The next generation of eco-friendly lightbulbs Dan Saelinger

Never mind that twisty compact fluo­rescent. The new energy-efficient way to light your home is with LEDs. An upcoming crop of bulbs draw 12 watts or less, edging out a typical fluorescent, and they have a more conventional shape, contain no mercury, and last at least 25,000 hours, three times as long. Read more »

MIT's Test Cell Patrick Gillooly, MIT

Plants are extremely efficient converters of light into energy, more or less setting the bar for researchers creating photovoltaic cells that convert sunlight into electricity. As such, researchers are constantly trying to mimic the tricks that millions of years of evolution and development have taught to plant biology. Now, a team of MIT scientists believe they've done it, creating a synthetic, self-assembling chloroplast that can be broken down and reassembled repeatedly, restoring solar cells that are damaged by the sun. Read more »

LaserMotive's Laser-Powered Helo New Scientist

An unmanned aerial surveillance drone is only as good as its power source, and as such many technologies are being considered that could drastically extend the duration of drone missions - for instance, DARPA's Vulture program has helped develop a giant solar plane that, theoretically, could fly for five years straight. But Seattle-based LaserMotive thinks laser power is the answer, and to prove it they recently kept a tiny 22-gram helicopter aloft for hours by beaming power to it via a laser. Read more »

Ascension Island Charles Darwin's artificial forest captures moisture from clouds that drift over the volcanic peaks on Ascension Island. Google Earth

The father of evolution apparently played God with a tropical ecosystem 160 years ago, and the results could inform future experiments to terraform Mars, botanists say.

The BBC recounts how Charles Darwin helped build an artificial forest on Ascension Island, one of his subjects of study from his trips on the HMS Beagle. Today, the island is home to species of plants that would not naturally co-exist. Darwin and his friends put them there, and nearly two centuries later, their grand experiment is living proof that we can transform natural environments. Read more »

Protecting Military Networks Thinking about WikiLeaking? Think again. U.S. Navy

The recent WikiLeaks exposure was a huge black eye for the U.S. Department of Defense, supposedly one of the more secure state organizations we have working for us. Its impact clearly wasn't lost on the Pentagon, whose blue sky research arm has launched a new project designed to ferret out malicious behavior on DoD networks. Named CINDER - Cyber INsiDER Threat - the project is designed not to sniff out people, but adversarial actions as they happen. Read more »

Unless you've been living underneath a Zune, you're likely aware that Steve Jobs and his Apple empire held a music-centric event in San Francisco today in which the company's best-selling line of portable musical devices received yet another refresh (the holidays are coming up, you know). And while some of the updates were the usual benign, tech trickle-down one might expect, Jobs did break some new ground with an Apple TV do-over and an iTunes update that's more social network than music store.

First, Apple TV: It seems everyone has levied an opinion on Jobs' move into the set-top box space, and few opinions have been laudatory (Jobs' defense: our product hasn't been a huge hit, but "nor has any competitive product." Fair enough). However, this year's "one more thing" is pretty slick. Read more »

A University of Michigan researcher thinks we can triple the fuel economies in our petroleum-powered vehicles in the next 25 years. All we need to do is replace horsepower with brainpower.

John DeCicco, a lecturer at the School of Natural Resources and Environment at Michigan, isn't bearish on alternative fuels or electric vehicles, but he argues that the most cost-effective means of reducing carbon footprints and keeping fuel prices from swallowing us whole is an evolutionary progress in the combustion engines that already make up our transportation paradigm. That means placing efficiency above power, and adopting smarter electronic systems for our automobiles.

In a study published for The Energy Foundation, DeCicco identifies emerging trends within the automotive world that are already pushing buyers away from raw power and toward other amenities, like Bluetooth connectivity, on-board Internet, and other IT amenities that enhance the customer experience minus the big block V-8 engine. Read more »

Call it a crash course. A group of undergrads at the University of Colorado at Boulder got to participate in an unusual and awesome classroom activity on Monday, the culmination of a weeks-long process to decommission a NASA science satellite: they crashed a satellite into the atmosphere, sending it to a fiery death.

The Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) spent seven years aloft under the careful guidance of professionals and their undergrad protégés at CU-Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP). The satellite gathered key data on polar ice, ice sheets and sea ice dynamics that have informed nearly a decade of climate research, but on Monday -- low on fuel and out of time -- ICESat's number was up. Read more »

Locked Up Andrew Bardwell via Wikimedia

Americans have a prison problem -- namely, we've got a whole lot of people in prisons and that's a huge drain not only on hard money in our public coffers, but on man-hours lost by both the inmates and the people who spend their productive hours keeping an eye on them. But Graeme Wood, writing in The Atlantic, describes a new prison paradigm that would take the economic - and, for the inmates, psychological - duress out of our penal system: let most of the inmates go free. Then use technology to monitor their every move. Read more »

The DM-2 Awaits Its Test Fire NASA

In Utah today, NASA completed a successful test of the world's largest, most powerful solid rocket motor, the DM-2. For two minutes, the motor, designed to provide up to 3.6 million pounds of thrust, roaringly fired a column of flame, while some 760 instruments monitored its every aspect. Best to turn down your speakers before the countdown in this video hits zero.

Before the motor was fired, the engineers chilled it to 40 degrees below zero, for additional stress testing. It reportedly passed every test. The motor is intended to be used in the heavy-lift rocket segment of the Constellation program that NASA has slated for 2015. Read more »

Silver Nanowires A microscope image shows the silver nanowires in which the cotton cloth is dipped. Courtesy of Yi Cui, Stanford University

Water, water everywhere, but in the developing world or in areas ravaged by natural disasters - like the ongoing flooding in Pakistan, for instance - there's often not a clean, purified drop to be found. Water is usually made potable in such places via filters that physically trap bacteria as water flows through, but researchers at Stanford have shown devised a high-speed filter composed of nothing but plain cotton cloth and nanotubes that can quickly filter nearly all bacteria from dirty water using less power than slower conventional water purifiers. Read more »

Solar panels are a common sight on rooftops but rare on vertical walls, which, being more or less parallel to the noonday sun, get less solar energy. Hoping to take advantage of this unused space, design start-up SMIT looked at how ivy plants nonetheless thrive on the sides of buildings. The company's upcoming solar-energy system takes inspiration from the way a vine's many leaves individually maximize their sun exposure.

Solar Ivy consists of thousands of four-ounce photovoltaic "leaves" that can be screwed into place on a steel-mesh wall covering. Exactly where each leaf is affixed to the grid depends on a pre-installation analysis: SMIT's custom software calculates the angle that gathers the most light-in New York City, for instance, the leaves are tilted 49 degrees and rotated south-and a pattern that prevents the leaves from shading one another. Read more »

Michael Gottesman The NIH intramural research chief ordered scientists to halt experiments that use human embryonic stem cells.

The move comes after an injunction barring federal funding for stem cell research

In what could be a major blow to health research, the National Institutes of Health on Monday ordered an immediate shutdown of NIH experiments involving human embryonic stem cells.

The move, reported in ScienceInsider, comes on the heels of a ruling last week that blocked the use of federal funds to study new embryonic stem cell lines. A judge said President Obama's 2009 executive order violates a federal law barring the use of federal funds to destroy embryos. Read more »

The successful use of an engineered chemzyme is a world first

For the first time, a human-designed chemical enzyme -- a chemzyme -- has been used to break down a toxin found inside fruits and vegetables.

Chemzymes are designed to emulate the body's naturally occuring enzymes, but are much simpler and tougher. A chemzyme designed by a Danish scientist successfully neutralized glycoside esculin, a toxic compound found in horse chestnuts. The toxin can cause nasty problems like muscle twitching, lack of coordination, vomiting, diarrhea, depression and paralysis. Read more »

Using Nanotech to Reach Every Drop of Oil Flcelloguy via Wikimedia

You can't throw a rock in the realm of biotech right now without hitting some scheme or another for tapping the unique properties of nanoparticles to hunt tumors, target drug delivery, or monitor the body internally for specific biomarkers. But a perhaps unlikely field of scientific exploration is also tapping these nano-biotechnology applications to search for the elusive hydrocarbons that are its lifeblood: the oil industry. Read more »

A Real-Time MRI Image of a Heart Frahm / MPI for Biophysical Chemistry

Those long periods of lying completely still inside that intimidating MRI tube may soon be a thing of the past. Employing some tricky math and some heavy-duty computing power, researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen have developed a new MRI method that renders images in just one-fiftieth of a second, fast enough to capture organs and joints "live" for the first time. Read more »

Protected By Science My hand is like a red-hot poker to the liquid nitrogen, but an insulating layer of nitrogen gas forms- a phenomenon known as the Leiden-frost effect- keeping my hand safe and warm for a fraction of a second. Mike Walker

A layer of bubbles protects the flesh from liquid nitrogen, though only for a split second. Need proof? Watch the video

When I first saw this photograph of a man's hand submerged in liquid nitrogen at somewhere below -320° F, my immediate thought was, "That guy must be crazy! One second in that stuff, and you're shopping for new skin!" My shock was tempered only slightly by the fact that it was my hand, and we'd taken the picture just a minute earlier. Read more »

Robot Swarm Control Mark Micire/UMass Lowell Robotics Lab

A sharp-looking tabletop touchscreen can be used to command robots and combine data from various sources, potentially improving military planning, disaster response and search-and-rescue operations.

