This image shows the intricate structure of part of the Seagull Nebula, known more formally as IC 2177. These wisps of gas and dust are known as Sharpless 2-296 (officially Sh 2-296) and form part of the “wings” of the celestial bird. This region of the sky is a fascinating muddle of intriguing astronomical objects — a mix of dark and glowing red clouds, weaving amongst bright stars. This new view was captured by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.
Eighteen months after the phrase first entered the collective public consciousness, the plight of the 99 percent is coming to mainstream superhero comics — via a new series from the second biggest publisher in the American comic industry, which just happens to be a subsidiary of a multi-national corporation that makes around $12 billion a year. Irony, anybody?
In May, DC Comics will launch two new series taking place in their mainstream superhero universe that offer different insights into the class struggle in a world filled with superheroes, alien races and inexplicable events. The Green Team, written by Tiny Titans and Superman Family Adventures creators Art Baltazar and Franco, with art by Ig Guara, revives an obscure 1975 concept about teenage rich kids who try to make the world a better place with their outrageous wealth. In an interview promoting the series, Franco promised that it would address questions like “Can money make you happy?” and “If you had unlimited wealth, could you use that to make the lives of people better?”
Obviously, this is one of the more fanciful series DC will be publishing.
But while DC is promoting The Green Team series as the adventures of the “1%,” its companion title, The Movement, is teased as a chance for us to “Meet the 99%… They were the super-powered disenfranchised — now they’re the voice of the people!”
“It’s a book about power,” explained The Movement writer Gail Simone. “Who owns it, who uses it, who suffers from its abuse. As we increasingly move to an age where information is currency, you get these situations where a single viral video can cost a previously unassailable corporation billions, or can upset the power balance of entire governments. And because the sources of that information are so dispersed and nameless, it’s nearly impossible to shut it all down.”
“The thing I find fascinating and a little bit worrisome is, what happens when a hacktivist group whose politics you find completely repulsive has this same kind of power and influence,” she elaborated in an interview at Big Shiny Robot. “What if a racist or homophobic group rises up and organizes in the same manner?”
While the concept is ambitious, the idea that a comic capable of living up to the book’s populist inspiration could come from DC Entertainment still strikes some as unlikely. Matt Pizzolo, the editor of the Occupy Comics anthology, told Wired that “though DC Comics did help launch Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s seminal anarchist epic V For Vendetta over two decades ago, it’s unlikely they would do so today. Between dismantling Vertigo and frankensteining Watchmen, the past year has demonstrated DC isn’t a safe place for bold creators who want to tell the kinds of stories that would inspire things like Occupy, rather than just cash in on them.”
Still, Simone says that the use of the iconography and language of a real-world populist movement is deliberate, promising that the book will reflect today’s decentralized political world and offer ”a slice of rarity that we’re unlikely to see in most superhero books.”
This wouldn’t the first time that DC has attempted to offer pre-packaged populist rebellion, of course; in addition to the aforementioned publication of the anti-establishment V For Vendetta, the company’s Vertigo imprint also published Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, a series centering around an international organization struggling against forces of authority and repression that included anti-corporate themes.
Only time will tell whether The Movement will live up to the subversive examples of these earlier books, or just end up a well-intentioned piece of topical super heroics that trades on, and commodifies, a real political movement.
The Movement #1 will be available in both print and digital formats on May 1, while The Green Team #1 will be released on May 22.
Christopher Poole, the man behind some of the web’s biggest hits like 4Chan and Canvas, launched a new iPad app today. DrawQuest is a painting app that lets you doodle on templates to create cartoon scenes and share them with others. The idea, says Poole, is to give people not only the tools but also the inspiration to have fun drawing.
Fire up the app, and you’re presented with a daily “quest,” basically just a template to doodle on that gets you started. For example, yesterday’s was “draw a superhero” and featured an outline of a figure in a cape, set against a blue sky. You can also go back and doodle on previous quests. There’s a color palette to work with, a brush, marker and pen tool, plus an eraser. It’s enough to get you started, but the tools also let you color over the template itself and create something wholly original. The idea is to give some direction and inspiration, but also leave as much room as people need to get creative. “We didn’t just want it to just be color-in-the-lines,” Poole told Wired.
Here, for example, is yesterday’s Draw a Superhero template, and my subsequent drawing. It’s quite awful! But I had fun making it, which, really, is the point.
DrawQuest isn’t a game, exactly, although you can score points (largely for participation) that let you buy in-game tools, like additional colors for your paint palette. There’s a social component that lets you follow other people and see their drawings, but you could certainly use it in complete isolation as well. And one of its most interesting features isn’t creative at all, but a feature that lets you play back videos of others’ drawing processes, showing artworks as they are made from start to finish.
What’s maybe most interesting about DrawQuest, however, isn’t its canvas tools. It’s that it’s not just a drawing app, but an attempt to kick-start the creative process for people who don’t think of themselves as creatives. Both 4Chan and Canvas rely completely on user-generated content. But Poole tells Wired that a small minority of people who visit either site are actually creating content — most just consume. It’s a classic one-percent rule situation. “People think of creativity as binary, like its either on or its off,” Poole explained, “but that’s not true.”
Instead, he argues, creativity is a continuum. And while one person may be able to sit down to a blank slate and come away with something utterly amazing, others need lots of direction. DrawQuest is an attempt to inspire both of those types of people, and everyone in between. The result is a quirky and charming little app. It’s free, and currently only available on iOS for the iPad.
