Roumen.ganeff

Adrian Wong, lead electrical engineer on Glass, has left Google to join Facebook. What's a guy like Wong doing at Facebook with his skill set? He's joining the Oculus team to work on the virtual reality.

The Ivanpah Solar Farm

At the Ivanpah solar farm, 347,000 software-controlled mirrors that track the sun’s movement throughout the day. They direct light toward one of three towers, where a water boiler creates steam that powers a generator.

Ethan Miller/ Getty Images

In February, the Ivanpah Solar Electricity Generating System opened over a 3,500-acre stretch of the Mojave Desert. The solar thermal farm operates at 392 megawatts—just under 1 percent of California’s total energy production, or enough to power 140,000 homes.

The Ivanpah solar farm eliminates 450,000 tons of carbon emissions annually, the equivalent of taking 88,000 cars off the road.

This article originally appeared in the May 2014 issue of Popular Science.

Lunar Landers of the 1960s

This drawing shows the scale of the Soviet LK lunar landing craft next to the American LM (lunar module). The LK never made it to the Moon, as the Soyuz program missions that would have carried it were cancelled.

Wikimedia Commons

Russia should prioritize creating a moon base with full-time residents by mid-century, according to a plan created by Moscow State University, the Russian Academy of Sciences, and the firm Roscosmos.

According to the Russian newspaper Izvestia, the proposal argues that Russia needs to get a geopolitical leg up on rivals for potentially sizable lunar deposits of minerals such as aluminum, titanium, and iron. It envisions a public-private partnership covering the roughly $816 million cost of a three-stage colonization effort.

First, from 2016 to 2025, a series of robotic explorers would go to the moon to make new and detailed surveys of mineral and water resources.

Then, between 2028 and 2030, manned expeditions would orbit the moon without landing (it's not explained why); and from 2030 to 2040, a series of manned missions would construct a permanent base for housing a “lunar astronomical observatory, as well as monitoring of the Earth.”

“The moon is the first step on the way to deep space,” Izvestia quotes Ivan Moiseyev, head of the Russia's Institute of Space Policy, because staging missions from the moon will be easier (and cheaper) than lifting heavy interplanetary payloads out of the Earth's gravity and atmosphere.

The Russian language article, "Russia will begin colonization of the Moon by 2030," was summarized in English last week by The Moscow Times.

H.R. Giger

Wikimedia Commons

In my mind, the only way to watch Alien is in a dark room, where the only source of light is the TV or the laptop as you're taken on the nightmare tour of a brooding spaceship. This is, I think, how H.R. Giger, the Swiss surrealist artist who created the xenomorph of the Alien franchise, would've wanted it.

Giger died in the hospital Monday at the age of 74. There will be countless eulogies pouring in today for the man, which is surprising, maybe, considering the collective nightmares he imprinted on (now multiple) generations of science fiction fans. But there may not be anyone who deserves the recognition more. 

A sculptor, painter, album designer, and, finally, set designer, Giger created a dark vision of the future that would seem at odds with most sci-fi of its day. Alien followed the crew of the spaceship Nostromo, as it's invaded by a creature that slowly, viciously, and assuredly begins hunting and killing them. Released in 1979, it preceded the other great, brooding film of its time, Blade Runner, by three years, but the two works couldn't be more different. While Blade Runner imagined a future Los Angeles that was expansive and melancholy, Alien was a haunted house film that only happened to take place on a spaceship -- it had the metallic surfaces of other movies, but the creeping menace of the film was an otherworldly horror, a gross hiccup of evolution.

If most films saw mechanization as the specter of the future, Giger saw it in biology; indeed, Giger was reportedly only in charge on creating the "alien" aspects of the film, as opposed to the industrial settings. Today's crop of sci-fi films, I'd argue, borrow more heavily from the epic rather than the claustrophobic feel Giger helped mold. Still: If his vision is underrepresented, it's because so few could match it in scope.

You could attribute much of that aesthetic to the director of Alien, Ridley Scott, and later, in the first sequel, to James Cameron, but you can't underestimate the inherent grotesqueness of Giger's creation. Test footage from the film was uncovered a while back, and even outside the actual movie, the creature is unnerving. (No small wonder it launched so many adaptations in comics and other mediums.)

How did he do it? Many remarked on the disturbing sexual imagery of the alien and other designs, and that's likely part of it, if a little Freudian. But it's easier to say this: He was an artist in every sense. The design for the film's so-called "chestburster" -- the young alien that burrows inside and breaks through a character's chest -- was based on artist Francis Bacon's abstract painting Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. If any others films about creatures from another world devouring hapless space miners were inspired by post-war fine art, please inform the Ph.D students, because they have a thesis on their hands.

There's one more reason Giger's xenomorph stays with us: It's that voice of the unknown that haunts all exploration, whether in space, or scientific research back on Earth. While most dystopian works have focused on the worst possible consequences of what we were already creating -- nuclear power, say, or cloning  -- Giger perhaps understood that the real terror in the modern world was what we couldn't predict, and what we weren't prepared to understand.  

The alien spends the vast majority of the film encased in shadow; we get a glimpse here, a quick shot there, until the harrowing end. If I watch the movie in the dark, with only the light from a screen, maybe it's because I'm convinced I'll catch a glimpse of something I've never seen before.

DARPA

For eight years now, the DEKA prosthetic arm -- a DARPA-funded project aimed at improving the lives of amputees -- has been moving slowly toward FDA approval. Now, right on schedule, the mind-controlled, robotic prosthetic has been approved up by the Food and Drug Administration. 

Nicknamed the "Luke" arm by its creators, the DEKA arm now has the distinction of being the first FDA-approved arm that can move multiple joints at once by receiving commands from electromyograms, or EMG, electrodes on remaining parts of the arm. In a study from 2012, the arm was also succesfully "mind-controlled" through the use of neural implants. As part of a "fast-track" review, the FDA reviewed a study of the arm, which "found that approximately 90 percent of study participants were able to perform activities with the DEKA Arm System that they were not able to perform with their current prosthesis, such as using keys and locks, preparing food, feeding oneself, using zippers, and brushing and combing hair." 

The company won't start producing the arm and delivering it to amputees until they find a manufacturer, but this looks like a major milestone in the field of prosthetics.

[FDA]

Spurious Correlations

Data suggest: marriages in Alabama are causing deaths by electrocution, divorces in South Carolina are causing bees to produce more honey, and Nicolas Cage movies are saving thousands of lives each year. 

Tyler Vigen created a program, appropriately titled Spurious Correlations, that finds correlations between random data sets and produces a chart every minute. Thus, the .95 correlation between mozzarella cheese consumption and civil engineering doctorates is finally uncovered. The sets appear to use easily available information, includings loads of statistics about deaths, which lends the correlations a hilariously dark humor.

Funny? Yeah. Clearly it's a sendup of the sometimes dubious findings of certain studies. But, hey, good time for a reminder: we know "correlation is not causation" but don't immediately dismiss every correlation as irrelevant. Otherwise how will we recognize and stop the swimming-pool-related deaths caused by The Wicker Man?

[Spurious Correlations via Flowing Data]