Mark Micire, a graduate student at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, proposes using Surface, Microsoft's interactive tabletop, to unite various types of data, robots and other smart technologies around a common goal. Read more »

Tuna at the Tsukiji Market John Mahoney

The rich, creamy red meat of the bluefin tuna is prized almost to a cultish degree -- at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market, a single majestic specimen can sell for over $100,000 -- and as a result the species is severely overfished and endangered. Farming the fish, which might offer a solution, has proven remarkably difficult. After years of experimentation with sexy mood lighting, Australia's Clean Seas company only managed to get them to breed in captivity by injecting them with spear guns full of reproductive hormones. Now, a European initiative has announced an alternative.

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It's been eight months since Boeing's 787 Dreamliner first took to the skies. Back then, Japan's ANA was expecting to have their first 787 roll into the hanger by the close of 2010. Now, thanks to a delay in production of the plane's Rolls-Royce engines, first deliveries are now slated for first quarter 2011 at the earliest. Read more »

500,000 Asteroids Discovered From 1980 to 2010

In this amazing video of the solar system, the asteroids that were discovered from 1980 to 2010 appear in the sequence as they were discovered. It's very cool to watch the process of discovery. You can observe patterns, as technological innovations come online and spur new batches of findings; and as groups of astronomers all look in the same direction at once -- for instance, when Voyager passed Jupiter, a lot of asteroids suddenly started to be discovered around that region of space. Read more »

Nike's Automatic Lacing System

Hold on to your hoverboards. Nike has filed a patent on some technology that takes us right back to 2015: self-lacing sneakers that tighten or loosen your kicks just like the ones McFly donned in Back to the Future II.

Perhaps self-lacing is a stretch. To quote the patent filing: "The automatic lacing system provides a set of straps that can be automatically opened and closed to switch between a loosened and tightened position." Meaning they will have cinching straps rather than actual laces. But let's not mince words here, because these are awesome shoes. Read more »

"Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits," Thomas Edison once said. But is hustling all it takes? Is progress always deliberate? Sometimes genius arrives not by choice-but by chance. Below are our ten favorite serendipitous innovations.

Read more »

The Ciclotte

The home gym is usually something tucked away in the spare bedroom or the basement, but the Ciclotte stationary bike is that rare piece of exercise equipment one would proudly display front and center in the living room. Designed by Luca Schieppati, the futuristic exercise machine takes its form from the Ciclo, a concept bike so sweet the Milan Design Museum keeps it in its private collection.

Constructed of steel, carbon and glass fiber materials, and a magnetized main wheel, the Ciclotte uses an epicycloid crank system and a magnetic field to generate thigh-steeling resistance. Part futuristic art installation, part home gym, it can be yours for just $10,700.

[Wired via Gizmodo]

Canon 60D

Canon's mid-range 60D, unveiled late last night, doesn't auto focus like Nikon's also-fresh D3100. But it does represent the final step in Canon's 1080p HD video transition across its full line of DSLRs. Plus--there's a nifty fold-out LCD.

Phil Ryan from Pop Photo had a chance to take the new rig for an early spin in Yellowstone. Read all about it, and see plenty of full-res sample shots, here. Read more »

PR2 Draws Itself

Everyone loves the beer-fetching Willow Garage PR2 robot, as seen in our recent gallery of its greatest achievements. Evidently, it even loves itself. When developers at Bosch Research gave it a pen, it drew a handsome self-portrait. Read more »

Inside the ISS The cramped, isolated quarters inside the ISS provide a good model for the conditions experienced by the miners trapped in Chile. NASA is advising the Chilean government on how to keep the miners physically and mentally healthy while they await rescue. NASA

When Chilean officials contacted NASA seeking advice from the space agency on how to keep 33 miners trapped in a tiny subterranean chamber both physically and mentally healthy, we wondered what that advice might be. NASA officials are now in a meeting to hash out exactly what they might be able to do to help the Chileans, though its still unclear what kind of advice or assistance they might provide. Read more »

The Nose Knows A mouse is rewarded with a drink after sniffing infected duck excrement. Monell Chemical Senses Center

Dogs can already sniff out drugs, diabetes, cancer and explosives, and new research suggests they could also be trained to sniff out diseases before they spread.

"Biosensor" dogs and mice could be dispatched to airports and other public spaces to sniff out avian influenza and other pathogens, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture study. The key is the animals' keen ability to smell poo. Apparently, excrement from an infected animal smells different from that of a healthy animal. This is the first study to show excrement can be used as a marker for specific illnesses. Read more »

Flash Drives Beware. Andrezadnik via Wikimedia

In the first on-the-record, official recognition that a foreign intelligence agency infiltrated sensitive U.S. military CentCom networks in 2008, Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn III has revealed the source of the attack. And it was -- drumroll please -- a flash drive. A simple flash drive inserted into a military laptop at a location in the Middle East allowed malicious code to install and conceal itself on both classified and unclassified servers, opening them to foreign control. Read more »

GVS in Action Courtesy of the Human Aerospace Laboratory at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine

Very few of us know exactly what it feels like to return to Earth's gravity after a long stay in microgravity, but a new system developed by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute can safely induce the mobility and sensory problems that accompany a return from space, unpleasant though they may be. The Galvanic Vestibular Stimulator (GVS) delivers electrical pulses to the nervous system, triggering the vision problems, confusion, and balance issues that often set in right about the time a Space Shuttle pilot is attempting to land his aircraft. Read more »

Exoplanets Around HD 10180 An artist's rendering. ESO

Spotting exoplanets is hot science in astronomy right now, and researchers at the European Southern Observatory have just made a significant find: a planetary system some 127 light years away containing at least five Neptune like planets circling a sun much like our own.

Using the ESO's HARPS instrument (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher) to monitor the gravitational wobble of distant stars, the researchers noticed a star called HD 10180 whose uniquely complex wobble signals that at least five planets are rapidly orbiting the star, within a distance equivalent to the orbit of Mars. Read more »

PR2 Pairs Socks

The guys over at Willow Garage have already proved their PR2 to be a worthy weekend companion, teaching it to play billiards, fetch beer, and even to clean up after a party. A team of UC Berkeley researchers more interested in domestic applications for robotics has also shown that PR2 can be a handy household companion during the slower parts of the week, namely laundry day. Now, they've shown that if you give PR2 a sock it can employ its keen ability for repetitive hand motions to that other regularly recurring chore: pairing socks! (wait, what did you think we were talking about?). Read more »

Microbes and an Oil Microdroplet Microbes are degrading oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a new study. This image shows bacteria and an oil droplet, magnified 100x. Science/AAAS

The massive plume scientists announced last week might already be gone

Remember how we told you last week about the problem of variables when studying the Gulf oil spill? Here's another one: according to a new study, a heretofore unseen species of bacteria is eating the oil, and eating it efficiently. Thanks to these cold-loving, oil-munching bugs, the huge oil plume we learned about last week is probably gone, according to Terry Hazen, a microbial ecologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and principal investigator at the Energy Biosciences Institute.

"In the last three weeks, we haven't been able to detect the deepwater plume anywhere we've gone," he said in an interview. "It appears to have been completely biodegraded and diluted out. Like the surface (oil), we can no longer find it." Read more »

How To Find a Dirty Bomb: As muons pass through the top and bottom detectors, their path builds a view of suspicious objects. Graham Murdoch

Smuggling a nuclear weapon into the U.S. is distressingly simple-all someone needs is a truck full of watermelons. Regulations prohibit using high-power x-rays on perishables, and Geiger counters don't beep alerts because the juicy fruit absorbs radiation. But a new drive-through detector takes advantage of cosmic rays to locate any nuclear material, no matter how cleverly hidden. Read more »

Tycho Brahe-1 Atop its HEAT1X Booster Copenhagen Suborbitals

The world's first volunteer-built, not-for-profit passenger rocket funded purely by donations and sponsorships is preparing for launch next week, ticking off a milestone in human spaceflight history. The Danish rocket, known as the Tycho Brahe-1, is slated to launch from a seafaring launch platform in the middle of the Baltic Sea on August 31.

Next week's planned flight won't actually be manned however. A crash-test dummy will helm the rocket in this initial launch so its creators - Copenhagen Suborbitals - can test the safety mechanisms of the rocket as well as to see how a human passenger might respond to the serious g-forces imposed upon him or her by the ascent. Read more »

Arecibo Wikimedia Commons

If we ever find aliens, there's a good chance they'll be intelligent machines, not biological systems as we know them. So says a senior SETI astronomer.

Writing in the journal Acta Astronautica, Seth Shostak says we ought to turn our attention to galactic centers and hot, young stars - likely areas of interest to machines because of their plentiful supplies of energy and matter.

He says because our own technology advances so quickly, it's reasonable to expect alien technology would, too. Biological evolution as we know it is comparatively slow. Read more »

Pavlosk Station Plants

Vavilov Institute of Plant Industry

During the siege of Leningrad, 12 scientists starved to death rather than eat the grains stored at Pavlosk Agricultural Station, the world's first seed bank. According to an AP story, their efforts to save the seeds for future generations may now be in vain after a Russian court approved plans to raze the station's fields of plants so a developer can build luxury homes.

Though Russian president Dmitry Medvedev has ordered an investigation, the first plot of land goes up for auction Sept. 23, leading scientists to wonder if Medvedev's intervention may come too late. Read more »

This Week in the Future, August 16-20, 2010 Baarbarian

Farming beets on Mars? With enough whisky, anything is possible.

