Skyscrapers are not built of steel and glass, but from statistics. They are bar graphs, their height and size representing population and wealth and other statistics of the urban landscape. At least, that's what mathematicians in the field of quantitative urbanism see when they gaze up at the buildings towering above. While the general idea of studying how cities form and operate dates back as far as cities have existed, the specific practice of quantitative urbanism is much newer.

Photo credit: Flickr user photochiel via Creative Commons.

Smithsonian recently published a lengthy feature about the mathematicians in the field, what they're studying, and how it formed. "The birth of this new field can be dated to 2003, when researchers at [Santa Fe Institute] convened a workshop on ways to 'model'—in the scientific sense of reducing to equations—aspects of human society," writes Smithsonian's Jerry Adler. This new form of studying cities through detialed mathematics actually resembles how biologists study mammals. Adler continues:

"An elephant is not just a bigger version of a mouse, but many of its measurable characteristics, such as metabolism and life span, are governed by mathematical laws that apply all up and down the scale of sizes. The bigger the animal, the longer but the slower it lives: A mouse heart rate is around 500 beats per minute; an elephant’s pulse is 28. If you plotted those points on a logarithmic graph, comparing size with pulse, every mammal would fall on or near the same line....the same principles might be at work in human institutions."

This idea prompted research, and a paper titles "Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities." Here's a basic explanation: aspects of a city, such as crime or employment or population growth, are charted based on the size of that city. Some of these factors increase linearly--Smithsonian gives the example "Household water or electrical use...shows this pattern; as a city grows bigger its residents don’t use their appliances more."

Photo credit: Flickr user thomashawk via Creative Commons.

Other elements of the city scale super-linearly or sub-linearly, meaning they increase more or less as the size of a city increases. The study itself offers an interesting perspective on these relationships:

Combining the Oculus Rift with an omni-directional treadmill is the closest approximation of the Holodeck the technology community has been able to whip up so far. It's still not quite so immersive as Star Trek: The Next Generation's impossibly perfect simulator, but it's not a bad first step. But it's hard to say if we'll ever reach that goal. As Valve discussed at this year's Game Developers Conference, virtual reality technology still has a long way to go on technical challenges like latency and resolution. And a recent study from io9 highlights an entirely different challenge that stands between VR and the holodeck: thoroughly fooling the brain's sense of "place."

The study focused on the brain's hippocampus, which includes cells referred to as "place cells." Another study io9 referenced explains their importance: "More than three decades of research have demonstrated a role for hippocampal place cells in representation of the spatial environment in the brain. New studies have shown that place cells are part of a broader circuit for dynamic representation of self-location...place cells and grid cells may form the basis for quantitative spatiotemporal representation of places, routes, and associated experiences during behavior and in memory."

To test out how the brain deals with its spatial environment, scientists started with rats in a maze. When rats are first dropped into a maze, their place cells light up as they map out their new surroundings. The rats seemed to do this quickly and easily, so the scientists conducted an experiment: Could the rats just as easily map their surroundings in a virtual environment? Writes io9:

For the study, the researchers tried to create two apparently identical worlds, one real (RW) and one virtual (VR). Each environment consisted of a linear track in the center of a square room with distinct visual cues on each of the four walls. These cues were nearly identical in both environments, but the rats' bodies were fixed in VR — thus minimizing (or even eliminating) other important spatial cues, like balance. So, the only incoming environmental data during VR exposure were the visual cues and self-motion.

The study's results showed a big gap between how rats perceived the real world and the virtual world. Here are a couple excerpts that are pretty easy to understand:

Fourteen billion years ago, when one tiny, dense point became an unfathomable explosion creating all the matter in the universe, no one was around to witness the spectacle. We may not have first hand accounts of just how hot the blast or just how fast the matter traveled, but that also doesn’t mean that our knowledge of the universe’s early years are blank pages. There is a record of what happened, and from it, you can make music—the big bang’s original sound track, in fact.

In 2003, the mother of an 11-year old contacted John Cramer, a physicist at the University of Washington, with a question about the big bang. She was helping her son on a school project, and she wondered if anyone had been able to record what the explosion sounded like. The answer, of course, was no, but he kept returning to the question.

Image credit: Flickr user altemark via Creative Commons.

Cramer was a frequent contributor to the magazine, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, and just two years earlier he had written enthusiastically about how recent research projects looking at the cosmic wave background allowed scientists to hear “the sound of a Big Bang from a distance of 14 billion light years!” Cramer’s linguistic flourish actually meant that the data gathered could be used to understand what the big bang sounded like over a period of hundreds of thousands of years as the universe rapidly expanded. But scientists hadn’t actually heard the sound with their ears. Cramer had access to enough information. Why not recreate the sound?

