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:

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:

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:

Next time you rock out at a concert, or feel a symphony sweep over you in waves, thank your nucleus accumbens. It's most commonly known as part of the brain's pleasure center, and without it, we'd never feel joy after listening to a piece of music we really, really love. But the "why" here is an interesting question. Why does music activate the pleasure center, and why do certain types of music or certain individual songs produce euphoric sensations when others don't?

National Geographic interviewed neuroscientist Valorie Salimpoor about a study she published in the journal Science today. It's called "Interactions Between the Nucleus Accumbens and Auditory Cortices Predict Music Reward Value," and as the name suggests, Salimpoor has discovered that the types of music we've listened to in the past can actually determine the music that gives us the most pleasure.

Photo credit: Flickr user nkashirin via Creative Commons.

The fact that we derive pleasure from music at all is actually linked to our prior experiences as well. Salimpoor conducted a study several years ago in which participants listened to their favorite songs and had their brain activity monitors through positron emission tomography. After listening, their brains were flooded with dopamine, providing pleasure--but this is a unique phenomenon in humans. Here's how Salimpoor explains it:

Green Bank, West Virginia, a town of 147, sits inside the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000 square mile area of land near the Virginia border. Green Bank is surrounded by national and state forests and parks like so many other secluded rural towns in the United States. It is not, however, surrounded by the radio signals that crisscross the rest of the country. There are no cellphone towers, no AM or FM radio stations. Thanks to the National Radio Quiet Zone, the skies above Green Bank are effectively dead air.

The radio-free Quiet Zone fills one important purpose and a second coincidental one. It was established by the FCC in 1958 to protect the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank from interference; the observatory operates the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. Of growing importance, however, is the fact that the Quiet Zone protects its inhabitants from radio signals as well.

Most of us don't think twice about needing to protect ourselves from radio signals. We use Wi-Fi and cell phones every day. Everything plugged into a wall socket gives off some low level radiation. While some studies have raised concerns about cell phones eventually causing cancer, we never think twice about the electromagnetic fields emitted by our refrigerators, televisions, or microwaves. Some of Green Bank's residents, however, worry about all of those things. In fact, they moved to Green Bank specifically to get away from it all.

Slate just published an article titled Refugees of the Modern World, detailing the issues some people have with electromagnetic hypersensitivity, or EHS. As the name implies, EHS sufferers are unusually sensitive to radiation that isn't harmful to the rest of us, and several dozen have moved to Green Bank in recent years to live in relative isolation. Some still use electronics in their homes, but they're still protected from the radio signals that would fill the air in most other parts of the country.

EHS is fascinating because the symptoms are most definitely real, but scientists aren't convinced that electromagnetic radiation is the cause. Slate details the conviction of several Green Banks residents and how much the National Radio Quiet Zone has improved their health. But it also dives into studies that have returned inconclusive results about EHS:

"James Rubin, a psychologist at King’s College London who studies psychogenic illnesses, has analyzed the literature on provocation studies and conducted some at his own lab. His most recent meta-analysis—which covered 1,175 participants in 46 studies—found no rigorous, replicable experiment in which radio frequencies were identified at rates greater than chance. 'It is definitely the case that some people experience symptoms that they attribute to electromagnetic frequencies,' he told me. 'But is it really these frequencies causing the symptoms? At the moment, we can say that there simply isn't any robust evidence to support that.' "

Slate also covers the opposition--some claim that the settings those tests were conducted under (in labs where other devices emitting radiation would be present) undermines the test. But there's a counter to that, too:

I had no idea how amazing whales were. That changed this February at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting when I watched a panel of scientists spend three hours detailing the latest research surrounding our most basic understanding of whales. It was anything but boring. It turns out we know very little about the biggest animals on the planet. Folks like Marine Biologist Ari Friedlaender, who I recently profiled for my series on field scientists, have dedicated their lives to understanding them better. But, for now, here’s a look at the latest in our understanding of what makes whales so amazing.

Photo credit: Flickr user barathieu via Creative Commons.

