Vein Identification

Another technology innovation is the biometric identification and security device known as PalmSecure.
It works by identifying the vein pattern in the palms of our hands.
Similar to our fingerprints, vein patterns are unique to each individual. The purported advantages of this technology is that it is less expensive, easier to manage, and is more reliable than traditional methods of identification.

A House that Walks

A new prototype house walked around the campus of the Wysing Arts Centre in Cambridgeshire, England.
The eco-friendly house is powered by solar cells and minature windmills, and comes with a kitchen, a composting toilet, a system for collecting rain water, one bed, a wood stove for CO2 neutral heating, a rear opening that forms a stairway entrance, and six legs.
house-invention A collaborative effort between MIT and the Danish design collective N55, the house walks about five kilometers an hour similar to the walking speed of a human.
The legs reguire a software algorithm to calculate the movement and position of the legs to provide stability over varying terrain.
The house can turn, move forward or backwards, or change height as required and can be programmed with GPS waypoints for travelling to destinations.

Curing Brain Diseases by Growing New Cells

Scientists are getting closer to reaching one of the Holy Grails of medical research -- regenerating brain cells to wipe out a wide range of neurological diseases, including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and epilepsy.
"We're not there yet," said Dennis Steindler, executive director of the McKnight Brain Institute at the University of Florida and one of the leaders of the global effort.
Steindler's group has reached a milestone that has set off a buzz throughout the world of regenerative medicine. It suggests that some time in the not-too-distant future scientists might be able to remove a few stem cells from the brain of a person suffering from a neurological disease, then produce a bucket full of new brain cells to replace those destroyed by the disease.
And ultimately, the research may point the way toward new drugs that will reset the chemistry in a diseased brain to make it produce the cells it needs to recover.

"We may not have to drill a hole in anybody's head at all," says Steindler. "We may be able to use drugs instead."
He and his colleagues have used chemicals to coax stem cells from the brain of an adult mouse to make other cells that, in turn, make brain cells, or neurons. Stem cells are primitive cells that develop into specialized cells, like neurons.

Blueprints to 'Neuron Factories?'

What distinguishes the Florida researchers is their ability to monitor every change along the way.
They also record the chemical and electrical activity during each change, and that has given them a comprehensive image of exactly where the process starts, how it changes, and the end results.
"We have a fingerprint of what the cell looks like, and what all of its children look like en route to making lots of new brain cells,'' he says. "That has never been done before."

What they have ended up with, he says, are "neuron-generating factories."
At this point, all this action occurs in a petri dish, and while other researchers have created brain cells in the lab, no one else has been able to document every event as thoroughly, thus shedding new light on how the process works.
"It's like an assembly line," says Bjorn Scheffler, a neuroscientist at the university and a member of the team. "We can basically take these cells and freeze them until we need them. Then we thaw them, begin a cell-generating process, and produce a ton of new neurons."

The researchers reported their findings in the June 13 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Optimism Abounds

The research so far involves cells from the brain of a mouse, but Steindler thinks it won't be hard to move from mice to humans.

"I don't think it's going to be difficult at all," he says. Of course, as so often is the case, what works for mice may not work at all for humans, but it's clear that Steindler is having a tough time keeping his optimism in check.

Here's how he was quoted in an Irish publication:

"I'm quite optimistic we will translate this to human therapeutics in the very near future. Because advances in the field of regenerative medicine are occurring so quickly at the moment, it could be anytime. It could be next week, it could be 10 years. I'd like it to be next week."

During my interview he was less specific:

"I hope it is pretty quick."

Other scientists not associated with the research say that if further experiments confirm the findings, it could be very, very important.

Samsung shows off new flexible display technology, Bill Clinton appears as guest

Samsung’s aiming to make smartphone tech a little less rigid with the introduction of new, flexible screens that can be used in smartphones and tablets to make them more resilient.
In the keynote presentation at the tConsumer Electronics Show, Samsung device head Stephen Woo and lab lead Brian Berkeley showed off bendable, rollable, foldable displays with several concept devices. The flexible screens, which Samsung has branded as Youm, are designed to have displays as rich and crisp as current smartphones, but with more options for form factors.
In one example, CNET noted, the screen bends around the edge of the device to display information on the side of it, similar to the information on the side of a book. More broadly, flexible screen technology could help improve the resilience of consumer technology devices and make them even more portable.

What A Giant Solar Eruption Would Do To Earth

Before the Impact-Coronal Mass Ejection

Ejection

The sun regularly releases bubbles of gas particles called coronal mass ejections. Many CMEs hurtle harmlessly through space, but about 30 collide with Earth every year, many glancing off its atmosphere. A direct hit from a very large CME is a one-in-100-year event.

In Transit

CMEs travel at up to six million miles per hour and can reach Earth in as little as 18 hours. As they move through space, CMEs produce shock waves that can damage satellites, and their high-energy proton radiation increases astronauts' risk of cancer.

Collision

How the CME strikes the planet's electromagnetic shield determines how disastrous the storm will be. If its magnetic field is parallel with the Earth's, the planet's shield will replace repel it. But if its magnetic field is aligned opposite the Earth's, the two magnetic fields connect, which allows the CME's charged particles to enter the atmosphere

When The Sun Unleashed Its Recent Plasma Blast, Earth Got Lucky

On Tuesday, the biggest solar flare in four years erupted from the sun, sending a mass of charged particles hurtling towards Earth. NASA announced that it was an M-2 (medium-sized) flare and an S1-class (minor) radiation storm. The electromagnetic pulse it induced created amazing auroras, but it could also damage satellites and radio communications.

