Watching certain episodes of the the original Star Trek, it's hard not to laugh at the show's 1960s-era technology transplanted into the future. But one of the series' most famous pieces of technology, the science tricorder, is still ahead of its time--it may be bulky, but it's still able to identify any known life form in a way modern scientists dream of. More than forty years later, we're still jealous of the tricorder, but scientists have actually figured out how to replicate its technology using a process called DNA barcoding. It's almost as good as Spock's magic box.

In "The technologhy that links taxonomy and Star Trek," BoingBoing describes the advances biologists have made in being able to identify different animal species. Ironically, the computational power needed for DNA barcoding fills a lab, much like the gigantic computers that existed when Star Trek was on the air in the 1960s. Spock's tricorder still has an advantage when it comes to portability, but as BoingBoing writes, we really can identify most organisms on the world with DNA barcoding.

Photo credit: Flickr user hartsell via Creative Commons.

"Canadian biologist Paul Hebert...thought there might be an easy way to quickly identify species using short DNA sequences that are unique to one species or another. If you had a database of these sequences, then all you'd have to do would be to match a sample to a sequence and you'd know what species you were looking at. It's similar to the way we store fingerprints, and then use those to match prints from a crime scene with an individual person."

Sounds easy! But it's not, of course. Here's the problem: DNA barcoding animals commonly relies on a gene called COI, which is a piece of mtDNA found within a cell's mitochondria. This DNA is passed down from generation to generation in the egg cells of organisms, picking up errors and changes in the sequence from one mother to another. Those changes in the sequence are what make DNA barcoding work, but they're also what make it tough.

Science is constantly discovering new things about the human brain. Just last week we wrote about how the brain can track a 100 mile-per-hour fastball thanks to the visual cortex. Part of the cortex is actually predicting where a fast-moving object is going to be--a 100 mile-per-hour fastball moves 12.5 feet in the amount of time it takes a signal to travel from our eyes to our brain. It's the kind of small discovery that neuroscientist Henry Markram may completely overshadow in the next decade as he attempts to do something unprecedented: model and simulate the entirety of the human brain on a supercomputer.

In January, the European Commission awarded Markram $1.3 billion in funding to pursue his ambitious goal. Back in 2009, he gave a TED talk about simulating the human brain and set out to accomplish that goal within a decade. Now he's got the kind of funding most scientists can't even dream of and the ambition to match. As neuroscientists are still making small discoveries about how the brain operates, would it be possible for Markram to chart every synapse within the next decade?

Photo credit: Sophie Moet.

Wired's great profile of Markram can't answer that question, but it does detail the challenges and promise of his research, the controversy, and Markram's grand goal of uniting the world's neuroscientists under his program. Jonathon Keats writes:

The Ultimate Burger, declares Modernist Cuisine, is no simple creation. It requires a bun with the perfect--not overpowering!--degree of sweetness, a cheese made with sodium hexametaphosphates, and a meat patty ground in such a way that every strand is aligned to produce an even texture. The meat is then cryofried--dipped in liquid nitrogen and then fried in hot oil--to keep the burger as juicy as possible. It's complicated, but it's still simple (and cheap) compared to a new $325,000 hamburger that will be eaten in London in the near future.

While Modernist Cuisine uses science to find the perfect way to prepare and combine foods, Dr. Mark Post of the Netherlands, creator of this burger, is doing something different--he's trying to prove that we can grow edible meat in a laboratory through the use of stem cells.

Photo credit: Francois Lenoir/Reuters

"In a lab with incubators filled with clear plastic containers holding a pinkish liquid, a technician was tending to the delicate task of growing the tens of billions of cells needed to make the burger, starting with a particular type of cell removed from cow necks obtained at a slaughterhouse," writes The New York Times. "Dr. Post, one of a handful of researchers in the field, has made strides in developing cultured meat through the use of stem cells — precursor cells that can turn into others that are specific to muscle, for example — and techniques adapted from medical research for growing tissues and organs, a field known as tissue engineering...His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue 'tastes reasonably good.' For the London event he plans to add only salt and pepper."

