We’ve all been there: desperately trying to shake the last few drops of ketchup or salad dressing out of the bottle, becoming more and more frustrated as the condiment stubbornly sticks to the sides and refuses to come out.

A few months ago, a group of MIT scientists led by grad student Dave Smith decided to do something a little more productive than shaking. As shown in the video above, courtesy of Fast Company, they created a remarkably slippery substance called LiquiGlide that, when applied as a coating to the inside of bottles, sends viscous condiments like ketchup pouring out in no time.

The team reports that LiquiGlide is made entirely of nontoxic, FDA-approved substances and can easily be applied to the insides of bottles made of glass, plastic and other materials. At first glance, the project seems a little frivolous—are a few drops of ketchup really worth the time of such talented researchers?—but the possible benefits go beyond reducing the annoyance of sandwich-makers and french fry-eaters.

“Everyone is always like, ‘Why bottles? What’s the big deal?’” Smith told Fast Company. “But then you tell them the market for bottles—just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market.” The research team estimates that if all sauce bottles were coated with LiquiGlide, approximates one million tons of wasted condiments would be saved from the trash annually.

How does it work? Details on the proprietary substance are hard to come by, but Smith said, “it’s kind of a structured liquid—it’s rigid like a solid, but it’s lubricated like a liquid.” The research team initially worked on coatings to prevent ice formation on windshields and clogs in gas lines, then realized one of the super-slippery compounds would be ideal for this entirely different use.

Last week, the product won second place in MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, and the team has already secured patents on the product. The researchers are reportedly in talks with several bottling and packaging companies, although it’s still early in the process.

Within a few years, though, we might have LiquiGlide-enhanced bottles of ketchup, mayonnaise and salad dressings on the dinner table. And why stop there? Might we see peanut butter, syrup, even honey cascading out of bottles and jars with ease? The possibilities are truly limitless.

Our advice? Get ready for this utopian future by watching a video of mayonnaise coming out of a LiquiGlide bottle:

The October 3, 2005 annular eclipse, as seen from Spain. Photo by Abel Pardo López

On Sunday evening, for the first time in 18 years, a solar eclipse will be visible from the continental United States. This won’t be your typical eclipse, either—as in the picture above, from October 3, 2005, the moon will cross directly in front of the sun but block out only a portion of its light, leaving a “ring of fire” that is much thicker than the ring seen during most total eclipses.

Why the ring of fire? Total solar eclipses occur when the moon passes directly between the sun and earth, covering up the sun for a brief duration from our vantage point. Because the moon is currently near apogee—meaning it’s at a point in its orbit that is farther from us than usual—the moon appears smaller in the sky, and thus isn’t large enough to block the entire sun. The result: a bold, shimmering ring of fire, known as an annular eclipse.

Unfortunately, those on the East Coast (including us here at Smithsonian) won’t be able to see the eclipse at all, since the sun will set by the time it will occur. Many residents of Western states will be able to see the ring of fire eclipse during the afternoon or evening on Sunday; others will see a partial eclipse, in which the moon crosses in front of the sun off-center, blocking just one portion of it. This NASA map shows the thin swath of the United States that will be able to see the annular eclipse. If you’re outside it, you can click on your exact location to see what time you should look to the sky to see a partial eclipse.

Although up to 94 percent of the sun’s light will be blocked out by the eclipse, looking at it for even a few seconds with the naked eye can cause permanent harm to your retinas. (Don’t try watching with your smartphone or digital camera, either—it can damage the lens.) Instead, punch a small hole in a piece of cardboard and allow the sun’s light to pass through it, and you’ll see a projected image of the eclipse on the ground. You can also look to the shaded ground beneath a leafy tree to see the shadows turn into circular rings of light.

