In this week's hottest new game, underground warbots search for a quantum kitty while avoiding land mines, collecting diamonds, and growing synthetic morphine.

Welcome to the future.

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Hand-powered negative-pressure pump is designed to speed wound healing

While many MIT students busily build break-dancing robots or websites that let your pets network better at doggie daycare, PhD candidate Danielle Zurovcik has designed a $3 pump to drastically speed up the healing of countless patients in the aftermath of Haiti's recent earthquake. Read more »

The wiring in many classic cars is more likely to be a fire trap than a masterpiece of industrial control. Not so with Dave Phipps' 1969 GTO, which he controls remotely with an iPod Touch.

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A jet engine shelved in the '80s could improve airplane fuel economy today

In 1983, engineers at General Electric experimented with an "unducted fan" engine. Without the external casing, airflow through the blades increased, delivering more power for the same amount of fuel. The thing was loud, but the company pressed on because the trick could reduce fuel consumption by as much as 26 percent. Then fuel prices dropped, gas guzzling became acceptable, and GE mothballed the project. Now that airlines are again conscious of fuel costs and carbon, the idea is back, and new tech is making it feasible. Read more »

After cost overruns, a series of delays, and almost a decade of hype, the F-35 Lighting finally performed a vertical landing for the first time. Yesterday at 1 P.M., after descending from a 150-foot-high hover, the test plane touched down on the tarmac at the Patuxent River Naval Air Station. This is a significant step forward for the F-35, as its vertical takeoff and landing capability are crucial to the fighter's role as a replacement for the aging Harrier jet.

The test began with a short runway takeoff at 93 miles per hour, after which the pilot swung around, positioned the plane over the runway, and lowered it down. The test pilot, a former Royal Air Force aviator with experience piloting VSTOL planes, said he found landing the F-35 vertically far easier than landing older planes, like the Harrier, the same way. Read more »

Like GPS for marstronauts

It will probably take another decade to perfect the sophisticated rocket and life-support technology needed to put a human on Mars. But once we're there, NASA may use centuries-old technology to keep us from getting lost during a stroll.

Apollo crews never left sight of their capsule, but explorers will be expected to roam farther on the Red Planet. Mars, however, like the moon, lacks a strong magnetic field to point a compass needle north. This conundrum inspired Richard Speck, the founder of space-tech company Micro-Space, to design a camera system that tracks celestial bodies for personal navigation cues. It uses the same principle as the sextant, the sun-mapping tool invented in 1731 for sailors to plot their course. Read more »

Scientists need the diamonds to build the next generation of X-ray lasers

Powerful X-ray lasers may allow scientists to image tiny drug molecules or even precisely target cancer cells, but the lasers require extremely high-quality mirrors to function well. Now researchers have created a nearly-flawless diamond that can do the job, according to Discovery News.

One X-ray laser already exists in an underground facility at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Laboratory, where it spans several football fields in length. A backlog of experiments in biology, physics and chemistry has already formed, which led to the need for more X-ray lasers.

Most lasers use silicon mirrors to bounce light wavelengths back and forth, but silicon can't reflect powerful X-rays. That's where diamond mirrors entered the picture. Read more »

The designers were inspired by the idea of prisoner rehabilitation

Prisoners pose an age-old dilemma for societies: try to keep them separated from the good citizenry while possibly easing some of the black sheep back into the fold. Now Malaysian architecture students have hit upon the solution of a sky prison city that allows prisoners to work in farms and factories to contribute to the host city below, CNET reports.

Convicted criminals, prison employees, and cargo would shuttle back and forth to the great big prison in the sky on pods that travel on the prison's supporting structural legs. Different pod types include a heavy lift cargo pod, a medevac pod, and an armored riot control pod that drops police on lines, commando-style. Read more »

But scientists warn that the treatment does nothing to prevent cancer risks, and that it's thus far limited to mice who smoke

Smokers might get a future reprieve on the damage that cigarettes do to their lungs. Australian scientists have successfully protected mice lungs against the inflammatory effects of smoking, which can lead to health problems such as emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). But the researchers still gave stern warning that this does nothing to alleviate cancer risks, The Register reports. Read more »

Still doesn't excuse driving one-handed while texting

Distracted drivers may soon get some warnings from their windshield displays about road hazards such as children playing in the street or vehicles in the driver's blind spot. General Motors has teamed up with university researchers to bring the concept to market around 2016, the New York Times reports.

The enhanced vision system would monitor a driver's eye and head movements via sensors located both inside and outside the vehicle. The display would then overlay enhanced views of the road on top of the actual scene visible through the windshield. GM hopes that the augmented reality (AR) windshield display can allow drivers to view GPS directions without looking away from the road, and cope with difficult driving conditions in fog or at night. Read more »

After cardiac arrest, lowering someone's body temperature can prevent life-threatening brain damage. It's so critical that New York City requires ambulances to take some patients up to 20 minutes out of the way to hospitals with cooling equipment. EMTs could improve patients' chances further using RhinoChill, a new portable nose spray that cools the brain on the scene.

In the past decade, doctors learned to safely induce hypothermia to slow brain cells' metabolism, preventing the buildup of toxic molecules that can cause lasting damage. Many hospitals insert a refrigerated tube into a major vein, a technique too dangerous to attempt in the field.

To take the treatment on the road, medical company BeneChill left the refrigerator behind. The key is a fast-evaporating liquid that, squirted up the nose, cools the brain. Read more »

The problem with surveillance cameras is that they can see but they can't think, which means there always has to be a human on the other end making cognitive sense of what's right in front of the camera. But if we meshed machine vision with visual intelligence, DARPA argues in a solicitation for its new "Mind's Eye" program, we could remove the human element from myriad tasks.

In essense, DARPA wants a smart camera that not only sees what's in front of it, but thinks about what's going on and even what might happen next. Read more »

On the sunnier side, rare earths could power a future generation of clean tech

All those hybrid and electric cars, wind turbines and similar clean tech innovations may count for nothing if the U.S. cannot secure a supply of rare earth minerals. Ditto for other advanced telecommunications or defense technologies, scientists told a U.S. House subcommittee.

China has supplied 91 percent of U.S. consumption of rare earths between 2005 and 2008, and continues to represent the world's largest rare earth exporter. But the Chinese have warned that their own domestic industry appetite for rare earths may eventually force them to stop exporting -- an action that would leave the U.S. high-tech industries crippled without other readily available supplies. Read more »

Schrodinger would be pleased

When we think of quantum mechanics, we often think of the very small and the very theoretical. Take Schrodinger's Cat for instance; it's an interesting thought exercise but not an experiment one would want to actually execute in his or her apartment. But a researcher at UC Santa Barbara has brought quantum systems down from the chalkboard and into plain sight, creating the first mechanical device large enough to be observed with the naked eye that behaves as a true quantum system, bridging the divide between the macro world of mechanical systems and the micro domain of quantum physics. Read more »

One of the major problems with current cybersecurity measures is that while systems can detect the erratic behavior that heralds an incoming attack, there often isn't a whole lot those systems can do once the attack is underway short of pulling the servers offline, resulting in lost revenues and credibility for Web sites and a loss of key services for users. A new MIT system aims to change that by keeping servers and applications running even as it contains an incoming cyberattack.

The system works by observing programs as they normally run and memorizing those ranges of behavior. During an attack, the system simply locks the programs within those behavioral ranges; that is, if a program usually stores data at either location X or location Y, those are the only two places it will be allowed to store data once the security system detects that an attack is underway. Read more »

The landmark Hangar One needs a giant new Teflon skin to replace its toxic siding, but funding is an issue

Hangar One's behemoth structure once housed airships such as the doomed U.S.S. Macon, and is so large that clouds can supposedly form and rain inside it. Now NASA and the U.S. Navy have promised to replace the hangar's toxic siding with a new Teflon-covered fiberglass fabric skin, The Register reports.

But that can only happen if NASA can somehow scrape together $15 million to $40 million for the job -- the Navy has only taken responsibility for removing the old siding. The U.S. space agency is considering turning to private development funds to restore the hangar, according to the Mountain View Voice. Read more »

Unfortunately for anyone looking to terraform Mars, a new study shows that powerful waves of solar wind periodically strip the Red Planet of its atmosphere. Scientists had known for years that Mars has atmosphere troubles, but only by analyzing new data from he Mars Express spacecraft were they able to identify the special double solar waves as the specific cause. Read more »

Scientists have long been stymied by human regenerative healing -- that is, wholesale regrowth of, say, a severed limb -- an ability inherent in some species but lost on humans. But new research suggests the ability to regenerate isn't based on something newts and flatworms have that we don't; rather, it's something we do have that's keeping us from regenerating tissues. Researchers think a gene called p21 may control regenerative healing, and that by switching it off, humans could perform our own regeneration.