Whales are bigger now than they have ever been before--making them the largest animals that have ever existed on earth. In fact, the fossil record shows they’ve evolved up in size several times throughout history. The oldest known whale skeleton is from India. It’s about 55 million-years old and, like many other early whales, it’s the size of a Golden Retriever.

Despite their enormous size, whales are incredibly fast-moving and agile. They lunge at Krill patches at a speed of about 16-feet per second. Blue whales have been observed doing 360-degree barrel rolls into dense krill patches from 1,100 feet underwater all the way to the surface in order to maximize foraging.

Photo credit: Flickr user mikebaird via Creative Commons.

They also navigate with extreme precision. Whales maintain their course with 1 degree or less difference. In other words: They know where they are at all times.

[Update: Video below!]

Tea bags are paper--cheap, simple, harmless paper--except when they're not. Today many packaged tea sellers have moved to plastic bags, which are often marketed as "silky" bags because, well, it sounds better. But they're made of plastic or nylon, materials that bring with them certain health concerns. We've read about particles from plastic water bottles being toxic. When she heard about plastic being used in tea bags, The Atlantic writer Taylor Orci decided to see if those tea bags are be dangerous, too. The results of her research aren't encouraging.

Orci learned that plastic tea bags are most commonly made from polyethylene terephthalate or food grade nylon. Phthalates are materials widely used in the plastic industry--they're also the materials in plastic bottles linked to health issues like infertility and hormone disruption. She discovered that, unsurprisingly, these plastics and nylons have melting points far above boiling water's 212 degrees. Tea drinkers don't have to worry about plastic bags melting and poisoning them. But that's not the only issue.

Credit: Amber Rose Tea Company

"There is another temperature point for plastics, though, that we may need to worry about, called the "glass transition" temperature (Tg) ," writes Orci. At glass transition temperature, the plastic material becomes more porous. Bonds aren't breaking, and the solid isn't changing states into a liquid, but that doesn't really matter--what matters is that, at the glass transition temperature, a plastic tea bag will start leaching more chemicals.

Orci continues: "In the case of PET and food grade nylon (either nylon 6 or nylon 6-6), all have a Tg lower than the temperature of boiling water. For example, while the melting point of PET is 482 degrees Fahrenheit, the Tg is about 169 degrees. Both nylons have a lower glass transition temperature than PET. (Remember that water boils at 212 degrees.)"

The question is, are there unhealthy phthalates in these plastic tea bags that we should worry about? As long as the plastics aren't leaching anything bad, there's little cause for concern. Orci found that Lipton's platic tea bags claim to use "the same food grade material clear water and juice bottles are made of." But, as mentioned earlier, those bottles aren't exactly safe. Studies have shown notable concerning effects on human and animal health.

While plastic tea bags aren't going to make you sick overnight--and probably never will do much to you, unless you drink a ton of tea--it makes sense to limit exposure to them, just like other similar plastics. More health studies and explicit regulations on what's safe for use in foods would help, too. Read Orci's full article for more information from experts and the argument for plastic tea bags, which notes the pollution of paper manufacturing.

Marine biologists are pretty badass. Just ask Ari Friedlaender about his job hanging off the side of a boat over Antarctic waters with a 25-foot pole trying to tag a whale. He spends most of his life on a boat off countless coasts following families of Humpback and Minke whales in an attempt to understand just a little bit about the biggest animals on the planet. Friedlaender chatted with us about what it’s like when an animal the size of a truck flicks its tail at you.

Photo credit: A. Stimpert, NMFS permit 808-1735

Why study whales?

First off, they're the biggest animals that have ever lived on the planet. In order to get big you have to be successful at what you do. In my mind they’re the ultimate ocean predators. They represent the health of ocean ecosystems. Where you find whales you also find healthy ecosystems that can support a lot of life.

Photo credit: C. Ware, NMFS permit 605-1904

At the same time, we as humans are doing all sorts of the things to affect whales and the ocean’s ability to thrive. Humans and whales have a checkered past. They’ve been the subject of commercial harvest for hundreds of years. To see that they can respond and rebound from that negative activity is pretty cool. We’re trying to understand which ones are doing that better and why.

