In 2005, South Korean scientists created the world's first cloned dog, and now the country has announced plans to use clones to sniff for drugs. Yesterday the Korean Customs Service announced that seven Labrador retrievers had been cloned from an expert drug-sniffer that is still on the job. The scientists leading the research at one point worked with disgraced researcher Hwang Woo-suk, but the dog cloning work is legitimate.

The clones are being trained near Incheon International Airport, and all are reported to be healthy. And, strangely, they've all been given the same name: Toppy. Each one cost between $100,000 and $150,000 to clone, but that investment could pay off in the long run, if they become successful drug detectors. The dogs are now part of the way through a series of tests set up to establish whether or not they're really fit for the job. Good genes aren't always enough, after all.




Road signs have been a blessing to many drivers, acting as a quick guide away from danger or to the nearest gas stations. Now researchers in France have come up with an iconic language of their own to help lead doctors to the right drug prescription. Jean-Baptiste Lamy and his colleagues at the University of Paris hope the VCM (Visulaisation des Connaissances Médicales) icon system will help lessen prescribing errors. Something often traced to restraints on physicians' time and resources that prevent them from easily looking up or remembering drug properties. With VCM, doctors can see the risks associated with any given drug at a glance.


The icons can even be put into groups to graphically represent complex sentences such as “Risk of hepatic problems, requiring hepatic monitoring; if an hepatic problem occurs, stop the treatment.” [left]

The eleven physicians who tested the system as part of a study published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making, learned VCM in a matter of hours. Once they had it down, doctors understood VCM questions almost twice as fast and several percentage points more accurately than text.



In a slow-motion shock to environmentalists worldwide, European countries are turning back to coal to fire new power plants. At a time when India and China are ramping up production in their outdated coal-burning facilities, the last place anyone expected to see a coal resurgence was in the generally progressive nations of Western Europe. Most turning again to coal are hamstrung by record oil and natural gas prices; Italy and Germany have the added stress of having banned new nuclear plants as an alternative. Coal is relatively cheap and widely available, both features absent from oil and natural gas. The global reserves are much deeper as well.

Proponents argue coal is better than it used to be due to "clean coal" technologies. It is something of a misnomer, however, because the "clean" largely applies only to particulate matter and not to carbon emissions. While no one will bemoan a reduction in airborne soot, it's the carbon we don't want getting out. To be fair, the plants on the drawing board are models of waste recycling and efficient cooling, but none of that serves to deter the inevitable warming effect from the plants' exhausts.

So far, 50 plants are on schedule to be opened over the next five years. Each has been given a life expectancy of at least fifty.


If we don't get our act together in time and we push this planet past its limits, to the point where things get disaster-movie bad, at the very least we can take solace in the fact that we've been there once before. According to new research out of Stanford University, the human species was on the brink of extinction 70,000 years ago due to an extended drought. It shrunk the human population to a number perhaps as low as 2,000.

The study used mitochondrial DNA to trace the divergence of the Khoi and San people in South Africa some 125,000 years ago. The researchers discovered the human population divided into small, isolated groups at the time of the split. The chronology of the DNA genetics corresponds to geological evidence of severe drought in the region during the same period. Once the severe weather patterns had passed, people slowly made their way out of Africa, reuniting during the early Stone Age.



The good news is that the ozone hole over Antarctica is slowly healing, thanks to controls on ozone-depleting substances that were once widely used in products such as refrigerators and aerosol cans. Stratospheric ozone protects us from harmful ultraviolet radiation that can cause problems such as skin cancer and crop damage.

Unfortunately, the recovery of the ozone hole has a dark side: The return of a thin, suspended blanket of stratospheric ozone will raise temperatures over the southern polar region, according to a new study by scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The scientists, who relied on a NASA computer model for their predictions, also report that the healing of the hole will weaken winds that currently shield the Antarctic interior from warmer air masses to the north.

Antarctica may not be the only continent affected: The researchers also found that the changes in air circulation caused by ozone recovery could mean wetter conditions during late spring and early summer in southern South America, and warmer and drier weather in Australia—which is already suffering from a long drought.

While average temperatures in most places on the globe have been increasing, the interior of Antarctica has experienced cooler summers and autumns. "We may finally see the interior of Antarctica begin to warm with the rest of the world," says Judith Perlwitz, the lead author of the study, which will be published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters on April 26.




