The Picts were a group of people that lived in Scotland during the Late Iron Age. You're probably familiar with their signature artwork: highly stylized animals, beautiful spirals, and intricate knots, all carved into stone, or worked in metal. And it's one of the most famous and beautiful Pictish stones that National Museums Scotland wants you to put back together.
The Hilton of Cadboll Stone was carved between 700 and 800 AD. On one side (shown above) you can see a hunting scene. On the other side, researchers believe there may have been a cross. Sadly, the original carving on this side was chipped off, and then recarved as a headstone for someone. Excavations of the site have unearthed roughly 3000 fragments that are believed to be the original work. These have been digitally scanned, and put into a game called .
Your job is to try to match up these fragments to help reassemble the stone. The online puzzle uses WebGL, which is available on the latest versions of the Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari browsers.
For more information about how to play the puzzle game, be sure to watch the brief tutorial video at the Pictish Puzzle site, on the left hand side of the screen.
Chandra Clarke is a Webby Honoree-winning , a successful entrepreneur, and an author. Her book is available at Amazon. You can connect with her on Twitter .
The Arctic lakes in Svalbard, Norway are among of the most pristine, isolated bodies of water on the planet. But that doesn't mean they're empty.
In a published today in Science Advances researchers announced the discovery of previously unknown viruses.
Viruses are found basically everywhere. They are minuscule packages of RNA or DNA surrounded by a protein shell. While some viruses can cause devastating diseases in organisms (including humans), many don't. In this case, the Arctic viruses infect algae and protozoa living in the lake.
The researchers working on the project found that the DNA viruses were smaller than other DNA viruses, and speculate that it could be because a smaller size makes it easier to replicate in the frigid arctic waters. They also compared the new viruses to similar viruses found in freshwater and ocean environments all over the world, including the Sahara, Antarctica, aquaculture farms in North America, temperate locations in Europe, and the Arctic Ocean. They found that the viruses collected from the isolated lakes were most closely related to each other, but that there was a little bit of overlap with the Arctic Ocean as well.
Because these viruses can function so well in low temperatures, the researchers are interested to know if they could harness that ability for future technological applications. It's not a crazy idea. Plenty of amazing inventions, like , [ice proof coatings(http://www.popsci.com/iceproof-coating-airplanes-based-frogs-skin) and have been based on nature. Why not add viruses to the mix?
Armor can be light, durable, and effective, but rarely all three at the same time. New research from the University of Texas Austin has a new solution: a honeycomb shape, but one durable enough to reform after impact.
Man-made honeycomb structures used in armor are light: the majority of the space inside them is air. They’re also cheap, generally made from plastics. But the biggest problem with honeycomb shapes is that they’re only good once: a single impact can collapse the whole structure, and then it has to be replaced with a new one. That’s a frustrating flaw when it’s a car bumper or a football helmet, and potentially deadly if it’s in a soldier’s helmet or reinforcing part of a military vehicle.
UT Austin’s new approach is called a “negative stiffness” honeycomb. Instead of rigid hexagonal spaces, the grid is a series of cells, with cross beams and close-together parallel walls. When impacted, this honeycomb compacts, but then is strong enough to resume its original form after the compression is over. The honeycombs were made from nylon, but it’s the structure, not the material, that makes it a breakthrough.
Watch it compress and reform below:
Funding for the project came in part from the Department of Defense, who have some need for light, durable, impact-absorbing armor.
Under the paddle-like objects are the shrimp's clubs, which are thick and bludgeon-shaped.
Despite its segmented carapace, the mantis shrimp is known more for the punches it gives than the blows it takes. Related to the powerful pistol shrimp, the mantis is pound for pound one of the animal world’s deadliest pugilists. Researchers from the United States and Colombia have studied the mantis shrimp's clubs, and found a new structure that might make for strong armor in the future.
Mantis shrimp use their clubs to generate deadly pulses of water that batter and break prey. These clubs strike fast, moving at 75 feet per second, and accelerating through the water over 10,000 Gs. It has to withstand generating those forces over and over again, or else the shrimp would be unable to hunt for prey. That means the mantis shrimp has evolved an incredibly durable club, making it tougher than the armor of the crabs and clams which it hunts and then bashes to pieces.