Space Tourism's Black Carbon Problem

irgin Galactic proudly touts the fact that each of the passengers who will fly into sub-orbital space on its SpaceShip2 will emit less carbon dioxide than a typical air passenger on a flight from New York to London. But some scientists say carbon dioxide emissions are irrelevant to measuring the greenhouse gas footprint of the nascent space tourism industry. The big threat from the scaling-up of space travel, they say, comes from something called black carbon—a type of particulate matter that, when hurled into the stratosphere, builds up for years, absorbing visible light from the sun. According to one study, black carbon emitted into the stratosphere by rockets would absorb 100,000 times as much energy as the CO2 emitted by those rockets.
"There's one issue and it's simple: you don’t want to put black carbon in the stratosphere. Period," says Darin Toohey, a professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Industry insiders say otherwise. Who’s right?
***
Black carbon should be familiar to anyone who’s ever idled behind a diesel truck or sat by a wood stove: it’s what makes soot black. Formed from the incomplete combustion of fossil fuel, biofuel, and biomass, it is emitted directly into the atmosphere and absorbs about a million times more energy than CO2. According to one study, it is Earth’s second largest contributor to climate change, after carbon dioxide. The reason black carbon doesn’t wreak more havoc on the environment is that it has a short lifetime in the lower atmosphere—precipitation washes away black carbon emissions from planes and other sources within a matter of weeks.
Not so in the stratosphere, which begins as low as 5 miles above the Earth and rises up to about 31 miles. Rockets need to scream through the stratosphere to the point 62 miles above the sea level, where space is conventionally said to begin. They are also the only direct source of human-created compounds above 12 miles. Because there is no rain or other atmospheric factors to wash out the black carbon in the stratosphere, black carbon would linger for 5 to 10 years or more. Moroever, rockets produce over 1,000 times more black carbon per unit of fuel than standard aircraft.
So in 2010, Toohey and Martin Ross, the head of the Center for Launch Emissions Analysis and Research at Aerospace Corporation, and Michael Mills of the National Center for Atmospheric Research,crunched the numbers to estimate the black carbon effects of a hypothetical 1,000 flight-per-year industry. They measured the black carbon's "radiative forcing" – a metric for how much extra energy the Earth and its atmosphere absorb from a given manmade or natural phenomena. The radiative forcing from the black carbon that rockets placed in the stratosphere was up to 100,000 times greater than that of the CO2 released by the rockets. (In contrast, the radiative forcing of the black carbon placed for just a few weeks into the atmosphere by jets is less than 1/10 of that of its carbon dioxide). How this extra heat in the stratosphere would effect climate is less clear, but it would definitely cause some climate change – both warming and cooling. The computer model showed a complicated pattern in which a ring-shaped cloud of black carbon would form at the latitude of the launch site, leading to shade that would cause cooling there, with corresponding warming in other places. Polar regions warmed or cooled by up to 5 degrees, depending on the season. The heating also caused ozone to radiate throughout the stratosphere, causing lower levels in some places and increases in others. The point of the study was not to say a warmer stratosphere is disastrous, but rather that 1,000 launches per year will have a significant climate change effect – and that the industry should have to study and explain the implications. After all, proposals to doctor the climate by deliberately injecting particles into the atmosphere have generated international outcry. Without meaning to, and without fully understanding the effects, Ross says, a growing space tourism industry will function like an experiment in engineering the climate. “At some point, the particles put into the stratosphere by rockets begin to look at little bit like geo-engineering,” says Ross.
***
Here’s where space tourism comes into play: The number of space launches annually around the world numbers around 70 today, but that figure could rise drastically, as private companies jockey to turn space tourism into routine adventure travel. The aerospace research firm Futron forecasts that by 2021 the space tourism market will consist of 13,000 potential customers, with possible revenues of roughly $650 million per year. Assuming the business is successful, commercial space travel might very well reach 1,000 launches per year some time in the next decade – XCOR alone plans to ramp up to four launches per day, as part of its "Southwest airlines" model. That creates 1,000 opportunities to shoot black carbon directly into the stratosphere. The amount of black carbon emitted during combustion on Earth, or in the trophosphere, where airlines fly, tends to be low, because of the relatively rich supply of oxygen. Once you get into the stratosphere, where low pressure leads to less oxygen, black carbon can amount to as much as 5% of the products of combustion.

The Federal Aviation Administration (F.A.A.), the organization responsible for assessing environmental impacts and deciding whether to grant licenses to launch vehicles into space, says the effects of black carbon in the stratosphere are unclear. “Although black carbon is known to be a short-term climate forcer, research on the potential climate change impacts of black carbon from rockets is in a very early stage, and any projections of impacts are speculative,” writes George Nield, the F.A.A.’s associate administrator for commercial space transportation, in an email.
The space-tourism industry has downplayed black carbon’s potential harm. Virgin Galactic declined repeated inquiries to comment. Andrew Nelson, the chief operating officer of XCOR Aerospace, which is currently selling $95,000 tickets for sub-orbital flights, says that the blend of kerosene and liquid oxygen in his XR-5K18 rocket engine powering its Lynx suborbital spaceplane will emit much less in the way of “aromatic” hydrocarbons than traditional kerosene-based rocket fuel. And he says the XR-5K18 will burn much more cleanly than the solid rocket boosters used in the Space Shuttle or “hybrid” rocket engines, which burn both solid and liquid propellant.
“XCOR will have di minimus impact on our environment,” Nelson says. “Our fuels are almost completely free of particulate matter. [They have ] 20-40 times less aromatics than traditional rocket fuels, and hundreds, if not thousands of times less particulate matter than hybrids or solids. So the concern about carbon or other particles is moot for us.”
Toohey still wants to see peer-reviewed studies of the actual interaction of XCOR and other engines with the stratosphere. “I have not seen any publications that confirm (or refute) the claims of particle-free emissions from combustion of any fuel in the upper atmosphere,” Toohey says. “So I think it is fair to say that we need studies to benchmark the emissions of all rocket types in order to be able to assess their impacts.”

How It Works- The Earthquake Machine

The fundamentals of earthquake mechanics are simple: Pieces of rock slip past one another along a fault to release pent-up energy. Some of that energy ripples outward, causing seismic waves that shake the earth. But how long it takes and exactly how the energy dissipates has remained elusive. To discern these processes, researchers recently built a machine at the University of Oklahoma to mimic what happens inside the earth’s crust. Two slabs of rock, ground against each other by a 500-pound flywheel, simulate fault stresses to provide data on the energetics of a tremor. “Most of the energy seems to go into heating, and some goes into grinding up material,” says David Lockner, a geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Surve in Menlo Park, California. “What we’re all familiar with—the energy that is radiated as ground shaking—ends up being 10 percent or less.” Lockner says that understanding how an earthquake’s energy evolves over time will help engineers design better earthquake-resistant structures.