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Hanyoung Lee wants you to be seen. The South Korea-based product designer devised a prototypical warning device to prevent pedestrian strikes along roadway crosswalks. It's called the Virtual Wall, a visual barrier created from plasma laser beams. The system casts larger-than-life images of pedestrians in eye-grabbing red across the roadway, at a location where such peds are likely to be crossing.

We don't imagine the plasma lasers are the cutting type, however. We would never endorse a radical social engineering project that radical.



Quite a lot has been written in search of the root causes of the recent global increase in food prices. While bio fuels have taken their fair share of criticism, they are proving not to be the only contributor. Widespread, long-term severe weather patterns—like the Australian drought responsible for rice shortages—are high on the list, as well as increased demand from India and China—a country experiencing tremendous demand for grain to fuel industrial cattle farming. Regardless of the causes, finding a solution is the next real challenge. While it likely won't be as simple as finding a new food staple to take the place of grains, one candidate could prove to be a viable option: the potato.

The potato is third only to wheat and rice in terms of its value as a food crop in the marketplace. It's adaptable to most any climate, matures quickly, and can produce up to four times as much food per acre as grains. More importantly, in the face of today's economic crisis, the potato has not become a speculative commodity and so remains affordable, although farmers are more likely to look past the potato in favor of crops with a higher profit margin. Also, compared to grains, it is relatively heavy and susceptible to rot in transit, which has largely kept it out of the global food trade. That's an obvious downside as far as exports are concerned, but with governmental support to make farming the tuber economically worthwhile, it could prove to be a good domestic source of food and ease some of the current burden.
Foreseeing these benefits, the United Nations even went so far as to declare 2008 the International Year of the Potato back in early 2006. Think of that next time you tear into that large order of fries.



When it comes to climate change, a quick fix won't do. Science published a paper Friday from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) which concludes that a proposed plan to inject the atmosphere with sulfate particles in order to cool the planet would actually have dire consequences.

According to the NCAR study, this geo-engineering strategy could lead to the destruction of at least one-quarter, and potentially three-quarters, of the ozone layer above the Arctic Ocean, and could delay the expected recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole by 30 to 70 years. "Our research indicates that trying to artificially cool off the planet could have perilous side effects," says NCAR's Simone Tilmes. "While climate change is a major threat, more research is required before society attempts global geo-engineering solutions."
Yes, but let's not stop the good ideas from flooding in. Here are some other tech-based schemes to save the planet.

This study marks the second time the ozone layer has factored in to recent climate change research—last week, we reported on a joint NASA/NOAA/University of Colorado study linking the regeneration of ozone with increased warming in the Antarctic.



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At a conference in Germany, engineers unveiled a robotic jellyfish designed to swim—but not sting—like the real thing.

The AquaJelly runs on rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, has a roughly spherical body and uses eight tentacles to get around in the water. The tentacles undulate like the tail of a real fish, and small fins at the ends give the machine a little extra push on the water. To steer, the robot shifts its weight, and it drives around its tank autonomously. Pressure sensors tell the AquaJelly how deep it is in the water within a few millimeters, and light sensors give it an idea of the location of potential obstacles, including other robo-jellies.

Now if we could just outfit them with lasers and get them to fry the jellies that plague so many beaches in the summer, that would be something.



Rockstar Games producer Leslie Benzies says that Grand Theft Auto IV may have cost more than $100 million to develop, which would reportedly make it the most expensive game ever produced.

Apparently more than a thousand people worked on the job. There's a 1,000-plus page script. Photographers snapped 100,000 photos for background scenes. And yes, the developers worked long hours getting things ready.

That $100 million figure might sound shocking—and Benzies says it's a real guess—but it's not that wild considering how successful the franchise as a whole has been. The controversial series boasts global sales of almost 70 million units. Now we'll see whether the latest installment meets the hype.



Albert Hofmann, Swiss chemist and discoverer of LSD died yesterday at the age of 102. Hofmann, who succumbed to a heart attack while at his home in Switzerland, first synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 while researching the alkaloid compounds of ergot, a fungus which grows on rye and wheat. It was deemed to be of no interest at the time and was set aside until Hofmann decided to reinvestigate the compound five years later. In mid April of 1943 while resynthesizing LSD, he accidentally ingested a small amount and was made aware of its effects. On April the 19th, he deliberately consumed 250 micrograms and set off on his bicycle to return home, unwittingly setting in motion a major catalyst for the drug counterculture of the 1960's.