The club itself is made of chitin, the same material that makes up the exoskeletons of other arthropod bodies. In the mantis shrimp’s club, the fibers are arranged in a “helicoidal” formation, like a . This shape helps to disperse the force of the strike, keeping the overall club durable.
Funding for the study came in part from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and its conclusions could lead to the creation of newer, stronger armor designed to resist stress. From :
Lessons from this study could provide relevant design guidelines for the fabrication of biomimetic impact-tolerant fiber-reinforced composite materials. Future work will focus on employing these models to make predictions and optimize composite designs for very specific applications.
Evaporation is one of the givens here on Earth, right up there with death and taxes. At any given moment, water is evaporating from the ground or oceans and entering the air in massive quantities.
Now, some researchers think they may have figured out a way to harness that process to create an endlessly renewable energy source. In a published today in Nature Communications scientists at Columbia announced that they had figured out a way to build an evaporation engine capable of producing power. The secret? Bacterial spores.
In nature, bacterial spores expand when exposed to water, and contract as they dry out, a simple movement that the researchers believed could be harnessed into a machine.
The researchers attached bacterial spores to a flexible tape, creating what they called hygroscopy driven artificial muscles (HYDRAs). When exposed to water or humid air, the spores expand, stretching out the tape. When they encounter something dry, the tape contracts, bunching up into curved shapes.
So what can these HYDRAs do?
They can lift weights:
Open weird flaps:
And even power a car:
Ok, it's a toy car, and it goes very slowly. But it is still awesome. Eventually the researchers hope that they or others can develop more powerful engines using similar techniques, paving the way for technologies in the future that run on nothing but water. As the researchers say in a video explaining their new technique, that possibility is
A re-mastered photo of Europa's surface. For more information, read Francie Diep's Story on the
What has lasers, a torpedo-shaped body, and is capable of tunneling where no one has tunneled before? VALKYRIE, one of the 'cryobots' that is paving the way towards exploring icy moons like Europa in the future.
Jupiter's moon Europa is considered a with a saltwater ocean buried under a thick crust of ice. Getting to the water from the surface is a difficult task, but some roboticists think they've found the answer in robots designed to function well in the cold--cryobots, for short.
Concept art of VALKYRIE cryobot from Stone Aerospace
Stone Aerospace
As reports, one group testing cryobots is Stone Aerospace, which developed the VALKYRIE (Very deep Autonomous Laser-powered Kilowatt-class Yo-yoing Robotic Ice Explorer) and has been testing it ever since, hoping that one day it will join a Europa mission. VALKYRIE (not to be confused with another NASA ) cuts through the ice with lasers, creating stable tunnels that she can slide through.
This summer, VALKYRIE will be tested again at the Matanuska glacier in Alaska, where it last summer. This summer it will be testing an instrument that can hunt for microbes beneath the glacier's surface, a technology that would be vitally important to finding life on Europa.
The first mission to Europa will likely be the Europa Clipper, launching sometime in the 2020s. Instead of landing on the surface, or drilling underneath the ice, it will stay aloft, making excursions into the moon's atmosphere. There will still be to search for signs of life. And who knows, the mission after that might be equipped with a cryobot, which can dig a little deeper into Europa's surface.
VALKYRIE will have some competition though. Stone Aerospace is also testing ARTEMIS, a robot that will be tested in Antarctica this fall, joining a growing crowd of autonomous vehicles , and other teams are working on lamprey-like that could explore Europa's oceans.
Nineteenth-century physiologist Charles Richet first used the term ectoplasm to describe a strange material that seemed to flow from spiritual mediums during a séance. Doughy strings appeared to ooze from their bodies and assemble into ghostly faces or disembodied limbs.
Of course, these ectoplasms were a parlor trick. Mediums used sleights of hand to present gauze and animal parts as spiritual phenomena. As silly as this now seems, many intellectuals of the time found the shows convincing, including Richet, who won a Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on anaphylaxis. “Richet was no dummy,” says Robert Brain, a historian of science at the University of British Columbia. Yet Richet was dogged in his studies of paranormal ectoplasm. “What made ectoplasm seem plausible to otherwise rational, clear-headed scientists?” Brain asks. “There had to be an underlying logic to it.”
He’s right. By the mid-1800s, scientists had discovered a gelatinous substance or “plasm” inside plant and animal cells, which they believed to be the basis for all life on Earth. “Biologists were actively interested in protoplasm for 100 years,” Brain says. The concept was mainstream.