BUILD ENERGY

The heart of the apparatus is a flywheel, a device that stores energy mechanically by spinning at high speeds. It’s driven by a 100hp motor that can reach 3,300 rpm within ¹/₁₀ of a second. The flywheel connects to a central shaft.
An additional shaft connects the clutch to a four-inch-diameter cylindrical block of granite or dolomite, which spins in sync with the flywheel. Researchers use the granite and dolomite as proxies for rocks in the Earth’s crust.
Sensors next to and within the rock monitor how the material deforms, grinds, and heats up during the simulation [see inset, above]. For example, infrared sensors and thermocouples measure rock temperature, while other sensors measure how fast the rock spins.

MODEL THE FAULT

To model earthquakes of varying magnitude, researchers start by spinning the flywheel at a given speed; a faster flywheel means a bigger quake. The researchers then disengage it from the motor, letting the flywheel spin on its own stored power.
Immediately afterward, the clutch engages, and the attached block of granite starts to spin. It grinds into a stationary block of rock positioned above. Where both rocks meet is the experimental fault.
At the experimental fault, the spinning rock transfers some of its kinetic energy to the stationary one, and they begin to grind and slip past each other—an earthquake in miniature.

Hiroshima Visualized

In the whole of human history thus far, nuclear weapons have been used in anger exactly twice. Sixty-eight years ago today an American B-29 bomber named Enola Gay dropped Little Boy, the first atomic bomb ever used in war, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Between 90,000 and 166,000 people were killed by the bomb, some in the initial blast and others later through radiation poisoning. The scale of devastation is hard to comprehend.
Mathew Lucas's Hiroshima infographics present the information abstractly. Lucas, a graphic designer based in Macclesfield, England, told Popular Science he "wanted the work to highlight not just the the dropping of the Atom Bomb but the factors leading up to the event, the event itself and the countries involved in the process." The first, above, is a timeline of sorts. Dozens of lines--each representing a historical event leading up to the dropping of the first bomb, from Wilhelm Röntgen's discovery of x-rays in 1895 to the first plutonium reprocessing in 1945--all shoot upwards from a single source. This very deliberately mirrors the rising smoke of a mushroom cloud. The second, below, features a line for every person killed by the blast, using the first-obtained casualty figures at respective distances from the blast. These rings also resemble the Enola Gay's targeting reticle.  The final image covers the globe in lines from bomb development sites until they converge on Hiroshima. It's designed to mirror the Uranium-235 atom, which was used in the bomb.

Union Soldiers Fired This Primitive Machine Gun During The Civil War

Yesterday in 1866, the U.S. Army adopted machine guns for the first time. Or, well, almost machine guns: the Gatling gun, first patented in 1862, wasn't fully mechanical. Someone still had to crank it by hand make the gun fire. In an era of warfare remembered for muskets and bayonets, the Gatling gun was a terrifying leap forward.
How it worked: The shooter turns a crank, which pushes a firing pin into a loaded, ready barrel at the top of the gun. When the firing pin sets off the bullet, the next barrel moves into place and the just-fired barrel moves toward the ground, where it drops the spent bullet casing. Then, the turning motion brings the barrel up to a hopper of ammunition, where the next shot is loaded into the barrel. A firing pin then connects with the bullet in the newly loaded barrel, and the gun fires. This happens for all six barrels, as fast as the crank can be turned—up to 200 shots per minute. (Here"s a helpful animation of this process.)
Pictured above is the patent for an improved version of the gun made in 1865. This is the version first officially adopted by the U.S. Army, though technically not the first used. That distinction goes to the1862 model. During the Civil War, Major General Benjamin Butler purchased a dozen for his forces and used them fighting near Petersburg, Va.
While Gatling guns didn't change the outcome of the Civil War (unlike some technology that certainly could have), they played a major part in the colonial wars of the next 50 years. During that time, the maxim gun appeared, a true machine gun that replaced Gatling guns by the start of World War I.
Musing on the Maxim gun's role in colonial wars, British poet Hilaire Belloc quipped "Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim gun, and they have not." The bloodiness of WWI, with tens of thousands dying in single days while charging machine guns, is in no small part a result of this evolution in weaponry.

Zap Away Would-Be Attackers With This 3800kv Anti-Rape Bra

In the wake of a highly publicized series of brutal rapes in India, a group of engineering students devised a way to help women deter sexual assault: Make their underwear a weapon.
Manisha Mohan, a 20-year-old student at SRM University in Chennai, developed an undergarment called the "Society Harnessing Equipment" or SHE, with two of her friends in response to the December gang rape of a 23-year-old student in Delhi.
The white nightgown's bra area is lined with pressure sensors calibrated to differentiate between more violent actions like squeezing, pinching or grabbing as opposed to say, hugging. Women can switch the garment on when they feel they might be unsafe. If the pressure sensor is activated, SHE sends a 3800kv electric shock through the garment, up to 82 times. The wearer is insulated from the shock by a polymer lining on the inner side.
It's also designed to alert others of the danger by sending a text message to a family member or friend and to the police with the wearer's GPS location.
The team is still working out a few kinks, like figuring out how to make it machine washable, and Mohan told the BBC they'd like to make the electronics smaller and link them to a smartphone app through Bluetooth.

FYI- Can I Buy The Moon?

For now at least, the moon is like the sea: everyone can use it, but no one can own it. In 1967 the U.S. and the Soviet Union negotiated the Outer Space Treaty, which states that no nation can own a piece of the moon or an asteroid. “You have a right to go up and take the lunar soil, but you don’t have any right to draw a square on the surface of the moon and say, ‘That square is mine,’” says Stephen E. Doyle, a retired lawyer who served as NASA’s Deputy Director of Internal Affairs. If the Space Settlement Institute—which lobbies for private industry to develop land on other planets—has its way, new laws will allow space colonists to stake moon claims and start a colony.
Alan Wasser, the Space Settlement Institute’s chairman, says that a private company should build a “spaceline,” similar to an airline, between the Earth and moon. And because a corporation is not a nation, the Outer Space Treaty would not apply. Corporations have settled new worlds before. The London Company was a joint stock enterprise that established the Jamestown Settlement in 1607,providing transportation to pioneers in return for seven years of labor in America, where they cultivated tobacco and other crops for the company’s profit.