Watch the video below by Science@NASA for a full explanation of the astronomical phenomenon:

A new study indicates 3.6 percent of American adults are prone to sleepwalking, but scientists still don't understand what causes the phenomenon. Photo by Soffie Hicks

A study in Tuesday’s issue of Neurology revealed something surprising about American nighttime habits—we like to walk. The first-ever large-scale survey of sleepwalking habits in American adults indicated that an estimated 3.6 percent of us—more than 8.4 million people—have had an episode of nocturnal wandering in the past year. This is much higher than researchers expected. Nearly 30 percent of respondents reported sleepwalking at some point in their lives.

“The study underscores the fact that sleepwalking is much more prevalent in adults than previously appreciated,” the researchers, led by Maurice Ohayon of Stanford University, noted in the study. “The numbers are very big.” For comparison, the sleep disorder narcolepsy affects an estimated .04 percent of the population.

Sleepwalking can take a number of forms, from brief periods of wandering to activities as complicated as cooking, cleaning and even driving a car. In 2004, an Australia woman reportedly had repeated sex with strangers over the course of several months while sleepwalking, and in rare instances, it has been used as a defense in trials for homicide and other crimes.

Despite the surprising prevalence of this phenomenon, though, scientists still don’t understand what causes it.

The American Academy of Sleep Medicine divides our sleep time into two categories—REM sleep and non-REM (NREM) sleep, depending on whether REM (rapid eye movement) is occurring underneath the eyelids. During REM sleep, the brain’s neuronal activity is most similar to when it is awake, and that’s when we do most of our most vivid dreaming.

Paradoxically, though, sleepwalking occurs during NREM sleep. Normally, adults go through sleep cycles: from the lightest stages of NREM to the deepest NREM, and then back to the lightest NREM and then REM, every one and a half hours or so. Sleepwalking typically occurs during the deepest stages of NREM—the part of the sleep cycle that, if interrupted, leaves you the most groggy. It usually happens during the first third of the night and can last anywhere from 30 seconds to 30 minutes. Some scientists speculate that it is caused by the brain attempting to directly transition from deep NREM sleep to wakefulness, rather than going through the subsequent stages of the sleep cycle.

One factor that seems to increase the likelihood of sleepwalking is simply the amount of time people spend in this deepest stage of sleep. Sleep deprivation, fever and excessive tiredness can increase the odds that an individual will sleepwalk. Additionally, over-the-counter sleeping pills and SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor) medications, commonly prescribed to treat depression, are known to increase the duration of deep sleep.

Thus, it’s not entirely surprising that the Neurology study found that sleepwalking is positively correlated with a number of mental disorders, such as clinical depression, alcoholism and obsessive-compulsive disorder. People who take SSRIs or sleeping pills are much more likely to sleepwalk at least twice a month than those who don’t.

“There is no doubt an association between nocturnal wanderings and certain conditions,” said Ohayon of the survey’s results, which sampled 19,136 individuals from 15 states. “But we don’t know the direction of the causality. Are the medical conditions provoking sleepwalking, or is it vice versa? Or perhaps it’s the treatment that is responsible.”

Overall, children sleepwalk far more often than adults, and the phenomenon is not strongly associated with a particular gender. The study found that most sleepwalkers experience the phenomenon chronically, as 80 percent who reported sleepwalking had done so for more than five years. Additionally, 30 percent had a family history of sleepwalking.

Experts disagree about what you should do if you see someone sleepwalking. While it may be amusing, it can often be dangerous, but some believe that suddenly waking the sleeper can cause excessive disturbance.

“Make sure they are safe. If at all possible, gently try to steer them toward their bed. If they resist, let them be,” neurologist Gayatri Devi told WebMD. “Make sure there is a lock on the door and the window,” Ohayon says. “They don’t realize what they are doing.”

Andrew Adamatzky is a professor in Unconventional Computing at the University of the West of England, and throughout his career he has indeed taken an unconventional approach to computing. Instead of servers and microchips, he uses a single-celled slime mold. The brainless, seemingly unintelligent organism (Physarum polycephalum) has been harnessed to transfer specific colors between foods dyed with food coloring, move a small boat through a gel medium and even solve mazes.