Welcome to the future.

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Fluorescent DNA Florent Samain displays a fluorescence microscope image showing how the fluorescent sensors change color in the presence of organic vapors. Linda Cicero, Stanford University News Service

A new generation of e-nose uses a DNA scaffolding and molecular fluorescence to distinguish among various vapors, in a breakthrough that could make electronic sniffers more powerful and simpler to produce, according to researchers at Stanford University.

The method could conceivably detect anything from spoiled milk to explosives, the researchers say -- a major advancement over existing e-noses, which search for only a couple of specific molecules. Read more »

Helium Balloon sfrancisball (CC licensed)

The world is running short on several metals, but perhaps more disconcerting is the impending loss of the noble helium. The stuff of birthday balloons, superconducting magnets and Mickey Mouse voices could get a lot more expensive in the near future, according to a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

New Scientist has an interview today with Cornell scientist Robert Richardson, who has worked on the superfluid properties of helium. He believes the world will run out of the gas in short order. Read more »

The Red Glasses Really Make It Look Like Mars IBMP

Shenanigans on a 520-day-long pretend trip to Mars

Have you been wondering what it's like to spend 520 days in a little sealed facility in Russia? The Mars500 project has cooped up 6 volunteers with no access to the outside world in an experimental isolation facility in Moscow, measuring just 550 cubic meters, to simulate a trip to Mars.

The experiment started June 3, and already we have some fascinating snapshots of what the volunteers are getting up to. In this gallery, the men play Wii, do chores, play-fight, study Chinese, and even man the "spaceship" controls once in a while.

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The Earth's Magnetic Weather AMPERE

The solar flare that slammed into Earth's atmosphere earlier this month was a prescient reminder that solar weather -- though sometimes beautiful -- can have serious impacts on the Earth. So perhaps the timing is right for something like AMPERE, the first space-based system capable of monitoring the Earth's immediate space environment in real-time. The system is the first step in a process that will enable around-the-clock monitoring and eventual prediction of solar and space weather and its effects on Earth. Read more »

Charging Up A Tesla Roadster tops its tank the green way in nearby Oslo, Norway.

Green cars require green roadways, and to that end Finland is planning the world's first "green highway," an 81-mile stretch of pavement dotted with electric charge stations and pumps pouring locally made biofuel that will hopefully stimulate the adoption of next-gen auto technologies. Read more »

IRAS 05437+2502 NASA, ESA, Hubble, R. Sahai (JPL)

This spooky image of a tiny nebula known as IRAS 05437+2502 was recently released by the Hubble Space Telescope, but perhaps even more eerie than the wispy, ghost-like appearance of the little-studied star forming region is the boomerang-like light crowning the nebula. Though the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) first discovered the nebula in 1983, astronomers have no clue what is lighting up this glowing object. Read more »

Mars Farm
NASA/KSC Mars Greenhouse Project

If we ever decide to colonize Mars, it might be fairly simple to grow crops in that red soil, according to a new study. Mars' reduced gravity could let us use less water and fertilizer than we do on Earth. Read more »

Scotch morberg via Flickr

File this under news you can raise a glass to: Researchers at Edinburgh Napier University have figured out how to turn the leftovers from one of Scotland's biggest exports into biofuel. Made from byproducts of the whisky-making process, the scotch-derived biofuel is ready to run in ordinary automobile engines without requiring any modifications.

The two main byproducts of the whisky production process are "pot ale" - the leftover liquid in the copper stills - and the used-up grains called "draff," which together can be processed into the fuel butanol. Butanol could be burned entirely on its own, but more likely it would be mixed with gasoline or diesel at about ten percent to reduce the amount of petroleum needed to produce a gallon of fuel. Read more »

Preparing To Lift: The massive crane prepares to haul up a 1,322 ton South Korean warship. Getty Images

A floating crane prepares to raise from the depths a South Korean navy combat corvette that mysteriously split in two and sank on March 26. To allow military and civilian investigators from South Korea, the U.S., Australia, the U.K. and Sweden to examine the 1,322-ton ship, a tag team of cranes-one capable of lifting 2,200 tons, the other, 3,600-retrieved the two pieces from the ocean floor.

Pumps and valves regulated the amount of water in the cranes' ballast tanks to keep the cranes stable during operation, while tugboats maneuvered the cranes into position and held them steady during the recovery. The investigators found a torpedo propeller among the scattered debris that led them to blame a North Korean submarine attack.

We talked to the Spitzer Space Telescope's visualization team about the challenges and rewards of rendering the mission's reams of non-visual data into something that catches the public eye. Plus: a gallery of their all-time favorite works

In a shared office on the southern edge of Caltech's campus, Robert Hurt and Tim Pyle are making art out of science. Armed with the industry standards-Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects-it's their job to break down the Spitzer Space Telescope's complex scientific data into visualizations that are accessible and meaningful to the average viewer. But their artistic challenge is unique: Human eyes have never seen the objects they are creating. Read more »

Most people with even the most fundamental knowledge of how computer chips work are familiar with binary logic -- the system of ones and zeros that enable modern computing to occur -- in which an input always results in a solid result (either a one or a zero). Now, a Boston-based startup is rewiring the basic concept of computation with a probability processor that deals in chance rather than binary logic, creating a chip that could speed all kinds of processes from flash memory in smartphones to better decision-making software for machines.

Lyric Semiconductor's chip accepts probabilities as inputs instead of ones and zeros, and the output is also a probability -- the odds that the two input probabilities match up. Rather than the usual NAND gates characteristic of conventional transistor schemes, the chips employ what are known as Bayesian NAND gates, named for the statistician Thomas Bayes whose field of thought is the basis for the idea. Read more »

Brokeback Mitochondria This is by far the most creative flier I've ever seen for an academic conference. Rebecca Boyle

Just as these genetically modified gay mice cain't quit each other

As a science journalist, I get all kinds of magazines, brochures and fliers from universities and academic societies, inviting me to learn about new research and attend science conventions. None has ever caught my attention like this amazing flier, which arrived in my mailbox today.

Announcing a study about "gay genes" is one thing -- featuring cartoon mice as the stars of "Brokeback Mountain" is something else altogether. Read more »

Spacewalking Astronaut Douglas Wheelock emerges from the ISS on his third spacewalk in just over a week. NASA

It's been a rough week troubleshooting the ISS, but the third time is a charm; today's emergency spacewalk to replace the faulty cooling system aboard the International Space Station went swimmingly, and Mission Control hopes to have the station running at full speed again by Thursday. Read more »

They are road signs for your daily rituals-the instantly recognized symbols and icons you press, click, and ogle countless times a day when you interact with your computer. But how much do you know about their origins?

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WASP Wi-Fi Hunter The friendly-looking homemade WASP drone can find Wi-Fi hotspots. Hak5 via sUASNews

Tired of driving around, laptop open on the passenger seat, searching for a wi-fi hotspot? The WASP, a flying wi-fi sniffer, can make the task easier.

It's an Arduino-powered aerial drone modeled, perhaps appropriately, after a Russian Cold War MiG jet. WASP stands for "Wi-fi Aerial Surveillance Platform." The folks at Rabbit Hole have detailed instructions on their Web site. Read more »

Space Junk An artist's impression of space debris in low-Earth orbit. The U.S. government wants a better surveillance system to keep track of the thousands of space junk pieces. ESA

DARPA has a thing for butterfly tech. Last week it was sensors based on butterfly wings. This week, it's a space junk capturing vehicle armed with 200 nets that gathers space garbage, much as a lepidopterist would net butterflies for a specimen collection. The technology was presented on Friday at the annual Space Elevator conference. Read more »

A few transplants out of the 28,000 performed every year involve the same organ spending time in more than two bodies. The most common scenario arises when a patient in the late stages of a disease receives a new liver or kidney as a last-ditch effort to keep him alive. If he dies shortly after, and the new organ wasn't the cause, re-transplanting may be an option.

There are a few good reasons, however, why donated organs aren't often re-gifted. If the organ is coming from someone who was so sick that he needed a new organ, it probably lived a pretty rough second life. What's more, dying involves the entire body shutting down. "The trauma of dying can injure an organ," says Robert Montgomery, the director of the Comprehensive Transplant Center at Johns Hopkins University. "And then the second person dies, and the organ is taken out again. That's more injury." But the main problem with playing hot potato with an organ is the scar tissue that forms on it within weeks after the first surgery. That tissue must be removed before a second transplant, and doing so can injure the organ too much to make it worth re-donating. Read more »

ALMA Sunrise ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)

Survey of scientists compiles astronomical wishlist for the next decade

The future of astronomy is an amped-up search for exoplanets and for a greater understanding of how the universe formed and evolved, according to a sweeping survey released today.

The much-anticipated Astro2010 Decadal Survey obtained wide input from the astronomy and astrophysics communities about which science projects the U.S. government should prioritize in the next 10 years. Their wish list includes two new telescopes -- one on earth, one in space -- that should help scientists investigate dark energy, supernovae and exoplanets. Read more »

Nano-FET A new nanoprobe can be used to measure the electrical activity of a cell. Courtesy of Charles Lieber

A new nano-scale wiretap device could tell researchers about the inner workings of cells, according to a new Harvard study.