Growing the meat for a lab burger isn't cheap--the research has cost $325,000 so far, which means Post's technique poses little threat to the existing meat business. It's a slow process. Post's work uses myosatellite cells, taken from the muscle tissues in a cow's neck. He uses myosatellite cells because they're able to produce new muscle tissue. The cells are placed in a growth medium--in this case, fetal calf serum--and then encouraged to divide and multiply.

GeoGuesser is my favorite kind of mash up. It shows you a random street corner somewhere in the world using Google Street View images. Your goal is to figure out where you are, using only the cues in the Street View images. Then place your guess on a map. The closer you are to the actual location, the higher you score.

The most difficult guesses for me have been long, desolate stretches of country roads, like the one pictured above. Give it a try, then let me know what your best tips for sussing out the right spots in the comments below. (via Kottke)

The red barns that dot the American countryside are, more often than not, painted red. They're not red because they would otherwise be too hard to see--they're big buildings. They're not red to be fashionable. They're red because red paint is historically the cheapest. And the next logical question--if you haven't dozed off thinking about barns and red paint--is why red is the cheapest. And that question, as answered by Google's Yonatan Zunger in a Google+ post and picked up by BoingBoing, is actually fascinating. Red paint is cheap because of billions of years of nuclear fusion.

Photo credit: Flickr user swainboat via Creative Commons.

Heavy, right? Zunger titled his post "How the price of paint is set in the hearts of dying stars," but before he arrives at his explanation, he offers a crash course in how colors work and how we create paints. Nuclear fusion comes into play when he gets into the root of how and why pigments are formed. But at the high level, we have to start with paints; paints are formed by the combination of a pigment, typically formed from a mineral, and a binding agent, like an oil or acrylic, that makes the liquid stick to something when it dries.

Zunger first posed this question: what makes a good, cheap pigment? "To be a good pigment, first and foremost, something has to have a nice, bright color," he wrote. "The way pigments produce color is that light shines on them, and they absorb some, but not all, of the colors of light. (Remember that white light is a mixture of many colors of light) For example, red ochre, a.k.a. hematite, a.k.a. anhydrous iron oxide (Fe2O3), absorbs yellow, green and blue light, so the light that reflects off of it is reddish-orange. (This happens to be the pigment that’s used in barn paint, so we’re going to come back to it.) Light is absorbed when a photon (a particle of light) strikes an electron in the pigment and is absorbed, transferring its energy to the electron. But quantum mechanics tells us that an electron can’t absorb just any amount of energy: the particular energies (and therefore colors) that it can absorb depend on the layout of the electrons in the material, which in turn depends on its chemistry."

Photo credit: Flickr user hiddenson via Creative Commons.

His explanation of quantum mechanics gets more involved at this point, but here's the most important part: the rotational speed of an atom's outermost electrons affect its ability to become a pigment. There are fixed increments of this property, called angular momentum, and this shows up in the periodic table in different blocks of elements. The only one we really care about is the "d" block, which is the big section in the middle. The "d" electrons produce an amount of energy that corresponds with visual light. These elements, then, tend to make for excellent pigments.

Now we get to the good stuff: Why red pigments are cheap.

It takes a very special baseball pitcher to throw a 100 mile per hour fastball. 90 miles per hour? That's a breeze. 95? A whole bunch of them can do that. But when you top 100 miles per hour, the list thins out. Experts estimate that baseball legend Nolan Ryan threw the fastest pitch of all time--108 miles per hour--in 1974. There's a reason Ryan and fellow blazing-fast-fastball pitcher Randy Johnson own the top two spots on the all-time strikeout leaderboard: It's really tough to track, much less hit, something moving at 100 miles per hour.

Photo credit: Flickr user sidehike via Creative Commons.

There's science to back that up. There’s a 100 millisecond delay between the moment your eyes see an object and the moment your brain registers it," writes Surprising Science. "As a result, when a batter sees a fastball flying by at 100 mph, it’s already moved an additional 12.5 feet by the time his or her brain has actually registered its location."