After years at sea, sockeye salmon returning to their freshwater homes may be guided by an early memory of the Earth’s magnetic field, encoded at the site where natal streams empty into the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published today in Current Biology.
“Lots of folks have been wondering for decades how salmon and other animals, like sea turtles or seals and whales, go out in the ocean for a couple of years and then return with remarkable accuracy back to their home,” said study coauthor Nathan Putman, a marine biologist at Oregon State University. “The magnetic field is an important part of the [salmon's] migratory decision.”
To study salmon navigation, Putman and his colleagues took advantage of a serendipitous natural experiment. Near the mouth of British Columbia’s Fraser River is 460-kilometer-long Vancouver Island. Salmon returning from sea and aiming for the river face a choice: swim north around the island, or go around to the south. Putman pored over 56 years of data from federal fishery scientists who tracked salmon in both waterways, then matched that up with measurements of the Earth’s geomagnetic field, which shifts predictably in strength and orientation over time. He found that fish tended to choose the path where the field strength was more similar to that of the river mouth when they’d left, two years before.
“The magnetic field at each route predicts the proportion coming in,” Putman said. He speculates that reaching saltwater triggers the fish to remember the magnetic field at the river’s mouth when they first head to sea — and then seek that same field on the return journey.
Scientists hope the finding will help solve the mystery of how salmon find their way home from thousands of miles away, across an ocean with no lanes or landmarks. It’s already accepted that in the final stages of the journey to their breeding grounds, salmon use odors to guide them back to the stream or inlet where they hatched. But how the fish find their target river is still a mystery, although scientists have suspected for a while that magnetic cues play a role. Last summer, a team reported that rotating magnetite crystals in a fish nose responded to magnetic field orientation, providing a possible biological mechanism for this sensory capability.
“In general, we know much less about how salmon complete the ocean part of their migration compared to fresh water,” said quantitative ecologist Chloe Bracis, a graduate student at the University of Washington who also studies geomagnetic salmon navigation. “The authors cleverly take advantage of spatial differences in a salmon migration route to provide the first solid evidence that salmon use geomagnetic cues to direct their oceanic migration.”
Putman now hopes to investigate this correlation in experiments with captive fish subjected to artificial magnetic fields.
But even if those experiments bolster the case that salmon use geomagnetic cues, these cues can’t be the whole story. The new study also revealed that sea surface temperature is an important guide for the fish — but even the interaction of water temperature and magnetic cues can’t explain all of the fishes’ knack for navigation. Temperature, olfaction and magnetoreception, while clearly important, may be just some of the tools salmon use to find their way home. “They might use … a sun compass or other cues,” Bracis said. “Geomagnetic cues could guide them to the vicinity of the river, then they would need to switch to other local cues to navigate the rest of the way to the river mouth or through the estuary.”
Photo: Current Biology, Putman et al.; Map: Oregon State University/NSF
Game of Thrones fans, time to get excited — or, perhaps, just conflicted: George R.R. Martin, the creator of the Song of Ice and Fire novels the series is based on (and occasional episode scriptwriter), has signed a new deal with HBO that will not only see him continuing as executive producer of the hit fantasy series for the next two years, but also developing and producing new series for the cable network.
The news comes ahead of the debut of the third season of GoT, which launches on March 31. Many fans of the novels are already reacting with mixed feelings about the announcement, complaining that these new duties will mean a longer delay for the next Game of Thrones novel, particularly after six years elapsed between the release of the fourth novel, A Feast for Crows, and the 2011 release of the most recent novel, Dance with Dragons — a delay that upset many readers.
Outside of his connection with the Game of Thrones show, Martin already has a long history in television. He worked on the 1980s incarnations of both The Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast as writer and producer, and also created a science-fiction pilot for a potential ABC series called Doorways in 1993 that ended up going nowhere; the script was eventually published in the DreamSongs: A RRetrospective collection in 2006, and turned into a comic book in 2010 by IDW Publishing.
Whether or not his new HBO projects will consist of all-new ideas or adaptations of his earlier, non-Game of Thrones work remains to be seen. If nothing else, his super-hero shared world anthology series Wild Cards may be one of the more obvious candidates for translation to television, if the rights have returned to Martin following a seemingly abortive attempt to adapt the series to the big screen a couple of years ago.
Tiny-eared and blind, common moles search for tasty meals – like crushed-up earthworms – with their noses. Now a study suggests that these unconventionally adorable critters find their food by smelling in stereo, by detecting small differences in the strength of an odor between the two nostrils.
The study “shows quite directly that stereo olfaction helps with finding food,” said Upinder Bhalla, a neurobiologist at Bangalore’s National Centre for Biological Sciences. Bhalla has studied stereo smelling in rats, but was not a part of the mole team. “It shows how there is a greater reliance on the stereo cues as the animal gets closer to the odor source.”
Stereo sensing is not an unfamiliar capability among mammals. Vision and hearing both work this way, with input from two eyes producing depth perception, and separated ears localizing sound. But for years, the question of whether mammals could smell in stereo has generated controversy. Studies have suggested that both rats and humans could do this, but not everyone believes it.