Staging a revival of a very, very old explosion took Cramer just 16 lines to program, and an one hour on a Saturday morning. He constructed the sound in the software Mathematica, which gives users the option to render mathematical functions as sound. For all his interest in the subject, Cramer explains now ten years later, “I didn’t know what I was going to get.”

Photo credit: Seattle P-I file

The sound (embedded below), compressed to cover the first 760,000 years of the universe’s life, shoots up and then drops into a chest-vibrating hum that sounds like an airplane landing mixed with the static of the television. What came out of the speakers shocked more than just the physicist. Cramer’s two Shetland Sheepdogs came running into the room to inspect what in the world was going on. It was something bigger.

Every discussion of a manned mission to Mars inevitably touches on the practicality of a one-way, no-comin'-back trip. Sending a lone astronaut, or a small team, on a trip to a planet roughly 50 million miles away (when the orbits of Earth and Mars are relatively aligned) becomes much more viable when you don't have the carry all of the fuel they'd need to get back. Private spaceflight project Mars One is now moving forward with this idea, and hopes to establish a settlement on Mars in the year 2023.

NASA doesn't currently support the idea of a one-way trip to Mars, but The Atlantic wrote a great feature on a similar plan, from way back in 1962, that NASA probably thought long and hard about before going with the Apollo program. It was named the Cord/Seale plan after two engineers at Bell Aerosystems. After John F. Kennedy charged NASA with reaching the moon by the end of the decade, Cord and Seale proposed a way to make that trip by 1965: Send one astronaut, alone, with no way to get back.

Image credit: Bell Aerosystems Company.

Writes The Atlantic's Megan Garber:

"The pair formulated a plan to build a one-man spacecraft, ten feet wide and seven feet tall, that would be large enough to house a single human occupant. It would be half the weight of John Glenn's Mercury capsule. It would include tools and medical supplies and a battery-powered spacesuit. It would be equipped with enough oxygen for 30 days of space travel and enough water for 12. It would also include a nuclear reactor that would generate electrical power.

As Mary Roach outlines in her book Packing for Mars, a series of nine subsequent launches would head to the moon to provide this ultimate lone ranger with a better living module, better communications equipment, and the nearly 10,000 pounds of the food, water, and oxygen he would need to survive away from Earth. During which time, Cord and Seale figured, NASA would have had time to determine the details of another mission -- a rescue mission, essentially -- that would come to pick him up and bring him home."

Unlike the proposed trips to Mars, the astronaut in Cord and Seale's proposal would, after a few years, make it back to Earth. The political reasoning behind their idea is especially interesting. It was partially based on practicality, but it was also the only way they predicted being able to beat the Russians to the moon. At the time, their reserach suggested Russia could put a man on the moon as early as 1965, and there was no way NASA could launch a two-way trip that quickly.

By 1969, the two engineers predicted a three-man ship could carry two more astronauts to the moon and bring the lone explorer back to Earth with them. Assuming, of course, that he survived his time on the moon. It's not hard to see why NASA passed on the plan and decided on the roundtrip that eventually took place in 1969. As much of a political black eye as it would've been to have the Russians land on the moon first, having an astronaut die, stranded, on the moon, would be both tragic and a PR disaster.

That no doubt plays a role in NASA's hesitance to send astronauts on a one-way trip to Mars, as well, but there are many space experts who support the idea. Read the rest of The Atlantic's piece for more on our plans for Mars; and if you're really into the idea, check out the 99% Invisible podcast episode devoted to the subject.

In the next few days, Bertrand Piccard will leave San Francisco on an airplane headed to New York. That's a long flight--five hours or so, on your typical 747--but he won't arrive until sometime in June or July. The plane Piccard is flying, dubbed Solar Impulse, only travels at about 50 miles per hour. It's also entirely solar powered, which will make the cross-country flight a historic milestone. Piccard and his partner André Borschberg have spent the better part of a decade designing Solar Impulse and preparing for solar-powered flights. And here's the most amazing part: This isn't even the most interesting thing about Bertrand Piccard.

Smithsonian Mag has a great story about Solar Impulse's impending flight, and it briefly touches on Piccard's history. In 1999, Piccard circumnavigated the globe in a gas-powered balloon. His father, Jacques Piccard, was one of the two men who first descended to the bottom of the Marianas Trench in 1960. They were the only men to reach the deepest point in the Ocean until James Cameron in 2012.

