARPA wants true remote sensing tech, something that can operate aboard an aerial system but scan across more than 6 miles of empty space to zero in on the weak signatures of an electrical system or a gravitational aberration. And possibly guide a Hellfire missile.

Swarming Satellites: Picosatellites--satellites weighing less than one kilogram (2.2 pounds)--are inexpensive to launch but also largely ineffective as stand-alone platforms. They're simply too small to carry any kind of large-scale sensor or power source. DARPA is already at work on what it calls its System F6 satellite cluster--a swarm of picosats that distribute the various computing, communications, navigation, and sensing chores between several satellites working as a unit. It's launching an F6 testbed to orbit in 2015.

What DARPA now wants is other picosats that can work with its backbone picosat cluster. Specifically, DARPA wants an Earth imaging picosat that can successfully communicate and integrate with the F6 cluster to command, package, and deliver Earth imagery from orbit to the ground via high-speed data link.

Also on DARPA's 2013 wish list: Biodegradable electronics for medical implant purposes, technologies that can boost wireless communications spectrum capabilities, and "single crystal self-assembly." If any of this sounds like a technology you can deliver, Uncle Sam wants you.

[DARPA]

Over 350 of the individuals that have gone missing in the UK over the last few years have not been found, according to a UK Missing Persons list. Meanwhile, the nation's police have the opposite problem--records and photos of over 1,000 bodies that have been found, but never identified.
In hopes of returning some of these anonymous deceased to their bereaved families, the UK police have launched a searchable website with sketches, photos, and other forensic records of 1,029 men and women, as well as details of 105 babies, who lie in unmarked graves.

[Read the full story at The Guardian]

We love Google Now, but we couldn't help but get a laugh out of this glitch reported for Android: ask your phone, "What is a giraffe?" and it'll inexplicably say "he now praises the iPad."

But you don't have to be using Google Now to see the problem. Head over to Google Translate and type in "end with," and you'll get the same "he now praises the iPad" when you click the audio button on the left. Apparently, putting a dee sound before the word "with" triggers it.

One Foot Tsunami explains how text from this random article was somehow used as the voice source text. Type "filled with" into Google Translate, and you'll get the full snippet: "filled with 'so much drama,' he now praises the iPad."

This will probably be fixed soon, so enjoy it while it lasts, everyone.

[One Foot Tsunami]

Do you live around a cranky neighbor? Are you the cranky neighbor?

These are important questions because, according to a new study, areas with low "social capital"--lack of neighborliness, I guess would be one way of putting it--are associated with higher rates of traffic fatalities. Love thy neighbor, or stay off the roads.

All the usual caveats here are in full effect. Correlation doesn't mean causation (maybe people are on edge because of the higher-than-normal traffic fatalities?), but it's still an interesting find: not only were the numbers statistically significant, but the chances of dying were a full 50 percent greater in areas with low social capital.

The City College of New York study, published in the Eastern Economic Journal, looked at 10 years of data for the 48 contiguous U.S. states. The study's author, Matthew Nagler, pored over survey responses to how "honest" people in each state viewed other people, assuming that was an indicator of trust. He also created a social capital "index" based on four different community activities: election turnout, church attendance, club meeting attendance, and volunteer activity. Looking at those parameters, Nagler found the correlation between lack of social capital and higher rates of traffic fatalities. Here are the tabulated results:

His hypothesis on why: Because people are more courteous to each other when they have ties to the community.

Well, maybe. There was some work done to eliminate other state-by-state causes--"real gross state product per capita, vehicle miles traveled per capita, unpaved roads as a percent of local road mileage, percentage of the population over 65 and the state maximum speed limit"--but it sounds like there's a lot of potential factors at play. At least it's a good excuse to finally join that book club.

[CUNY]

The Consumer Electronics Show, the year's largest gadget expo, gets underway next week. Historically, it has been the place for major electronics companies to show off their most amazing and futuristic wares. Here's a quick list of stuff that debuted at CES: the VCR, the audio cassette, the Pong home console, affordable digital watches, the Nintendo Entertainment System, Tetris, the Apple Newton, and the Palm Pre. Here's an awesome photo roundup of past CESes.

It hasn't been that way for a while; technology is no longer a niche market for hobbyists, and the introduction of new gadgets is major national news, so the big companies have stopped announcing flagship products or stopped attending CES altogether. Why bury your news among a thousand other products when you can wait a few weeks and have the news cycle all to yourself? This year, Microsoft isn't even attending, and the other real players in tech--Apple, Google, and Amazon--either haven't attended in years or have never bothered.

But that also opens the door for smaller companies, which have a larger platform during CES than they'd have normally. We don't know exactly what to expect from them, because those companies often are not on our radar until they reveal something that wows us on the show floor. Barring that, here are some other things we're pretty sure we'll see.

Tons of Windows 8 stuff. Windows 8, Microsoft's most innovative version of Windows in, well, maybe ever, is promising and super interesting, though it hasn't been a blockbuster success. We've only just seen the first wave of Windows devices, so we're expecting to see lots and lots of crazy form factors, from small tablets to large tablets, convertibles to detachables, and probably a few we haven't even thought of yet. Will they be better than the Lenovo Yoga 13, our current favorite laptop? We hope so!

4K is the new 3-D is the new HD. One of the trademarks of CES for the past few years has been wildly expensive TVs that may or may not actually exist. Last year's was a $25,000 55-inch OLED, but this year I think 4K will be the big wow-TV. 4K is four times the resolution of what we think of as high-definition. It's pretty amazing, but only if you're very very close to the screen--from 10 feet away, sitting on a couch, you'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference. Still, we're expecting a whole bunch of 4K screens, and we will get all up in them.

You are fat. We haven't been impressed with fitness trackers in the past, but that's not because we don't like the idea of fitness trackers--it's just that fitness trackers aren't smart enough yet. CES is the perfect place for a new crop of trackers to pop up, and in fact, the Basis Band, one of the most innovative and intelligent fitness trackers we've seen yet, debuted at CES last year. These gadgets are mostly made by smaller companies, and we wouldn't be surprised if we see some very cool new high-tech ways to get in shape.

Connect your home. Soon enough, we'll be able to control every element of our homes through our phones. Lights, temperature, humidity, all of our appliances, door locks, everything. We're not there yet--mostly we see a lot of cobbled-together "connected" tools--but we'll move closer on the path to the connected home this year at CES.

An analysis in Nature has confirmed what we already knew: politicians need to hurry up if we're going to stop climate change. What's more, the longer they wait, the more it'll cost them--and taxpayers--to fight the problem. (Good thing everything has been going swimmingly in Congress as of late.)

The researchers behind the study knock down the excuse that waiting until scientific and technological "uncertainties" are cleared up is worth delaying action. For example, one common goal is to keep global temperature at no more than two degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels. The analysis calculates the odds of staying below that two-degree line if countries work to meet target emissions by a certain year:

• If the 195 countries that plan to start cutting off emissions by 2020 meet that goal, it gives the planet a 56 percent chance of staying within that goal.
• But if those countries delay action until 2025, it drops the odds to 34 percent.
• And if that goal was pushed forward to 2015, it would raise our chances to 60 percent.

As for cost: if action started in 2015, the analysis states, it would cost 60 dollars to get rid of each metric ton of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of another greenhouse gas. But waiting until 2020 would raise the cost to $150 per metric ton.

No one ever went broke betting against politicians taking swift action, but we can at least hope it makes financial sense for our leaders in this case.

[Nature]