The new report, published today in Nature Communications, aims to add the common mole (Scalopus aquaticus) to the roster of stereo-sniffers. To test these subterranean furballs, Kenneth Catania, a neurobiologist at Vanderbilt University, constructed a chamber containing 15 food wells arrayed in a semicircle.
Moles placed in the chamber had to follow their noses to a chunk of earthworm randomly hidden in one of the 15 wells. Most sniffed a few times and went directly to retrieve their yummy treasure.
But when one nostril was plugged, a different pattern emerged. Temporarily blocking the left nostril with plastic tubing sent moles veering off to the right. When the right nostril was plugged, the moles favored initial forays to the left. When Catania inserted tubes that crossed the odor cues between left and right, the moles were completely flummoxed. They often wandered around, even missing the wriggling worm completely. A different testing chamber — designed to simulate an underground tunnel — produced similar results.
Catania acknowledges that the findings are unexpected given the tiny distance between a mole’s nostrils. Even so, he argues that the creatures smell in stereo.
Bhalla concurs. “The methods are very sound and you just have to watch the behavior of the mole in the attached movies to see how the stereo olfaction works, and how switching the direction of sampling — using the little tubes in the nostrils — confuses the mole,” he said.
British troops in Afghanistan are flying a drone that’s shrunk down to its essentials: a micro-machine that spies, built for a solitary user.
This is the Black Hornet. Its Norwegian manufacturer, Prox Dynamics, bills it as the world’s smallest military-grade spy drone, with a weight of 16 grams and a length of 4 inches. Propelled by two helicopter blades, the Black Hornet carries little more than a steerable camera that records still and video imagery. (That is: It’s unarmed.) Now British soldiers have brought it to Afghanistan, as it fits in the palms of their hands. It’s supposed to be a drone for an Army of One.
“We use it to look for insurgent firing points and check out exposed areas of the ground before crossing, which is a real asset,” Sgt. Christopher Petherbridge of the Brigade Reconnaissance Force told the British Ministry of Defence for a Monday announcement.
The fruit of a contract initially worth $4 million that the Ministry of Defence inked in 2011, the Black Hornet is a major step in the recent trend of miniaturizing drones. The U.S. has its own shrunken spy drones: The Raven can be launched by hand; the collapsible Switchblade fits in a rucksack; and on deck is the insect-inspired miniatures at the Air Force’s “Micro-Aviary.” But it’s currently got nothing as petite as the Black Hornet — although the Ministry of Defence is confident the nano-copter is rugged enough to withstand Afghanistan’s harsh conditions.
What’s perhaps more significant than the Black Hornet’s size is its personalized application. Prox designed it to be a one-man intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance package. The video imagery captured by a Predator, by contrast, has to supply a lot of people (even if only a handful of airmen operate its ground control station). There aren’t that many Predators, and getting clearance to fly each one requires going up the chain of command. The smaller Raven pushed that spy capability down to company level.
But the Black Hornet is designed to be the robotic, remote-controlled eyes of a single soldier. Its imagery is transmitted down to a personal device that looks kind of like a Game Boy. A handheld mouse-like device steers it. While it’s way too early to say how much value it actually adds in wartime, the Black Hornet hints at a future where recon soldiers and marines get kitted with their own cheap spy drones, the surveillance equivalent of the smartphone.
The U.S. military is far away from that future, especially as budget cuts set in and the ground wars wrap up. But the Army, at least, has been all about pushing data down to an individual soldier on patrol through her own handheld smart device. It might be interested in playing with its British counterpart’s latest tiny drone.
Magellan radar image of Wheatley crater on Venus. This 72 km diameter crater shows a radar bright ejecta pattern and a generally flat floor with some rough raised areas and faulting. The crater is located in Asteria Regio at 16.6N,267E.
It’s simple, but lovely. Web designer Franck Ernewein‘s real-time Twitter visualization, Tweetping, drops a bright pixel at the location of every tweet in the world, starting as soon as you open the page.
The result is a constantly changing image that grows to look like a nighttime satellite shot, bright spots swarming over the most developed areas. But Ernewein has packaged it all in a subtly interactive visualization that avoids distracting the viewer while still imparting a great amount of information.
Meanwhile, a selection of tweets are projected, along with latest hashtags and mentions, all while tracking total tweets, words, and characters. The length of the two gray lines on the display represent the number of characters and words in each tweet.
Though it’s one of the most beautiful, Tweetping is far from the first to display geotagged tweet information; coders have built sites to display election tweets, adjustable parameter maps, and even 3-D visualizations.
Tweetping even represents Antarctica, but not the ISS. And there’s no pause button; like Twitter itself, Tweetping’s data accrues incessantly; there’s no off switch but the back button.
Nathan Hurst is learning how to make some things, knows how to fix some others, and is already pretty good at breaking everything else. He has written for Outside and Wired, traveled in Africa, and tweets as @NathanBHurst.
Today's leading-edge technology is headed straight for tomorrow's junk pile, but that doesn't make it any less awesome. Everyone loves the latest and greatest.
Sometimes, though, something truly revolutionary cuts through the clutter and fundamentally changes the game. And with that in mind, Wired is looking back over 12 decades to highlight the 12 most innovative people, places and things of their day. From the first transatlantic radio transmissions to cellphones, from vacuum tubes to microprocessors, we'll run down the most important advancements in technology, science, sports and more.