His latest project, though, is perhaps the most unconventional of all. Over the past several years, he and Andrew Ilachinski of the Center for Naval Analyses have used the slime mold to do something astoundingly complicated: design plans for national highway systems. And each time, within days, the mold created routes that are remarkably similar to actual systems designed by human engineers.

The slime mold, it turns out, is specifically evolved to do one thing very well: efficiently transport nutrients from one location to another. As the pair of researchers explained in a New York Times op-ed this past weekend, the forest-dwelling organism forages for microscopic nutrient particles by sending out protoplasmic tubes of slime and maintaining the links between these food sources as efficiently as possible.

So Adamatzky, Ilachinski and a team of colleagues decided to use this ability to determine exactly which routes would be most logical to build if one were designing, say, the U.S. Interstate Highway System from scratch. As detailed in an article that will soon appear in the journal Complex Systems, the team replicated the United States for the mold by overlaying a agar gel dish shaped like the country on top of a map and placing a food source (rolled oats) in each of the 20 most populous metropolitan areas. They repeated the experiment for 13 other geographical areas, including Brazil, Africa and Germany, and replicated it several times for each map.

A slime mold is used to design an efficient U.S. interstate system. Photo by Andrew Adamatzky, University of the West of England

After placing the oats, they let the slime mold spread naturally from the largest city or capital, and observed what routes it determined were most efficient for transporting the nutrients across the country. As depicted in the video above (showing one of the experimental trials for Canada) and the image to the right (showing the results of a trial for the United States), the slime mold repeatedly created routes that were strikingly similar to the ones laid out by decades—and sometimes centuries—of human engineering.

“Physarum is renowned for building optimal transport networks, which minimize distance of cytoplasmic transfer but also span as much sources of nutrients as possible,” Adamatzky told Wired last year. “Ideally, human-built roads should fulfill the same criteria.”

Indeed, it seems that the U.S. Interstate Highway System does fulfill the same criteria, as the mold created routes that match the majority of interstates. In nearly every trial, the mold grew links that correlate with Route 95 from New York to Boston and Route 45 from Dallas to Houston; In most trials, the mold closely replicated highways that span the major cities of the southwest (Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix and Los Angeles) and the eastern seaboard (Route 95 all the way from Boston to Jacksonville).

The mold’s designs correlate even more closely with Belgium, Canada and China’s highway systems, suggesting that those are more efficient in terms of minimizing travel distance between population centers and spanning as many densely populated areas as possible.

Why do the mold’s and humankind’s route creations match so closely? The authors speculate that, because many early roads were determined based on prehistoric human footpaths and animal trails, and many modern highways are in turn based on these early roads, our design process is really not so different from the slime mold’s: using trial and error to find the most convenient paths for travel over time.

The experiments are fascinating—and maybe a little creepy—in the way they demonstrate that seemingly unintelligent life forms can perform extremely complicated tasks. But they also hint at potential applications in the real world. Adamatzky seeks to devise means of problem-solving that are cheaper and simpler than silicon-based computing, and the mold has already been used to solve a number of arcane spatial mathematical problems. The mold requires relatively little expertise or laboratory resources to use, and it is a more sustainable computing option than traditional electronic circuitry.

One practical application that immediately comes to mind is using the mold to analyze which routes would be most efficient to build for countries that don’t yet have developed national highway systems. They could also be used to efficiently model ideal pathways on a much smaller scale, such as a college campus or public park.

Regardless of what we might end up using it for, one thing is already clear: the brainless slime mold is much smarter than we think.

Scientists calculated how to make a force field big enough to fit the Millennium Falcon. Photo courtesy of Mary Evans / Lucas Film / Ronald Grant / Everett Collection (10336353)

Today, if you aren’t already aware, is something of an intergalactic holiday. In recent years, May 4th has become an unofficial day to honor the iconic film series Star Wars, because the date is a rhyming pun of the signature line, “May the Force Fourth Be With You.” All around the world, Star Wars fans are celebrating Luke, Leia, Boba Fett and (maybe even) the Ewoks.