Some researchers at Berkeley decided to find out. They put subjects through an fMRI to figure out which parts of the brain are responsible for predictive vision. A summary of the study's results says "Findings suggest that the middle temporal region of the visual cortex known as V5 is computing where moving objects are most likely to end up."

The researchers used the test below, which uses a moving background to trick the brain into thinking a stationary object is sliding around.

Here's what's happening when you watch that video:

We all know that life on Earth, in the grand scheme of the universe, is a pretty lucky deal. Our planet is just the right distance from the sun, with just the right atmospheric conditions, to support life. That's so rare, we obviously haven't found another planet with similar conditions. If we had, our sci-fi depictions of alien races would probably be a lot different.

For as unique as Earth is, though, scientists have typically considered our solar system to be, structurally, unremarkable. As NPR writes, we thought our solar system was normal. A star sits in the center. Small(ish) rocky planets, formed from dust melted by the star, orbit fairly close to that star. Beyond a certain point, called the frost line, larger, gaseous planets like Saturn and Jupiter hold much wider orbits. Their formative dust never got close enough to the sun to melt and condense into a rocky planet.

Photo credit: NPS.gov

That was the theory for years. It makes sense. But it's wrong. By peering at other solar systems, astronomers have discovered systems with gigantic, Jupiter-size gas planets nestled closely to their stars, with orbits of only a few Earth days. Mercury, the closest planet to our sun, takes 88 Earth days to make its orbit. Many systems even have twin gas planets in close orbit to their stars.

Given the proximity, these planets are obviously hot, not like the cold gaseous planets we expected. Other systems have rocky planets close, like ours--except not like ours, because they're also orbiting extremely close to their stars.

"As of this month, we've discovered 884 planets, 692 planetary systems, 132 of them with more than one planet and, strange to tell, almost none of them look like us...Though it will take a while to discover smaller planets, right now there's only one planetary system that looks a lot like our own" writes NPR's Robert Krulwich. According to an astronomer from the University of California, Santa Cruz, these solar systems are changing how we view the universe. That systems with very tightly clustered planets are more common than not.

All this makes our own solar system even more unique, but it raises questions, too. How did gaseous planets form so close to stars? One theory is that they form beyond the frost line, like our own gaseous planets, but then move closer to the star. Will that happen in our solar system? DId we have other planets in our system at one point that have been absorbed by the sun?

We don't have the answers, yet, but the questions are interesting all by themselves.

When experts test the safety of modern cars, there's no getting around the big, dramatic test: Smashing a car right into a wall, watching it crumple in slow motion, and seeing if the poor crash test dummy inside lives to tell the tale. Thanks to the evolution of seatbelts and airbag, that crash test dummy is less likely to introduce his face to the steering wheel or windshield. Football helmets, it turns out, are tested almost exactly the same way--the helmets are violently smacked against a hard metal surface, and the impact is measured in a lab. According to a brand new study published in the Journal of Neurosurgery, modern football helmets actually reduce the risk of a concussion by 45 to 96 percent compared to the old leather helmets you've seen in old-timey sports reels.

Modern plastic football helmets, then, are football's equivalent of the airbag. Except the issue isn't quite so cut-and-dry--in 2011, a similar impact study declared that plastic football helmets are often no better than leather ones. Concussions and brain injuries are serious problems in football. They can leave permanent damage. The issue is so serious, the United States Congress even introduced two bills in 2011 to ensure children in sports programs were equipped with the proper safety gear.

So who's right? Are helmets actually reducing the risk of concussion, or is it simply impossible to prevent the brain from hammering against the inside of the skull?

Virginia Tech, which carried out the new study, measured front, side, rear, and top-of-head impacts with 10 plastic helmets and two old leather models. Sensors inside a dummy head (poor guys always get the violent jobs) measured the impact from a variety of drop heights, ranging from 1 to 5 feet. In the past, Virginia Tech has used the same system to assign a safety rating to football helmets.