There is an element of serendipity in Hofmann having been the one to have discovered the drug. He long saw promise in the compound as a psychiatric tool for understanding human consciousness and championed its carefully controlled use by doctors during the short span before it took on a life of its own and was ultimately banned worldwide. It was a tremendous disappointment to him to have seen it become a recreational drug of choice and cause widespread panic. He viewed it as almost sacred, in much the same way historical cultures have ingested psychotropic plants with a focused spiritual intent.

While Hofmann is understandably most well known for LSD, his work was also key to developing many new drugs for treating postpartum hemorrhaging, stabilizing blood pressure, and improving circulation and cerebral function.


Not much in science is more of a mind-bender than thinking about the size and fate of the known universe (except for quantum mechanics and string theory, which also has a lot to do with the size and fate of the universe, albeit on the opposite end of the size spectrum). When we first developed theories about the universe, the model which resulted depicted all of space as static and unchanging, infinite in depth in any direction. Then Einstein posited general relativity and suddenly a whole host of universes were theoretically possible: static, dynamic, infinite, and finite.

Once practical observation caught up to theory, we were able to conceive of the Big Bang and prove it by observing Doppler shifts. We knew at least that galaxies were moving away from each other, expanding off into the distance. What we didn't know was whether that expansion would continue forever or if it would, like the largest and slowest rubber band ever known, eventually snap back.

It is only recently that we have determined the former to be the case. The universe will expand until our neighbor galaxies are no longer visible to us (of course, assuming we are still around tens of billions of years from now) and the stars in our galaxy will use up all the raw hydrogen fuel, fading out to nothing. There is one other long shot possibility (and here we return to string theory) that dark matter may ultimately refuel the rubber band from the earlier example and we may indeed all snap back to the first moment of the Big Bang. Under this scenario, our universe could be just the most current in an infinite number of universes that have expanded and collapsed over trillions and trillions of years.



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Silicon Valley is mostly a world of practical technology—applying principles from pure science to create handy gadgets. But today, Hewlett Packard announced a new electrical component born of theoretical physics. The device, a nanoscale component called a "memristor," requires no power to retain data, which it can store more densely than a hard drive and access about as fast as a computer’s RAM memory—potentially allowing it to replace both components in the future.

Memristors can function in either a digital mode, in which a memory cell is “on” or “off,” or in analog mode, in which each cell holds some value in between. These values grow every time the cell receives an electrical signal, mimicking the way neurons in the brain build stronger memories the more they are stimulated.

The memristor was theorized in the early seventies by an electrical engineer name Leon Chua, but it took decades before anyone could prove it exists. The process was similar to particle physics, in which mathematicians first propose a particle and then experimenters eventually find it—or don’t. (The hottest current example is the search for the theoretical Higgs boson, aka the “god particle.”) Chua’s mythical electrical component didn’t show up until recently when HP researchers were studying the electrical properties of nanoscale materials and came upon a few that acted suspiciously like the memristor. After some refinements, they invented exactly what Chua theorized.

First PCs
It’s a long path between proving something in the lab and selling it at Best Buy. Stan Williams, who leads the HP research team, expects memristors to first show up in the next few years as “cache” that sits between a hard drive and the DRAM memory in PCs. The hard drive could load key data, like the instructions to start up Windows, into the memristor cache, which can dump it into the DRAM far faster than transferring it straight from the hard drive—resulting in lightening-fast boot-ups and quick opening of large files.

But Williams has bigger plans to eventually replace both the hard drive and the RAM with one memory system that eliminates the need to store data on a relatively slow hard drive and then laboriously load it into fast DRAM before the PC can use it. He thinks a memristor can hold scads more data than a hard drive and access about as fast as DRAM. “You expand out both ways and try to eat the heart out of both the DRAM and the hard disk,” said Williams.

Then Androids?
Williams also wants to eat into the CPU. He says that many processes requiring fuzzy logic, like recognizing a face, are very hard to work out with that yes/no logic of a digital computer. But for an analog computer—like, say, the brain—it’s a piece of cake. So Williams proposes a CPU with multiple processing cores: Some digital for the number crunching that today's computers do so well, and others using analog memristors. Take facial recognition. Someone’s face can change from day to day, and definitely from year to year. But it’s not a drastic change that a yes/no digital system is good at figuring out. It’s a mild difference with some degree of change along a continuum that Williams says is perfect for an analog computer.