This week's installment takes us back to 2001-2010, when the U.S. was attacked, the iPhone was introduced to the world and social media took over.
We don't expect you to agree with all of our picks, or even some of them. That's fine. Tell us what you think we've missed and we'll publish your list later.
“Every once in awhile a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” Steve Jobs said when he unveiled the first iPhone at the Macworld Expo in 2007. He was right. The iPhone was and is revolutionary. It did change everything.
The iPhone, hell, smartphones in general, are so ubiquitous now it’s easy to forget it was just six years ago when the iPhone first said hello. But the iPhone was the first device that challenged our expectations of what mobile devices can, and should, do. It was the first device that took the mobile phone from something ugly, unreliable, and unwieldy to something elegant, intuitive, and sexy.
It was the first handset to have a multitouch screen, visual voicemail, and its own browser that could access any web page, not just WAP versions of pages. You could store up to 16 GB of music, photos, notes, and e-mails on one device. Wi-Fi and EDGE (and later 3G) capabilities meant you could stay connected no matter where you went. By putting e-mail, web-browsing, and maps at our fingertips it changed not just how we communicate but how we consume information.
And, perhaps most importantly, it’s responsible for the robust app ecosystem we have today. The iPhone jumpstarted the now billion-dollar mobile-apps industry. It was a full year after the iPhone came out when the first third-party apps were introduced. But what started off as just 500 apps quickly spawned into the multi-billion dollar industry of hundreds of thousands of apps we have today.
With two critically acclaimed, small-to-medium budget sci-fi movies under his belt, Duncan Jones (Source Code, Moon) is seemingly headed to the big-time with the announcement that he will be directing Legendary Pictures’ big-budget live-action adaptation of the popular MMO game World of Warcraft.
Confirming a Hollywood Reporter story from earlier that day, Jones took to Twitter Wednesday evening to write “So the gauntlet was thrown down ages ago: Can you make a proper MOVIE of a video game. I’ve always said it’s possible. Got to DO it now! ;)” (Blizzard Entertainment also confirmed the news via its official World of Warcraft Twitter account.)
Jones’ tweet points to a hurdle that the WoW movie will have to overcome: The fact that movies based on videogames tend to be somewhat… well, lousy.
From 1993′s Super Mario Bros through last year’s Resident Evil: Retribution, the genre consistently struggles with poor reviews and a box office appeal that seems cult at best, perhaps because it’s difficult to convince fans of the games that the passive experience of watching the stories unfold is more fun than actively participating in them.
Because of the sprawling, massively de-centralized nature of MMOs as a genre, any World of Warcraft movie faces an additional problem: There’s no central narrative for the movie to adapt. A script for the movie already exists, written by Charles Leavitt, best-known for his 2006 Blood Diamond script and 2001 adaptation of Gene Brewer’s novel K-Pax, but Legendary has so far kept plot details under wraps.
Jones’s involvement kickstarts the project, which has been in various stages of development since 2006. (At one point, Sam Raimi was heading up the adaptation, although he left to direct the soon-to-be-released Oz: The Great and Powerful.) Now that Jones is onboard, Legendary reportedly wants production on the movie to begin in the fall of this year for a 2015 release, which would put it right at the center of an already-crowded year for genre movies; in addition to J.J. Abrams’ Star Wars debut, 2015 is also the scheduled year of release for Avengers 2 and Warner Bros’ mooted Justice League movie, based upon the DC Comics heroes.
The WoW movie is expected to have a budget upwards of $100 million — for some context, the budget for the first Lord of the Rings movie, The Fellowship of the Ring, was $93 million – by far the biggest project that Jones has tackled to date. His last movie, 2011′s Source Code, had a budget of $32 million according to Box Office Mojo, while his debut, Moon, cost just around $1 million. Given what he has been able to do with less money before — and his apparent awareness of the problems inherent with the videogame movie genre — the prospect of Jones having over $100 million to play with and spend wisely is an exciting one indeed, even for those who have never been tempted to play the online fantasy game.
Fire Emblem: Awakening might be a tactical role-playing game, but the most compelling part for me wasn’t plotting out intricate strategies or watching a risky plan came together. What kept me going was watching my army fall in love with each other.
To be released on February 4 for Nintendo 3DS, Awakening keeps the series’ trademark strategic design: Players deploy the units they’ve recruited and trained and then position them around a grid-based map, taking turns with the opponent for moving and performing actions. This basic formula has been tweaked a little in each of the 13 Fire Emblem games released so far, and Awakening’s twist is that it makes you more conscious of your army’s composition than any series entry before it.
If you place “compatible” soldiers next to each other, they’ll fight together and grow closer emotionally, as shown in dialogue sequences that take place after the battles. If the two units are of opposite genders, they will eventually get married. To be fair, this was always possible to a certain extent in past Fire Emblem games, but it had minimal impact on the story, and required you to sacrifice smart tactics for the tedious process of forcing units to stand next to each other. Here, as long as any two compatible units take part in a fight, their relationship will develop.
The marriage system is inextricably linked to the storyline as well. Awakening‘s story revolves around the use of time travel and will eventually have you meeting the future children of any units you’ve paired together. Depending on how they’ve been trained, the parents can pass on unique skills to their offspring, who can then be used in combat.