It involves a transistor that can take electrical readings, embedded inside a membrane that fits inconspicuously inside an individual living cell. The tiny probe, which is smaller than many viruses, is the first semiconductor device to take measurements of the inside of a cell. Read more »

One of NASA's Global Hawk recon drones NASA Dryden

An unmanned Global Hawk recon drone will join a team of aircraft--all equipped with advanced weather instrumentation--to observe the 2010 storm season closer than ever before

So far this hurricane season, the Atlantic has been quiet. That's good news for Gulf oil spill cleanup efforts, but a team of NASA and NOAA scientists are hoping things will get just a little nastier.

This weekend, NASA is launching a six-week mission to study the formation and intensification of hurricanes, hoping to inform forecast models and improve hurricane prediction abilities. The GRIP experiment (for Genesis and Rapid Intensification Processes) involves more than a dozen satellite-quality scientific instruments onboard a Global Hawk unmanned drone, a converted WB-57 cold-war bomber and a modified DC-8. Read more »

The Blue Morpho Butterfly Zirland via wikimedia

Researchers at GE Global Research are working with DARPA funding to tap butterfly tech to make a new breed of sensors that could detect everything from explosives, to chemical attacks, to disease biomarkers on a person's breath.

The research team discovered a few years ago that the scales on Morphos butterfly wings have extremely fine-tuned sensing abilities that can pick molecules out of the atmospheric noise. Nano-level structures underneath the colorful scales on the butterflies' wings react to different vapors, changing the spectral reflectivity of the wings depending on what they are exposed to. Read more »

Would You Like a Statin With that Heart Attack? ebruli via Flickr

A group of researchers at Imperial College London recently cross-referenced a couple of studies on heart health and have made an interesting recommendation to fast food outlets: rather than fries, each order should come with a free statin drug. A dose of statins, they reason, reduce heart attack risk to about the same degree that a cheeseburger and shake raise the risk. In effect, the two should neatly cancel each other out. Read more »

The Clock that Would Replace GMT Saudi Press Agency

At PopSci we're comfortable with the concept of time travel, but this story is perhaps a bit more than we can wrap our heads around. The Saudi Arabian city of Mecca is building the biggest clock in the world -- a massive 1,983-foot tower sporting four timekeeping faces each 151 feet in diameter -- with the goal of displacing Greenwich Mean Time as the world's central time zone. Read more »

Staphylococcus Aureus Being Tested for Antibiotic Resistance

Good morning, readers. Settled in, ready to take on the day? Great, we hope you have a good one. Also, FYI, a new mutation that makes bacteria resistant to pretty much every antibiotic known to man has become increasingly prevalent on the Indian subcontinent and has made the leap to both the UK and the United States, according to a new report in the Lancet. Because there's nothing modern medical science can do to stop it, the NDM-1 "superbug" may spread globally. Anyhow, enjoy your Thursday. Read more »

Liquid Nitrogen Tank

Wikipedia

Cryonic technology could help meet the world's peak energy demands as well as cut down on greenhouse gas emissions, a new study says. No, not by freezing excess humans -- by storing excess energy at sub-zero temperatures. Read more »

The entire 80s cyberpunk Max Headroom TV series is available today on DVD, and one of the pleasures of rewatching the series is discovering how many things it got right about the future. Read more »

Neurochip An example of a neurochip, which combines brain cells with a computer chip. Moritz Voelker and Peter Fromherz/ Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry

An updated version of a neurochip can monitor brain cells' communications at the clearest resolution yet, according to scientists in Canada. It's cellular-scale mind-reading -- or mind-listening, to be more precise.

The team at the University of Calgary was one of a handful of groups to first demonstrate it was possible to wire neurons into a computer chip, thereby sensing brain cells' electrical communications. The goal is an improved understanding of how brain cells talk to each other, which could help scientists can design new drugs and therapies for neurological disorders. Read more »

Silky Invisibility You can get a silk invisibility cloak in any color you want as long as it's invisible. mckaysavage via Flickr

To think Marco Polo didn't even know what he had. Silk and gold, considered luxury items for as long as mankind has enjoyed shiny things, might now lead the way forward in the growing field of metamaterials. Turning flashy into inconspicuous, scientists from Tufts and Boston University have created an invisibility cloak from silk coated with gold. Read more »

MIT's Ramen Spectroscopy Glucose Meter No pain, no problem. Photos by Patrick Gillooly

Medical device makers have been trying to come up with a better way for diabetics to measure their blood glucose levels for decades, but while a handful of promising methods have enjoyed measured success, the finger-pricking, blood-drawing glucose meter is still the most common tool for everyday use. But a new development in an old research pursuit at MIT may finally provide diabetics with a painless means of checking their sugar, by simply shining a light on their skin. Read more »

Rubik v. God Lars Karlsson via Wikimedia

The world has waited with bated breath for three decades, and now finally a group of academics, engineers, and math geeks has discovered the number that explains life, the universe, and everything. That number is 20, and it's the maximum number of moves it takes to solve a Rubik's Cube. Read more »

A Self-Calibrating MEMS Device Jason Vaughn Clark, Purdue University Birck Nanotechnology Center

Micro electromechanical systems-or MEMS-hold a lot of promise for the future of high tech, but they also have their drawbacks, namely that they aren't very precise. That's because at such small scales there are no standards by which to measure very small forces or distances. But a team of Purdue researchers has developed a way for MEMS to self-calibrate, potentially opening the door to a variety of super-precise sensors and instruments used in everything from medicine to engineering to defense. Read more »

In an acknowledgement that the private space industry just might have something going for it, NASA is setting aside $30 million to buy information gleaned from future commercial missions to the moon. NASA believes it can learn from these missions and will pay up to $10 million per mission for data that could be useful for future robotic or manned missions of its own even though NASA has no lunar missions on the books.

NASA is trying to leverage the technology push initiated by the Lunar X Prize - the Google-funded competition offering a $20 million purse to the first non-government entity that can put a robotic rover on the moon - into research that could inform its own future ambitions, be they lunar landings or future missions to asteroids or even Mars. For instance, NASA is interested in autonomous navigation tech that enables landing spacecraft to identify and avoid hazards on the ground. Read more »

Google & Verizon

As we watch the future of the internet drastically moving toward wireless broadband access, a joint policy proposal by Verizon and Google could spell doom for openness on anything but the traditional wired web

Google and Verizon announced a joint vision for the future of net neutrality this afternoon--a plan that may wield significant influence in the ever-intensifying debate over who controls the internet and its content. The plan calls for strictly regulated openness for today's wireline broadband--the DSL or cable internet you likely have at home. But for wireless networks (read: the future), the story is different. Read more »

Microdrones md4-200 Google purchased a similar quadcopter model from German surveillance drone maker Microdrones for testing. Microdrones GmbH

There's no question that the future of warfare, espionage, and clandestine operations is moving rapidly toward reliance on drone aircraft. But should citizens grow restless when this technology moves into the private sector? A German drone maker claims Google is trialing one of its drones, a battery-powered surveillance quadcopter previously used by UK police and special forces. What the search giant and alleged Wi-Fi data collector plans to do with the drone is unclear, but it seems likely that this isn't going to sit well with privacy advocates. Read more »

They've Encased Him In Carbonite Research engineer Andy Barry shows off a plastic model of his face, made with a 3D scanner he designed. Wired Gadget Lab

The 3-D scanner is the love child of a webcam and a laser

With little more than a laser, a webcam and a MakerBot, you can make a 3D plastic replica of your face -- or anything else you might want to copy, just in case.

A research engineer at NASA's Ames Research Laboratory has built a cheap 3D scanner that might go on sale this fall through the MakerBot store, Gadget Lab reports.

As shown in this photo, builder Andy Barry used it to make a nice carbonite mask of himself. He says it could be used to replace damaged plastic goods, like a broken car part that you've glued back together. Read more »

The International Space Station

Saturday's emergency spacewalk outside the International Space Station failed to replace the faulty cooling pump that malfunctioned last week, prompting NASA to schedule a third spacewalk in addition to the two already scheduled for the task. The second could be performed as early as Wednesday, giving NASA engineers time to consider the problem while lawmakers continue to mull NASA's future, which is pinned to the success of the ISS. Read more »

The Screw-In Coffin David Friedman via Discover

Donald Scruggs has a ground-breaking new idea

They're not making any more real estate; not until we colonize other planets at least. Laying out our dead horizontally, and leaving them in peace forever, is becoming an expensive proposition. That's why inventor Donald Scruggs has come up with the screw-in coffin.

Holding a body vertically, it is screwed down into the ground securely, to optimize graveyards' use of space. Read more »

Fuel From the Air? Scientists have learned an enzyme found in soybeans can convert carbon monoxide into propane. via Flickr/ brew127CC licensed

An enzyme found in soybeans could turn an ingredient in vehicle exhaust into new usable fuel, according to a new study. It's a major step on the path toward making fuel out of thin air.

Scientists were working with a microbe called Azotobacter vinelandii, which is found around the roots of various food plants. It creates an enzyme called vanadium nitrogenase, which produces ammonia from nitrogen. Read more »

Ferrari Simulator This image shows the robotic arm Ferrari simulator without a steering wheel attached. The simulator includes a force-feedback steering wheel and pedals. via Cyberneum

The hot-pink industrial arm whips you around while you sit in the driver's seat

Paolo Robuffo Giordano and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, must really enjoy their jobs. Their CyberMotion Simulator is intended to realistically replicate the experience of driving a Ferrari without actually having to buy one.