We decided to channel our inner Jedi by checking out the contributions science has made towards a better understanding of the Star Wars universe. Last year, it turns out, a team of physicists from the University of Leicester in Britain took a closer look at many fans’ favorite spacecraft: Han Solo and Chewbacca’s hyperspace-traveling Millennium Falcon (which made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs!)

The scientists noted that force fields are often employed in the Star Wars universe to provide a barrier between the hangars of spaceships and outer space, preventing the ship’s atmosphere from being sucked outwards (think of spacecraft flying inside the Death Star‘s massive hangar bay, with no mechanical airlock). The physicists noted that a real-life innovation, the plasma window, could theoretically serve to create such force fields. Plasma windows, invented by Brookhaven Lab physicist Ady Hershcovitch in 1995, use magnetic fields to create bounded areas filled with plasma (superheated, viscous ionized gas), which have the special property of blocking air from entering a vacuum while allowing radiation and physical objects to freely pass through.

With this knowledge in hand, the research team decided to try calculating the amount of energy that would be necessary to create a docking force field large enough to accommodate the Millennium Falcon, which they estimate is roughly 100 by 40 by 6 feet. Their conclusion? Theoretically possible with current technology—but generating sufficient amounts of energy to continuously sustain a force field that size is unlikely to be feasible.

But, in a galaxy far, far away, anything is possible.

The supermoon of March 2011, rising behind the Lincoln Memorial In Washington, DC. Photo by NASA/Bill Ingalls

This Saturday evening, take a look at the night sky and you might see something special. The moon will make its largest, most stunning appearance of the year—an event known to scientists as “the perigee-syzygy of the Earth-Moon-Sun system” and to the popular skywatching public simply as the “supermoon.” As one of the most spectacular supermoons in years, the moon will appear 14 percent bigger and 30 percent brighter than when it is on the far side of its orbit.

Why does the moon sometimes appear larger, and sometimes smaller? The answer lies in the fact that its orbit around Earth is elliptical, so its distance from us varies—it ranges from roughly 222,000 to 252,000 miles away each month. On Saturday, the moon will reach what is known as the perigee, coming as close as it ever does to the Earth, just 221,802 miles away. At the same time, it will be a full moon, with the entirety of its Earth-facing surface illuminated by the light of the sun.

This supermoon will appear especially large because the exact moment of perigee will neatly coincide with the appearance of a perfectly full moon. The full moon will occur at 11:34 p.m. EST, and the perigee will occur at 11:35. During last year’s supermoon on March 19, 2011, for comparison, the perigee and full moon were 50 minutes apart.

A comparison of last year's March supermoon (right) with an average moon from December 2010. Photo by Wikimedia Commons user Marcoaliaslama

“The timing is almost perfect,” says NASA, according to the Washington Post. AccuWeather’s astronomy blogger Daniel Vogler notes that a look through recent data reveals no more closely-timed (and therefore bigger) supermoons.

Apart from providing a sight to behold in the night sky, the moon’s perigee also has a tangible effect on Earth: It causes higher than normal tides. Because tides are driven by the moon’s gravitational effects, a closer moon means that the oceans will be pulled more than usual towards the satellite. In most places, this will mean a tide that is an inch or so higher than usual, but geographical factors can multiply the effect up to around six inches.

There has long been speculation that the moon’s gravitational effect during its perigee could be the cause of natural disasters, including earthquakes and volcanic activity. In particular, many suggested this link following the earthquake and subsequent tsunami off the coast of Japan in March of 2011. However, the devastating quake occurred over a week before the supermoon, and studies have shown no strong evidence for increased frequency of high-intensity seismic activity during the moon’s perigee.