Could Williams take it even further—creating not just a PC that thinks a little more like a human, but an electronic mind that thinks exactly like one? “We’re not claiming we’re going to build a brain anytime in the next decade,” he says. But he’s not ruling it out for later on.

How it Works
The unlikely invention of the memristor took about 40 years. It started in the early 1970s when electrical engineer Leon Chua was looking at the interplay of electrical forces in the basic elements of circuits: resistors, capacitors and inductors. The same math that explained those three elements indicated that there should be a fourth, which he named the memristor (short for “memory resistor”) in a 1971 paper. A memristor would change its level of electrical resistance if charge were applied and retain or “remember” that resistance until another charge were applied. Like the Higgs boson “god particle,” the memristor made perfect sense on paper, but no one had ever seen one.

Not until the late 1990s, when researchers at Hewlett Packard Labs were studying the electrical properties of different nanotech materials and found several that looked pretty similar to Chua’s hypothetical memristor. Suspecting that Chua’s mythical circuit was real, HP researchers set out to invent one.

What they wound up with was deceptively simple: two layers of a semiconductor, titanium dioxide, sandwiched between electrodes. The bottom layer contains the standard material, which is virtually useless for conducting electricity. The top layer is missing a few oxygen atoms, creating positively charged “bubbles” that make it a conductor.

Running a positive charge through the electrode above this layer pushes some of the charged bubbles into the lower layer (where they stay, until another charge is applied), allowing it to conduct electricity and lowering the electrical resistance of the entire cell. A computer can read information in a memristor cell by measuring how much resistance it has.

Hitting the cell with relatively big zaps switches it from high to low resistance levels that correspond to zero and one for digital data. Using less power can give it some resistance value in-between the extremes. And the results are cumulative. The more often you charge the cell, the lower its resistance—in other words, the stronger its memory becomes. That matches the way neurons build stronger connections over time to make memories stronger (and explains why the more you practice something like piano, the better you get at doing it). Applying a negative charge to the top of the cell reverses the process—a lot of power switches a one to a zero in a digital system. Applying finer amounts of current causes a memory to fade.

HP’s memristors are tiny, about 15 nanometers across. That allows them to store data about as densely as a hard drive—100 gigabits per square centimeter. But HP thinks it can get them far smaller—down to four or even two nanometers. Even at 4nm, a square centimeter of memristor can hold one terabit.

The complete explanation is in a paper that HP published this morning in the journal Nature.



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NASA has been catching some extra criticism in the past few days after The Houston Chronicle—Johnson Space Center's hometown paper—ran an expose on credit card abuses at the agency.

The paper reportedly reviewed 451,000 transactions, and among plenty of apparently legitimate purchases, found that NASA employees had also bought iPods, video games and jewelry. The first two you might be able to slide past accounting, if you were, say, an astronaut doing isolation chamber testing, and needed a few gadgets and games to pass the time. But jewelry is a stretch.

It appears that NASA may already be on top of the problem, though—or at least the most egregious cases. The space agency already caught an employee who had used her NASA plastic to buy $157,000 worth of stuff, including Wal-Mart gift cards, an air conditioner and $13,000 worth of electronics. Yes, she pleaded guilty. No chance of talking her way out of that mess.



Granted, it might not seem like such a big deal when astronomers find some of the missing mass in the universe, since there's very little that isn't missing. Roughly 95 percent of the cosmos is either dark matter or dark energy. About five percent of the universe is made up of the normal mass we're familiar with—baryonic matter. Yet by adding up the known stars and galaxies and gas, astronomers have only accounted for about half of that five percent.

Now, scientists using the XMM-Newton, ESA's super-sensitive detector, have begun to pick up some of that missing mass by studying X-ray emissions coming from tendrils of gas stretching between two galaxy clusters, Abell 222 and Abell 223. These gaseous filaments connect many other galaxies in the universe, forming a kind of cosmic web, and studying those other links will be the next task. "This is only the beginning. To understand the distribution of the matter within the cosmic web, we have to see more systems like this one," says astronomer Norbert Werner. "And ultimately launch a dedicated space observatory to observe the cosmic web with a much higher sensitivity than possible with current missions."



Scientists have shown off a new laser that boasts an incomparable mix of speed, short pulses and power. That's newsworthy in and of itself, but this laser, developed by researchers at the University of Konstanz in Germany and, here in the U.S., at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, could also lead to a 100-fold increase in the sensitivity of observatories searching for extrasolar planets. The laser itself is the size of a dime, and pops out 10 billion pulses per second with an average power of 650 milliwatts. It is 100 to 1,000 times more powerful than standard high-speed lasers.