The new research suggests that the potential to heal without scarring -- or possibly even to regrow a limb, albeit in a limited manner -- may lie dormant in human cells, kept in check by the p21 gene. A group of lab mice engineered to lack p21 were able to regenerate surgically removed tissue to the point that no evidence of the surgery remained. Holes punched in their ears -- a standard procedure for tagging lab animals -- also healed perfectly, leaving behind no traces of scar tissue or previous damage. Read more »

Chinese rail passengers already zip between cities on trains traveling three times faster than the average train in the States, and a 217-mph line linking Wuhan and Guangzhou will soon be the fastest train on Earth. But not content with screaming-fast trains linking cities within its borders, China now plans to extend its high-speed network all the way to London with a rail line that will fly through 17 countries at speeds reaching 200 miles per hour.

The project calls for the construction of three lines, hopefully by 2020: the first will link London's King's Cross Station to Beijing and take approximately two days to traverse the entire stretch (it will then continue on down to Singapore). A second line will connect China with Southeast Asian nations like Vietnam, Thailand and Malaysia. The third line will link Germany and Russia, crossing Siberia to terminate, of course, in China. Read more »

Ben Cooper combines photography with rocket science

Our sister publication Popular Photography has a great interview with Ben Cooper, whose photos of space shuttle launches are both beautiful and technically amazing.

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Today the Federal Communications Commission unveiled its plan to expand broadband Internet access to 100 million more Americans within the next five years. The plan calls both for the expansion of wired networks in under-serviced areas, and for the dedication of more wireless spectrum for Internet use as opposed to television. Largely deficit-neutral, the plan has bipartisan support in the current Congress, in part because contentious issues of net neutrality and privacy were not tackled by the FCC's plan. As you remember, PopSci called for an improvement to the nation's broadband infrastructure last year Read more »

The cats over at CSI might just have another forensic tool to supplement their super-sleek glass and steel science lab: the bacteria on our hands. A group of researchers at University of Colorado Boulder have conducted a proof-of-concept study in which they were able to accurately identify people using samples of bacteria collected from their computer keyboards and mouses.

As it turns out, even the most obsessive-compulsive among us carry about 150 species of bacteria around on our hands, and those bacteria in turn carry a genome unique to that person. Those bacteria could potentially become a damning forensic tool at crime scenes, allowing investigators to gather DNA information unique to a perpetrator even without recovering any of that person's actual DNA. Read more »

Warning: this game may have beneficial real-life consequences

Cambodian children grow up in a nation where millions of landmines left by decades of civil war have continued to cripple and kill hundreds of people each year. Now they could get a life-saving lesson from a video game developed by Michigan State University researchers.

In the game, players navigate photos of Cambodian jungle landscapes in search of photos for several adorable cartoon pets -- no cartoon landmine characters here. The point of the maze-like game is to train players and embed warning signals about landmines in their minds. Read more »

Natural silk, as we all know, has a strength that manmade materials have long struggled to match. In a discovery that sounds more like an ancient Chinese proverb than a materials science breakthrough, MIT researchers have discovered that silk gets its strength from its weakness. Or, more specifically, its many weaknesses. Silk gets its extraordinary durability and ductility from an unusual arrangement of hydrogen bonds that are inherently very weak but that work together to create a strong, flexible structure. Read more »

How poppies do their thing

Morphine is potent, effective and in many cases the only pleasant aspect accompanying a visit to the surgeon. But the opium from which it is derived is the base ingredient for heroin and a politically problematic cash crop in places like Afghanistan. Now researchers working to unravel the morphine synthesis process have figured out two of the final, critical steps in that chain reaction, which could lead to better production methods and cheaper opiates like codeine and oxycodone -- not that we have any clear idea what these fantastic, euphoria-inducing painkillers do inside the body.

The breakthrough centers on a couple of key enzymes that kick off the chemical reactions that convert the chemical precursors thebaine and codeine into morphine. The University of Calgary researchers identified the enzymes as well as the genes that encode them with their unique catalyzing capability, then used that information to verify their work through experimentation. Read more »

A few months ago, we brought you the "You Built What?!" feature about Charles Guan's Electric Death Trap Shopping Cart Contraption. More recently, he released an excellent Instructable about making your own miniature electric hub motor. Read more »

The experiment transmitted 10 Mbps through a person

Human skin is apparently a very energy-efficient conduit for transmitting data. A recent experiment achieved a rate of 10 megabits per second, which may put my Internet connection to shame. The experiment used small, flexible electrodes and took place at Korea University in Seoul, New Scientist reports.

The finding may lead to a new generation of medical devices that can monitor blood sugar or electrical activity in the heart. Such devices cut energy needs for a monitoring network by about 90 percent compared to wireless devices running on batteries.

South Korean researchers placed electrodes about 12 inches (30 centimeters) apart on a person's arm, and found that the low-frequency electromagnetic waves travel easily through the skin without any outside interference. Read more »

Only you can tip off scientists about coronal mass ejections

Solar storms could wreak havoc on satellites and power grids, and so scientists have humbly turned to netizens across the world to help watch our sun for possible signs of such storms. Anyone who can spare some time from YouTube and Facebook also gets to peer at nifty 3-D images of the sun, according to BBC.

The plea for help comes from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, which has set up a Solar Stormwatch website for would-be Earth saviors. The website contains imagery collected by two NASA spacecraft that together create "stereo" 3-D images of the sun's coronal mass ejections.

A quick tutorial teaches netizens what to look in the image overload, so that they can tip off scientists about possible solar storms forming. Read more »

The first all-weather convertible

Unless you live in, oh, Palm Springs, convertibles are better in concept than reality. With the top on, a pleasure machine can become a cramped, compromised ride. And even when the weather is perfect, backseat passengers can expect a case of windburn. But with the 2011 E-class Cabriolet-the fourth and final member of the redesigned E line-Mercedes is betting that gadgetry can beat the elements. Read more »

Poor Mario has to contend with a genetically modified superfish and an army of parasite-infected kitties! Fortunately, caffeine and lightning are on his side. Welcome to the future.

(Get the details, and win the T-shirt, after the jump). Read more »

Earlier today, I came upon the site of a man who is building his own jet-powered motorcycle. That's right. He's converting turbochargers into jet engines and building a motorcycle around them. But that's not all; there are apparently a lot of these crazies out there. Here's a look at some. Read more »

The nifty program takes advantage of accelerometers built into many newer laptops

Here's one genius computer program you might consider pushing virally for science's sake. The "Quake Catchers" program aims to make earthquake detection a lot easier and cheaper by taking advantage of accelerometers built into MacBooks and other newer laptops, the Los Angeles Times reports.

The accelerometers that are embedded in everything from iPhones to the Nintendo Wii aretiny devices that detect movement. Having software that takes advantage of the tiny devices on thousands of laptops could complement the current system of earthquake sensors installed along fault zones. Read more »

Not exactly what you'd expect to see on the old radar screen

Perhaps it's time for Space Ghost to hand over his moniker to the International Space Station (ISS). The orbital outpost makes for an eerie blue shadow in this image taken by a German radar satellite, SPACE.com reports.

The snapshot was taken by Germany's TerraSAR-X satellite on March 13, 2008. But the German space agency only released the startling view of the then-incomplete space station this month. Read more »

A new study shows that blasted asteroids could re-form, Terminator-style

Pop quiz. An asteroid the size of Manhattan is hurtling towards Earth, its impact is sure to result in mass extinction and the destruction of humanity as we know it. What do you do?

The traditional answers would be "blow it up". But new research from Los Alamos National Lab and the University of California, Santa Cruz, shows that if the asteroid isn't moving fast enough, or if the nuke isn't big enough, the asteroid will pull itself back together, T-1000-style, within a matter of hours. Read more »

For the last five years, eVolo Magazine has hosted a futuristic skyscraper design competition. Usually, the entrants imagine giant buildings taller than anything under construction today. However, the most impressive entry in this year's competition goes the opposite route, by dropping the building straight into the sea. This floating building would generate its own electricity and food, house thousands, and plunge deep beneath the waves. Read more »

Methane hydrate crystals show promise as a clean energy source

When methane and freezing cold water fuse under tremendous pressure, they create a substance as paradoxical as it coveted: burning ice. Earlier in the year, a report from the National Research Council identified the combustible water, also known as methane hydrate, as a potential source of natural gas. Now, according to the Chinese news organization Xinhau, China is joining the US, Japan, and South Korea in the hunt for this weird mineral. Read more »

As sequencing becomes more affordable, the way forward for diagnosis is not DNA snippets, but full genome workups

Despite coming from a range of different backgrounds, everyone whose genome has been fully sequenced has had one thing in common: they were all healthy. But now, two teams have decoded the first genomes of people who carry genetic diseases, with one group also performing the first-ever full sequencing of an entire nuclear family. By decoding the entire genome, rather than just snippets linked to a particular disease, the two research groups were able to identify the genetic roots of particular disorders more precisely than ever before, paving the way for a radical improvement in the usefulness of genetic diagnosis. Read more »

Since we launched our archive viewer last week, it's been a thrill to read emails with everyone's kind words and impressions. Particularly great was reader Michael Dixon's story involving salvaged scrap wood from ships arriving at the Port of Houston, a suburban backyard and the October 1969 issue of Popular Science. Read more »

Mamma mia, I'm the ultimate science project!