Players sit in a cabin on a robot arm about 7 feet off the ground and drive a Ferrari F2007 car around a projected track. Read more »

DLR, the German aerospace agency, is showing a new pair of legs. DLR-Biped, which could use a new name, is a four-foot-eight walking research platform that was developed in less than a year. Read more »

The Bio-Bug

Think your car runs like crap? A sewage utility in Bristol, UK, has converted a Volkswagen Beetle to run on human waste. The Bio-Bug is the first car in the UK to run on byproducts of sewage processing, and if its trial run is successful Wessex Water, the utility company that made the car, might build a whole fleet of them.

Wessex's Avonmouth sewage treatment plant was already producing methane gas, which it refined from the waste treatment process and used to power the facility. But there was surplus gas available and the company didn't like to see it going to waste. So they decided to build a sustainable car. Read more »

Studying Stem Cells Dr. Gabriel Lasala and Dr. Jose Minguell examine cells in TCA Cellular Therapy's lab. Business Wire

Last week, the FDA gave biotech firm Geron the green light to proceed with clinical trials of an embryonic stem cell treatment for spinal cord injuries. But while we wait on promising embryonic stem cell research to clear political and regulatory hurdles, adult stem cell research is trucking right along. Yesterday it was announced that Iraq War veteran and Marine Matt Cole, paralyzed from the chest down since a 2005 insurgent attack in Iraq, has enrolled as the first patient in the first FDA clinical trial of adult stem cells used to treat spinal cord injuries. Read more »

Aurora over Denmark Jesper Grønne via NASA/SDO

On Sunday, sunspot number 1092 emitted a C-class solar flare--not a large one, by solar flare standards. But NASA scientists were intrigued by what accompanied it--an unusually fast corona mass ejection that sent a large cloud of charged plasma toward Earth. There will be no adverse effects here on Earth--other than increased aurora activity. Read more »

For the first time, scientists have been able to watch electrons move in an atom's outer shell, in a breakthrough with major implications for our understanding of chemical processes.

Using ultra-short flashes of laser light, scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Germany and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., were able to time oscillations between valence electrons' quantum states.

Chemical reactions happen because of the dynamics of valence electrons, the ones in the outermost orbit of an atom. If you can watch them move, you can understand their mechanics and learn how they combine with other atoms to make up everything around us. But electrons move pretty fast, so this has been impossible until now. Read more »

Eye Mario

The people that brought you such fringe DIY projects as the "first person shooter with real guns" and "driving your car with an iPhone" have come up with yet another project that you probably shouldn't try at home: a means of placing electrodes all over your face so you can play NES using only your eyes. Read more »

Cephalandole A Atomic force microscopy unveiled the previously unknown structure of cephalandole A, a chemical compound that could lead to new drugs. via PhysOrg

A molecule-mapping method developed by IBM researchers has unveiled the structure of a deep-sea compound, and the process could lead to faster drug development, according to a new study.

Using atomic force microscopy, researchers in Scotland and Switzerland were able to see the molecular structure of a marine compound recovered from the Mariana Trench, whose chemical composition was unknown. And it took only a week to figure it out. Read more »

Supernova 3-D An artist's impression shows material being ejected from supernova 1987A, a star that exploded in the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud. A new instrument on the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope allowed astronomers to reconstruct the supernova in 3-D. ESO

Those of you who thought 3-D had jumped the shark, check this out. Using a new instrument at the Very Large Telescope, astronomers have been able to capture a three-dimensional view of the distribution of the innermost material expelled by a supernova, the European Southern Observatory said today. Read more »

Engkoo

It sounds a bit Google-ey, what with all the data mining across the Web and all that, but it's Microsoft researchers in Beijing that are crafting an online Chinese-to-English dictionary that could become a model for language learning tools bridging any two tongues. Engkoo.com pulls its database from the Web itself, cross-referencing sites that exist in both English and Chinese, searching existing online dictionaries, and mining other sources to create a rich resource for both learning and translation. Read more »

Reverse Engineering the iPhone Charger ladyada

Remember the Minty Boost, the DIY battery-powered USB charger for your portable devices that fit neatly in an Altoids tin? It was a decent fix for those constantly failing early iPod batteries, but that 2006 incarnation has had to be updated several times to keep up with the changing architectures of a certain very closed-sourced company's products. Minty Boost recently received yet another DIY update to make it functional with iPhone 3GS. Even better, that update comes with a video showing exactly how to reverse engineer an iPhone charger and create your own backup battery pack. Read more »

Each 3D Fast Bus can carry over a thousand passengers

Public transit in a metropolitan area is all about balance; if there aren't enough public transit options, too many people choose to drive, clogging roadways and adding to pollution. But trains are expensive (and, if above-ground, contributors to traffic) and adding more buses to the road can magnify traffic woes further. Enter the 3D Fast Bus, a futuristic concept vehicle that carries passengers above street level, straddling the lanes below so traffic can pass freely underneath. Read more »

The pitch: fill up from any tap, and the bottle's filter removest all the nasties for clean, pure refreshment

Americans blow $17 billion a year on water, the creators of the Bobble will have you know, and 1.5 million barrels of oil go to making the plastic bottles from which we consume it. The Bobble is the solution - a reusable bottle with a filter built right in.

What's New

The idea is brilliant. Fill your Bobble from any tap, and you have clean, free, guiltless drinking water. The filter is made of activated charcoal (the same super-absorptive stuff that goes in your shoe inserts and filters your aquarium's water) hit with a slight electro-positive charge, which grabs onto any impurities which threaten to taint your refreshment. As you take a pull from the bottle, the water passing through the filter leaves chlorine, hard metals and other odd tastes behind. Read more »

Cupcake CNC The kit requires only some simple bolt-together assembly and basic surface-mount soldering. A simpler software interface is currently in the works. John B. Carnett

For less than $1,000, the MakerBot kit provides nearly everything you need for your very own 3-D plastic printer. We find out what it takes to build and use one

It sounds like the promise of an ad in the back of a PopSci issue from the 1950s. Build your own replicating machine! Make anything you desire in your own garage! But that's exactly what veteran hacker Bre Pettis and his pals offer with their CupCake CNC kit: a computer-controlled 3-D printer that can whip up almost any object of less than four inches on a side from two kinds of plastic. The company's goal is to make home manufacturing cheap and common. And the whole setup is open-source, so anybody can modify and improve the design, or even copy it wholesale.

Read more »

PETE A small PETE device made with cesium-coated gallium nitride glows while being tested inside an ultra-high vacuum chamber. The tests proved that the process simultaneously converted light and heat energy into electrical current. Stanford University

Exploiting both types of radiation could be the key to making solar power competitive with fossil fuels

Though the sun offers us a couple options for exploiting its energy -- light and heat -- we've always had to choose to use one at a time, because solar-energy technology hasn't been able to capture both typs of radiation simultaneously. Stanford researchers say that's about to change, however. Their new breakthrough could put solar power on par with oil, price-wise.

Using readily available materials, a team of engineers has come up with the first solar technology to combine photovoltaic and thermal electricity generation. Read more »

Secret Grave A new method developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology can help identify hidden graves by testing for decaying flesh. via Flickr/ mdpettittCC licensed

Cops searching for hidden graves usually rely on dogs or ground-penetrating radar. Now they have another tool in their arsenal -- a corpsefinder probe, slightly thicker than a human hair, that can quickly and easily detect decaying flesh.

Before they go tearing up the ground in search of a body, authorities often want to be sure about what lies beneath. Typically, tests of soil around a suspected grave site involve extracting samples and shipping them to a lab for testing, which is expensive and time-consuming. Read more »

Garbage Islands Threaten Three Gorges China Daily

Islands of garbage so thick people can stand on them are threatening China's massive Three Gorges Dam, according to Chinese state media.

Recent heavy rains have washed thousands of tons of trash down the Yangtze River, and it threatens to jam the locks of the enormous dam, which is itself environmentally controversial. Read more »

Measuring Brain Waves via Flickr/ mousyboywithglasses

Mind-reading can improve national security, a new study says. Brain-wave scanners could help authorities uncover secret details of a terrorist plot and help pinpoint people with guilty plans before they commit a crime, according to research conducted at Northwestern University.

If the test works in real life, authorities will be able to pluck information from terrorist "chatter" and study the brain waves of terror suspects to confirm information about an attack in advance, such as date, location and weapon. Read more »

Internet Explorer via Flickr/ bnpositive

In the war over Internet privacy, money has apparently won a major battle.

Microsoft engineers initially wanted a feature in Internet Explorer 8 to limit the powers of third-party tracking cookies by default, the Wall Street Journal reports today. But executives, concerned with the ramifications for online advertisers, won out--and the world's leading browser was designed to share users' private information with advertisers. Read more »

We show you how to add remote control to any project, large or small

You may associate remote control with the urge to jump little R/C cars through walls of fire in your backyard, but that's just the beginning of what you can do with the technology. Once you've mastered the basic concepts, the same parts and techniques used in toys can be used to control machines big and small, practical and absurd.

The basic R/C setup consists of a transmitter, a receiver, and several actuators on the receiving end-either servos (electric motors that rotate to a specified position or speed) or relays (which turn electrical components on and off). Commands from the transmitter about position, speed of rotation, or simply "on" and "off" are sent to the onboard receiver, which decodes them into a signal that can be interpreted by the connected servos and switches. Read more »

The Population Reference Bureau has projected that in 2011, the planet Earth will be home to more than seven billion living humans. At current growth rates, we'll top 9 billion in 2050. Read more »

Rabbit Joints Regenerated Using a scaffold inside a living rabbit, researchers were able to stimulate the rabbit's own stem cells to regrow injured joints. via Technology Review

Though artificial-joint tech is pretty advanced these days, with titanium hips and knees built to last a decade or more, they won't last forever -- and aging patients will have to go back under the knife for upgrades. Naturally re-growing their own bones would be a nice alternative.