There are more concrete examples, though, in which supermoons may cause problems. In particular, flooding during storms may be made more severe because of the higher tides. In 1962, the coincidental arrival of a powerful storm with the moon’s perigee inundated the entire Atlantic coast of Cape Cod, causing 40 deaths and $500 million in property damage.

On Saturday, assuming no damaging storms or floods are at your doorstep, just hope for a clear night and take a look outside. The moon will appear larger and brighter than usual all night, but for the most striking views, try to catch it just after it rises above the horizon, when an optical illusion causes it to look larger than it really is, and viewing it through the gases of the earth’s atmosphere can cause the moon to appear yellow, orange or red in color.

Jorge Cham is the creator of Piled Higher and Deeper, one of many popular science-themed web comics

There was once a time when schoolchildren might conceal a comic book behind a science textbook to avoid getting in trouble for looking at cartoons when they should be studying biology.

My, how times have changed. We’re here to tell you that you no longer have to choose. Funny, informative and absurd science and math-themed comics are alive and well, proliferating both on and off the internet. Read one and you’ll discover what thousands already have: They are one of the few forms of entertainment that can appeal to your inner child and inner nerd at the same time.

Now in its 15th year of publication, the popular web comic PhD (which stands for Piled Higher and Deeper) released its very own feature length movie on Sunday. The series, drawn by Jorge Cham, follows the lives of several grad students and professors and is published three times a week. The gags about the tedium of scientific research, the perils of procrastination and the endless search for free food are catnip to anyone involved in the oftentimes maddening realm of academia. The live-action movie can be downloaded for $10 and is being screened at campuses across the country.

PhD is only one of the many comics that poke fun at the world of science and math. One of the most widely read, xkcd, describes itself as “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.” The comic began in 2005, when NASA roboticist Randall Munroe began scanning his notebook doodles and posting them on the internet. Now an award-winning comic, it is also published three times per week and covers everything from extremely detailed, slightly humorous maps of the ocean floor to in-jokes about the language of formal logic.

Abstruse Goose, another favorite, bills itself as “a strip cartoon about math, science, and geek culture.” While some of the comics joke about the immense complexity of video game programming or the absurdity of trying to argue with a string theorist, the site is one of few places on the web—or, really, anywhere—where Schrödinger’s cat and “lolcats” collide.

Some science comics focus on a particular subject, such as Dinosaur Comics (created by Ryan North, who was interviewed over on our Dinosaur Tracking blog last year), while others stick to one particular medium, such as Indexed, which presents diagrams and doodles drawn on an index card; the artist also writes Smithsonian‘s own Indexed in Quotes.

Take a look at the comics on the list, or tell us your own favorites in the comments section. While perusing these sites, though, be careful: Browsing with a few minutes of entertainment in mind can lead one down the dark path of hours of unintended procrastination. As PhD puts it, “Reading this can be hazardous to your research. Proceed with caution and use only in moderation.”

Our beliefs about the morality of beaning a player with a pitch differ from our believe about other areas of life. Photo by Caleb Williams

On a sunny April afternoon at Wrigley Field, in the bottom of the third inning, a pitcher from the Cardinals intentionally beans the Cubs batter, right in the shoulder. The next inning, the Chicago pitcher retaliates, hitting the St. Louis batter, an outfielder, with a beanball on the elbow. The outfielder, of course, was uninvolved in the first transgression. So is it morally acceptable to hit him?

A new study, published last week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, indicates that many of us believe that beaning an innocent player on an offending team is perfectly fine—despite the fact that, in most other areas of life, American culture does not condone this type of “vicarious punishment.” Not surprisingly, an individual fan’s team allegiance plays a large role in determining whether they find this sort of revenge palatable. It’s telling, though, that for fans of all stripes, baseball seems to represent a unique ethical holdover from our earlier days of family feuds and a culture of honor.