I never thought myself to be the romantic type but I was enthralled with this. I loved playing matchmaker with my favorite characters and watching their interactions. I purposely sent them into battle together whenever I possibly could and I meticulously manipulated the parents’ stats so their children could be as powerful as possible.
As a result, I found myself more attached to my army in Awakening than any previous Fire Emblem. One of Fire Emblem‘s defining features is that any characters lost in battle are permanently dead. But for me in this case, the stakes were higher than ever because your characters have real emotional weight. They have families, lives. So any time one of my units died, I immediately reset the game to try from my last save point.
Sure it meant resetting in the middle of an otherwise excellent run, but there was no way I was going to let anyone in my army die. They had come too far for that.
Of all the great match-ups among tech’s Fantastic Four — Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon — it’s Google versus Amazon that’s becoming the most fascinating, and not because of who has the better tablet.
Quietly, Google has been retooling in a bid to beat Amazon as the place to shop — and some early evidence suggests the search giant isn’t crazy to try.
In a survey released today, Google’s transition last fall to all-paid product listing display ads in search results is paying off. (These are the product photos that show up next to price and seller info at the top of “organic” Google search results for products, such as at the top of this search for “iPhone 5.”) Digital ad management provider Marin Software found that advertisers managing $4 billion annually in online ad campaigns through its platform spent 600 percent more on Google product listing ads after the change in October than before. That result alone doesn’t necessarily surprise: If Google says pay to play, advertisers have little choice.
But they may be paying gladly. Marin found that the paid product listings were turning up more in Google search results, especially around the holidays, which means advertisers’ products are getting seen more by potential buyers. And that visibility is translating into action: Marin says click-throughs on product listing ads have increased 210 percent since last year.
(Marin also is releasing a new product today to help advertisers manage Google paid product listing campaigns, though the company says it has no strong reason to show bias toward Google, since advertisers also use its software to manage campaigns on competing sites such as Yahoo, Bing and Facebook.)
When Google announced its plans to require companies to pay to be listed in product searches, critics and competitors complained the change would hurt consumers by tainting the objectivity of the search results. While the results may now be plainly biased, Marin vice president of marketing Matt Lawson says users are responding to the paid listings more because Google is putting more effort into them.
And so are advertisers, who had less incentive to care about the quality of listings they got for free. “As soon as it became clear they were going to be paying for them and contributing a significant amount of their budget to them, then they became interested in managing it,” Lawson says.
What does any of this have to do with Amazon? Lawson and Marin Software CEO Chris Lien say that online shoppers today tend to start in one of two places for product information: Google or Amazon. In effect, Amazon has become a “commerce search engine,” which cuts into Google’s core function. To compete, Google wants to give shoppers every reason not to go straight to Amazon by becoming as reliable a destination not just to learn about products, but to buy them.
“What you’re going to see them do is do everything they can to enable marketers to sell through their platform,” Lawson says.
Not that Google likely plans to set up its own warehouses, he says. But he adds that the days when merchants see Google as a conduit for clicks to their own sites is fading. If Google can package the sale from search to checkout, merchants can handle the inventory and shipping themselves. If Google and retailers — especially brick-and-mortar Amazon competitors — can come together in that way, suddenly online shoppers have another broad, deep Amazon alternative.
At the same time, Lien says, the competition between Google and Amazon isn’t all-or-nothing. Shoppers are too smart for that.
“Consumers are looking on Amazon and they’re looking on Google,” Lien says. “I think most thoughtful consumers are to take the best deal.”
The Chinese military’s first homegrown long-range transport plane has flown for the first time, extending Beijing’s impressive record of new warplane development.
But the Xian Y-20 (“Y” for Yun, meaning “transport”), roughly in the same class as the U.S. C-17 or the Russian Il-76, is probably still a long way from being fully operational — to say nothing of militarily effective. A lack of custom engines limits the new plane’s potential.
State-owned China Central Television depicted the four-engine jet transport taking off from what was probably the military airfield in Yanliang, central China, home of the People’s Liberation Army Air Force testing establishment. The Y-20, still wearing only its yellow primer paint, flew what appeared to be a short test flight and landed in front of a crowd waving Chinese flags. It seems the transport’s landing gear stayed down for the entire sortie — a standard precaution in early tests of new planes.
“The successful maiden flight of Yun-20 is significant in promoting China’s economic and national defense buildup as well as bettering its emergency handling such as disaster relief and humanitarian aid,” the government-run Xinhua news service announced Saturday.
Development of the new transport began no later than 2005, and was possibly spurred in part by the massive earthquake that killed tens of thousands in Sichuan in 2008. In the disaster’s aftermath, the PLAAF — which has long favored jet fighters over more mundane support aircraft — was able to deploy only a handful of small cargo planes carrying relief supplies. The U.S., by contrast, sent in two Boeing C-17s — welcome assistance but also embarrassing for the Chinese Communist Party.
The Y-20 is the latest in a chain of new Chinese airplanes. Since late 2010 Beijing has debuted two stealth fighter prototypes; a new carrier-based naval fighter; plus radar and patrol planes, two gunship helicopters and, now, a heavyweight cargo plane at least as capacious as Russia’s workhorse Il-76, which China also possesses and which seems to provide the basis of the Y-20′s design. Beijing may also have acquired some of the C-17′s blueprints from a spy working at Boeing.