Nintendo's Mario has long been beloved by geeks and scientists everywhere, as evidenced by a fluorescent bacterial version (seizure warning!) and a Mario "multiverse" that acts as a better guide to parallel universes than "Lost." Now a Carnegie Mellon University student has concocted a playable pixel tribute on an 8x8 LED matrix. Read more »

The future of wireless: illumination as information

A bright idea coming out of Germany's Fraunhofer Institute could change the way we connect to the Internet in the future, as well as drive the nascent market for interior LED lighting. Researchers there have found a way to encode a visible-frequency wireless signal in the light coming from lamps and fixtures, turning the light that surrounds us into a high-speed broadband source.

That's not to say there's anything particularly wrong with radio-frequency wi-fi, but its limited bandwidth restricts it to a certain spectrum within an already crowded field of signals. It also leaks through walls -- a benefit for signal pirates but a detriment for those who want a signal that is both secure and free of interference. Read more »

A 10-year effort has finally created pumped-up fish for commercial aquaculture

Rainbow trout with six-pack abs and burly shoulders have emerged from a University of Rhode Island laboratory, and could someday find their way to humans' dinner tables. That's assuming diners don't panic at the sight of the muscular ichthyoid awaiting their knives and forks.

The bodybuilder stature of the trout comes from turning off myostatin, a protein that normally slows muscle growth. Researchers had known of a natural myostatin mutation that allowed for 20 to 25 percent more muscle growth in Belgian blue cattle, but did not know if the same would apply to the different mechanism of muscle growth in fish. Read more »

Chalk up another technological victory for Big Brother. Japanese phone maker KDDI has developed a mobile phone that analyzes users' movements, beaming that information back to the corporate office/Party headquarters/the Ministry of Love for review. Specialized software can identify several distinct movements, including walking, stair-climbing, and even cleaning. On-the-job slackers, the jig is up.

The system employs the accelerometers that are now standard in many mobile handsets to determine what sort of tasks workers are performing. And it doesn't just identify broad categories of movements; the software can identify if a cleaning worker is scrubbing, sweeping, or even bending and lifting to empty a trash bin. Read more »

Never content to let a paradigm remain a paradigm, DARPA has issued a broad agency announcement seeking the development of super-low-power, non-volatile logic integrated circuits that retain their computational states as well as their data even after their power supplies have been removed. Focusing on magnetic-moment-based approaches, the agency wants a new breed of portable electronics, sensors and UAVs that can compute even when the lights go out. Read more »

It seems like every week there's a new scheme for making electric vehicles a reliable transportation option for the masses, but a team of South Koreans at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) today launched what may be one of the most feasible plans we've seen. The Online Electric Vehicle (OLEV) gathers power magnetically from electric strips buried below the road's surface as it travels, eliminating the need for long-term recharging. Read more »

Wait, don't call it a microphone -- it's an acoustic vector sensor

Between the yelling of sergeants, the rumble of jet engines, and the deafening pop of gunfire, a soldier's sense of hearing rapidly deteriorates in the heat of battle. Luckily, the Dutch company Microflown has designed a special microphone that can do a soldier's listening for him. By measuring the mechanical movement of individual air particles, as opposed to sound waves as a whole, the device can not only pinpoint the origin of sniper fire or approaching aircraft, but detail their make and model, as well. Read more »

Toxoplasmosis, a common food- and pet-borne illness linked to hallucinations, personality alteration, and, since it's often carried by house pets, the stereotype of the crazy cat lady, infects around 15 percent of the US population. Luckily, a new technique that traps the parasite with gold nanoparticles, and then zaps them with lasers, should help ease the $7.7 billion the disease costs America every year. Read more »

They don't exactly look like the saviors of our energy economy, but that's exactly what some researchers think they could be. Gribbles -- tiny crustacean pests with a knack for digesting wood -- have long been considered a marine parasite for the destruction they cause to wooden hulls and piers. But the enzymes gribbles use in to break wood fibers down into sugars could make them the next biofuels breakthrough.

Essentially, gribbles are blessed with a digestive process unparalleled (to our knowledge) by other wood-consuming insects and animals. Their digestive enzymes can break down woody cellulose and even lignin -- the normally indigestible part of woody plants -- creating sugars that are more or less ideal for fermenting into alcohol-based fuels. Read more »

The most complex machines ever built don't just hunt for obscure subatomic bits

Beneath the French-Swiss border, the Large Hadron Collider will help scientists seek answers to some of the most profound questions about the universe. Beyond this lofty goal, though, particle accelerators can be used for decidedly more down-to-Earth projects -- like fighting cancer, cleaning up industrial waste and even shrink-wrapping your Thanksgiving turkey. More than 17,000 particle accelerators are in operation around the world, used for radial tires, computer chips and 3-D images of molecules, among other tasks. Read more »

DIY tool build projects are one of my favorite topics. Recently, I Heart Robotics posted documentation of a DIY cleanroom build to further particle sensitive schemes like hacking a Hokuyo Laser Rangefinder. The essential elements are a sealed box, some workspace, and a supply of filtered air for positive pressure inside the box.

As a few of the comments on the post and on Make suggest, a particle counter, though spendy, would be key to gauging success and pinpointing issues with the cleanroom. Without some quantification, it is impossible to meaningfully measure the performance of the clean room. This shouldn't take anything away from the clean room build, but hopefully it will inspire a DIY particle counter solution from our readers. Anyone? Read more »

The world's first commercial effort at a patient-ready brain computer interface is on display over at CeBIT 2010, but don't go throwing out your keyboard and mouse just yet. Intended for patients suffering from locked-in syndrome and other communication-impairing conditions, the Intendix from Guger Technologies allows users to input text using only their brains. Read more »

Can space farms provide biofuels for a greener Earth?

Future biofuels from space could be go for launch, if a space station experiment shows that microgravity can favorably affect the growth of Jatropha curcas plant cells. Jatropha can produce high-quality oil that represents one of the more promising possibilities for a source of alternative energy.

The National Lab Pathfinder-Cells 3 experiment launched aboard the space shuttle Endeavour's mission in February. The plant cells will endure the microgravity environment inside their flasks containing nutrients and vitamins, until they return to Earth aboard the space shuttle Discovery mission slated for April. Read more »

Electric vehicles (EVs) are seen as a key component in America's carbon-free energy diet of the future, and Ford is ready to step into the role of supplier. But before you putter down to the dealership in your gas guzzler with down payment in hand, take note: Ford's first mass-market foray into all-electric vehicles is the Transit Connect EV, a delivery van available later this year -- to large fleet customers only. Read more »

"Thermopower waves" could be a brand-new way to produce electricity

Johnny Cash can't have known about carbon nanotubes when he sang about that burning ring of fire, but MIT scientists have shown how the tiny tubes can channel a ring of heat that creates electrical current -- about 100 times as much energy per unit of weight when compared with a lithium-ion (Li-ion) battery.

The new experiments involved nanotubes, or submicroscopic structures just a few billionths of a meter in diameter, that can conduct both electricity and heat. Engineers coated the nanotubes with reactive fuel that produces heat by decomposing, and then ignited it with laser beams or high-voltage sparks. Read more »

The bomb blast was meant to gauge what might have happened if the Flight 253 suicide bomber succeeded

An explosion aboard Flight 253 on Christmas Day would not have crippled the Boeing 747, according to a recent test that simulated the success of would-be bomber Umar Abdulmutallab. Only the bomber and passenger next to him would have died, the BBC reports.

The test plane didn't quite get away without a scratch, but it only lost some rivets and suffered an outward dent. The flight controls and fuel tanks appeared safe post-blast to Captain J Joseph, an air accident investigator, and John Wyatt, an international terrorism and explosives adviser to the United Nations. Read more »

PopSci's builder-in-residence outfits his four-wheeler with a screaming turbine

When John Carnett-Popular Science staff photographer, inventor and tinkerer-about-town-began confiding in people about plans for his latest project, he found few allies. Not surprisingly, almost no one wanted any part of his scheme to stuff a jet-turbine engine in a Polaris RZR all-terrain vehicle. But Carnett, who grew up near an airfield, remained undeterred. Read more »

Post a comment to win this image on a T-shirt

This week, PopSci took a look at re-shaping the hot dog -- a notorious choker of children, apparently -- as well as an affordable new sort of toilet.

Japan unveiled a new robot, AGAIN. This one is modeled on the hummingbird, and can hover in place on its four tiny wings.

And we went to the gym, future-style.

Read more »

Howard Schmidt wants U.S. cybersecurity efforts to refocus on education, information sharing, and better defense systems

Obama's new cybersecurity czar doesn't much like the term "cyberwar," calling it a "terrible metaphor" and a "terrible concept." But just in case his dislike of the term didn't get through, Howard Schmidt flat-out stated that "there is no cyberwar" during a Wired interview at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco.