With this in mind, it might not have seemed so strange for the body to extrude plasm under exceptional circumstances. Or for that external protoplasm--called ectoplasm--to change form. Eventually modern molecular biology revealed that heredity is stored not in the vibrations of a cell’s jiggly plasm but in the acids of its nucleus. At that point, “protoplasm became an embarrassment to biology,” Brain says.
This article was originally published in the of Popular Science.
Prop styling by Sarah Guido-Laakso for Halley Resources
It’s tempting to imagine the brain as a biological computer, with the tissue as hardware and electrical activity as software. If that were the case, mind transference might be technically feasible (albeit ethically fraught), at least pending the development of some extremely advanced electrode arrays. Extricating mind from matter, though, can’t be done. “The self is in the structure,” says Charles Higgins, a University of Arizona neuroscientist and electrical engineer. “It’s in the interconnection of 100 billion neurons, and in the individual shape of neurotransmitters and receptors.” Even if surgeons could successfully transplant a brain, they would have to transfer the spinal cord as well, or risk stripping the subject of a lifetime of muscle memory.
One workaround, says Higgins, could involve cloning. A clone with a structurally identical central nervous system could perhaps be stimulated with electrical signals that mimic the original. However, human cloning is itself still the stuff of science fiction, and neuroscientists have so far mapped the connections between only about 100,000 neurons at once--the equivalent of a worm or fish brain.
Mind Transfer
Focus Features
Self/less comes out July 10
What scientists can do today is rewire the brain in situ. For example, Columbia University researchers implanted deep-brain stimulators in people with severe treatment-resistant depression. When they sent electrical impulses to precise areas, the patients’ symptoms instantly diminished. After two years, one person reported that her depression had disappeared completely. As scientists stimulate more patients’ brains, they could unlock other possibilities. “We might accidentally discover, as we’re trying to stop someone’s epileptic seizure, that we can stimulate a pattern in the visual cortex to create a memory,” says Higgins.
So body-hopping immortality is off the table. But with enough time, and a lot of experimentation, humans might find a way to load memories and learn skills like characters in The Matrix.
This article was originally published in the of Popular Science, as part of our Weird Science feature. .
Terminator Genisys comes out July 1; Tomorrowland comes out May 22
In movies, robots typically masquerade as humans in order to infiltrate society and annihilate us. In real life, researchers are more concerned about the damage androids could inflict on our minds. Alan Winfield, a roboticist at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the U.K., says we need rules for how lifelike a robot can appear--even those built to work as companions or caregivers. “It’s unethical to build a robot that looks like a human but is not much smarter than a washing machine,” he says. “It’s a deception.”
Humans are “pathological anthropomorphizers,” Winfield says. And that puts us at risk of becoming emotionally attached to a machine that can’t reciprocate. It’s the sci-fi equivalent of a one-sided friendship (or, possibly, robomance) with all of the corresponding social costs. When Winfield and his colleagues drafted ethical guidelines for creating robots in 2010, they included a restriction on deceptive systems. A robot’s appearance, they wrote, should expose its mechanical form. “You should always be able to pull the curtain aside to reveal the machine,” says Winfield, “just like Toto did in The Wizard of Oz.”
Others are not so sure. Karl MacDorman, an Indiana University roboticist who specializes in human-robot interaction, says robotic companionship can be therapeutic. “With elderly people, the biggest concern is the three D’s--dementia, delirium, and depression,” he says. Robotic pets have been shown to elevate mood and decrease stress in the elderly in Japan; an android could likewise reduce the social isolation that’s believed to exacerbate the three D’s. MacDorman agrees that humanlike bots could interfere with our social instincts. But if the alternative to a fake friend is debilitating loneliness, perhaps a dose of deception is just what tomorrow’s doctors should prescribe.
This article was originally published in the of Popular Science, as part of our Weird Science feature. .
In truth, galactic cosmic rays (GCR) don’t bestow otherworldly abilities. Their gift is an increased risk of cancer. While this isn’t a concern within Earth’s magnetosphere, which deflects radiation, astronauts on a mission to Mars could hit NASA’s cumulative, career-long radiation limit in as few as 150 days. It could take up to 260 days to reach the Red Planet, let alone return. According to Kerry Lee, operations lead of NASA’s Space Radiation Analysis Group, there’s no easy solution to this problem. Adding multiple layers of armorlike passive shielding might work, but it would make a spacecraft too massive to launch.