Parties just aren't the same without alcohol. Everyone knows booze is the great social lubricant. Put 20 people in a room and they may get along well enough, but after a drink or two they'll be more social, more at ease with themselves and their surroundings. This is the basis of bars, cocktail parties--and maybe civilization, according to Jeffrey Kahn. In a recent opinion piece for the New York Times, Kahn argues that beer may have been around as far back as 10,000 years ago, and is responsible for society's development as we know it.

"Five core social instincts, I have argued, gave structure and strength to our primeval herds," he writes. "They kept us safely codependent with our fellow clan members, assigned us a rank in the pecking order, made sure we all did our chores, discouraged us from offending others, and removed us from this social coil when we became a drag on shared resources...But then, these same lifesaving social instincts didn’t readily lend themselves to exploration, artistic expression, romance, inventiveness and experimentation...To free up those, we needed something that would suppress the rigid social codes that kept our clans safe and alive."

Photo credit: Flickr user wv via Creative Commons

And that something was, of course, beer. Kahn points to evidence that, counter to common theory, humans first started growing and storing grain to make beer, rather than food. Mexican anthropological work indicates that the ancient grass teosinte was ideal for brewing, but a poor grain for making tortillas or bread; only after farmers domesticated that grass into maize did they primarily use it for food. Similarly, studies of stone age brewing tools in the Mediterranean indicated that beer may have been an important societal component.

Kahn writes that beer may have loosened rigid social structure, encouraging more creative thinking and collaboration. Eventually, it found a place in important social and even governmental decisions: "Beer was thought to be so important in many bygone civilizations that the Code of Urukagina, often cited as the first legal code, even prescribed it as a central unit of payment and penance."

Today no judge would order a guilty farmer to pay his neighbor in kegs of beer, but our modern-day equivalent to sitting around the ancient campfire--a night at the bar or your average house party--still relies on beer to help everyone get along.

Dinosaurs occupy an important role in education: In addition to being every kid's favorite creatures, they're often used to explain the concept of extinction. They're hardly the only extinct animals, of course--many, many species have been killed off since the days of the dinosaurs. And ever since Jurassic Park, dinosaurs have taken on another role that veers closer to science fiction. What if we could bring extinct animals back to life?

The fiction in that story is slowly fading, as Wired's story "The Plan to Bring the Iconic Passenger Pigeon Back From Extinction" proves. The story focuses on scientist Ben Novak and his research into "de-extinction," or the process of reviving an extinct species through cutting-edge DNA manipulation. It's Jurassic Park, except the focus of Novak's obsession is the North American passenger pigeon, which isn't quite as dangerous as a Tyrannosaurus Rex or raptor.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Which isn't to say the passenger pigeon was totally harmless. Wired writes that flocks of several hundred million passenger pigeons roamed the east coast of the United States in the mid-1800s, destroying forests by landing on trees by the thousands and devouring acres of acorns and nuts. Their mass migration patterns made them easy picking for predators--including humans, who would stand below trees of the birds and fire guns into the branches, guaranteed to shoot down scores of birds. By the end of the 19th century, thousands of birds remained where there were millions decades before. And then they were extinct.

Novak's research focuses on reassembling the DNA of those birds to eventually recreate them. "Every cell in its fleshy toe pads contains the 1.5 billion base pairs of DNA that spell out the bird’s identity, from the color of its eggs to the sound of its voice," writes Wired. "But this DNA has seen better days. It has been broken apart by enzymes and oxygen, zapped with ultraviolet radiation and contaminated by other organisms."

Next-generation DNA sequencing makes it possible to analyze those DNA fragments. Modern sequencing led to the passenger pigeon's closest living relative, the band-tailed pigeon, which may provide similar enough DNA to allow scientists to piece together the passenger pigeon's missing pairs. But that's just the beginning of the de-extinction process.