Schmidt noted that the real cybersecurity threats are online crime and espionage. His words seem to stand in contradiction to a statement last week by Michael McConnell, former director of national intelligence, who told Congress that the U.S. was already in the midst of losing a cyberwar. Schmidt seemed more than willing to downplay McConnell's Cold War mentality. Read more »

Targets have included cheating spouses, corrupt government officials, and amateur porn makers, as well as citizens or journalists viewed as unpatriotic.

There's a new type of vigilante roaming across China. But unlike Batman or other caped superheroes, who work with a few sidekicks at most, this type of faceless vigilante draws power from legions of netizens who channel Internet crowd-sourcing to become "human-flesh search engines" that hunt down and punish wrongdoers in real life. The New York Times reports on the phenomenon. Read more »

Inventor claims breakthroughs come to him under self-induced hypnosis

Russian leaders have occasionally demonstrated a weakness for pseudoscience during the nation's history. Now Russian scientists have rallied to expose Viktor Petrik, a modern-day inventor whose supposed innovations -- realized under self-hypnosis -- have won over the Kremlin. Petrik's ideas include a way to produce silicon for computer chips from fertilizer and a filter that can turn radioactive waste into safe, drinkable water, the Wall Street Journal reports. Read more »

Pre-orders start March 12

Apple aficionados and first-adopters will have to wait a bit longer than anticipated to get their hot hands on the iPad. The tablet computer's debut has been moved back to April 3 for the U.S., AP reports.

Apple originally gave a tentative "late March" rollout when it unveiled the iPad for the first time in late January. The company has not given reason regarding the delay, but at least one analyst suggested some production issues relating to possible component shortages for Hon Hai Precision, Apple's Taiwan-based supplier. Read more »

One of the interesting side effects of last year's stimulus bill was $400 million in funding for ARPA-E, the civilian, energy-focused cousin of DARPA. And in this week's first ever ARPA-E conference, MIT chemist Dan Nocera showed how well he put that stimulus money to use by highlighting his new photosynthetic process. Using a special catalyst, the process splits water into oxygen and hydrogen fuel efficiently enough to power a home using only sunlight and a bottle of water. Read more »

Barbecue-grill gas creates a better mower

Propane fuels your camp stove and patio grill because it burns efficiently and is easy to store safely. Now the same canisters are making lawn mowers more eco- and user-friendly, too. The propane-powered Eco Mower spews 26 percent less greenhouse gases and 60 percent less carbon monoxide than a gasoline model, plus you can replace its fuel conveniently and inexpensively. Read more »

The seemingly subjective nature of pain always proves problematic for doctors, who have to use a woefully imprecise chart to gauge a patient's suffering. But by using a new interpretation of fMRI scans, doctors at the University of Oxford have found a way to measure the brain's pain response in a quantitative way. Aside from providing a more precise tool for doctors, this technology may also enable doctors to measure pain in people with locked-in syndrome, people in vegetative states, pre-verbal children, animals, and fetuses. Read more »

Your cellphone does not in itself cause cancer. But in the daily sea of radiation we all travel, there may be subtler dangers at work, and science is only just beginning to understand how they can come to affect people like Per Segerbäck so intensely

Per Segerbäck lives in a modest cottage in a nature reserve some 75 miles northeast of Stockholm. Wolves, moose and brown bears roam freely past his front door. He keeps limited human company, because human technology makes him physically ill. How ill? On a walk last summer, he ran into one of his few neighbors, a man who lives in a cottage about 100 yards away. During their chat, the man's cellphone rang, and Segerbäck, 54, was overcome by nausea. Within seconds, he was unconscious. Read more »

Want to know what a jam session between Jack White and Stevie Ray Vaughan might have sounded like, or how Billie Holliday would interpret the latest dreck from Avril Lavigne? Advances in artificial intelligence are resurrecting musical legends of the past, tapping into old recordings to establish a musician's style and personality, then applying those attributes to newer recordings of old songs, or even to songs the musician never played before. Read more »

The cool thing about economies of scale, and especially about cutting-edge gadgetry, is that generally the price goes down over time (remember the $500 iPhone?). But that may not be the case for ever-more-popular LED-backlit LCD TVs this year, or for LED light bulbs for that matter. Accompanying the surge of LED use in electronics, a shortage of light emitting diodes could put upward pressure on prices as device makers cut deals to get their hands on the essential little components. Read more »

We've partnered with Google to offer our entire 137-year archive for free browsing. Each issue appears just as it did at its original time of publication, complete with period advertisements. And today we're excited to announce you can browse the full archive right here on PopSci.com. Read more »

Nurses usually pluck splinters from people's flesh, not put them in. But a new rice-size implantable glucose sensor that monitors blood sugar all day might mean less pain for diabetics.

A nurse would inject the sensor, called Glucowizzard, in a patient's wrist and fit him with a wristband that powers the chip's photovoltaic cells by flashing light pulses through the skin. The chip works like conventional monitors: An enzyme reacts with glucose in the blood and frees electrons in proportion to sugar levels. The chip senses the electrons and beams data to the bracelet, which pings the user if sugar levels are extreme. Running continuously, it could detect problems that might be missed by current finger-prick monitors, which are typically used only five times day. Read more »

Beloved by Bay Area natives and loathed by the rest of the country, the term "hella" has entered the general American lexicon thanks to the combined efforts of No Doubt and South Park. And now, if University of California, Davis, physics student Austin Sendek gets enough signatures, it might enter the scientific dictionary as the prefix for numbers with 10^27 zeroes. Read more »

Sure, the maze gets boring every so often. And yeah, there's not much variety in the food. But compared to the kill or be killed world of the wild, being a lab rat is a pretty good life. So good, in fact, that researchers at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) believe many lab rats are so overfed they distort research results from experiments intended to help cure everything from cancer to Alzheimer's to, you guessed it, obesity. Read more »

And they cost only three cents each

The mismanagement of human waste is a serious health problem for the 2.6 billion people who don't have regular access to toilets. In fact, in the slums of Kenya, waste management is so haphazard that residents dispose of feces-filled plastic bags by simply flinging the bags away without concern about where they land. And it was discovering those flying sacks of waste that inspired Anders Wilhelmson to invent the PeePoo, a chemically treated toilet bag that sterilizes human waste and converts it to fertilizer, all for only two or three cents. Read more »

Privacy-loving Americans have roundly rejected the idea of implanting microchips within their bodies, but one in four Germans is enthusiastic about the idea of having a chip implanted as long as there are tangible benefits involved. Those benefits don't even have to be of the life-and-death nature; some said they would implant a chip simply to make a shopping experience more enjoyable.

A poll released Monday in anticipation of Europe's CeBIT trade show indicated that 23 percent of Germans are open to the idea of implantable microchips. The largest contingent (16%) said they would do it to help emergency services respond to them more quickly and effectively in case of an accident.

Another 5% would do it for mere convenience, to make everyday tasks like shopping go more smoothly. Purchasing goods simply by carrying them past sensors on the way out of the store? Seems feasible enough, though the opportunities for fraud and theft would likely discourage such a scheme. Read more »

While retina scans still give a James Bond feel to security, and finger prints have a bit of retro charm, the cutting edge of biometric identification has moved to a new body part: the nose. According to researchers at the University of Bath, England, the nose is both unique and easily scanned in a crowd, making it the perfect biometric identification marker. Read more »

Last year's "moon bombing" proved that water ice exists beneath the lunar south pole, but new findings from a NASA instrument aboard an Indian orbiter have determined that tons of water ice is hiding on the lunar surface in permanently shadowed craters at the north pole as well. Researchers estimate 600 million metric tons of water ice could be hiding there, an amount that could potentially sustain a manned moon base. Read more »

The 8.8 magnitude seismic shock that rocked Chile over the weekend likely also rocked the Earth's axis, shifting the planet's mass enough to shave 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second) from the day, a NASA scientist said. But that's nothing; the magnitude 9.1 Sumatran ‘quake that spawned the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004 trimmed 6.8 microseconds from the day.

And all it takes to measure is a simple spinning disk here on Earth. When reached for comment, Dark Matter says: "Come on, you almost found me!"

Dark matter's status as a mysterious and invisible lurker in the universe has frustrated scientists for years. Now, one hopes to solve the puzzle a different way: using a modified version of Newton's second law that would eliminate the need for dark matter altogether. Researchers in Brazil have devised an experiment that could put the modified Newtonian dynamics (MOND) to the test, New Scientist reports. Read more »

If storms as strong as the biggest recorded in the last few two centuries, our electronics-dependent world of today could be in trouble

No electricity, no running water, and no phone service for millions of people. That scenario could easily become reality if a solar storm as intense as those found throughout the history of our planet were to strike Earth today. NPR reported on FEMA's recent simulation of such a storm, and the grim conditions it uncovered. Read more »

No really, you can let go

Drones can do just about everything autonomously these days, but most systems still require human assistance to land, refuel and take off again. Now, an aerospace startup, Aerovel, hopes to change that with its hover-capable Flexrotor drone that will come with its own automated docking station. No human ground support needed, The Register reports.