Lee’s favored approach is to surround the ship with a protective magnetic field. But the superconducting magnets would need to be kept colder than space itself, requiring a huge amount of power. And while nuclear reactors could supply that energy, they also emit radiation themselves. Ultimately, NASA might have to patch together various partial solutions. “Maybe the answer isn’t to shield the crew completely, but to use a small shield in addition to faster propulsion,” says Lee. Astronauts might sleep behind physical barriers, work within a limited magnetic field, and spend less time in transit in order to reduce their overall GCR exposure. Whatever design NASA lands on doesn’t have to be as elegant as its sci-fi equivalents. It just has to work.
This article was originally published in the of Popular Science, as part of our Weird Science feature. .
Once again, Popular Science has teamed up with the to issue a challenge: Can you visualize a scientific idea, concept, or story in an arresting way? If so, submit your work to the 2016 Vizzies! You can enter over on the . The competition has five categories: photography, illustration, posters and graphics, interactive, and video, which should cover just about every way to communicate science visually.
We’re accepting submissions through September 15, at 11:59 p.m. Pacific time. After that, our panel of scientific and visualization experts choose the winners. Finalists appear online for a global people’s choice vote. Winners—both the people’s choices and the experts’ choices—will be featured in Popular Science and get cash prizes.
Need a little inspiration? Here are . They include a revealing X-ray of a tortoise and chemistry way more winsome than the typical science-class experiments. Plus, a number of last year’s winners and finalists were chosen for an exhibit last month at the , displayed on big digital screens at the National Museum of Heath and Medicine in Chicago:
Michael Doyle
Finalists from the 2015 Vizzies competition, on display at the Chicago Science Festival in late May
A mile beneath Italy’s Gran Sasso mountain lies the DarkSide-50 detector. The three-story cylinder was built to search for our universe’s most mysterious substance: . “We know it exists in our galaxy and roughly how much there is,” says Princeton physicist Peter Meyers. “What we don’t know is what it is.” The most promising lead is --weakly interacting massive particles. If they do exist, these theoretical particles should drift through the walls of DarkSide-50’s three nested tanks and collide with atoms of liquid argon at its core. The argon atoms would then recoil like billiard balls and emit light, providing proof of WIMPs and bringing us closer to figuring out dark matter’s elusive identity.
100,000: Number of WIMPs scientists think pass through every square centimeter of Earth each second
This article was originally published in the of Popular Science.
Scientists Zahra Bagheri and Benjamin Cazzolato, and robot.
The University of Adelaide
Some robots of the future will see the world through the eyes of insects. In a study published this week in , researchers have developed software that lets machines track moving objects with the same precision as dragonflies.
Although dragonflies have puny brains and vision with extremely low resolution, they are still able to catch prey with greater than 95 percent accuracy against oft-cluttered backgrounds such as swarms of other insects. What’s more, they can do this while flying upwards of 60 miles-per-hour.
The robot the researchers are developing will look more like a yellow Tonka truck than a flying insect, but what’s important is that its vision system could be used in the future for such things as smart cars, bionics and surveillance, said Zahra Bagheri, the lead author of the study.
“There are so many labs in the world that are developing animal-like robots,” she said. “It’s the algorithm that interests us.”
To get the data needed for the algorithm, Bagheri’s team first identified a set of neurons in dragonfly brains that specifically track tiny moving objects, which give the insects' their incredible abilities to follow and intercept prey. In the lab, the researchers plucked the wings from dragonflies and drilled a tiny hole into its head where they could put an electrode onto the neurons. In a method analogous to the rehabilitation scene from A Clockwork Orange, the researchers placed the dragonflies in front of a monitor and showed them different stimuli while they recorded data from the neurons.
The researchers found that the dragonfly’s ability to filter out noise helps them track targets moving along continuous trajectories, Bagheri said. She compared this method of filtering stimuli to people who are deep sleepers.
“You might be someone with a deeper sleep or someone who has a light sleep,” said Bagheri. “The one with the deeper sleep allows them not to wake up to everything, only their alarm. The light sleeper might wake up to any kind of stimuli.”
Dragonflies also have an “active gaze control” where their eyes are fixed, and they can only rotate their heads. This forces it to keep its target within five degrees from its central view. This was an integral part of the tracking algorithm that Bagheri and her team created.