For the first time, researchers have proven this can work, by stimulating the body's own stem cells to re-grow joint tissue around an implantable scaffold. Read more »

Call it a new form of rapture of the deep. Chemicals from sea snail saliva can be made into pain pills that work as well as morphine, but without the risk of addiction, a new study says.

Researchers have already used the saliva of marine cone snails as a potent painkiller, but it has to be injected into the spinal cord with a special implanted pump, which limits its use. Researchers led by David J. Craik of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland in Australia figured out how to make the peptide orally active, so patients could simply pop snail-saliva pills. Read more »

Even a great camera won't take memorable shots if it's so big that you tend to leave it at home. So companies are creating models that aim for a happy medium between pocketable point-and-shoots and higher-quality SLRs. This new breed can change lenses to suit a shot, like an SLR does, but ditches the optical viewfinder and the bulky mirror that sends it light. That means compromise: Autofocus isn't SLR-fast, there are fewer lenses, and point-and-shoots are still smaller. We tested which interchangeable-lens compacts (ILCs) hit the sweet spot. Read more »

The Spill is Capped, but the Oil Remains NASA

From the people that brought you private spaceflight and super-fuel-efficient automobiles comes the $1.4 million Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge. X-Prize officials announced today a $1 million purse for the team that can demonstrate the most efficient method of capturing crude oil from the ocean surface.

Inspired, of course, by the ongoing Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico -- which as of this writing appears to still be contained -- the new X Challenge aims to provide impetus for both venture capital and innovative talent gravitate toward next-gen oil cleanup technology. Read more »

Controllers Get Temperature Sensitive Tech Tokyo Metropolitan University

First we got wireless video game controls, then motion sensing controllers, and now even a controller-free video game interface. But the next stage of human-computer interaction could be controllers that add hot and cold sensations to users' simulated experiences. Read more »

Good Froth and Bad Froth The drink on the left was shaken with egg white; the one on the right with gelatin. The two were equally frothy just a moment before the photo was taken. Paul Adams

At a cocktail convention, McGee and other experts unleash a cutting-edge arsenal of handy science

The annual Tales of the Cocktail convention happened again in New Orleans last week, I seem to recall. And somewhere between the sazeracs and the rusty nails, I attended a series of enlightening seminars (each accompanied by appropriate cocktails, of course).

Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking and probably the most famous name in food science, was present at Tales for the first time, to lend his expertise to a deserving cocktail world. He sat on a panel with Audrey Saunders, celebrated owner of New York's Pegu Club, and Tony Conigliaro, who pushes the frontiers of molecular mixology at London's 69 Colebrooke Row. Read more »

Dimitar Sasselov at TED TED

Yesterday, everyone got excited (PopSci included) at the idea, drawn from Kepler scientist Dimitar Sasselov's TED talk, that the Kepler planet-hunting mission had turned up 140 new "Earth-like" planets.

In a blog post today, Sasselov clarifies that that wasn't exactly what he meant. Read more »

Levitated Orbit This graphic depicts a "levitated orbit," which Scottish researchers say is possible using a solar sail. Advanced Space Concepts Laboratory, University of Strathclyde

Space is getting pretty crowded -- there are a couple thousand satellites orbiting Earth, not to mention destroyed-satellite debris and at least one zombiesat. Adding new ones is increasingly difficult, because there's only so much room for satellites to sit in specific, geostationary orbits.

A theory first proposed by a physicist/science fiction writer may provide a solution. In a new study, engineers from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland claim to have worked out a system of displaced orbits, first proposed in 1984 by American physicist Robert Forward. Read more »

Implantable Glucose Sensor

A new, implantable sensor that wirelessly transmits blood-glucose data has the potential to completely change the way most diabetics control their disease.

The round device is just a bit smaller than a Double-Stuf Oreo -- about 1.5 inches wide and half an inch thick -- and would be implanted in a person's torso. It's hermetically sealed, with an integrated antenna that wirelessly transmits data, a long-lived battery, and a pair of sensors. Read more »

GPS Tracking A GPS-IIRM satellite. Wikimedia Commons

Sometimes, you want Big Brother to be watching. In that spirit, South Korean officials are turning to GPS technology to keep their kids safe from criminals, AFP reports.

Starting in October, about 1,200 elementary school children in Anyang City, south of Seoul, will receive matchbox-sized GPS-embedded beepers. The devices can notify authorities of the kids' location and activate surveillance cameras.

The move comes a month after a 44-year-old habitual sex offender was arrested and accused of kidnapping and sexually assaulting an 8-year-old girl. That case, as well as other crimes against children, shocked the country and mobilized the government to declare war on child molesters. Read more »

The International Space Station is upgrading its timepiece. An atomic clock constructed by EADS Astrium will arrive at the ISS in 2014, providing the most accurate timekeeping to date in space, better synchronization of clocks on Earth, and the opportunity to learn a few things about time itself.

Cesium clocks, like the one the National Institute of Standards and Technology uses to keep the official time in the U.S., generally rely on the microwave signals that electrons emit when they change energy levels to keep highly precise, consistent measurements of time (it's estimated that the NIST's current clock won't gain or lose a second for more than 60 million years). Read more »

Measuring Electron Delay During photoemission, it was long thought electrons excited by high-energy light were ejected from their atoms instantaneously. New findings suggest there is an extremely short delay between excitation and expulsion, suggesting an unknown interaction between electrons may be at play. Thorsten Naeser / Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics

During an average day of knocking electrons loose from their host atoms with high-energy lasers, a team of European physicists uncovered the shortest time interval ever measured in nature. At about 20 attoseconds, the interval is indeed very short. That's 20 billionths of one billionth of one second. Blink and you've missed it many, many times over again. Read more »

Dimitar Sasselov at TED TED

Some big news dropped quietly during a recent TED talk in the UK: Kepler co-investigator Dimitar Sasselov jumped the gun -- and likely angered a few colleagues -- with one of his presentation slides, letting the audience (and the world) know that Kepler has identified at least 140 "candidate" planets in the Milky Way that are "like Earth." That is, they are small, rocky exoplanets with at least an outside chance of harboring life. Read more »

The Sniff Detector By turning nasal pressure into electrical signals, the sniff detector lets those with "locked-in" syndrome communicate and paraplegics operate an electric wheelchair. PNAS

Israeli researchers have sniffed out what could become a way to give paraplegics and those suffering from "locked-in" syndrome a means to communicate with the outside world and even drive a wheelchair using their noses. Using a device that converts nasal pressure into electrical signals, the team has successfully enabled locked-in patients to write messages independent of stimulus and allowed paraplegics to effectively navigate an electric wheelchair. Read more »

Group Effort Dragons don't exist (as far as we know), but some of their individual characteristics can be found throughout the animal kingdom. iStock (2); Dorling Kindersley/Getty Images; Richard T. Nowitz/Photo Researchers

It would have taken quite a few turns for natural selection to have produced dragons, but if you're willing to stretch a bit, most classic dragon characteristics do exist in other species. They just don't come packaged in one animal.

First up on the dragon checklist: flying. Dragon wings are usually depicted in one of two ways-a third pair of limbs connected to the backbone, or webbed forearms. Jack Conrad, a paleontologist and reptile expert at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, thinks the latter is more plausible. Read more »

Curiosity Gets in Gear

It may not look like much, but NASA's next candidate to touch down on Mars has taken its first steps toward its larger ambition of exploring the Martian landscape in 2012.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a big week last week, mounting the Remote Sensing Mast and an array of navigation and sensing cameras on their latest Mars rover. Then on Friday Curiosity took its first drive, traveling about three feet back and forth on its brand new 20-inch aluminum wheels. Read more »

Tevatron Fermilab

As particle physicists gather this week for a conference in Paris, they're reporting progress toward finding the elusive Higgs boson, with two groups suggesting a Higgs discovery may not be far off.

Physicists from Fermilab in Illinois announced they combined the results of two experiments to refine their search for the Higgs, sometimes called the "God particle" because it is thought to endow particles with mass.

Calculations of quantum effects that involve the Higgs say it has to be a certain size, between 114 and 185 GeV/c2. That means giga-electron volts divided by the speed of light squared. It's easier to think in terms of relative sizes, so for comparison: 100 GeV/c2 is equivalent to 107 times the mass of a proton. That means the Higgs is a lot more massive than a proton. Read more »

WOWee One The WOWee ONE uses vibrations to turn any flat surface into a speaker for music or calls, but with more-intense bass than similar designs. Its driver is embedded in a synthetic gel, which allows it to pulse more freely and to transfer stronger bass lines through a tabletop or window. $80; woweeone.com

A 13-blade pocketknife, a plastic anchor and more great ideas in gear

Each month we look beyond the shelves of your local big-box store to dig up a dozen of the best new ideas in gear. This is the stuff that is better, faster, stronger, and does more than pretty much anything we've seen before it. Click the gallery thumbnails below to dive in: Read more »

This Week in the Future, July 19-23 2010 Baarbarian

As Bo Diddley once said, "you ain't got to be on dope to be on a bad trip"--you just have to spend a moment contemplating cyborg Dick Cheney without a pulse. But wow, those obscure hallucinogens now being used to successfully treat addiction sure aren't helping either.