Wasser says that land ownership—and the promise of profits based on it—is a necessary incentive to invest in space settlement. He is lobbying for legislation that would commit the U.S. government to honor future moon claims. But anyone can buy a deed to land on the moon right now. The Lunar Registry (“Earth’s leading lunar real-estate agency”) sells such deeds on its website for about $20 an acre. Doyle says that some kind of lunar governing body is necessary to recognize and enforce property rights, but no such body exists. So as it stands, the claims are not much more than fancy pieces of paper.
Doyle says that future moon settlers could look to the Antarctic Treaty, which designates the continent as a scientific preserve and prohibits military activity or mining; 28 countries maintain research stations subject to review by the Council of Managers of National Antarctic Programs, which oversees best practices of scientific research on the continent. “Anybody who understands the implications of imposing a national law on celestial bodies,” Doyle says, “understands we are better to treat it like Antarctica and the high seas than we are to treat it like Manhattan.” If not, he says, we would “take all the problems and contests we’ve had on the surface of the Earth for 5,000 years and extend them to outer space.

FYI- Can Anything Move Faster Than Light?

Yes, the universe itself will eventually outpace the speed of light. Just how this will happen is a bit complicated, so let’s begin at the very beginning: the big bang. Around 14 billion years ago, all matter in the universe was thrown in every direction. That first explosion is still pushing galaxies outward. Scientists know this because of the Doppler effect, among other reasons. The wavelengths of light from other galaxies shift as they move away from us, just as the pitch of an ambulance siren changes as it moves past.
Take Hydra, a cluster of galaxies about three billion light years away. Astronomers have measured the distance from the Earth to Hydra by looking at the light coming from the cluster. Through a prism, Hydra’s hydrogen looks like four strips of red, blue-green, blue-violet and violet. But during the time it takes Hydra’s light to reach us, the bands of color have shifted down toward the red end—the low-energy end—of the spectrum. On their journey across the universe, the wavelengths of light have stretched. The farther the light travels, the more stretched it gets. The farther the bands shift toward the red end, the farther the light has traveled. The size of the shift is called the redshift, and it helps scientists figure out the movement of stars in space. Hydra isn’t the only distant cluster of galaxies that displays a redshift, though. Everything is shifting, because the universe is expanding. It’s just easier to see Hydra’s redshift because the farther a galaxy is from our own, the faster it is moving away.
There is no limit to how fast the universe can expand, says physicist Charles Bennett of Johns Hopkins University. Einstein’s theory that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum still holds true, because space itself is stretching, and space is nothing. Galaxies aren’t moving through space and away from each other but with space—like raisins in a rising loaf of bread. Some galaxies are already so far away from us, and moving away so quickly, that their light will never reach Earth. “It’s like running a 5K race, but the track expands while you’re running,” Bennett says. “If it expands faster than you can run, you’ll never get where you’re going."

On Nightmare Planet Covered In Boiling Lava, A Year Lasts 8.5 Hours

Kepler 78b is an Earth-sized exoplanet not too far from us--only about 700 light-years away. But don't bother getting your hopes up about settling there, because Kepler 78b is one of the most aggressively unpleasant planets ever discovered (competitive category, to be sure): its surface is covered with seas of boiling lava and it completes its orbit around its star in a whiplash-inducing 8.5 hours.
Researchers at MIT discovered the exoplanet while indulging an experiment: how close can a planet be to its star? Kepler 78b is about 40 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun; in fact, Kepler 78b's orbit is only three times larger than the circumference of the star it's orbiting! (Earth's orbit is more than 215 times larger than the circumference of our sun, for comparison.)
To find the planet, the team pored over research from NASA's Kepler telescope, analyzing the tiny dips in light visible from stars, indicating that a planet might be passing in front. This particular star is younger than ours, and rotating twice as fast, which may have some influence on how Kepler 78b is able to exist. Not that Kepler 78b is a pleasant place; the researchers believe it's made of some highly dense material, but that its surface is about 5,000° F and covered in oceans of boiling lava. Oh, and it completes its year in about as long as you complete one (relatively light!) day of work. It's one of the fastest orbits ever detected.
The discovery was published in The Astrophysical Journal, but you can read more about it here.

At The 2011 New York Auto Show, Exciting New Signs of Life

It’s been a brutal few years for the auto industry. But at this year’s New York International Auto Show, the world felt right again. The crowds were thick, the parties were plentiful, and the cars were appropriately flashy.

FYI What Are Cruise Missiles, And How Do They Work?

The Obama administration is considering what sort of military action to take, if any, against the government of Syrian President Bashar al Assad, which stands accused of using chemical weapons against its own people. The most likely option: a cruise missile strike against assorted military and government sites, like the presidential palace and chemical munitions facilities. Here's a primer on cruise missiles.
What are cruise missiles?
Cruise missiles are fast-moving, guided bombs that soar at a very low trajectory, parallel to the ground. They are distinct from regular (non-cruise) missiles primarily because they go really far. They are also distinct from drones, because they do not have on-the-ground pilots--instead, they fly a pre-set path--and you can only use them once. Germany used the first cruise missile in World War II. Called V-1s, after Vergeltung, the <="" a="">German word for retribution, they were fired from sites in northern france  and aimed at London. The idea behind the V-1, which is the core idea behind all cruise missiles since, is to attack from far away without needing a pilot to control it.
How do cruise missiles work?
All cruise missiles have an internal guidance system, though the types vary. The Tomahawk cruise missile, which the U.S. Navy has deployed since 1984, uses a system called "Terrain Contour Matching," where an altimeter and an inertia detector plot the flight path against a pre-loaded terrain contour map. Later versions of the Tomahawk also use GPS, and there are other guidance systems that some cruise missiles use.
Cruise missiles all have basically the same parts: an engine, often a jet with an air intake, propels the missile through the air. There's a spot for fuel, and a spot for the warhead, or explosive carried inside. Both cruise missiles pictured below were designed to carry nuclear warheads, but most cruise missiles, and all that have actually been used in war, carry conventional, non-nuclear explosives. The front end of a cruise missile usually has a guidance system. Cruise missiles, with wings and engines, often resemble pilot-less planes.
Cruise missiles can be launched by airplanes, submarines, ships, or from launching vehicles on land. Besides the United States, more than 70 nations have cruise missiles.
Has the United States used cruise missiles before?