"Instead of just trying to keep the target perfectly centered on its field of view, our system locks on to the background and lets the target move against it," she said
The researchers tested how good their algorithm was at tracking motion by making it analyze moving targets in a virtual simulation of the outside world. They took photos of nature scenes around Adelaide, Australia, and used a computer to stitch them together into a cylinder-shaped panorama. Then, they made their algorithm track objects moving in a three-dimensional space, a kind of virtual dragonfly’s eye. The results were encouraging: their algorithm was 20 times faster than other similar programs at locating a target in a cluttered environment. The robot that will use this vision system might be completed in the next few months, said Bagheri.
Emulating the vision of insects isn’t new to the field of robotics. In a , researchers created a curved robotic eye that would produce a mosaic effect like that of the eyes of fruit flies, giving it a large field of vision and excellent motion detecting capabilities. And just last March, a used a vision system based off that of bees to help visually gauge its position and stay level with uneven terrain, without using a large accelerometer.
, chemist at National Institute for Medical Research
MRC National Institute for Medical Research, via Wikimedia Commons
Tim Hunt is a nobel-prize-winning biochemist, with an apparently well-earned reputation of chauvinism. Speaking to a conference of science journalists earlier this week, “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls … three things happen when they are in the lab … You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.” That’s an absurd, sexist thing to say, and the subsequent outcry on Twitter was immediate and vast.
Under the hashtag #DistractinglySexy, women scientists, engineers, researchers, and lab workers have all taken to social media, uploading pictures of themselves in lab-appropriate gear doing science. Tim Hunt responded to the outcry by apologizing for giving the remarks in front of a crowd of journalists, and then .
In contrast to Hunt’s remarks, the tweets under the hashtag offer an alternative, inclusive, and affirming vision of what labs can be like and how science should strive to be. Read some tweets below:
Clean, drinkable water is unfortunately out of reach for hundreds of millions of people around the world, contributing to a vicious cycle of poverty and disease. People who have to spend large amounts of time finding safe water to drink don't have time for other things like education or work, and contaminated water often harbors deadly diseases. But there is hope, in the form of , , and an ancient Egyptian seed.
In ancient Egypt, people used the crushed seeds of the Moringa oleifera tree to clear up cloudy water. Scientists that a protein in the seeds kills bacteria by gathering them into clusters which sink to the bottom of the container.
In a in Langmuir, researchers at Penn State announced that they'd solved a piece of the puzzle: how the protein kills the bacteria. It seems to fuse the membranes of the bacteria together. Membranes are designed to protect a cell, so when those defenses are breached, it's bad news for the bacteria.
Clean Water
The bottle on the left has been treated with crushed seeds, which cause the bacteria to clump together and die.
The researchers also worked out the best time to harvest the seeds. Until now, harvesting the seeds at the peak of their useful protein was guesswork. People knew that seeds harvested at different times had different abilities to clean water, but the differences hadn't been quantified. The new research found that the proteins were at their strongest cleaning ability when harvested as mature seeds during the rainy season.
Eventually, the scientists hope that the seeds can be grown and harvested in areas where they are most needed. Other parts of the plant are edible, making it useful for not only cleaning water, but providing a nutritious source of food for communities.
As anyone who has experienced the devastation of spilling a glass of water on their laptop knows, H2O and computers don't mix. Almost equally as bad? Magnets. Both are terrible, horrible, no-good computer killing substances... which is why it was kind of a surprise to learn about a brand new computer built using water droplets and an electromagnet.
A 'computer' is a that can follow a program or list of instructions. This computer, announced in a published this week in Nature Physics, doesn't process information, however, like electronic computers do today. Instead, it can manipulate tiny droplets of water.
"Droplets are fascinating material, because they are a little bag, you can put anything you want in it" Manu Prakash, a bioengineer at Stanford who designed the computer along with his students.
In this case, Prakash and his team put tiny amounts of into the water droplets, and placed them on a tiny metal maze about the size of a stamp. The metal bars act as pathways along which the magnetic drops can travel--a movement that is equivalent to the patterns of ones and zeros that make up computer code today.
The hope is that one day, those tiny droplets could act like , analyzing chemicals or biological components more quickly and more easily than any current lab technology.
There are plans to release the design of this physical computer to the public, but in the meantime, to see machine in action, watch the Stanford team's video below:
