Can Humans Smell Fear?

If humans can indeed smell fear they wouldn’t be unusual in the animal kingdom. Sea anemones, earthworms, minnows, fruit flies, rats, mice, and deer, among others, have all been shown to signal unease through odor. Some responses are even more overt. For example, the offspring of one bird species vomits up a pungent, orange liquid when frightened by a predator; if a parent catches a whiff, it becomes warier in the nest. 

From an evolutionary perspective, a silent signal makes sense. “If you find yourself in a fearful situation, you might want your cohorts to know about it, but without calling attention to yourself by screaming or jumping around,” says Charles J. Wysocki, of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. The same could hold true for humans. “Primates have become much more visual creatures [over time],” he says, “and I suspect that smell in general, including the perception of the fearful notes, have taken second place. But they’re still there.”

Tiny Traps Capture Individual Blood Cells

Gotcha! These little pyramids are actually microscopic traps designed to gently enclose single cells without killing them. The idea is that in the future, such traps could be a part of a system for capturing and analyzing individual cells, perhaps as a part of cancer monitoring.

The traps, which are made out of silicon oxides, start out as flat, star-like shapes. When they're dipped into a saline solution, the arms automatically begin to fold inward along their hinges, capturing any cells that might be nearby at the time. In a new study, the traps' creators have shown the little nano-stars are able to grip two different kinds of mouse cells without killing them: red blood cells and fibroblasts, which are a type of connective tissue cell.

Microscopically Structuring Steel Like Bamboo Makes It Stronger Yet More Flexible

People's teeth and bamboo stalks may not seem very durable compared to bars of steel. But, a new series of experiments finds, making metals mimic those materials could improve metals' endurance and strength.
A team of chemists from China and the U.S. manufactured steel with a particular microstructure, inspired by teeth and bamboo. The resulting material was both more flexible and able to handle higher amounts of stress than conventionally made steel. In factories, you want both qualities. Structural steel should be able to handle a lot of stress, but it should also bend a little when it comes near its stress limit. That way, it will give engineers more time to fix it before it fails, instead of shattering suddenly.

Wearable Tech Gets A Makeover

The market for wearable gadgets will reach about $1.8 billion within the next four years, according to Juniper Research, a firm that specializes in mobile telecommunications. Trouble is, it’s hard to wear a gadget without looking like you’re wearing a gadget. Plastic or silicone fitness monitors, such as the Fitbit and Nike Fuelband, practically scream “activity tracker!” And smart watches are large, heavy, and obvious—the calculator watches of the 21st century.
But that awkward stage may be drawing to a close. As sensors become smaller and cheaper, and low-energy Bluetooth data sharing mitigates the need for bulky batteries, designers can integrate smart components in unobtrusive ways. The Misfit Shine activity tracker, for instance, looks like a piece of jewelry (and can last four months on one watch battery). Start-up Cuff will embed location sensors into a line of bracelets and necklaces. Fitbit has even signed a deal with designer Tory Burch to create accessories for its products.
Baking smart components into clothes and accessories is also getting easier to do. In March, Google unveiled the Android Wear operating system, which is optimized to deliver at-a-glance information, such as appointments and text messages, so designers won’t have to spend months developing custom code for their devices. Instead, they can just do what they’ve always done: focus on the fashion.

Squid Protein Could Help Brains 'Talk' to Computers

Scientists have discovered a new feature of a protein called reflectin, found in a group of animals called pencil squid. It turns out reflectin conducts protons and may be able to bridge the communication divide between cells and biomedical implants. It's ability to move around these positive charges and it's "tunability," or versatile nature, could be used to build implants and prosthetics that can more easily communicate with the human body. The fact that it is biological and flexible means that it may be better than existing materials for integrating into the human body, and with a lower chance of being rejected, the researchers (from the University of California, Irvine) said. And since it is a protein, it could be modified in other desirable ways, such as possibly being able to biodegrade after it is done serving a useful purpose, which could help patients avoid additional surgeries. 

See For Yourself How Many Animals Are Close To Extinction

Mass extinctions have happened before in Earth's history, for example when an enormous meteorite slammed into our planet and (likely) wiped out the dinosaurs. But we are now in the midst of one caused by, you guessed it, human beings--with species going extinct between 100 to 1,000 times the natural "background" level. But these numbers are a bit hard to picture. Thankfully, the online journalism outfit ProPublica has created an amazing visualization called "A Disappearing Planet" that tells the story very well through data. The visualization shows how many mammals, reptiles, amphibians and birds are endangered, and it breaks it down into families, genera and species. Just clicking at random to find a critically endangered species, I came across the Yanbaru whiskered bat, which was only discovered in Okinawa in 1996 isn't in very good shape. I also learned that 63 percent of primates, 69 percent of big cats, and 100 percent of rhinoceroses are at risk for extinction.

This Bot Has Written More Wikipedia Articles Than Anybody

You might think writing 10,000 articles per day would be impossible. But not for a Swede named Sverker Johansson. He created a computer program that has written a total of 2.7 million articles, making Johansson the most prolific author, by far, on the "internet's encyclopedia." His contributions account for 8.5 percent of the articles on Wikipedia, the Wall Street Journal reports.
But how can a bot write so many articles, and do it coherently? As Johansson--a science teacher with degrees in linguistics, civil engineering, economics and particle physics--explained to the WSJ, the bot scrapes information from various trusted sources, and then cobbles that material together, typically into a very short entry, or "stub." Many of the articles cover the taxonomy of little-known animals such as butterflies and beetles, and also small towns in the Philippines (his wife is Filipina).

Scientists Create Map of Martian Surface Properties

The new map uses nighttime temperature images to derive the thermal inertia – a calculated value that represents how fast a surface heats up and cools off – for areas of Mars, each the size of a football field.
“We used more than 20,000 THEMIS nighttime temperature images to generate the highest resolution surface property map of Mars ever created,” explained team member Dr Robin Fergason at the U.S. Geological Survey’s Astrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Arizona. As day and night alternate on Mars, loose, fine-grain materials such as sand and dust change temperature quickly and thus have low values of thermal inertia. Bedrock represents the other end of the thermal inertia range: because it cools off slowly at night and warms up slowly by day, it has a high thermal inertia.“Darker areas in the map are cooler at night, have a lower thermal inertia and likely contain fine particles, such as dust, silt or fine sand. The brighter regions are warmer, she explains, and have surfaces with higher thermal inertia. These consist perhaps of coarser sand, surface crusts, rock fragments, bedrock or combinations of these materials,” Dr Fergason said. A version of the map optimized for scientists is available at the U.S. Geological Survey.
“The map has an important practical side. NASA used THEMIS images to find safe landing sites for the Mars Exploration Rovers in 2004, and for Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover, in 2012,” Dr Fergason said. “THEMIS images are now helping NASA select a landing site for its next Mars rover in 2020.”

Solar Sponge Efficiently Makes Steam

The spongey device is made of graphite on top, with a carbon foam on the bottom. The graphite is highly porous and fractured, a crown of flakes, created by putting the material in a microwave oven and allowing bubbles to come to the surface and burst, in a way "just like popcorn," the researchers said.  Graphite absorbs the sun's rays and heats up. This creates a pressure differential that sucks water from the bottom into the top, where it vaporizes. This sponge converts 85 percent of the solar energy in sunlight it absorbs into heat, the authors wrote in the study, which is extremely efficient.
Current methods to create steam involve heating liquids or using a system of mirrors to concentrate sunlight, which are both more expensive and inefficient--whereas the graphite and carbon used in this sponge are relatively easy to get your hands on, the scientists said.