Oh, yeah. If the drone is the signature weapon of the 2000s and 2010s, cruise missiles were the go-to in the 1990s. Deadly, launched from far away, and without a pilot on board, they promised to destroy enemies without risking American casualties. Here are three American cruise missile strikes from the 1990s:
In 1993, Kuwaiti authorities foiled a plot by Iraqi Intelligence services to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush. In retaliation, President Bill Clinton ordered the firing of 23 cruise missiles at Iraqi intelligence headquarters. In 1998, President Bill Clinton ordered a cruise missile strike against the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries plant in Sudan, under the assumption that it was a chemical weapons plant. Also in 1998, Clinton ordered troops to fire cruise missiles at Osama bin Laden in the Khost province of Afghanistan. Both of these 1998 attempts were retaliation for the bombing of U.S. embassies in East Africa.
What were the consequences?
Following the 1993 strike, Iraq and the United States existed in a state of simmering hostility for the next decade. America (together with the United Kingdom and, for some of the time, France) imposed a "no-fly-zone" over the country, to prevent Iraqi's government from attacking Kurds in the north and Shi'ites in the south. The no-fly-zone was deeply problematic: Iraqi anti-air missiles occasionally fired at American aircraft overhead, and Americans bombed Iraqi anti-air missile sites in return. It only ended with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Tensions and violence in Iraq persist to this day.
The El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries destroyed by the United States in 1998 was in fact actually just a pharmaceutical plant. The ruins were left untouched and now serve as a shrine to American incompetence.
The cruise missile strike in Khost failed to kill Osama bin Laden; a mission that would take 13 more years, a ground invasion of Afghanistan, a decade-long man-hunt, and a special kill team of Navy SEALS to complete. From the 2000 report, there is also evidence that "the strikes not only failed to hurt Osama bin Laden but ultimately may have brought al-Qaeda and the Taliban closer politically and ideologically."
What are cruise missiles' limitations?
A 2000 report by the U.S. Air Force on Tomahawk cruise missiles notes several limitations:

Although the consensus is that Tomahawks are a highly successful weapon, these weapons have several limitations. One of these is that their flight paths are relatively predictable, which is a function of the fact that some terrain, notably deserts, provides relatively few features for terrain following guidance. A second problem is that mission planning for terrain following guidance systems is more time consuming and complicated in terms of intelligence requirements than one might expect. For example, to use Tomahawks a unit would have to request a targeting package from such agencies as the Defense Mapping Agency to gather the data necessary for a mission. A third limitation was that Tomahawks could not be used against hardened targets because the 1,000 pound warhead, the weapon's accuracy, and its final kinetic energy when it hits the target do not produce high probabilities of kill. The final limitation was that Tomahawk cruise missiles cannot attack moving targets because they are guided to a position rather than to a specific target. Similarly, a Tomahawk cruise missile could not attack relocatable, that is mobile, targets because these may move while the mission is being planned or during the flight of the cruise missile.

Since then, cruise missile guidance systems have improved, but the overall limitations of the weapon system remain. The weapon requires good intelligence and good maps to hit the target. It also needs the enemy to stay in one, relatively vulnerable place.
Will the U.S. use cruise missiles in Syria?
It's not entirely clear. More certain is that idea that drones won't be used. Drones are great at tracking individuals from safe skies. But Syria's government has anti-aircraft weapons, which can easily shoot down drones. Cruise missiles, instead, fly faster, hit harder, and instead of hunting individuals take aim at big, fixed targets like military bases or palaces. Also, the United States has a lot of cruise missiles near Syria, and very few available drones.
Several publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and the Wall Street Journal expect the U.S. to use cruise missiles if the Obama administration does order strikes. Anonymous senior U.S. officials told NBC that a three-day cruise missile barrage against the Assad regime is possible. Of course, there's no guarantee that strikes will happen at all. Yesterday, President Obama said he had not made a decision on whether to intervene in Syria.
Launching cruise missiles feels like a strong military action for a president to take, but it's very unlikely to be a decisive one.

Facial Plastic Surgery Doesn't Make People More Attractive, Study Finds

Heidi Pratt Heidi Montag, now named Heidi Pratt after her marriage, is one of many celebrities known for getting plastic surgery. The procedures she has received include many beyond those studied in the research below. heidipratt on Instagram

Do you get a refund if the product doesn't work as desired? A new study has found that those who get aesthetic facial plastic surgery, such as brow lifts and eyelid surgery, aren't rated as significantly more attractive after their procedures, the new york times reports. This is the first time anybody has done a quantitative scientific study of whether people become more attractive after these facial surgeries.
Of course, not all people who get plastic surgery do so to look more attractive, but that's the major reason behind these procedures in particular.
The researchers gave independent evaluators a random assortment of photos. The evaluators were supposed to guess the ages of the people in the photos and rate their attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10. No single evaluator would get before and after photos of the same person, which 1.) ensured the evaluators wouldn't deduce the study's aim and 2.) makes sense because few people see you with a before picture next to your face after you've gotten plastic surgery.
The researchers, a team of face and head surgeons in Canada and the U.S., found that on average, evaluators said the "after" photos looked three years younger than the same person's "before" photo. The differences in perceived age ranged from four years older to nearly nine and a half years younger. On average, patients' attractiveness scores were slightly higher, but the difference wasn't enough to count as statistically significant.

3D Glasses: Can They Have Universal Appeal?

While 3D movies have been doing blockbuster business in theaters, for some potential viewers the idea of wearing (and buying) expensive, uncomfortable 3D glasses at home has all the appeal of Carrot Top/Pauly Shore double feature.