These are but two of our favorite stories this week from the future. Read more »

Flip It, Flip It Good The flapjack bot robotic arm proudly displays a metal pancake it learned how to flip. via Make:Online

And after 50 or so tries (and some kinesthetic training), he does

This pancake-flipping robotic arm is definitely one of the more endearing helper ‘bots we've seen. After a hand-held lesson from its programmers, it just tries so hard to flip a pancake. And it fails, again and again.

After about 50 attempts, the arm is finally able to perfect its wrist-flipping technique, so the fake metal flapjack flips and lands in the skillet. You almost want to start clapping. Read more »

The Avenger General Atomics Aeronautical Systems

Future airplane flocks would require a trained corps of pilots who intimately know their aircraft and their partners' flying habits. Drone flocks would be a different task, however. Drones are not as smart as pilots, and cannot tell what other aircraft will do. But the military would like to change that. Read more »

Black Hole Concept Wikimedia Commons

Scientists trying to explain the universe's accelerating expansion usually point to dark energy, which seems to be pushing everything apart.

But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist: We're inside a black hole that exists in another universe. Specifically, a black hole that rebounded, somewhat like a spring.

Some fairly mind-blowing physics is involved here, but the gist is that Nikodem Poplawski of IU-Bloomington used a modified version of Einstein's general relativity equation set that takes particle spin into account. Read more »

The Patriot Missile System Has an App Because you don't want to forget a step when firing this bad boy.

There's an app for everything, Apple says, and apparently that rule does not exclude "the operation ofadvanced missile defenses." Raytheon has developed an app for the Patriot anti-missile system that helps troops stay sharp on the weapons platform even when they are called away from their primary peacetime duties for combat tours. Read more »

Cheng's Underwater 3-D Filming Rig Eric Cheng

Fancy yourself the Steve Zissou of the digital age? Photog Eric Cheng is bringing his underwater footage into the 21st century with a really nice-looking custom dual camcorder setup that lets him shoot Shark Week-worthy video in 3-D. Read more »

Get It Porsche 2011 Cayenne S Hybrid
$67,700; porsche.com Courtesy Porsche

Clever engineering makes Porsche's hybrid genuinely efficient

Few vehicles flaunt their gas-chugging power as proudly as a Porsche Cayenne, so it's natural to be suspicious of the hybrid version. Can this racecar-like SUV really improve gas mileage and still be a Porsche? Read more »

PlanetSolar Christian Charisius

In February, the Swiss company PlanetSolar SA unveiled PlanetSolar, a floating test bed for renewable energy, during a ceremony held in Kiel, Germany. The $15-million catamaran measures 49 feet wide, 25 feet high and 102 feet long and weighs 94 tons. It is equipped with 5,380 square feet of photovoltaic solar panels, and its four motors run entirely on solar power (when it's cloudy out, energy stored in batteries powers the boat).

The designers purposely eschewed fuel-powered engines to emphasize the need to conserve global resources. The company's scientific coordinator and COO, Pascal Goulpié, hopes that its size and visibility-the boat will make a world tour next year-will inspire others to pursue alternative-energy ventures throughout the next decade.

The Cosmic Web of the Universe Nickolay Y. Gnedin, Nature, 435 (2 June 2005)

It took mankind centuries to map the Earth, and even with all of the indexed knowledge in the world behind it Google can't always figure out exactly where the nearest Pinkberry is. So one might imagine how even with the amazing leaps in technology over past decades, mapping the universe is no small undertaking. But a new technique could allow cosmic cartographers to map 500 times as much of the universal landscape as they have thus far at a fraction of the cost. Read more »

Hunting Massive Stars in the Large Magellenic Cloud ESO

When speaking of the cosmos, we like to attach really amazing modifiers to the phenomena we find there, prefixes like "super-" and "extra-" or adjectives like "massive" and "giant." So, having used up most of the good ones, we're not really sure how to describe the gargantuan (oh, that's a good one) star that European researchers just discovered with the ESO's Very Large Telescope; at 265 times the mass of our own sun, it is the largest star ever discovered, by more than 100 solar masses. That is to say: it's really, really big. Read more »

Concept Plane Airbus unveiled this 2030 concept plane at the 2010 Farnborough International Airshow. Airbus

So far, it's just an idea

Of all the aviation tech emerging from the Farnborough International Airshow, Airbus' futurist visions are among the coolest.

The aviation firm unveiled its 2030 Concept Plane earlier this week, which includes dreams of a self-cleaning cabin; extra-long, slim wings; a U-shaped tail; and an intelligent fuselage designed to improve efficiency. Read more »

Bird-Like Landing MIT researchers built a glider that can land like a bird. MIT

Move over, hovercraft. This airplane can perch, bird-style, on a power line.

Using computer algorithms, MIT researchers have designed a foam glider with a single motor on its tail that can perch like a bird. The work has implications for robotic planes, potentially allowing them to recharge their batteries by perching on power lines, according to MIT News.

Watch a bird careening through the trees, and you might wonder how it can suddenly stop and alight on a single branch. There are certainly no flying machines capable of such aerobatics.

It's because birds take advantage of a phenomenon called stall -- not a word you usually want to hear in aviation. Read more »

Trippy Medicine Ibogaine, derived from a plant root, acts on the brain's nicotine receptors to help alleviate cravings for alcohol and drugs like heroin. Courtesy Christopher Hansen/Clare S. Wilkins/Pangea Biomedics

Giving a heroin addict one of the most powerful psychedelic drugs seems like a bad idea. Yet that's exactly what a group of scientists will do this month. Ibogaine, they say, might be the best way to break drug addicts of their habit. Read more »

VSS Enterprise Taking a Spin with Mothership Eve Virgin Galactic

Virgin Galactic just released some nice video of its latest SpaceShipTwo (aka VSS Enterprise) test flight, the first with the spacecraft's two-pilot flight crew aboard. Read more »

The Sun Sets on Kazakhstan's Baikonur Cosmodrome

As conflicting visions for NASA's future continue to generate gridlock in Washington D.C., the Russians are investing $800 million in a new spaceport in the country's far eastern region. The spaceport, which will relieve the traffic at the Soviet-built Baikonur launch site in Kazakhstan, is aimed at fostering the growth of Russia's commercial space industry, and should be launching unmanned flights by 2015. Read more »

NASA Remains Adrift, Awaiting a Mandate from the Government

Meanwhile, Boeing unveils new renderings of its own CST-100 capsule, contracted to ferry passengers and cargo to the ISS

The U.S. Senate appeared to have cobbled together a compromise with the White House concerning NASA's immediate future as of late last week, but a new House Science Committee bill might undermine those dealings. The House proposal does not include an extra shuttle flight as the Senate compromise did, and it explicitly calls for a renewed commitment to develop the canceled Constellation program for deep space technologies like the Ares I rocket and the Orion crew capsule. Read more »

Quantum Time Travel Explained! Seth Lloyd et. al.

Looking to build a time machine but nervous about the classic grandfather paradox, aka the Marty McFly conundrum, aka the idea that you might unwittingly do something that causes you to never exist in the first place? An MIT professor and a few of his quantum quoting buddies have published a theory that allows for time travel while circumventing the grandfather paradox. All you need is a quantum teleportation device and a precise understanding of the idea of postselection--Flux Capacitor optional. Read more »

iSpace The iSpace smart apartment at the University of Essex, England, is a test bed for emerging smart-home technologies. University of Essex

And the creators are looking for volunteers to spend time in the house

Smart house tech is about to go a step beyond your average energy-efficiency monitoring systems. What about a house that prepares a fresh pot of coffee when you wake up, plays your favorite music without being told to, and sets the thermostat to your ideal setting? Now that's smart.

Smart-home researchers in the UK want to test systems that rely on "ambient intelligence" -- systems that can learn your preferences and behavior and adjust conditions accordingly, according to Greenbang, a London-based sustainability blog. Read more »

Cutting Emissions from Cows Annie Kavanagh via Wikimedia

UK researchers seeking to cut back on greenhouse gases have found a deliciously potent weapon for fighting agricultural methane emissions: curry. It turns out two spices customarily used to season curry dishes -- coriander and turmeric -- have an antibiotic effect in the stomachs of sheep and cows, killing methane-producing bacteria there. By spicing up animal feeds, farmers could reduce methane emissions from farms by up to 40 percent. Read more »

Month at the Museum Museum of Science + Industry

Has anyone ever told you -- maybe because of your Star Trek knowledge, your impressive gadget collection, or your propensity to use phrases like "quark-gluon plasma" -- that you belong in a museum?