But let's get back to planet-hunting. Scientists often look for planets outside our solar system by searching for shifts in the light coming from a distant star—these little wobbles can indicate the passage of a smaller planet between the star and Earth. This new laser could help detectors pick up smaller shifts in the frequency of that starlight, and give astronomers a better shot at determining the presence or absence of a planet.



With a death toll steadily rising, the effects of Myanmar's devastating cyclone have yet to be quantified, but days after the storm one thing is clear: they will be long-lasting and far-reaching.

"Our biggest fear is that the aftermath could be more lethal than the storm itself," said Caryl Stern, head of the U.N. Children's Fund. Four days on, electricity and water supplies are still cut throughout the country. With broken sewage lines, mounting trash, impassable roads preventing access to clean water and food, and damaged hospitals, the nation faces a likely-devastating public health crisis. The World Health Organization has pinpointed malaria and tuberculosis—two diseases that thrive amidst overcrowding and bad water—as especial threats. Meanwhile, the spread of communicable diseases is speeded by blocked roads, which trap sick people in and keep health workers out.

They also prevent the easy egress of rice: one of Myanmar's major exports. Last year the country exported 400,000 tons of rice. Now, shipments to Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, which would have fed some of the world's poorest, have been


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Bioplastics, like biofuels, are on the rise as consumers demand alternatives to fossil fuel-based plastics and big business take their wants seriously. Everything from shopping bags to clamshell containers are being reengineered out of bio-based packaging in the hope of finding a truly disposable container; one that, instead of ending up floating in the ocean, will quickly decompose underground. That ideal, as you might expect, is not quite so simple. And already, our two leading alternative bag types are falling short of the hype.

Packaging made from polyactic acid (something we reported on a few weeks ago) needs anaerobic conditions in order to break down. (This is part of the reason researchers are looking for hybrids of polyactic acid that can break down in all conditions.) Current commercial anaerobic digesters—used mostly for treating wastewater— don't take this kind of packaging and are very difficult and expensive to maintain. If the bags end up in current plastics recycling operations, they can contaminate the works and make the entire batch they're in unrecyclable.

The other alternative, oxy-degradable bags and materials, need composters in order to break down correctly. While digesters are as complicated as power plants, a composter can be nothing more than a tremendous pile of hot dirt and waste. Unfortunately, a landfill is not a composter, and that's where the majority of these bags will end up. Landfills are in fact terrible places for degradation; they're oxygen-starved and tightly packed, both factors that work against natural chemical breakdown.

If nothing else, these difficulties should tell us we need to think more seriously about not throwing out that shopping bag or even taking it in the first place. No matter how well-engineered it may be to break down in the environment, we are quickly learning the cost of putting it there in the first place.



Just in time for this year’s growing season, farmers have new equipment to help keep tabs on their crops while away. With SmartCrop, a system developed by Accent Engineering, farmers get text messages when their plants need water. The system uses infrared thermometers to measure leaf temperature and data is then transferred to a computerized base station. A cellphone modem hooked up to the base station allows farmers to receive SMS alerts when their plants are too hot. Research has shown that each plant species has a range of temperatures that is best for its growth. High temperatures mean plants are experiencing heat stress and need to be watered to cool off.

With a base price of $1,200, the system promises farmers an inexpensive and easy way to help determine irrigation schedules for their props. SmartCrop can simplify the data to the most basic level: Irrigate or Don’t Irrigate.



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Flowers are known to attract pollinating insects through a variety of means, from alluring fragrances and nectar to vibrant colors and shapes. According to a new study in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, scientists can now add an unlikely mechanism to the list: movement. Researchers from the University of Aberystwyth in Wales observed 300 specific coastal flowers, noting stem lengths, the range of swaying distance, how often and how long they were visited by insects, and how many seeds were ultimately produced.

Those flowers with long and thin stems proved to be the most attractive to insects and produced the most seeds. The scientists concluded their swaying motions made them most visible among others. There are practical limits, however. Those flowers with terribly long stems moved too much to allow insects to make a stable landing and so were generally avoided. Similarly, the flowers with shorter stems were less visited since they were hard to differentiate from the crowd.