The Y-20 first appeared in blurry snapshots posted to Party-friendly Chinese Internet forums in December — Beijing’s standard procedure for rolling out major new prototype weapons. A series of overhead images provided by U.S. commercial satellite operator GeoEye in early January provided more detail. In contrast to the high degree of official secrecy surrounding other new warplanes, Beijing promptly announced the Y-20′s existence — a move that trade magazine Flightglobal called “remarkable.”
As with China’s other new warplanes, the Y-20 prototype is apparently fitted with older, Russian-made engines rather than purpose-designed motors. A lack of suitable powerplants has slowed progress on many of the new planes. The Y-20′s current D-30 engines are low-bypass models better suited for supersonic fighters than an efficient, slow-flying cargo hauler. Beijing has poured billions of dollars into developing new engines but so far has little to show for it.
“The giant aircraft will continue to undergo experiments and test flights as scheduled,” Xinhua said of the Y-20. But that doesn’t mean the new transport is close to being ready for frontline use.
Hitting the streets to get fit by spring? We review four new specialty sneakers for runners.
Adidas' Adizero Feather 2.0 runners are so light (barely 7 ounces) and so responsive, running in them feels more like bouncing on fluffy clouds than pounding on pavement. OK, I'm exaggerating, but I was really blown away by the light weight when I took them out on long-distance runs. So effective was the feather-weight design on a 5-mile outing, I could actually notice the reduced effort in my legs.
The shoe is topped with a barely-there breathable mesh that runs from the toes all the way back to the heel. Ventilation is therefore excellent, with a constant flow of cool air delivered directly to your piggies. And, unlike most shoes that make use of fancy, lightweight materials, they're actually quite sturdy.
These sneaks are compatible with Adidas' miCoach data reporting system and its companion apps. So if you already have a miCoach Speed_Cell sensor, just lift up the shoe's insert and pop it in (You can also attach the sensor to your laces). The sensor can be synced with your iPhone to track your speed, acceleration, distance, and pace during runs.
The only problem is that the miCoach system needs some work, including the inconsistent syncing and the iPhone app's interface. If you're used to the Nike+ app, you'll be struggling to work your way through using Adidas' lesser creation. That said, it's an add-on to the shoe and not a primary feature, so miCoach's shortcomings don't detract from the sneaker's quality.
WIRED Obscenely light at only 7 ounces. Flexible mesh upper keeps your tootsies cool and dry. Durable, despite the lightweight design. miCoach-compatible for tracking your runs. Great styling. Affordable at $115. Men's and women's versions.
TIRED If you're not into light shoes, these aren't for you. The miCoach system needs a lot of work -- it's adequate, but could be so much better.
Scientists have modeled the internal workings of lightning-filled “rocket dust storms” on Mars that rise at speeds 100 times faster than ordinary storms and inject dust high into the Martian atmosphere.
The Red Planet is a very dry and dusty place, with global storms that sometimes obscure the entire surface. Satellites orbiting Mars have seen persistent dust layers reaching very high altitudes, as much as 30 to 50 km above the ground, though scientists are at a loss to explain exactly how the dust got there.
Using a high-resolution model, researchers have shown that a thick blob-like dust pocket inside a storm may become heated by the sun, causing the surrounding atmosphere to warm quickly. Because hot air rises, these areas will shoot skyward super fast, much like a rocket launching into space, hence “rocket dust storms.”
“The vertical transport was so strong we want to come up with a kind of spectacular name, to give an idea of the very powerful rise,” said planetary scientist Aymeric Spiga from the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris, France, who is lead author on a paper describing the phenomena in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets on Jan. 14.
These speedily rising dust blobs can soar from near the surface to 30 or 40 km into the atmosphere in a matter of hours at speeds in excess of 10 meters per second (22 mph). This is far faster than the typical convection speeds in a dust storm of 0.1 meters per second (0.2 mph). Since the dust particles rub up against one another and create friction, the rocket dust storms may become charged with electrostatic forces, which could which could trigger fantastic lightning bolts.
Spiga and his team used detailed models of winds and dust on Mars to determine exactly how these rocket dust storms behave. Most previous models of Mars’ climate simulate large-scale global dust storms with fairly coarse resolution and so have not noticed the rocket storms. The team seeded their model with data from a dust storm observed by the OMEGA instrument aboard ESA’s Mars Express orbiting satellite and watched the rise of rocket storms.
Similar dust storms can’t happen on Earth. This is mainly because Mars’ atmosphere is about 100 times thinner than our own, meaning that it gets quickly and efficiently heated when dust particles absorb sunlight and then emit thermal radiation.
But a comparable phenomenon occurs in grey cumulonimbus thunderstorm clouds on Earth. The large accumulations of water particles in such clouds release latent heat, causing strong vertical motions and an extensive tall structure. Spiga’s team has used this Earthly analogy in the rocket dust storm’s more technical name, conio-cumulonimbus, from the Greek conious, which means dust.
“But I prefer to call them rocket dust storms,” Spiga said. “Then everyone knows what I’m talking about.”
Other researchers are impressed with the physical modeling done in the work. “I was a little surprised that such a small dust disturbance could remain intact over such long distances,” said planetary atmospheres scientist Scot Rafkin from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The mechanism could help explain how long-lasting layers of dust climb so high in the Martian atmosphere, he says.