Well, now you can, friends. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago would like to add you to its collection. Temporarily, anyway. The museum is sponsoring a contest to win a month's stay inside the museum, where you can spend quality time in the 14-acre site, hanging out in the submarine and in the cockpit of the United Airlines 727. Read more »

In order to create truly autonomous robots that can sustain themselves without human intervention, it's necessary to first create a way for them to fuel themselves. While engineering our 'bots to plug themselves into the wall is one solution, robotics researchers envision the androids of the future consuming waste and biomass to generate power to operate. To that end, researchers at Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK have created the first synthetic gut for use in self-sustaining robots. Read more »

A Rendering of Raytheon's Laser Weapon System A Raytheon-U.S. Navy team is working to add a solid-state laser to the Phalanx Close-in Weapon System. Raytheon

Raytheon revealed its next-gen directed energy weapon at the Farnborough Air Show today, releasing video showing its Laser Weapons System (LaWS) -- a six-laser weapon that focuses on a single target -- engaging and then destroying an unmanned aerial vehicle from the deck of a Navy vessel at sea. Read more »

Toasty iStock

Of all the bodies in our solar system, the sun is probably the one we want to give the widest berth. It gushes radiation, and even though its surface is the coolest part of the star, it burns at about 9,940°F, hot enough to incinerate just about any material. As such, there are no plans to send a manned mission in its direction anytime soon (Mars is much more interesting, anyway), but it can't hurt to figure out at what distance a person would want to turn back. You can get surprisingly close. The sun is about 93 million miles away from Earth, and if we think of that distance as a football field, a person starting at one end zone could get about 95 yards before burning up. Read more »

Good news for BitTorrent users -- a new MIT study says the nation's broadband network is in better shape than Uncle Sam thinks it is.

The Federal Communications Commission released a National Broadband Plan back in March, which included the frustrating and surprising statement that most Americans' broadband speed is half what service providers advertise.

But it might not be that bad after all, MIT researchers say -- most Internet measuring methods underestimate the speed of the access network. That's the part of the Internet ISPs actually control.

Slowness can often be attributed to home networks, users' computers, and ISP servers instead, say MIT scientists Steve Bauer, David Clark and William Lehr. Read more »

Terapixel Night Sky Microsoft's Terapixel project, part of Microsoft Research, stitched together more than 1,700 pairs of photographic plates from two powerful telescopes to create the clearest, largest night sky map yet. Microsoft

First they gave us a high-res tour of Mars -- now Microsoft has made the largest and clearest night-sky map ever. It's a terapixel image: 1,000 000,000,000 pixels.

The software giant's Terapixel project stitched together 1,791 pairs of red-light and blue-light plates from telescopes in California and Australia. The result is the map above, which covers the night sky of the northern and southern hemispheres. Read more »

Point, Click, Rescue This image shows an example mosaic generated by a search-and-rescue drone. The dotted circle shows where a dummy was dropped off in the Utah wilderness. A human operator spotted the "missing person," but the researchers are working on object-detection algorithms that would allow the drone to find the missing person. Brigham Young University

Unmanned drones could make searching for lost hikers much cheaper, faster and safer than using helicopters, according to researchers at Brigham Young University in Utah. They are turning drones, best known for their search-and-destroy capabilities, into search-and-rescue vehicles. Read more »

Atlantis Draws One Last Ride

Bill gives green light for a more ambitious NASA

A Senate committee vote this afternoon should keep the Space Shuttle Program alive for at least one more mission and grant NASA the leeway it wants to continue developing a heavy-lift rocket capable of carrying crews into deep space. The Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee unanimously approved the authorization bill earlier this afternoon, sending it up to the full Senate for review sometime in the near future. Read more »

Superconductors Mai-Linh Doan

The bright green energy future that surely awaits us exists in concept, but as we all know there are key pieces of technology that we still haven't quite figured out, like higher-capacity battery tech or better biofuel processing methods. Similarly, one of the key technology gaps hampering the U.S. energy grid is a lack of understanding regarding superconductors -- materials that can carry electricity with no energy loss. Now, DOE scientists may have cracked a critical part of the superconductor mystery, opening the door to a grid that can carry electrical current over great distances without drastic energy loss. Read more »

Aerial Rendering of Recylced Island Recycled Island Project

It's an ambitious recycling project to be sure, but Dutch visionaries want to turn the Pacific Garbage Patch into a self-sufficient, green island paradise that draws its resources from the ocean and the garbage floating therein. Read more »

Energy Secretary and National Genius Steven Chu Left: Chu considers getting scientific. Middle: Dubious Chu. Right: Chu dropping some serious science. Stand back, son! Stanford University, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Secretary of Energy is still publishing

A Nature paper co-authored by Steven Chu, Nobel laureate and Energy Secretary of the United States, describes a big breakthrough in the science of the very small: a method of optical microscopy that can image at resolutions as small as half a nanometer, a full order of magnitude smaller than the previous finest optical resolution. Read more »

The Persistence Of Memory A Polish study showed plants send electrochemical signals in a way that can be likened to an animal nervous system. This image shows chemical reactions in leaves that were not exposed to light; they are reacting to a chemical signal from a leaf that was exposed.
via BBC

In new study, cabbage relative remembers and responds to information

Plants are able to remember information and react to it, thanks to an internal communications system that can be likened to a central nervous system in animals, according to a new study by a Polish plant biologist.

Plants "remember" information about light, and a certain type of cell transmits that information, much like nerves do in animals. Read more »

Brammo Empulse Profile Bramo

Electric motorcycles no longer need be thought of as slow and boring. When the Brammo Empulse, successor to last year's Enertia, goes on sale early next year it'll be capable of reaching speeds in excess of 100 MPH with an average range of up to 100 miles.

Read more »

The Brightest X-ray Burst on Record NASA/Swift/Stefan Immler

NASA scientists have figured out what temporarily knocked out the X-ray detector on the agency's Swift space observatory earlier this summer: the strongest blast of X-rays ever recorded from beyond the Milky Way slammed into Swift unexpectedly, overwhelming the detector and puzzling mission handlers for a moment. But good luck sending a bill to the culprit for time lost; the X-rays were spawned 5 billion years ago during the violent explosion of a massive star as it turned into a black hole. Read more »

Chorus of Life A UK choir recently performed a new choral piece based on the singers' individual genetic codes. This photo at right is from a performance in Oxford July 9. Oxford Times

There's no doubt humans are a musical species, although whether there's a genetic basis for our musicality is still up for debate. A UK team put that question into literal terms Tuesday night in London.

Over the weekend, the New London Chamber Choir offered three performances of "Allele," a 20-minute, 40-part choral work in which the members sing their own genetic codes. Read more »

Stealth Paint New Israeli nanotech paint purportedly turns any airplane or missile into a stealth aircraft.

Some innovations in flight are huge; for instance, this week we've already seen concepts for a flying car and caught wind of the first fully-autonomous helicopter flight.

But other aviation innovations are as simple as a fresh coat of paint. An Israeli nanotech company is claiming that it has created a special paint that makes planes, missiles, drones, and other aircraft invisible to radar. Read more »

The Autonomous Boeing Little Bird Sanjiv Singh

An Army-funded research group at Carnegie Mellon University, working with engineers at Piasecki Aircraft Corporation, has made a huge leap forward -- or perhaps skyward -- for the future of autonomous flight. In mid-June, the team launched an unmanned helicopter and watched it land several minutes later, after negotiating an in-flight obstacle course. But unlike previous unmanned helo flights, this one required no human input whatsoever; for the first time ever, a full-sized helicopter made a fully autonomous flight. Read more »

Fermilab's Twitter Response

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory responds via Twitter to rumors that circulated earlier this week claiming its Tevatron accelerator may have discovered the elusive Higgs boson: "Let's settle this: the rumors spread by one fame-seeking blogger are just rumors. That's it."

And the search for the God particle continues.

Not that soldiers on the North Korean side of the demilitarized zone can read this tale of Western decadence, but if they could they would do well to take note: South Korea has deployed two $334,000 robotic sentries armed with automatic weapons and 40-millimeter grenade launchers along the tense border region bisecting the Korean peninsula.

The robots are fitted with surveillance equipment, tracking and voice recognition systems, and heat and motion detectors that can identify threats approaching from the other side. If they prove successful they could be deployed along the entire DMZ, augmenting South Korea's strong military presence already in place. Read more »

Tethys Voyager 1 photographed Saturn and two of its moons, Tethys (shown here) and Dione in November 1980. Shadows from Saturn's three bright rings and Tethys can be seen on the cloud tops on Saturn. NASA/JPL

Next time you're marveling at the fact that Spirit and Opportunity have been roving Mars for over six years now, ponder this: the two Voyager spacecraft have been hurtling through our solar system for nearly 33 years. Today, Voyager 1 hits a mission milestone of operating continuously for 12,000 days. The spacecraft launched on September 5, 1977, while Jimmy Carter was president, and has now traveled 14 billion miles. Read more »

The Terahertz Remote Detector Nature Photonics

If those new airport X-ray scanners offend your modest sensibilities, you may not want to read this. A new terahertz remote sensor may soon be able to see through walls, packaging materials, and even clothing from thousands of feet away, identifying materials contained inside through their unique spectral signatures.

Terahertz waves exist in the part of the spectrum between infrared and microwave light, but they were largely thought to be a dead end for remote sensing tech because they are absorbed and degraded by moisture in the air, making them highly unreliable at distances beyond just a few inches. Read more »

Armored Spacecraft Workers place the special radiation vault for NASA's Juno spacecraft onto the propulsion module. Juno's radiation vault has titanium walls to protect the spacecraft's electronic brain and heart from Jupiter's harsh radiation environment. NASA/Lockheed Martin

A satellite that will help scientists understand the solar system's largest planet is being outfitted with some special interplanetary armor.

The Juno spacecraft will study Jupiter's powerful radiation belt, but it has to be built to survive that radiation. Engineers recently added a special shield around the spacecraft's electronics, turning it into a Jovian armored tank, says its principal investigator, Scott Bolton, based at Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio. Read more »