In 2009, Canada plans to launch a suitcase-sized spacecraft that will be charged with spotting asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. There's already a big ground-based program underway. NASA regularly identifies and tracks asteroids, calculating the likelihood that they could at some point run into our pale blue dot.
But the Canadian Space Agency thinks that its Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite might be able to identify risky rocks that grounded telescopes can't see. And its total cost to build and launch will be just $10 million. So, even if it doesn't prove to be much better than ground-based observatories, as some experts suggest might be the case, the CSA won't be blowing its budget. And if it does spot a threat that NASA's NEO program doesn't catch, we'll all be saying thank you, before sending Bruce Willis up to blow the thing apart.



Duke University engineers think they've made an important step towards developing robotic surgeons that operate independently. The robot they used in their experiments—which were just feasibility studies, and were not performed on real people—uses 3-D ultrasound as its eyes, and an AI program that processes the 3-D information it gathers to determine the robot's next steps.

The robot has successfully performed several simulated procedures—directing catheters inside synthetic blood vessels, carrying out needle biopsies and even removing a fake cyst. A tiny 3-D ultrasound transducer gathers the images, effectively providing the robot's arm with a map of where it needs to go.

And while the long-term goal is to have some future version of their robot perform more complex tasks in animal models, the engineers also say that the 3-D ultrasound tech they use could prove to be a valuable tool to today's surgeons.



Broadband over Power Lines, or BPL, is a technology developed to send data over lines also used for electric power transmission. Simply put, it's high-speed Internet through your electrical outlets. Right off the bat, the appeal of a system like this is attractive for a lot of reasons. It could provide broadband service to rural areas without the physical infrastructure for DSL or cable and would require only minimal hardware installations by the power utilities. It would also pave the way for Internet-enabled appliances in that end users would be able to connect any device to the Internet simply by plugging it into any electrical wall socket.

It's of course not without its downsides, the most significant of which is the lack of standardization across the national electricity network. Another is the issue of managing the noise on power lines, which are already a noisy environment from a transmission perspective.

All this speculation may be moot, however, as the largest planned U.S. deployment of the technology has been scrapped by Oncor, a Texas utility company buying out the network. The system was poised to offer Internet service to 2 million electricity customers, but Oncor has decided to use the wires for power only. Without this new launch, the number of BPL subscribers in the U.S. remains under 5,000. In the business of high speed data delivery, that figure spells almost certain future demise.



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Putting food back in the freezer after it thaws causes ice crystals to grow, imparting the unwelcome crunchy texture and mildew-like taste of freezer burn. Now food chemist Srinivasan Damodaran of the University of Wisconsin–Madison has derived an edible antifreeze from papaya enzymes and gelatin. His concoction, which stunts ice-crystal growth, promises always-creamy ice cream and juicier T-bones, even after their third trip between icebox and table.

While studying gelatin, Damodaran realized that its protein is similar to the one that keeps the lowly snow flea from freezing in Arctic temperatures. To isolate the molecule involved, he mixed the gelatin with papaya enzymes, which are excellent at freeing proteins from other cellular material, and separated all the protein chunks by size. Then he mixed each batch with ice cream. The final step was to subject the dessert to a series of temperature changes until he found the one that remained ice-crystal-free.

Damodaran still wants to better understand how the proteins work, but a patent for the process is in the works. In a few years, ice cream with a beard of frost should be a relic.



Atom bombs are just the beginning. In the last half-century, the greatest military minds on Earth have developed an arsenal of weapons to make mutually assured destruction seem tame.

Whether these masterpieces of destruction come from miles above Earth or millimeters below the skin, they have one thing in common: they're spooky as hell.

Can turning animals into cyborgs ever end well? Should lasers really be strapped to planes? Is dispersing humans with the worst smell ever created a better alternative to doing it by burning their skin? You be the judge. Launch our gallery of the world's spookiest weapons—some decades away and others already implemented—and marvel over what humans can create when they work apart.



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The Aral Sea, located between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, was once the fourth largest lake on the planet. Decades of irrigation works diverting water from the two rivers which fed it have left the sea today at 10 percent of the size it once was. Much of what remains is heavily polluted, devoid of fish, and surrounded by a great empty bed of salt which often blows into the surrounding areas, wrecking crops and contaminating drinking water. We might be tempted to write off the disaster as a consequence of the lumbering Soviet bureaucracy, something that could never happen in the States. But as the Plains face consecutive droughts and the Western states continue to burn, all eyes turn to the Great Lakes to fill the growing voids.