The notion comes from Tad McGeer, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who created the small ScanEagle drone for fishermen and U.S. Navy SEALS. ScanEagle relied upon a pneumatic catapult launcher and "SkyHook" recovery pole, but the Flexrotor would do away with either requirement.

Instead, McGeer envisions his new drone using VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) abilities. Tiny wingtip thrusters would do the same job as a helicopter's tail rotor and counteract the torque of the drone's main propeller in hover-mode. Read more »

A map-equipped exercise machine can reenact any hike on Earth

Dreaming of running up Mt. Kilimanjaro? Do it today. The NordicTrack X7i Incline Trainer raises and lowers itself to mimic the dips and hills of real-world topography.

The X7i downloads maps over Wi-Fi from a Web site called iFit, which lets you pick popular routes like San Francisco's Golden Gate Trail, as well as treks you've designed on your computer across any territory covered by Google Maps. As you run, a seven-inch screen scrolls the map and shows snapshots of passing landmarks. Read more »

A plastic skin impregnated with printed sensors could be wrapped around an airplane wing, for instance

Microelectromechanical devices (MEMS) have the potential to enable a wide range of nanomachines. Unfortunately, MEMS suffer from the critical drawbacks of an expensive manufacturing process, a high rigidity that restricts their use, and a limited pool of suitable materials for construction. Now, it seems that MIT scientists have accidentally solved all those problems by stamping gold MEMS into a sheet of plastic.

The happy accident occurred while the researchers tried to develop a new method of printing circuits onto plastic. However, after repeated failures, the scientists realized that the metallic spots they hoped would carry a signal were actually small machines. Read more »

For all the government conspiracy militia nuts out there, I've got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that there is no such thing as silent, stealth black helicopters. The bad news is that, thanks to Eurocopter's noise-canceling Blue Edge rotor blades, there soon will be.

The extremely loud noise made by helicopter blades results primarily from the blades chopping through eddies in their own wakes, a phenomenon known as blade-vortex interaction. By changing the shape of the rotor blades, Eurocopter manages to pair down the blade-vortex interaction so thoroughly that the sound only reaches the whisper volume of 3 or 4 decibels.

To hear just how drastic the difference between a normal rotor and the Blue Edge rotor is, check out this video. Read more »

NASA can put humanoids on the Moon in just 1000 days. They would be controlled by scientists on Earth using motion capture suits, giving them the feeling of being on the lunar surface. I'd pay to use one. Read more »

To perfect the vertical and short takeoff and landing ability of the F-35 Lightning II, test pilots have been taking off and landing at progressively shorter distances and slower speeds, building up to the final, true vertical boost. And today, engine manufacturers Pratt and Whitney released video of the slowest, shortest takeoff and landing yet, in which the jet cruises to a stop at 130 knots. Read more »

With cuts in the manned space program and the impending retirement of the Space Shuttle, NASA will soon face the need to repair satellites without the ability to send any astronauts to do it. Fortunately, they're already working on the solution: robots.

Over the next seven months, NASA will finish installing the Dextre robot on the International Space Station (ISS). Once fully affixed to the ISS, Dextre, which previously helped astronauts repair the Hubble Space Telescope, will practice refueling satellites.

Once complete, Dextre will remove insulation from the outside of the ISS, disconnect safety wires, and eventually dock with and pump fuel through fuel ports on the ISS. The ISS fuel ports resemble the ports on most satellites, so Dextre's operators can test different configurations for problems and efficiency. Read more »

Fermi would approve

A new formula allows computers to simulate how new materials behave up to 100,000 times faster than previously possible, and could drastically speed up innovation relating to electronic devices and energy-efficient cars. Princeton engineers came up with the model based on an 80-year-old quantum physics puzzle.

Llewellyn Hilleth Thomas and Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi first theorized in 1927 that they could calculate the energy of electrons in motion based on how electrons are distributed in a material. Knowing that kinetic energy of electrons in a material helps researchers understand the structure and properties of new materials, as well as how they might respond to physical stress.

But the Thomas-Fermi equation was based on a theoretical gas with electrons distributed evenly, and so it could not work for imperfect real materials. Read more »

If the thought of a Wiimote-controlled robot drum circle sounded vaguely disturbing, prepare yourself. This month, composer and software developer David Cope is set to unveil the first musical works composed by his latest creation, dubbed "Emily Howell." Emily is a piece of software that many see as the most advanced artificially intelligent music composer. The program is already stirring fierce debate over its supposed ability to generate creations indistinguishable from those composed by the masters--Mozart, Bach and the gang. Miller-McCune went in-depth with this strange and fascinating tale of creativity in the age of artificial intelligence. Read more »

When it comes to preserving your data, there's no such thing as overkill. Your safest bet is actually to employ multiple methods. Fortunately, most of them are cheap-or free.

Start by leveraging the other computers in your house. Microsoft's free Windows Live Sync tool will sync selected folders on your system, automatically or on-demand, with any other computer(s) you own. Next, give that same data a safe haven online. Backup services like Carbonite and MozyHome provide secure, unlimited storage space for around $55 per year. Just choose the data you want to protect, and get on with your life; the software works in the background to continually keep your backup version up to date. Read more »

While far from a cure-all, technology will play an important role in health care reform

For the past six months, fixing our flawed health care system has consumed our country's politics. In the course of the debate (including the health care summit underway today), one of the few things that both sides can agree on is the potential for new technologies to improve the system. And while technology can never do the job on its own, the money-saving potential is vast. Here we've gathered the most promising devices and processes--ranging from simple tweaks of doctors' most basic tools to advanced methods for drug production--that could save our bloated system billions. Read more »

Electronics geeks hacking oscilloscopes fall, for me, into the same category as support truck racing at Dakar: Technicians having fun with their tools. Following in the proud tradition of Oscilloscope Tennis, Oscilloscope Pong, and Oscilloscope Clocks, Matthew Sarnoff has built a VT100 serial terminal - from an oscilloscope. Here's why this entirely impractical idea is also entirely awesome. Read more »

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute are done spending valuable time heading out to sea on routine monitoring missions, and they have the autonomous underwater robot to prove it. A team of marine researchers there has developed what they are calling the Gulper automatic underwater vehicle (AUV) that operates autonomously far out to sea, planning its own experiments and negotiating ocean depths without human input. Read more »

With Detroit reeling and Toyota busy trying to explain away some rather egregious design flaws, it might seem like a ripe time for an innovative car company to introduce a mind-blowing, paradigm-shifting idea to the automotive world. This is not that idea. Hungarian car company Antro's ambitious reinvention of the modern auto involves creating a six-seat hybrid-solar car that splits into two three-seater cars. Or a pair of three-seater cars that combine into six-seaters, depending on how you look at it. Read more »

Pentagon mad scientists at DARPA have continued on their quest to create killer robots by announcing a new plan for "robotic autonomous manipulators" that can emulate human hands. And by killer, we of course mean awesome. National Defense reports that the DARPA program aims to create inexpensive robotic hands that can perhaps also replace existing prosthetics for amputees. Read more »

A telescope-toting 747 is about to become astronomy's most versatile tool

In the movies, opening the door on a plane at 45,000 feet is disastrous. But this spring it will be standard procedure on one 747-one carrying a telescope high enough to capture the cosmos better than ever before.

Built into the tail end of a Boeing 747, the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) will soar above the atmospheric water vapor that blocks most infrared light from ground observatories, to shoot detailed images of star-forming nebulae, planets' atmospheres and clouds of organic molecules. The 2.5-meter mobile telescope-operated by NASA and Germany's space agency-will best the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes by scanning the widest range of light of any scope, from ultraviolet to the far infrared. And because SOFIA is easier to design and maintain than a space telescope, it could be built and operated for a third of the cost. Read more »

Linguo lives!

A shortage of English teachers has compelled South Korea to take the next logical step and plan a $45 million rollout of robotic teaching assistants. That official go-ahead follows several months of robot trials, io9 says based on Korean news reports. But the idea of replacing old fashioned human English teachers has already stirred much debate. Read more »

Neurologists love picking the brain, but getting in there can be both difficult and dangerous, and once inside it's tough to make the brain do exactly what you want. But researchers at medical device maker Medtronic are developing a neural implant that uses light to manipulate the neurons in the brain in a far more controlled fashion than current electrical therapies. All they need to do is genetically tamper with your brain first; no big deal. Read more »

There's not a whole lot to we can say to preface this photo except yes, it is real. The image of the tiny Asian weaver ant clinging upside-down to a smooth surface holding a 500 mg weight - that's 100 times its body weight - captured first prize in the first Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) science photo competition, and with good cause; not only is it an amazing close-up of a tiny creature, but it captures some pretty amazing biology as well. Read more »

As we've been hearing for months, 2010 is going to be a year of belt-tightening for NASA. But now, with the release of the new NASA budget, we can see that even with substantially less money, NASA still has some cool technologies on the way. In particular, this budget allocates money for inflatable space stations, research into mid-orbit refueling, and the development of a slew of new autonomous space vehicles.