The researchers conducted surveys outside of a number of ballparks during the season, asking fans about a range of scenarios involving beanballs and revenge. The study’s most striking finding is that, of the 145 fans polled outside both Chicago’s Wrigley Field and St. Louis’ Busch Stadium, a full 44 percent felt it was okay for a team’s pitcher to intentionally hit a batter on the other team, if they were avenging a previous beanball by a different player.

The percentages climbed even higher when the researchers asked specifically about the team that the fan supported. Of participants polled outside Boston’s Fenway Park, 43 percent approved of the scenario when the revenge was exacted against the hometown Red Sox, but a full 67 percent were fine with it when a Sox pitcher was carrying out revenge.

Vicarious punishment, the researchers say, has emerged countless times in human history. In certain circumstances, cultural norms allow individuals to take out revenge on any members of a group, even if they did not commit the original transgression. Early U.S. history includes many family feuds, such as the notorious Hatfield-McCoy feud of the late 1800s. Anthropologists have identified “cultures of honor”—in which members carry out excessive punishment against relatives or allies of their enemy—among groups as varied as Scottish herdsmen, cowboys in the 19th century American West and Bedouin nomads in the Middle East.

Nowadays, though, in Western culture, this type of vicarious vigilante justice is generally seen as unacceptable, both legally and morally. If you attacked a family member of someone who had assaulted your brother or sister, you’d go to jail. So why does baseball present such an unexpected exception?

One of the follow-up questions the researchers asked points to the explanation. Although a healthy percentage of fans approved of the original revenge scenario, a much smaller fraction (19 percent) were okay with a pitcher beaning a player on an entirely different team a day later to exact revenge. If an innocent batter can justly be hit by a pitch to avenge the unrelated actions of his pitcher, why not a batter wearing an entirely different uniform?

The answer might be related to something any sports fan has long recognized: In the heat of the game, we take on a powerfully clannish mentality about our team and our side. For fleeting moments, the team becomes a cohesive ethical unit, and our emotional world seems to encompass anyone wearing the uniform. In the world of sports, at times, it’s Us versus Them. So if our guy gets revenge by hitting a different player from their side, we say just one thing: “Play ball!”

Read more great baseball stories, including the physics of cheating in baseball, on Smithsonian.com

If we wanted another name for the Age of Information, one that highlighted its darker side, it might well be the Age of Distraction. Many of us find ourselves constantly reaching into our pockets and tapping on glass screens to read texts, emails, Twitter feeds and status updates. This flood of information can interrupt conversations and concentrated thought.

Google aims to solve the problem of information overload in a surprising manner: by sticking all this data right in front of your face, at any given time. Its new computerized glasses prototype, currently under development, is part of Project Glass, which, the company says, will be a technology “that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.”

A prototype of Google's new wearable computing system

The glasses have been in development for some time, and rumors of their potential capabilities have popped up all over the web. On Wednesday, Google finally released some specific information about one of its most intriguing innovations, produced by Google X, the company’s secret lab that works on future technologies.

As seen in the video above, the glasses will be voice-operated, contain a camera and have the capability to project all sorts of digital information right on the lens. They could be used to provide real-time GPS directions, field video calls, perform internet searches, send text messages–really, anything an Android-powered phone or tablet can do, since they’ll presumably run on that operating system.

Google has declined to release much information about the technology itself, instead focusing on what capabilities the device will offer to users. Based on the video, it looks like the system will include a transparent display, which will project graphics in front of your view of the real world. Potentially, users might be able to navigate the system with subtle eye movements, tracked by a micro-camera focusing on the eyeball. The glasses would likely be tethered to a smartphone or other external computing device to save weight and battery capacity.

Responses have been all over the map, with some bloggers gushing over the glasses and others calling them creepy or downright dystopian. The main concern, as PC World notes, is obvious—if we’re so distracted by the tiny computers we carry already, how will we possibly escape the clutches of a smartphone that we wear on our face? According to the New York Times, though, people who have tested the glasses report that they are less distracting than they seem:

One person who had used the glasses said: “They let technology get out of your way. If I want to take a picture I don’t have to reach into my pocket and take out my phone; I just press a button at the top of the glasses and that’s it.”

Others are concerned that Google—which does, after all, still derive the vast majority of its revenue from selling advertisements—will incorporate ads into the glasses as well. Retailers might, for example, buy advertisements that are projected when the wearer walks past one of their stores, or a competitor’s, as depicted in a remixed version of Google’s video by Jonathan McIntosh.

Another worry is that wearable computing technology will only exacerbate concerns about privacy and surveillance in the digital age. Google already bases the ads it shows users on the content of their emails and internet searches; presumably, it might use visual, location and even speech data to further refine its advertisement algorithms. Additionally, many have criticized the glasses for a reason far more mundane: the look. Admittedly, the prototype looks quintessentially nerdy, like something out of Star Trek.

But, as the Atlantic notes, our technology history is filled with severe miscalculations of the popularity of new devices—various visionaries have declared that computers, telephones and televisions would never be adopted by mainstream consumers. And Google isn’t the only technology giant looking to break into the field of wearable computing: Apple filed patents relating to a head-mounted visual display system as far back as 2008, and the company is rumored to be developing a bracelet-type device that could display smartphone notifications and other data. Like it or not, it seems that the flood of data is soon going to move out of our pockets and into our realtime field of view.

Will computer servers like these be the reporters of tomorrow? Photo courtesy of Florian Hirzinger

We live in an era when artificial intelligence is being used to take over countless tasks that used to be reserved for humans—everything from competing on Jeopardy! to answering phones at call centers. Now a new technology is sure to strike fear into the heart of any journalist, reporter or blogger. Software is being developed that can use raw data—such as Twitter feeds, company earnings reports and baseball box scores—to automatically produce news articles that seem as though they were written by a real live human. For better or worse, welcome to the brave new world of computerized journalism.

The most prominent example is a startup called Narrative Science, which has made waves (and raised $6 million in capital) by pioneering computer software that analyzes these sorts of datasets and writes everything from stock advice to sports analysis.

Previous efforts by other programmers to automate journalism led to formulaic, unvarying articles. But Narrative Science’s cofounders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum of Northwestern University’s Intelligent Information Lab, have developed algorithms that can do some remarkable things. The software, for example, can interpret box scores to determine an appropriate angle for a game recap, distinguishing between a blowout, a come from behind victory, or a close loss.

Recently, the software has been employed to analyze tweets about political candidates, noting that Newt Gingrich attracted positive public attention by focusing on tax issues, but also received considerable criticism on character issues. Future uses, the company suggests, could include articles on data sets such as crime stats, medical study results and surveys.

The writing may not read like poetry, but it gets the point across in language less stilted than you might expect, and would likely fool readers unaware that a software program wrote the article. In his blog, Just to Clarify, Hammond writes that the company uses an editorial staff with expertise in the field to manually configure the engine for each type of data. The software is proprietary, so publicly available details on how the system works are somewhat vague, but Hammond says that its ability to subtly mimic the human voice is improving all the time.

Although most of the company’s 30 or so clients use the service for internal memos—and, presumably, most news organizations would prefer to keep quiet about their robot-written articles—there are already several examples of published articles that were written using the software. A small section of Forbes.com features articles with the byline “Narrative Science.” The Big Ten Network has used the software to publish nearly instant recaps seconds after games have ended. And Hanley Wood, a construction trade publisher, has employed Narrative Science to comb through data on housing trends and publish articles on its site, builderonline.com.

What are the consequences of this trend? Well, if the software improves to the point that it rivals the work of humans, it could theoretically outcompete traditional journalism, since the cost is so much lower. Last fall, it was reported that Hanley Wood paid roughly $10 for each 500-word article—much less, by most estimates, than the cost of paying actual writers.