The 3D glasses you wear at home aren't the cheaper, lightweight passive glasses used by most movies theaters in the U.S. That technology, developed by RealD, polarizes light from a projector, clockwise for the right image, and counterclockwise for the left image; the glasses have circularly polarized lenses so each eye only sees its intended image. While the passive glasses are incredibly cheap, theaters need to be outfitted with a polarizing modulator and a silverized screen to maintain the polarization. While a few companies are experimenting with passive polarized TV — Vizio, for example, recently demonstrated one at a New York trade show and said it would start selling them early next year—they're generally more expensive to manufacture than the current sets, and there are questions about performance given the lower (1920 x 540 per eye) resolution.
Instead, the current crop of 3D TVs relies on active-shutter LCD glasses provided by the TV manufacturer. In addition to being pricey—about $150 or more per pair — and somewhat bulky, the glasses only work with the same-brand TV. But by the fall we should see the first "universal" 3D glasses that can work with most major-brand 3D TVs. Two companies, XpanD and Monster Cable, are leading the charge with 3D glasses they say will be out in September. While they aren't going to be much—or, in Monster's case, any — cheaper than current models, they will be lighter and a bit more stylish and, if the manufacturers' claims are to be believed, they will outperform current 3D glasses. If so, it's not hard to imagine the day when toting a pair of 3D glasses to a friend's house is as common as bringing a six-pack of beer.

Behind the Shades

To create a successful 3D image, each eye needs to receive its own separate image — or actually, a slightly different angle of the same image. Our brain then processes the two images and derives a sense of depth from the distances. One of the toughest parts of the process is syncing the sequential opening and closing of the active LCD shutter glasses — done by applying voltage to the liquid crystals, just like an LCD TV — with the onscreen 3D content, so that one eye's view is blocked when the other receives an image. If the glasses don't respond quickly enough, or don't go completely opaque or transparent, images meant for one eye can bleed into the other, causing crosstalk (ghosting), flicker, blurring, or other picture anomalies.
Complicating the matter for third-party eyewear makers is that so far there are no 3D sync protocol standards, so universal 3D glasses must be able to work with the growing array of proprietary protocols used by the TV manufacturers. That's been the biggest challenge for XpanD, according to the company's chief strategy officer Ami Dror. "The protocols are like a language, and Panasonic is speaking Chinese and Sony is speaking Swedish," he says. "That requires us to speak multiple languages." Because XpanD's has been making eyewear for cinemas for years — it's the dominant player in Japan and parts of Europe, where most theaters use active-shutter glasses, not passive models — XpanD's 3D TV glasses "actually outperform the models offered by the manufacturers," Dror says.
According to Dror, a specialized fast-switching liquid crystal cell, called the "pi-cell," in the lenses of its active-shutter glasses helps to produce brighter images and reduce crosstalk (ghosting). The cells act as a shutter to alternately block each eye, operating at the 144 frames-per-second rate required for 3D digital cinema. The glasses are essentially in a continual sleep mode; about every two seconds they search for an IR signal, and if one is recognized the glasses "wake up" and lock onto the signal. Dror says that many of the complaints about 3D — headaches, nausea, etc. — occur when either a 3D TV or 3D glasses doesn't perform properly. "The brain can sustain bad 2D — the loss of little resolution, some pixelization or missing frames — but it's not as tolerant with bad 3D."
XpanD initially intended to ship its X103 universal 3D glasses at the end of June, but postponed the launch to include sync codes for Sony's recently released 3D TVs, as well as those arriving from LG Electronics this month. The software can be updated as new codes are released. The X103 glasses, available in September for $129, will work with almost any display — including plasma, LCD and rear-projection DLP microdisplays, as well as PC monitors — that can show 120-frames-per-second 3D content. Although the X103 glasses are sleeker than most OEM models and available in a choice of several colors, an even sleeker elite designer series, called the X104, will be offered in 2011 for more fashion-conscious users. A kids-sized line is also in the works.

A Monster-ous Approach

Taking a very unique approach is Monster Cable — its Vision Max 3D active-shutter glasses, also expected to arrive in September, will be the first to use radio-frequency (RF), rather than infrared (IR), technology to sync with the TV. Monster's senior product manager Elbert Lee says the technology offers improved performance while eliminating typical IR issues, such as interference from room lighting or other IR devices, and losing sync when someone steps between the glasses and TV.
Physically, the Max 3D glasses are a bit larger than the X103 prototypes I saw. The transmitter uses a technology licensed from a company called Bit Cauldron to convert the IR shutter signals sent by the TV into 2.4GHz (ZigBee) RF signals, which communicate with a receiver embedded in the glasses. Lee says that as new 3D TV brands enter the market, updated IR codes will be available via the Monster Vision website. If you're only going to use the Monster glasses you can place the transmitter in front of the TV to block its IR emitter, but moving it away from the TV allows you to use both the Monster glasses and those provided by the TV manufacturer. Unlike the X103 glasses, which use a standard replaceable battery, the Max 3D glasses have a rechargeable battery that rejuices via a mini USB plug. The Max 3D system, which includes one pair of Monster 3D glasses and a transmitter, will cost $250, while individual 3D glasses will be priced at $170 each.

In the Clear

Unlike the 3D glasses we've seen from some TV manufacturers, which use color-tinted lenses, both the XpanD and Monster glasses have a neutral tint. Although some have wondered if colors will be off when the TV shifts into 3D mode, since the TV's settings likely compensate for the tint, Dror says any color inaccuracies will likely be negligible. "There are far bigger issues for 3D TV, such as providing a higher-quality, idiot-proof experience for the average consumer, who is unlikely to notice a 1% inaccuracy in color." The relative insignificance of color shifts caused by universal active-shutter 3D glasses is a point echoed by Monster's Lee. "Compared with the ability of a good pair of shutter glasses to go completely opaque or clear, small color differences is a fairly small issue. There was so much for 3D TV manufacturers to worry about at launch, I don't think color correcting for glasses was even on their plate."

The Next Wave of 3-D Specs Look More Like Regular Glasses

Today’s high-def 3-D looks amazing, but those movie theater glasses are dull, dirty and wasteful. every year, tens of millions of theater-provided pairs are used. now, makers of 3-D glasses are letting you swap those frames for reusable polarized specs that look and feel more like sunglasses.