Inflatable space station modules rank high on NASA's wish list for an important reason: they're cheap. However, don't let the price fool you. Despite costing less, the modules can be larger than current models for the same weight, provide just as much protection, and even be tested with the currently deployed ISS. Plus, private sector companies have already started developing the technology. Read more »

By this point, we're all familiar with augmented reality, but Swedish mobile software firm The Astonishing Tribe is taking information overload to the next logical step: augmented identity. Mashing up face recognition technology, computer vision, cloud computing, and augmented reality with the complex digital lives many of us lead on the Internet, TAT has created an app that allows you to gather information on a person and their social networking life simply by pointing your camera phone at their face.

Dubbed Recognizr, the app essentially works like this: the user points the camera at a person across the room. Face recognition software creates a 3-D model of the person's mug and sends it across a server where it's matched with an identity in the database. A cloud server conducts the facial recognition since and sends back the subject's name as well as links to any social networking sites the person has provided access to. Read more »

Some take religious journeys to sacred places, others gather at the home fields of beloved sports teams. But my pilgrimage? One day it will be here, to the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group outside of Tuscon. Better known as the "Boneyard," it's the place where nearly 5,000 aerospace vehicles have gone to die. I'm going to spend the rest of the work day scoping out the new high-res Google map. Read more »

Inside the wild kingdom of the world's newest and most spectacular species of unmanned aircraft, from swarming insect 'bots that can storm a burning building to a seven-ton weaponized spyplane invisible to radar

New breeds of winged beasts are lurking in the skies. Bearing names like Reaper, Vulture and Demon, they look nothing like their feathered brethren. Better known as unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, these strange and wily birds are quietly infiltrating vast swaths of airspace, from battlefields to backyards.

With hundreds of different species, from spy craft to airborne sheepherders, UAVs have in the past decade morphed into a full-blown kingdom of creatures deserving of its own taxonomy. Here is our complete guide. Read more »

Never at a loss for creative ways to make aging look like more fun than it is, the Japanese are developing an approach to senior mobility that's far more like a hovercraft than the mis-named Hoveround. Researchers there have engineered a chair that floats on a cushion of air, gently cruising above the floor like a puck on an air hockey table.

The prototype, designed by Tsunesuke Furuta and colleagues at Japan's Kobe Gakuin University, can be fitted with a performance-style car seat as well as a zabuton -- that's a Japanese-style floor cushion -- and reportedly can corner with ease while transporting a 330-pound payload.

The research team at Kobe Gakuin is looking for a commercial partner to help develop their hover-chair. In the meantime, you can see it in action below. Read more »

Hong Kong researchers have combined simple latex with some plastic buttons to create metamaterial panels that can stop sound waves very effectively, according to New Scientist. The reflected sound waves include low-frequency bass sounds that typically manage to sneak through the walls.

Thick pieces of certain materials, such as the commonly used foam, can typically absorb or reflect sounds, but creating a thin soundproofing material that can block low-frequency sounds has proven extremely difficult. For instance, a thin latex membrane by itself cannot resonate at the right frequency to either absorb or reflect the bass rumble of a jet taking off. Read more »

Top threats include toxic contamination, loss of wildlife habitat and invasive species

Pollution and ravenous Asian carp may threaten the U.S. Great Lakes, but the Obama administration has now put forth a four-year, $475-million rescue plan that would clean up the huge lake ecosystem and institute a "zero tolerance policy" against future incursions by invasive species, AP reports.

The Great Lakes supply drinking water to more than 30 million people, and also support regional shipping, outdoor recreation, tourism and manufacturing. This latest effort goes toward fulfilling a campaign pledge by President Obama to spend $5 billion over a decade on rescuing the lakes, and will launch under the aegis of the Environmental Protection Agency. Read more »

I see you, space shuttle

Space shuttle Endeavour has landed safely after installing a new observation deck on the International Space Station. But the Endeavour astronauts didn't leave without first checking out the new view from the cupola window.

Here we get a view of George Zamka, NASA astronaut and STS-130 commander, peeking out from the newly-installed cupola on February 19 while the space shuttle remained docked with the space station. Read more »

Scorpion venom and intense pain generally go hand in hand, but a group of researchers at Tel Aviv University are rethinking that relationship, using a better understanding of the peptide toxins found in scorpions' pain-inducing payloads to create a breed of non-addictive, side effect-free painkillers.

Pain is communicated to the brain via a certain type of sodium channel embedded in our nervous and muscular systems. Understanding the way these sodium channels convey the sensation of pain from certain parts of the body to the brain is key to manipulating these signals to reduce or eliminate feelings of pain. Figure out how to manipulate those mechanisms, and we could be on the way to a much less painful future. Read more »

Thirty-two years after the birth of the world's first test-tube baby, artificial conception has never been more popular or successful. Today, up to 3 percent of infants born in the U.S. owe their existence to assisted reproductive technology, or ART. The majority is overwhelmingly healthy, but new research from scientists at Temple University and other institutions suggests the technique is not without its long-term risks. Read more »

As always, drop us a comment to win this illustration on a T-shirt

Campbell's soup sure tastes good--but I'm not sure just seeing a can of the stuff would get me all tingly. That's probably what their neuromarketing test subjects thought, too. Plus: a "bush blitz" to seek out undiscovered species in the outback, volcanoes-as nuclear waste dumpsters, and of course, a ping-pong-playing Terminator. All this week in the future. Read more »

Cars could shed their image as energy hogs and become mobile storage points for the electric grid, if engineers backed by the National Science Foundation get their way. Hybrid electric vehicles might even feed unused electricity back into the grid and earn money for their owners, not unlike how some homeowners who create renewable energy can sell back electricity to utility companies.

The concept of vehicle-to-grid (V2G) integration would do away with simply considering hybrid electric cars as energy consumers that require stations or places to plug into the electric grid and recharge their batteries.

"Cars sit most of the time," said Jeff Stein, a mechanical engineer at the University of Michigan who leads the NSF-funded effort. "What if it could work for you while it sits there?" Read more »

Just as DARPA pushes the wackier Pentagon ideas and ARPA-E backs next-gen energy projects, IARPA serves the intelligence community by checking out "high-risk, high-payoff" research. The spooks' lab has now launched a "TRUST (Tools for Recognizing Useful Signals of Trustworthiness)" program that aims to figure out whom can be trusted, even under the most stressful or deceptive circumstances. Read more »

Meet the next generation of art installations. Together, the SENSEable City and ARES Labs at MIT have created an adaptable, remote-controlled display comprised of dozens of robotic, flying "smart pixels." Read more »

A cheap meter can now translate the most esoteric coffee aromas into pretty colored dot patterns that anyone can recognize. The device also works like a radiation dose badge that can warn workers when they have been exposed to toxic gases, according to Sciencepunk. Read more »

For over a hundred years, Campbell's Soup cans have sported the iconic label inspired by Cornell's football uniform and made famous by Andy Warhol. Now, thanks to market research that measured customers' involuntary physiological responses, Campbell's will introduce the most radical can design change in decades.

The self-reporting associated with market research is notoriously flawed, and in 2005 Campbell's acknowledged the weak correlation between highly rated advertising and actual buying habits. To suss out people's actual intentions, Campbell's utilized experts in the growing field of neuromarketing. In neuromarketing, specialists monitor involuntary biometric changes in subjects as they view different images. Since the subjects can't control these changes, neuromarketers believe they reveal the real feelings of consumers. Read more »

This Python Goes Boom:  courtesy of British Ministry of Defense

Clearing battlefield obstacles has pitted trapper against sapper since Roman times. But whereas the minefields and dragon teeth of previous conflicts merely slowed advancing armies, the IEDs favored by today's insurgents have become the number one killer in the Long War. Now, to ensure safe passage through trap laden Afghan paths, the British Army is fighting fire with even bigger fire in the form of their newly developed Python explosive whip. Read more »

Can the search giant make sense of foreign menus?

The Google Goggles Android app can already copy business cards directly into the address book and provide augmented reality overlays for restaurants. But now, Google has unveiled a real-time optical character recognition system, providing the menu translation we Chinese-food obsessed gweilo have been craving.

Yesterday, at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Google scientist Hartmut Neven debuted this new feature by translating a German menu. The system parses the text from photos of a menu, and then converts the German phrases into English using Google's translation engine. Read more »

Humans have been observing sunspots for over 2,000 years, but never has it been as simple as this. Thanks to NASA's new iPhone app, watching for intense bursts of magnetic radiation is as easy as playing Plants vs. Zombies or checking out the Yelp! review of the closest taco truck.