Photo Credit: SolarImpulse.com

Piccard's grandfather Auguste Piccard was also a balloon explorer and invented the bathyscape, used in undersea exploration. He designed the Trieste, which his son used to explore the Marianas Trench. And if the family wasn't acclaimed enough already, Auguste's twin brother Jean Felix Piccard invented high altitude unmanned balloons. Auguste served as the inspiration for Professor Cuthbert Calculus from Tintin, and he and Jean Felix had their family name adapted into Star Trek: The Next Generation character Jean-Luc Picard by George Roddenberry.

Bertrand Piccard clearly has a legacy to live up to, and his solar flight from California to New York is hopefully only a lead-up to a solar-powered circumnavigation of the globe. Solar Impulse won't be able to make that flight, however. Despite its 12,000 solar cells and 900 pounds of batteries, Solar Impulse couldn't sustain a pilot for the flight across the oceans, which will take 3-5 days to fly over at less than 50 miles per hour. Piccard plans to add a larger cockpit and weather-proof electronics to Impulse's successor. The new plane will also be bigger and lighter, with a more advanced carbon fiber frame and more efficient batteries. Solar Impulse already has a wingspan of 69 yards.

The plane should have what it takes to make it across the continental United States. In 2010, Borschberg piloted the plane for 26 hours straight, proving that the energy it stored during the day could keep it flying through the night. In a few years, Solar Impulse may prove something else: That planes can fly around the entire world without burning an ounce of fuel.

Check out Popular Science's feature on Bertrand Piccard and Solar Impulse for more photos and technical information on the aircraft, and the Solar Impulse website for some awesome photos and videos of the plane.

One of the best gags in Aaron Sorkin's West Wing played out when the White House staff dedicated a single day dealing with the small organizations that were ignored the other 364. One of those groups, the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality, petitioned the government to ditch Mercator maps in schools in favor of the Peters Projection map. Why? Because the Mercator map is distorted--we all know Greenland isn't that big--and the organization argues that size is associated with power. Africa and South America, which appear far smaller than they really are, don't get the respect they deserve.

The gag works because it actually has a good point behind it, something we don't think about very often. The Mercator map is really, really inaccurate. And the Peters Projection is inaccurate, too, just in a different way--it stretches all the continents vertically to approximate their actual landmasses. Maybe the Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality should've been pushing Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map, which just turned 70. To celebrate, the Buckminster Fuller Institute is looking to give the map a rebirth.

The Dymaxion world map looks nothing like what we typically associate with a map, but its tesselated design, which folds up to form an icosahedron, does a better job of preserving the shapes and sizes of the continents than either the Mercator or Peters maps. The downside, of course, is that the array of unfolded triangles would make sea navigation impossible. But the map offers something unique as well: there's no "right" direction to look at it from, no real up or down. The Dymaxion is all about equality.

The Buckminster Fuller Institute's Dymax Redux contest " is calling on today’s graphic designers, visual artists, and citizen cartographers to create a new and inspiring interpretation of the Dymaxion Map. BFI will publish accepted entries within an online gallery, feature the selected finalists in a gallery exhibition in New York City and select one winning entry to be produced as a 36" x 24" poster." Anyone can enter a map design, and the deadline is on June 14.

Gizmodo's story on the contest includes some pretty cool versions of the Dymaxion map, as does the contest page itself. The map may never replace Mercator as the go-to representation of the Earth, but at least it's produced some pretty cool art.

"No, you can't actually name a star after a person," wrote Penny-Arcade in 2012. "But what if you actually could, for reals?" Cut to that day's comic: a kid names a star after his mother. Then, five thousand, four hundred years later: War in the Susan System! Great joke--only it turns out that the very real International Astronomical Union is none too pleased about a similar situation playing out right now.

The story, by way of the New Yorker, is that a newly founded non-profit science fund called Uwingu is raising money to fuel scientific research. Sounds great, right? They'll give out grants just like other non-profit funds and government branches. But one of the ways they're raising money is a bit unusual: For $5, they let people suggest names for planets out there in the Milky Way. Simply voting on a favorite only costs $1. And now they've picked their first winner: the closest planet to our solar system, orbiting Alpha Centauri, is now named Albertus Alauda.

Photo credit: NASA.

Except the International Astronomical Union isn't keen on the idea. Writes the New Yorker: "According to its Web site, the I.A.U.’s tasks include serving 'as the internationally recognized authority for assigning designations to celestial bodies and surface features on them.' The process of naming new objects is complicated (the Web précis of the document is itself formidable), and the I.A.U. press release claims exclusive rights to decide what a planet is called—even over the wishes of the scientist or scientists who discovered it."