In this test, they found some expected variation in how the 10 plastic helmets performed, but they all did better than the leather helmets of old:

Few things in science fiction look as straight up fantasy as solar sails. The solar sail in fiction essentially mimics the surfboard-plus-sail combo used in windsurfing here on Earth. Except where windsurfers catch gusts of air to carve their way through waves, solar sails would harness radiation pressure--the light and gases emitted by a star--to surf through the blackness of space. Well, turns out that solar sails aren't that fantastical--in fact, NASA plans to launch one as early as 2014.

Photo credit: NASA

NASA's solar sail project couldn't have a more perfect name. It's called Sunjammer, after a 1963 Arthur C. Clarke which coined the term solar sail. According to NASA, the in-development solar sail will measure approximately 124 feet to a side for a total surface area of about 13,000 square feet. But "when collapsed, it's the size of a dishwasher and weighs just 70 pounds. Attached to a 175-pound disposable support module, the Sunjammer is easily packed into a secondary payload on a rocket bound for low-Earth orbit."

Solar sails could offer an alternative to heavy and costly rocket fuels, but they don't exactly offer the same degree of thrust. The maximum thrust would amount to less than a Newton of force, but because the surface area of NASA's sail is so large, it will still be able to move. A solar sail wiki writes:

"Solar pressure is very weak - about 9 millionths of a Newton (micro-Newtons) or 2 millionths of a pound (micro-pounds) of force on a square meter at Earth's distance from the sun. This is far too little pressure to have any effect on Earth, because other forces are much larger, like air drag and gravity driving us into the ground. In space there is no air and objects fall freely under the influence of gravity without the ground to constrain them. Sunlight can have a significant effect on objects, depending on how lightweight they are. Large and lightweight objects are affected more. Dust given off by comets is pushed into brilliant tails millions of kilometers long. Sunlight causes small errors to accumulate over time in spacecraft orbits and spin. Even asteroids gradually change their spin over millions of years. This gentle force is enough for a solar sail that is sufficiently large and light weight to travel between planets or change the behavior of its orbit around a planet or the sun - without consuming any propellant."

Monolith Magazine writes that "When held in orbit, Sunjammer will act as a type of forward observatory for both NASA and the UK Space Agency, with British scientists developing two instruments on board to study solar wind." Sails could eventually be used to clear debris from Earth's orbit or even deflect dangerous asteroids, though it's hard to predict what kind of thrust would be required for that.

Clarke's vision of ships racing under the power of the sun won't come true anytime soon, but NASA launching a real solar sail? That's a good first step.

Robert Downey Jr. owned the screen in all of his scenes in 2008's Iron Man, but the next-most popular characters in the film weren't human beings--they were robots. Tony Stark's robotic assistants, which he constantly chides and quips at, are imbued with a ton of personality through simple sound effects and exaggerated mannerisms, drooping sheepishly when they fail Stark. Those are emotions--not real ones, because Iron Man is a movie. But a very interesting, and very detailed, article from science publication Nautilus questions whether robots may be capable of the kinds of emotions Iron Man's robots exhibit. The answer starts with reconsidering how we define emotions.

Having feelings, we usually assume, and the ability to read emotions in others, are human traits," writes Nautilus' Neil Savage. "We don’t expect machines to know what we’re thinking or react to our moods...Special and indecipherable, except by us—our whims and fancies are what makes us human. But we may be wrong in our thinking. Far from being some inexplicable, ethereal quality of humanity, emotions may be nothing more than an autonomic response to changes in our environment, software programmed into our biological hardware by evolution as a survival response."

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux compares emotions to survival circuits ingrained in living things, from humans down to amoebas. A stimulus in the environment flips that circuit and makes us react in a certain way to encourage survival. "Neurons firing in a particular pattern might trigger the brain to order the release of adrenaline, which makes the heart beat faster, priming an animal to fight or flee from danger. That physical state, LeDoux says, is an emotion."

Obviously not all organisms share the same circuitry--our brains, and emotional reactions, are more complex than an amoeba's or even another mammal's. But there are other elements of how we express our emotions (and how we're coming to understand them) that bring us a step closer to seeing how robotic "emotions" could be real.