Written by the team of programmers behind NASA's news site Science@NASA, the app compiles data from the STEREO spacecraft monitoring the sun. The STEREO program utilizes two different satellites on either side of the sun, and by combining the two different perspectives, NASA can provide the 3-D image seen in the app. Read more »

Physicians usually rely on surgery or drugs to bust blood clots in the brain that might otherwise cause a stroke, but sound waves might provide a third noninvasive choice. U.S. researchers have begun testing an Israeli ultrasound device to see whether it may prove accurate enough to break up a clot without causing collateral damage in the brain, Technology Review reports.

Strokes represent the third most common cause of death in the U.S., and occur when a blood clot prevents blood from reaching the brain. Only drugs or surgical intervention can remove the clots in time to prevent serious brain damage or death, but fewer than 10 percent of patients usually fit the requirements to undergo those procedures. Read more »

Paging Frodo

Dumping all our nuclear waste in a volcano does seem like a neat solution for destroying the roughly 29,000 tons of spent uranium fuel rods stockpiled around the world. But there's a critical standard that a volcano would have to meet to properly dispose of the stuff, explains Charlotte Rowe, a volcano geophysicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory. And that standard is heat. The lava would have to not only melt the fuel rods but also strip the uranium of its radioactivity. Read more »

Washington insiders recently sweated out a real-time war game where a cyberattack crippled cell phone service, Internet and even electrical grids across the U.S. The unscripted, dynamic simulation allowed former White House officials and the Bipartisan Policy Center to study the problems that might arise during a real cyberattack emergency, according to Aviation Week's Ares Defense Blog.

The Policy Center's vice-president reports ""The general consensus of the panel today was that we are not prepared to deal with these kinds of attacks." Read more »

You guys put up shields, right?

Science fiction writers may have to rethink how their starship crews survive travel near or beyond the speed of light. Even the occasional hydrogen atom floating in the interstellar void would become a lethal radiation beam that would kill human crews in mere seconds and destroy a spacecraft's electronics, New Scientist reports.

Just a few stray wisps of hydrogen gas -- fewer than two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter on average -- would translate into 7 teraelectron volts for a starship crew traveling at 99.999998 percent of the speed of light. That's as much fun for humans as standing in front of the proton beam created by the Large Hadron Collider, according to William Edelstein, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University. Read more »

Producing a biofuel cheap enough to compete at the pump with oil has remained as elusive as a ghost on the walls of Elsinore castle. But this week, two Danish companies announced they had developed enzymes capable of breaking down cellulose into ethanol cheaply enough to produce $2-a-gallon gas.

The two companies, Genencor and Novozyme, both announced different cost-cutting enzymes at the 15th Annual National Ethanol Conference in Orlando, Florida. Obviously, the exact recipe of either enzyme remains a proprietary secret, but the fact that both multiple companies came out with cost-cutting enzymes at the same time represents a larger shift towards affordability in the ethanol market. Read more »

Australia has hosted a wide range of weird creatures, from rabid wombats to Yahoo Serious. And now, the Australian government wants to see what other interesting critters are hiding out on that island. To that end, they are funding a series of expeditions to the outback that the Environment Minister has labeled "Bush Blitz".

With $9 million in funding, the Bush Blitz will consist of 18 expeditions over the next three years. Each expedition will consist of around a dozen scientists, who will scour the outback for previously undiscovered lifeforms. The expeditions will focus on areas that have been little explored by humans. The effort to find and preserve new species comes as part of a larger effort by the UN to make 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. Read more »

Your table-tennis dynasty is toast

Meet TOPIO 3.0, the ping-pong-playing robot. Made by Vietnam's first-ever robotics firm, TOSY, the bipedal humanoid uses two 200-fps cameras to detect the ball as it leaves the opponent's paddle.

Read more »

An oil-free deep fryer, which its inventor hopes could hit the market later this year, could let health-conscious consumers have their donuts and eat them, too.

Call it an infrared-wave, radiant fryer, or miracle oven -- it makes french fries with half the fat, no engineered chemicals like Olestra, and the same crispy, oily goodness we all know and love.

The radiant fryer, developed at Purdue University by food scientist Kevin Keener, is meant for foods with just a little bit of oil on them already, like the par-cooked chicken nuggets, hash browns and french fries you'd find at a fast-food restaurant. And that's the target, Keener said.

"You can dial in (a heat level) for a certain product. That would allow a restaurateur to provide on-demand products," he said. "You'd pay your money, and within two minutes, your order is coming out of the fryer hot onto the bun and they are putting it on your plate." Read more »

iPhone, meet mPhone

Gadget lovers are nothing if not fickle, always ditching their older tech for pretty young things. And recently, all the attention on the iPhone and Google's Android OS has made Microsoft seem a bit like Norma Desmond, wandering around the ruins of the Redmond campus muttering "I AM big, it was the platforms that got small."

But now, with the revelation of Windows Phone Series 7, Microsoft is once again ready for its closeup. Read more »

A root-beer bouquet, anyone?

Future guys and gals looking for a sweet-smelling bouquet for Valentine's Day might consider the root-beer-scented variety. Or they could opt for a fouler odor, if they want to send a different message. That's all in the coming future, according to Discovery News. Read more »

Kirk would approve

Someone at Google apparently took pity on the poor users who can only explore Google Earth on their laptops. Jason Holt used his 20 percent project time to create a wraparound view of a modified Google Earth engine, and splashed it across 8 LCD screens in an immersive viewing booth. The result provides a view not unlike that from a starship's bridge, and allows users to seamlessly explore a virtual environment of the Earth, moon, and Mars -- an experience that Google has dubbed "Liquid Galaxy." Read more »

But can it shoot down skeeters?

Futuristic airborne energy weapons have officially arrived, so mark your calendars. The U.S. Missile Defense Agency said that its airborne laser weapon successfully shot down a ballistic missile during a test late last night, according to Reuters. Read more »

It tracks fielders for definitive defensive analysis

This could be the year that baseball-stat freaks finally crack the "Derek Jeter enigma." A panel of coaches has awarded the New York Yankees' shortstop four of the past six Gold Glove awards for fielding excellence. That drives statisticians nuts, because nearly every statistical model ranks Jeter's defense below average.

But evaluating fielding is baseball's hardest math. There are just too many unknowns in a play. How much ground did Jeter cover? How fast was the ball moving? In essence: How unlikely was it that he'd catch the ball?

This off-season, the broadcast-tech company Sportvision will install a new player-tracking camera system into ballparks that could finally help produce accurate defensive statistics. Read more »

Photoluminescent nanofibers emit light efficiently

For those who want to start saving the planet at home, lighting presents a vexing paradox. While incandescent bulbs are wildly inefficient, compact fluorescent bulbs contain hazardous chemicals. With funding from the Department of Energy, RTI International claims to have solved the problem with the invention of nanofiber bulbs more efficient than regular lights, and more environmentally sound than fluorescent bulbs.

The nanofibers themselves have diameters smaller than a human hair, and emit warm, white light when in contact with an electric current. More important from an energy usage perspective, the nanofiber lights put out 55 lumens of light per watt. That makes them five times more efficient than a traditional light bulb. Read more »

While IBM is primarily known for its information technology products, the company has recently begun expanding into the alternative energy market. So far, that change has mainly taken the form of a new ad campaign. But IBM is now backing those words up with action, by unveiling a groundbreaking solar cell, 40 percent more efficient than any similar cells. Read more »

Bold innovation or terrible idea? Your guide to the experiments that only sound scary-and the lab work you truly should lose sleep over

In labs around the world, scientists are working to expand our understanding of the weird, the unexpected, and the potentially dangerous. Their aim is true, yet, many of these boundary-pushing projects carry serious potential for things to go wrong. Horribly wrong. Read more »

A satellite peers down on a hellish landscape in south-central Algeria

In the Tanezrouft Basin of south-central Algeria, vegetation is sparse and sand is plentiful. Images like this one, taken by Japan's Advanced Land Observing Satellite, provide researchers with an easy look at hard-to-reach areas to survey natural resources, monitor disasters, and track vegetation coverage. Read more »

While an all-biofuel economy is a nice notion, we often overlook the fact that biofuel sources, while renewable, are limited in their supplies just like fossil fuels. When you get down to the economics of it, there are still limited biofuel stocks to go around at any given time, and that can create economic pressures that are decidedly undesirable. So a group of Manchester, UK, researchers have identified the specific genes that make plants grow thicker in hopes of juicing trees and other plants species to produce more biomass. Read more »

This shot seems a bit below the belt ... Orion's belt

Amateur and professional astronomers alike know the Orion Nebula as one of the most recognizable constellations in the night sky, and a new image from Europe's powerful VISTA telescope has captured it in a stunning new light. But rather than just seeing the visible cloud of gas enshrouding the stellar nursery, VISTA turned its infrared vision upon the young stars emerging in and around the nebula. Read more »

Say hello to Inuk

Scientists have sequenced the genome of an ancient human for the first time. An international team extracted DNA from 4,000-year-old hair found in Greenland's permafrost. They were able to sequence an impressive 79 percent of the genetic material and shared a thing or two about this ancient Homo sapiens in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

For starters, it's a dude, and they nicknamed him "Inuk." His DNA indicates that his ancestors left Siberia to travel to the new world before the ancestors of current natives of North America did. He also had brown eyes, thick hair, and darker skin.