The five lakes make up nearly 95 percent of the United States' surface fresh water, clearly the source at the top of everyone's list. Those who live in the basin watershed—the areas which feed and drain into the lakes and are directly affected by the lakes' health—have drafted an international treaty with the Canadian provinces which also stand in the basin. The compact is designed to protect the water and prevent another Aral Sea disaster, but its outcome is still uncertain. Lawmakers in Wisconsin continue to squabble over where to draw the basin line and threaten to derail the entire agreement in the process.




Speaking at yesterday's CEO Summit in Redmond, Washington, Bill Gates - that guy from Microsoft - demonstrated the TouchWall, a four foot by six foot touch-screen computer prototype. TouchWall uses infrared and laser technology to register your manual input, and turn it into action. One writer described it as a giant version of Microsoft's Surface technology oriented vertically.

This isn't the first such large touch-screen interface - Panasonic revealed a similar system at CES (plus, it's also reminiscent of the interface featured in Minority Report). What's interesting is how Gates described its potential impact. He said that it could turn every surface in your home or office, every wall, into a computer. As he put it in his speech: "Think about the whiteboard in your office becoming intelligent."

Read the full speech here.




ESA's Venus Express spacecraft has picked up evidence that the molecule hydroxyl is lurking in the dense atmosphere of the hot planet.

The molecule is considered to be a crucial component of any planetary atmosphere because it is highly reactive - scientists say it combats pollutants in Earth's atmosphere, and may prevent carbon dioxide from transforming into carbon monoxide above Mars.

The presence of hydroxyl - which was picked up by the spacecraft's Visible and Thermal Imaging Spectrometer - isn't exactly a huge surprise, but ESA scientists say it should help them refine the theoretical models they use to describe what's going on in the planet's atmosphere. Principal Investigator Giuseppe Piccioni said: “Venus Express has already shown us that Venus is much more Earth-like than once thought. The detection of hydroxyl brings it a step closer.”



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Terahertz radiation, or T-rays, can see through clothing, paper, cardboard and numerous other materials, so scientists have been touting their potential for years. A T-ray-based imager could spot concealed weapons hidden under a person's clothes or even identify tumors without inducing any bad side effects.

Now scientists at Harvard University have developed a prototype device that moves portable terahertz scanners a little closer to reality. Previously, the radiation sources were just too big and complex. The Harvard group used commercially-available nano-technology to develop a device that works at room temperature, and doesn't have to be cryogenically-cooled, like previous versions. "Terahertz imaging and sensing is a very promising but relatively new technology that requires compact, portable and tunable sources to achieve widespread penetration," says one of the lead scientists, Federico Capasso. "Our devices are an important first step in this direction."



Astronomers using the Arecibo telescope have discovered a fast-rotating pulsar that doesn't fit the accepted notions of how those exotic, lighthouse-like stellar objects form. Pulsars get their name from the brief beams of light they shoot our way every few milliseconds or more.

Scientists think they typically form as a kind of strange byproduct of a star's death, and end up orbiting a white dwarf. But a group led by David Champion of McGill University says that the new pulsar, PSR J1903+0327, actually orbits a Sun-like star. In other words, a star that hasn't gone supernova, blowing off its outer layers and condensing into a white dwarf or a neutron star. The new pulsar is also fast - it rotates every 2.15 milliseconds, or 465 times per second - which normally means it should be flying around its host in a circular orbit. But that's not the case here.

Naturally the astronomers plan to study the pulsar further to find out more, but for now they think it may have been born elsewhere, forming in a global cluster, perhaps, and then getting ejected and finding its way to its present location. “Pulsars like this are why you do these surveys,” says Champion. “You don’t want to just find hundreds of objects, you want to find the two or three that are plain weird and we’ve found one.”



Laser radar systems now being developed at Rochester Institute of Technology and MIT's famed Lincoln Lab could eventually generate ultra-detailed, three-dimensional maps of planets, comets, asteroids and moons. The scientists are developing a LIDAR (light detection and ranging) technology that operates both in the optical and ultraviolet, and could deliver detailed information about atmospheric composition, plus air temperature and pressure, wind speed, and precise topological features of a planet or planetary body. The tech is so precise, in fact, that the LIDAR system will be able to distinguish between bumps on the surface that have just a one centimeter difference in height.

And it will also be quicker than the current standard. "You can take LIDAR pictures at fine resolutions and build up a map in hours instead of taking years at comparable resolution with a single image," says Donald Figer of RIT.



http://www.popsci.com/

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