Military Grade

Gunnar’s lenses have an anti-reflective coating used in military binoculars to prevent flashes from revealing soldiers to enemies. They lose fewer rays to reflection, letting in 10 percent more light than most lenses for brighter, more vivid images.
Gunnar Midnight Onyx, $150; gunnars.com

Hot Curves

To create its wraparound lenses, which help viewers perceive shapes and distances more clearly, Polaroid uses heat and pressure to shape a lens (embedded with 3-D-enabling polarized film) into a curve.
Polaroid Premium 3-D glasses $30; polaroideyewear.com

Double Vision

Keeping you from looking like a dweeb on a movie date, Marchon3D’s new EX3D line also works in the 2-D world. The circularly polarized lenses won’t distort linear outdoor light and are 100 percent UVA/B protective, so they can double as sunglasses.
Marchon3D EX3D $30-$35; polaroideyewear.com

Home/Theater

A leader in “activeshutter” 3-D, in which lenses flicker, Vizio (along with other TV makers) is trying something new: passive circularly polarized specs. Built to the same standard used in most 3-D cinemas, they work at the movies or at home.
Vizio Theater 3-D Glasses, From $30.vizio.com

2013 Invention Awards Ballast Bulb

More than 780 million people rely on kerosene to light their homes. But the fuel is pricey and is toxic when burned—not to mention a fire hazard. In 2008, London-based product designer Martin Riddiford and his colleague Jim Reeves decided to create a cheap, safe alternative.
Riddiford knew a falling weight could produce enough energy to run a grandfather clock, so why not a light? To find out, he attached the crank of a wind-up flashlight to a bicycle wheel. He hung a weight from the wheel to cause it to spin; the wheel cranked the flashlight, and the device lit up.
Over the next four years, Riddiford, Reeves, and a small team spent their downtime between projects in a basement, refining the GravityLight. To use it, a person hangs the device and fills an attached fabric bag with up to 28 pounds of rocks, dirt, or other material. Lifting and releasing the bag steadily pulls a notched belt through GravityLight’s plastic hub; the belt spins a series of gears to drive a small motor, which continuously powers an LED for about 30 minutes.
The team used crowdfunding to manufacture 1,000 GravityLights, which it plans to send to developing countries for field testing—plus 6,000 more for backers. “It’s exciting to witness so much positive reaction to what we’re doing,” Riddiford says. Besides remote villages, the lamp could prove handy in campsites, closets, and any dark nook far from a socket, so Riddiford also hopes to license a retail version for less than $10.

HOW IT WORKS

1) As a weighted bag descends, it tugs a belt to turn a series of plastic gears.
2) The gears work in unison to spin an electric motor.
3) The motor powers a small yet bright LED, providing continuous illumination for about 30 minutes—the maximum amount of time that the bag can take to descend.
4) External connectors can power low-voltage devices, and the entire system is designed to work for thousands of lift-and-drop cycles.

2013 Invention Awards Fume Fighter

Within his first 30 minutes on the job at an aluminum factory in 1999, metalworker Michael Buckman inhaled so many noxious fumes he was sick with bronchitis for three days. As he recovered, Buckman wondered whether a commercial welding helmet could have filtered his breathing air. “I didn’t see anything out there like what I was thinking about,” he says. So he set out to build the WindMaker: a helmet that can prevent lung damage.

WindMaker draws fresh air from behind the helmet, pushes it through a HEPA-rated filter, and then blows it toward the front, cooling skin while preventing fog on the glass faceplate. A fan near the chin helps expel air, blowing away toxic smoke in the work zone. LED lights on each side of the faceplate illuminate the welding job, while a thick shroud deflects sparks.
Several companies have expressed interest in licensing the helmet. Before anyone can sell WindMaker, however, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health needs to extensively test its air-filtering abilities—a costly process that requires consumer-ready units. If the device lives up to its claims, the convenient combination of eye, heat, spark, and respiratory safeguards could motivate more welders to protect themselves, says Shawn Gibbs, an occupational health expert at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. “And that increased use is something welding needs,” he says.
Buckman already has ideas for high-tech add-ons, including wireless communication devices, solar panels, video cameras, and heads-up displays. Whatever futuristic features make it into the final helmet, Buckman is confident it will deliver on safety. “I got hurt on the job,” he says. “I had to go through that experience to design this.”

2013 Invention Awards: Family Flier

John McGinnis thinks ordinary families would rather skip the airport and fly themselves. So he is trying to reinvent the personal airplane with the help of his father, son, and a rotating crew of about two dozen volunteers. Unlike small aircraft today—which can cost more than a house—McGinnis says Synergy could be cheaper, quieter, and, at more than 40 mpg, three times as fuel-efficient.
McGinnis, a 47-year-old composite manufacturer, flew his first airplane in second grade. Perplexed by the inefficiencies of personal aircraft, he taught himself aeronautical engineering and fluid dynamics over two decades. One day, while perusing scientific studies at a desk in his daughters’ bedroom, he read a NASA researcher’s paper challenging a classic aerodynamic drag equation. McGinnis could see the possibilities. “I came out of the girls’ bedroom ranting like a madman to my wife,” he says. “ ‘Honey, you’re never going to believe this. I think I just solved a problem I’ve been working on since I was a little kid.’”
Synergy’s wings bend upward and into a box shape for minimum drag and maximum efficiency. The top half of each wing swoops behind the body to function as a tail while providing greater in-flight stability. The double-box tail design also makes gliding easier by counteracting tornado-like vortices at the wings’ tips. And instead of a front-mounted propeller, an impeller placed behind the bullet-shaped body quiets noise while adding thrust.