And, of course, other key traits we were just dying to know: he had dry earwax (common in Asians and Native Americans), a propensity to baldness, and type A+ blood. Read more »

A race against time to complete a new subway line

A worker stands inside one of the Metro tunnels under construction in New Delhi, India, in preparation for the Commonwealth Games this October. To overcome the challenges of a tight three-and-a-half-year schedule and construction underneath a densely populated city, engineers used 14 tunnel-boring machines (TBMs) to dig the underground thoroughfare. Read more »

A new simulator has the answer

By definition, one can't see a black hole itself, only its effect on the light of intervening stars. And without some serious equipment, even that's a tall order. Luckily for all us amateur astronomers, Thomas Müller and Daniel Weiskopf of the University of Stuttgart, Germany, have created a simulation that uses actual star data to calculate exactly what seeing the Schwarzschild black hole would look like. Read more »

Google loves nothing more than redefining vast tech industry sectors with a single stomp of its Godzilla paw. And in unveiling their latest creation today, a social networking and sharing platform for Gmail and mobile phones called Buzz, the Goog Monster has set its sights squarely on Facebook. Read more »

DARPA wants to know what's happening in the skies overhead and seeks full situational awareness on the ground, so we suppose it's no surprise that now it wants full, real-time surveillance of what's happening beneath the surface. As part of the agency's fiscal 2011 budget, $4 million will go toward creating a system of sensors and algorithms that will create real-time 3-D maps displaying "the physical, chemical, and dynamic properties of the earth down to 5 km depth, including natural or man-made structures at militarily- relevant spatial scales." Read more »

The male birth control pill has lingered for years tantalizingly just out of reach, in the realm where rumor meets science. Recently developed hormonal and mechanical contraceptives never found an audience, serving only to highlight the absence of a male pill. Now, an examination of how smoking pot lowers fertility may make the male pill more than a persistent rumor. Read more »

The difficulty of supplying remote outposts across rugged terrain has contributed to many of the deadliest moments in the Afghan War, by preventing the delivery of weapons and ammo to engaged soldiers, forcing supplies to travel over dangerous roads, or turning helicopters into vulnerable targets. Last June, the Marines put out a call for a helicopter UAV to solve those problems. Now, with a successful demonstration at Utah's Dugway Proving Grounds, the Marines might have found their robocopter.

In the demonstration, a modified K-MAX helicopter moved 3,000 pounds across 600 miles, in under six hours. The K-MAX, built by Kamen Aerospace, is a single-seat helicopter designed specifically to carry cargo externally slung beneath the craft. For the Marines, Kamen simply removed the crew cabin, and transformed the helicopter into a UAV. Read more »

If a few very smart neuroscientists are right, with enough number crunching and a powerful brain scanner, science can pluck pictures-and maybe one day even thoughts- directly from your brain

It's after dark on a warm Monday night in April, and I'm lying face-up in a 13-ton tube at the Henry H. Wheeler, Jr. Brain Imaging Center at the University of California at Berkeley. The room is dimly lit, and I am alone. A white plastic cage covers my face, and a blue computer screen shines brightly into my eyes. I'm here because a neuroscientist named Jack Gallant is about to read my mind. He has given me strict instructions not to move; even the slightest twitch could affect the accuracy of what he's about to do. As I stare straight up, I notice an itch on my thigh. Don't scratch it, I tell myself. I try to keep my thoughts blank as the beeping gets faster and the fMRI machine-the scanner that will detect changes in blood flow in my brain-powers up. Read more »

Attention recruits. Those of you landing in Afghanistan in coming months may not have to engage in the sandbag stacking and trench digging usually associated with lowly grunt-dom. An $800,000 investment in an armored wall system known as McCurdy's Armor could have Marines rapidly erecting 6.5-foot-tall mortar-, RPG- and bullet proof fortresses in less than an hour, saving the days it can take to fortify an area by conventional means and making forward-operating units more nimble.

Named for Ryan S. McCurdy-a Marine killed in Iraq in 2006 while hauling a wounded comrade to safety-the system is designed to offer troops increased protection and mobility when setting up outposts in hostile areas. The walls can be ferried into place in panels that are easily stackable in a truck or trailer. Once in position, four Marines can assemble a single panel in less than ten minutes without any special tools or additional equipment. The panels then snap together like bomb-proofed Legos secured with steel pins to form a blast- and bullet-proof shelter. Read more »

The body is a resilient biological structure, but there's one thing medical science, an increasing number of Baby Boomers, and the majority of professional athletes will all tell you: Take care of your joints, because once you burn up the cartilage you started with, you're not getting any more. But a breakthrough by Northwestern University scientists will now allow adult joints to naturally grow new cartilage for the very first time.

Unlike bone, muscle and other tissues in the body, cartilage that is damaged or worn away over time does not regenerate itself. The cartilage you have when you reach adulthood has to last you for life; if it doesn't, you can suffer debilitating joint pain or even osteoarthiritis, which is neither pleasant nor effectively treatable. Read more »

Google's vision for a better world involves removing those pesky language barriers that keep people apart, and so the Internet search giant has begun development on a voice recognition and automatic translation system for cell phones. Such technology could either herald a new era of fruitful international collaboration or usher in new grievances and conflicts, depending on your viewpoint. The Times makes the obligatory reference to the Babel Fish of Hitchhiker's Guide that spawned bloody interstellar conflicts. Read more »

It's a sight captured by many a late-night stargazer: a shuttle streaking through the dark sky on its way to orbit. Last night, a gorgeous predawn launch of the space shuttle Endeavour marked the last scheduled night launch ever for the retiring NASA vehicle, even as NASA looks forward to a new age of commercial spaceflight. All four of the remaining shuttle flights are slated for the day, SPACE.com reports. Read more »

Come on, you apes! You wanna live forever?

Humanity's search for the secrets to immortality has inspired Ray Kurzweil's Singularity vision and DARPA's hunt for ageless synthetic beings. Now scientists have discovered a single gene that appears to control how quickly individuals will biologically age, The Telegraph reports. The discovery could not only encourage people to adopt healthier lifestyles earlier, but may eventually help people live longer if scientists can figure out how to manipulate the gene. Read more »

A little oxygen is all a zinc-air battery needs to become a powerhouse

A battery that runs on air? Why, that's almost as good as a car that runs on water! Those cars are fantasy, but batteries that run on air are actually quite common, especially among older people. Tiny zinc-air batteries are widely used in hearing aids, where they have replaced toxic mercury-based batteries in providing a small but steady stream of power. They supply more energy for their size than any other battery, because they draw some of their power straight from the air.

All batteries generate power with two chemical reactions: one that produces electrons at the anode (negative terminal) and one that absorbs them at the cathode (positive terminal). This creates a circulation of electrons-an electrical current-from the anode to the cathode. Most batteries contain all the chemicals needed for both reactions. Read more »

A glimpse of the post-silicon age; how does Graphene Valley sound to you?

Silicon Valley may want to update its name, because IBM has created graphene transistors that blow away the silicon competition. The transistor prototypes were made from sheets of carbon just one atom thick that could switch on and off at 100 billion times per second. The 100-gigahertz speed is about 10 times faster than any silicon equivalents, Technology Review reports.

The transistor creation is supposedly compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing, and so experts anticipate a scaling-up process that could put transistors into high-performance imaging devices, radar and communication gadgets within the next few years. Graphene-based computer processors might take another decade at least. Read more »

First, a disclaimer: Selling your organs is illegal in the United States. It's also very dangerous. Handing off an organ is risky enough when done in a top hospital, even more so if you're doing it for cash in a back alley. No, really: Don't do this. OK? OK. Read more »

In space, no one can hear your shutter click

Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi has spent his time aboard the International Space Station doing much more than just making sushi to entertain his fellow crew. He's also taking full advantage of the space station's new Internet access to stream plenty of Twitpics taken from space And to give all of us Earth-bound folk some sights to remember, he's using something a bit more advanced than the camera on his iPhone. Read more »

Dreams of Olympic glory could make athletes risk their lives on an experimental procedure

Steroids seem so last-decade, now that gene therapy has caught the eye of athletes looking for a competitive edge. But scientists warn that gene therapy still represents a high-risk, experimental practice even within medicine, and that athletes could endanger their lives by giving it a try.

Gene therapy has shown promise in a few treatments by helping swap out defective genes or changing the degree to which genes turn on and off. For instance, it has helped establish some immune system function in so-called "bubble children." But researchers have become extra cautious with gene therapy ever since the death of 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger during a 1999 research trial. Read more »