Because they appear to be relatively rare, it may take a while to track down more rocket dust storms. But Spiga is hopeful they will be found by orbiting satellites, which may even image the lightning flashes inside them.
Video: Spiga, Aymeric, et al. “Rocket dust storms and detached dust layers in the Martian atmosphere,” JGR:Planets, DOI: 10.1002/jgre.20046
Get your spell-caster on, explore castles, and lop off heads. Lop off lots of heads.
Battle for Wesnoth
Position your elven archers so they can take down orcs on horseback. Send scouts across the river and behind enemy lines. You’ve got to fight if you’re going to rule the land of Wesnoth. If you’re new to the moving-pieces-around-a-map strategy genre, this isn’t the place to start. Our army was wiped out during the tutorial.
WIRED Complex gameplay will keep you coming back for months.
TIRED Learning curve is more of a vertical line.
$3.99 iOS | $3.99 Android | Battle for Wesnoth
Final Fantasy 3
Previous mobile ports of classic Final Fantasy games have been pretty uneven. (The iOS version of the original is downright brutal.) But this 3-D remake feels great. You can tap anywhere on the screen to advance the turn-based battles, meaning you can plow through them as easily as if you were holding a controller. And for a touchscreen game that lasts 40 hours, comfort is key.
TIRED Graphics pulled from Nintendo DS are a waste of a retina display.
$16.99 iOS (iPad) $15.99 (iPhone, iPod) | $15.99 Android | Final Fantasy III
Zenonia 4
You won’t understand what’s going on with the swords-and-sorcery story line if you jump right into the fourth iteration of this action RPG (it involves time travel and your future self), but who cares when slashing up monsters and going on quests is this much fun? It’s free to play, which means you can spend real-life cash to buy upgrades like powerful helmets and pickaxes without having to grind.
WIRED Vibrant graphics. Satisfying thwack when you strike enemies.
TIRED Only one control option.
Free iOS | Free Android | Zenonia 4
Chrono Trigger
This time-traveling, dimension-hopping romp is one of the most beloved RPG adventures of the classic console era. But it doesn’t quite make the leap to mobile unscathed. The controls are imprecise at best, and the graphics, ported over from the Super Nintendo, look blurry instead of pixel-crisp. Still, it’s a fantastic game with wonderful writing and music.
WIRED A polished, thrilling, classic RPG for your phone.
TIRED Lackluster port job. Messy control scheme.
$9.99 iOS | Chrono Trigger
Mage Gauntlet
This action role-player features 16-bit-styled pixel artwork that makes it look like a long-lost vintage game. You’re an apprentice magician looking to pick up the tools of the trade while taking down bad guys, and you can alternate hacking and slashing with magic spells that you find along the way. It’s generally difficult to control characters using touchscreens, but Mage Gauntlet’s scheme is nearly perfect.
Winter outerwear has come a long way from the clammy straight-jackets your mom would wrap around you every time you wanted to go outside.
Every year, we see jackets, shells, bibs and pants that are more breathable, lighter, stretchier, and just plain better-looking than last year's crop.
We sifted through the countless options on the racks and selected a dozen or so favorite items, then took the whole pile of gear with us to Squaw Valley in California's Lake Tahoe region. We worked them over on the slopes for three days, then took the lot deeper into to the Sierras for another week. We also tried to pick something for everyone -- from Gore-Tex jeans (pre-distressed!) to a snow shell that costs as much as a mortgage payment, and even a down jacket hand-stuffed by followers of a 16th-century pacifist. It's going to be a weird, Wired winter.
The Phenomenon jacket from Spyder is pretty much what would happen if you said, "Screw the cost, let's make a jacket with the best materials we can find." The list of what went into the $1,200 garment looks like the textile version of the Robb Report.
The waterproof membrane is made of Schoeller c-change, which opens its pores to vent heat and moisture when the interior warms up. Custom-embossed stretch polyester lines the interior. Primaloft One insulation lines the body and sleeves. And the outer shell is composed of DWR-treated stretch polyester material with wool accents. Premium!
It was warm, waterproof and comfortable on the slopes, with no movement restricted, plenty of waterproof zip pockets and ventilation, and so many features, I actually lost track of everything that was special about it while I was showing it off to people. To top it all off, the jacket looks like money -- the slim cut and wool accents made it fit right in over a suit and tie on the way to office Christmas parties. -- Billy Brown
WIRED Fantastic material choices all around. Tough waterproof outer with great stretch. Removable hood and snow skirt. Gusseted cuffs are adjustable. Plays dress-up better than Eliza Doolittle.
You might not be able to pick your fingerprint out of an inky lineup, but your brain knows what you smell like. For the first time, scientists have shown that people recognize their own scent based on their particular combination of major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins, molecules similar to those used by animals to choose their mates. The discovery suggests that humans can also exploit the molecules to differentiate between people.
“This is definitely new and exciting,” says Frank Zufall, a neurobiologist at Saarland University’s School of Medicine in Homburg, Germany, who was not involved in the work. “This type of experiment had never been done on humans before.”
MHC peptides are found on the surface of almost all cells in the human body, helping inform the immune system that the cells are ours. Because a given combination of MHC peptides—called an MHC type—is unique to a person, they can help the body recognize invading pathogens and foreign cells. Over the past 2 decades, scientists have discovered that the molecules also foster communication between animals, including mice and fish. Stickleback fish, for example, choose mates with different MHC types than their own. Then, in 1995, researchers conducted the now famous “sweaty T-shirt study,” which concluded that women prefer the smell of men who have different MHC genes than themselves. But no studies had shown a clear-cut physiological response to MHC proteins.