With Nymi Wristband, Your Heartbeat Unlocks Your Devices

Here's a twist on knowing thy heart. A startup is looking to manufacture a wristband that recognizes its wearer by his or her heartbeat. The wristband, called Nymi, then communicates with wearers' other devices—laptops, tablets, smartphones—to unlock them when their owners pick them up.
The wristband isn't ready for sale yet. Its creators, part of a small Toronto-based company called Bionym, are now taking pre-orders for $79. Bionym plans to ship Nymis in 2014. Once ready, the wristband will come with the ability to unlock PCs, Macs, and iPhone and Android phones and tablets, Karl Martin, Bionym's CEO, tells Popular Science.
It's not clear yet exactly how accurate Nymi (Martin pronounced it "NIM-mi") will be, nor how convenient it will be to use. But it is a very cool combination of technologies: It not only IDs who's wearing it by his or heartbeat, it also recognizes gestures and its distance from different electronic devices.
Here's how it works. When wearers put the Nymi on, sensors in the wristband will take the person's ECG. That's the measurement that hospitals take when they measure people's heartbeats. Although all healthy hearts make roughly the same spiky shapes in an ECG sensor, there are enough differences in the graph to tell different people apart, several years of research has found.
The Nymi takes its wearers' heartbeat just once, when they put the wristband on. Then, as long as they wear the wristband, the Nymi is able to communicate with and unlock any devices with which it's registered. If people take their Nymi off, it won't work anymore until it takes another ECG measurement. That prevents others from being able to use a lost or stolen Nymi.
In the future, Martin and his colleagues are hoping other app developers will make programs that will let Nymi do more than what Bionym will build in. A video* Bionym produced shows some possibilities. Unlocking a car door with a gesture, unlocking a hotel room door, turning on the TV to the wearer's last-watched program—those are all things Nymi will be prepared to do, given the right app.
"Anywhere I use a password or a PIN or even a physical key or a key card, these are all places where I'm providing my identity and I can provide it in a seamless way with Nymi," Martin says.
Although I asked, I didn't get to try the Nymi, see a live demo of it, or see it in its current, prototype form. Right now, the Nymi doesn't look like it does in the video because Bionym is still developing it. The company didn't want photos of it to get out that don't reflect what it would look like in its final form, Martin says. He showed me a non-working model of what their final product will be like over Skype. The design is minimal--it's just a black wristband with a button on top.
When I asked independent researchers if they had any concerns about Nymi, the one thing they brought up was that it's not clear how accurate the wristband will be at identifying users. Bionym worked with the University of Toronto to test Nymi's ECG-IDing accuracy in more than 1,000 people, Martin says. They've found Nymi is comparable to fingerprint recognition and more accurate than facial recognition. They will test its accuracy further this fall.
However, such results aren't published yet in the peer-reviewed literature. What has been published indicates it's "premature" to say an ECG identification scheme can compare to fingerprints and facial recognition, says Kevin Bowyer, the chair of the computer science department at the University of Notre Dame.
Bowyer does agree the product has potential for some yet-unimagined applications. "I haven't seen this combination of heartbeat and gesture sensing and proximity sensing before," he says. "There's a chance someone will figure out something really interesting that you could do with this."

2013 Invention Awards Robotic Performer

Brian Roe spent nearly a decade building animatronic monsters for films such as Virus, A.I., and Scooby Doo 2. Then, almost overnight, Hollywood abandoned mechanical characters for computer renderings. Roe now works as a technology consultant, but with the surge of cheap, user-friendly microelectronics, he saw a market emerging for hobbyist robots. “It used to be that electronics and software were out of reach,” Roe says. “Over the past six or eight years, it has completely switched.” So Roe began developing a low-cost kit to teach anyone robotics. He calls his work-in-progress Roy the Robot.
For now, Roy is a head, neck, and pair of lower arms. Yet, with about 1,200 parts controlled by animatronics software, the robot already looks and moves like a human. Roe laser-cut the robot’s frame from pliable, lightweight wood to retain complex architecture while keeping costs low. Twenty-eight inexpensive servomotors help Roy gesture with his hands; move his wrist, neck, and jaw; and even blink his eyes.
To complete Roy’s upper arms and shoulders, Roe launched a successful crowdfunding campaign and sent backers DIY kits based on the hands and arms. He eventually hopes to sell the kits for about $300. That would fill a need for inexpensive manipulators. “The cheapest capable robotic arms are in the $20,000 range,” says Siddhartha Srinivasa, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon University.
Roe estimates that a full robot kit with a torso and legs might cost $3,000, and he hopes to one day imbue Roy with enough artificial intelligence to learn human motion. “But my main goal is to help people build, program, and understand robotics,” Roe says. “Because, in the end, we’re going to live in a robotic society.”

New Car 2014

While much of the new-model-year chatter will be focused on the Corvette and S-Class, there’s no shortage of drama unfolding elsewhere in the auto business for 2014. For example, Acura recently rolled out its own new flagship luxury sedan, the RLX, which replaced the largely overlooked RL. Though it’s a nice enough car in its own right, we’re doubtful buyers will find the new model to be up to the standards of similar models from Audi, BMW and Mercedes-Benz. In a good news/bad news situation, Acura sold just 499 RLX units in June (outpacing only the dismal ZDX in the lineup), though that translates into an encouraging 1,459 percent increase over RL transactions in the same period a year earlier.

Similarly, Kia is reaching farther upscale for 2014 with its new top-of-the-line Cadenza sedan. Based on the Hyundai Azera, this is the costliest Kia to date, starting at just over $35,000. Though it comes with a more luxurious interior and offers a few opulent options its showroom sibling lacks, the Cadenza may not make a compelling case for itself as a major upgrade over the less-expensive and similarly sized Optima sedan. Albeit just being introduced to consumers, Kia sold only 1,001 Cadenzas in June, which made it the brand’s slowest selling model (by comparison, buyers snapped up 14,599 Optimas last month).

Replacing the former Liberty model in Jeep’s lineup, the new midsize Cherokee SUV features a dramatically sculpted exterior that’s capped by a swept-back treatment of Jeep’s signature seven-slot front grille that might be too extreme for some brand loyalists. It packs either a Fiat-supplied 184 horsepower 2.4-liter four-cylinder engine or a new 271-horsepower 3.2-liter V6, with an advanced nine-speed automatic transmission standard. The Cherokee rides on a four-wheel independent suspension that should deliver excellent ride and handling manners around town, with Jeep’s Selec-Terrain traction control system and no less than three separate four-wheel-drive systems optional that promise exceptional off-road abilities. The Cherokee offers many high-tech safety features, along with niceties like a heated steering wheel, ventilated front seats and a wireless charging pad for portable devices.

Likewise, Toyota redesigns its popular Corolla compact sedan for 2014 with uncharacteristically fluid exterior styling to help silence critics who have long found the car’s appearance to be too bland. Buyers, however never seemed to mind, as the outgoing-version Corolla continues to outsell all other compact cars during the first half of 2013, and that’s despite lingering in its current form since the 2009 model year.