But with a membership of over 10,000 astronomers and scientists, the I.A.U. isn't exactly able to give all of its members a direct say into the naming of a planet. If other astronomers and scientists are the ones running Uwingu, and the money that goes towards naming planets pays for research, isn't this all for a good cause?

The New Yorker digs further into the controversy, pointing out that planet "license plates"--their alphanumeric designations like Planet 2M 0746+20b--won't disappear, and astronomers can still use those names even if easier handles are established through popular votes. There may be hope for a Planet Susan yet.

The James Bond films, much as we love them, don't always tell the most believable villainous plots. It's still painful for us to think about Die Another Day's North Korean-turned-British-playboy who wants to carve up the Earth's surface with a sunlight-laser satellite. But an interesting post from Wired Science blogger Deborah Blum calls into question a different rogue plot element in the latest Bond film, Skyfall, that actually applies to decades of spy flicks: Cyanide.

Image credit: Columbia Pictures

Cyanide serves as a convenient plot device to kill off a lackey before he can spill the villain's secrets--most spy movies would only be 30 minutes long if the hero could interrogate the first bad guy he comes across. But as the trope goes, spies often keep a cyanide pill hidden in a false tooth, and when captured, they can bite down on it, releasing the toxin into their mouth and killing themselves in seconds. Blum writes for Wired that cyanide absolutely works--it may take a 2-5 minutes to kill, so it's a bit exaggerated in the movies--but the plot device is sound.

Mostly. Exception: Skyfall. Blum distinguishes between the gaseous hydrogen cyanide, used in Nazi concentration camps, and the salt forms of potassium and sodium cyanide, both of which are lethal when swallowed. Spies did carry suicide pills. But in Skyfall, villain Javier Bardem reveals that he bit down on a hydrogen cyanide capsule. It didn't kill him, but it did corrode his face and melt away most of his jaw.

Plot holes in James Bond movies? Nothing surprising. Cyanide pills, though? Surprisingly real.

Blum says: That doesn't make sense! "In the movie scenario, it’s identified as hydrogen cyanide," she writes. Remember, that's the cyanide usually delivered as a gas, not in a solid form. "And according to the script, it’s not lethal but corrosive...Although hydrogen cyanide (HCN) is best known as a lethal gas (it actually has a chemical warfare classification), it can also be found in liquid form, where it is usually referred to as Prussic Acid or hydrocyanic acid. This is what I suspect the Skyfall scriptwriter grabbed onto when he chose it for his destructive suicide pill."

The problem with that acid bit, Blum writes, is that hydrocyanic acid sits below citric acid on the scale of acidity. Since lemons typically don't melt our jaws, hydrocyanic acid probably wouldn't, either.

But now we've learned something. Plot holes in James Bond movies? Nothing surprising. Cyanide pills, though? Surprisingly real. Check out the rest of Blum's post for a more technical breakdown of how cyanide pills work, and for some more real world examples of spies using cyanide, like these glasses with a hidden pill compartment.

What's the most counterintuitive way to interact with a touchscreen device like a smartphone or tablet? We'd have to go with not touching it. Samsung's playing around with exactly that with an experiment to see how effectively people can control a Galaxy tablet with nothing but the power of their minds. And, of course, a brain-computer interface, which uses several electrodes to monitor electrical activity within the brain.

Just last month we wrote about a new implant that's a promising step for translating brain activity into computer interaction. Samsung's study isn't so invasive or complicated, since it involves wearing an EEG cap rather than having a wireless device drilled into your head. But turning brain impulses into virtual actions is still no simple task.

An EEG cap, photo courtesy University of Maryland, via Creative Commons

Technology Review describes how the study allowed participants to open apps:

"To use EEG-detected brain signals to control a smartphone, the Samsung and UT Dallas researchers monitored well-known brain activity patterns that occur when people are shown repetitive visual patterns. In their demonstration, the researchers found that people could launch an application and make selections within it by concentrating on an icon that was blinking at a distinctive frequency."

The researchers point out that pushing interaction forward is an important part of the evolution of technology. The same is true for the move from buttons to touchscreens. But there are still major challenges for brain-computer interfaces. "The initial focus for the team was to develop signal processing methods that could extract the right information to control a device from weak and noisy EEG signals, and to get those methods to work on a mobile device," writes Technology Review.

Samsung's Galaxy Note was tested with a prototype EEG device that doesn't use the classic system of wet or gel electrodes to encourage conductivity through the scalp. The dry electrodes are much faster to set up--the gap is as wide as 10 seconds versus 45 minutes--but they're less accurate. Participants were able to make a basic app selection with 80 to 95 percent accuracy every five seconds or so, which is plenty accurate, but far, far slower than manipulating a touchscreen by hand.