In the new work, Thomas Boehm, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany, and colleagues first tested whether women can recognize lab-made MHC proteins resembling their own. After showering, 22 women applied two different solutions to their armpits and decided which odor they liked better. The experiment was repeated two to six times for each participant. Women preferred to wear a synthetic scent containing their own MHC proteins, but only if they were nonsmokers and didn’t have a cold. The study did not determine which scents women preferred on other people, but past studies on perfume have shown that individuals prefer different smells on themselves than on others.
The researchers wanted to know whether the preferences were truly rooted in the brain’s response to the proteins. So next, they used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure changes in the brains of 19 different women when they smelled the various solutions, in aerosol form puffed toward their noses. “Sure enough, there again was a clear difference between the response to self and non-self peptides,” Boehm says. “There was a particular region of the brain that was only activated by peptides resembling a person’s own MHC molecules.” The brain had a similar response to all non-self MHC combinations, suggesting that any preference for how other people smell is a preference for non-self, not for particular MHC types.
Claus Wedekind, a biologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland who spearheaded the original smelly T-shirt study, says the results fit well with his research over the past decade. “After our original T-shirt study, I had the impression that people had preferences between different MHC types,” he says. “But based on later studies, it seemed that people are actually just distinguishing between self and non-self. This new paper certainly confirms this view.”
Past studies on perfumes have shown that different scents amplify the natural aromas of different MHC types — peach might mesh best with your own smell, whereas vanilla might jibe with your best friend’s odor. Boehm says his group’s new findings on distinguishing self from non-self smells, which appear online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, could help researchers understand why people prefer different perfumes on themselves than on others. They might, he says, choose to wear a perfume that amplifies their own MHC peptides, but they favor perfumes on another person that amplify a non-self MHC type. But questions on the physiology of sensing MHC peptides still abound. Researchers don’t know which receptors in the nose actually sense MHC proteins, because humans don’t have the vomeronasal organ that animals use to sniff out the molecules. “We would really like to continue this research to identify the receptors that recognize these peptides in humans,” Boehm says.
Other molecules the human body produces could also influence individual smells and scent preferences, Zufall says. The individuality of people’s microbiomes—the collection of microbes living in and on us—could also be linked to the body’s odor or preferences, Wedekind says. “We just don’t know the full physiology yet,” he said, “But this is a good start.”
This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.
One day, robots will ascend into the heavens, take working parts off of dead satellites, and use them to construct new ones. That’s the dream of the Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers, and they’ve already gotten started in the laboratory.
The video above, released by Darpa on Tuesday, displays the initial stages of Darpa’s Phoenix project, an effort that began last year to make satellites cheaper. And the way Darpa wants to control those costs is to have space robots pluck functional antennas off of dead satellites floating above geosynchronous orbit, and combine them with small, modular “satlets” into new, longer lasting communications satellites. Darpa combined the footage of the lab research on the Phoenix component robots with a computer-generated rendering of how the project might work in space four years from now when Darpa tests it.
“The fundamental precept is cost,” says David Barnhart, Darpa’s program manager for Phoenix. “That is the bottom line: is there a way that we can completely rethink the cost-calculus of how satellites are put together?” Satellite launches are really expensive: think tens of millions of dollars for the satellite and then tens of millions of more to get it into space. And most of what’s floating in space is debris, junk and dead sats: out of 1300 “space objects,” Barnhart says, only 500 are functioning satellites. If Darpa can resurrect just a fraction of that floating junk, it points to a cost-effective way to maintain the U.S.’ edge in space.
So the ghoulish, $180 million effort depends on things like the FREND, a robotic arm designed by the Naval Research Laboratories‘ space-engineering division. The arm will be one of Phoenix’s main limbs, used to sever an antenna from a dead satellite and attach it to the network of satlets Darpa’s building. Another crucial part of Phoenix, unveiled to the public in this video, will bond materials together in space without using any mechanical parts: one model Darpa’s working with will adhere them using an electrostatic charge, and another “is patterned after how a Gecko crawls up walls,” Barnart says, “using thousands of individual micro hair-like follicles on its foot pads.” A touchscreen, shown here in a laboratory, will theoretically allow a remote human operator to control a robot as it cuts through a piece of space debris.
That is, if the tech isn’t so ridiculously complicated that it cancels out the reduced launch costs. There are a lot of variables: keeping costs down while launching the satlets into orbit; controlling fuel use; and not destroying space antennas that weren’t designed so that robots could deconstruct them. “If you cannot replace the appropriate function, which we translate into mass, of that very large satellite… to control that [antenna], then it doesn’t make sense,” Barnhart concedes. Darpa will host a “proposer’s day” for makers who might want to build the satlets, robots and associated Phoenix systems on Feb. 8 in northern Virginia.
Lab work, extending to 2015, will test the concept. Next month, Darpa will announce the next wave of its Phoenix research, which will explore such concepts as “safe and responsible space-to-space interaction.” Just because Darpa wants its celestial handymen to combine old antennas with new mini-satellites doesn’t mean it’s cutting back on robotic workplace safety.