Doomsayers may warn that this portends the end of journalism as we know it—the beginning of a world where our news comes to us untouched by human hands and armies of angry writers are out of work. Narrative Science, though, suggests that their software is most useful for small companies looking to extend or enrich their coverage of a previously overlooked area.

We’re not sure who to believe. We can only promise you one thing: This article was written by a real live human.

A microbiologist collects a manure sample. Image courtesy of the USDA.

Hog farmers have a lot to worry about, such as fluctuating pork prices and sick pigs. Now they have a new concern: barn explosions. The culprit appears to be a strange new foam that has begun growing on the pools of liquid manure beneath large pig farms. The foam traps methane, a flammable gas that, when ignited, can cause catastrophic blowups. One explosion last September in Iowa leveled an entire barn, killing some 1,500 pigs and injuring one worker.

On big farms in the Midwest, pigs spend the latter part of their lives in large, low buildings called finishing barns. These barns have slotted floors and sit atop eight-foot-deep concrete pits. When the pigs defecate and urinate, the waste falls between the slats and into the pit, forming an underground manure lagoon. Once a year, the farmers empty these pits and sell the manure as fertilizer. This model has been used in the Midwest for the past 30 or 40 years, says Larry Jacobson, an agricultural engineer at the University of Minnesota.

In 2009, Jacobson and other agriculture experts began to hear reports of a mysterious foam growing on swine manure ponds. “Sometimes it would be enough that it would come up through the slats,” he says. To get rid of the foam, some farmers poured water on it. Others used machines to break it up. That’s when the explosions began.

Why these explosions happen is well understood. As manure ferments, it releases methane gas, which bubbles to the surface of the pit. Normally this methane doesn’t pose a risk. The gas seeps out of the pit, and the barn’s ventilation fans carry it away. But when thick, gelatinous foam covers a manure lagoon, the methane can’t rise. The foam acts like a sponge, Jacobsen says, soaking up the gas. Jacobsen and his colleagues have collected foam samples that are 60 percent methane by volume. When a farmer disturbs the foam by agitating the manure or emptying the pit, the methane gets released all at once. In barns without adequate ventilation, the concentration of methane can quickly reach the explosive range, between 5 percent and 15 percent. A spark from a fan motor or a burning cigarette can ignite the gas. An explosion in southeastern Minnesota raised a barn roof several feet in the air and blew the hog farmer, who was on his way out, 30 or 40 feet from the door.

For the past three years, Jacobson and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota and the University of Iowa have been trying to figure out why the foam forms. The slimy stuff appears to be the byproduct of bacteria. But the researchers don’t yet know which strain or why these foam-producing bacteria suddenly appeared. The researchers are in the midst of conducting DNA analyses to try to identify the microbes, comparing foamy manure with non-foamy samples.

One explanation may be dietary changes. About five years ago, pig farmers began mixing distillers grains, a fermented byproduct of the ethanol production process, into their pig feed. Distillers grains are much cheaper than traditional feed. But that can’t be the only factor, Jacobson says. Today, nearly everyone feeds their pigs distillers grains, but only a quarter of the swine barns grow foam.

Jacobson and his colleagues have identified a few additives that seem to help eliminate the foam. But those fixes are just “band-aids” Jacobson says. What he really wants is a way to prevent the foam from forming.

Want to see what the foam looks like? Check out this YouTube video, and prepare to be disgusted.

A new study involving lab mice could bring a breakthrough in treating Alzheimer's. Image courtesy of Flickr user Rick Eh?

Alzheimer’s disease damages brain tissue in a variety of ways, but one of the most important seems to be the buildup of “plaques.” The deposits contain protein called beta-amyloid. Normally, beta-amyloid is produced and then removed at a more or less constant rate, but not in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease.

Beta-amyloid is normally removed from the brain with the help of a molecule called apolipoprotein. One version of this molecule, ApoE, increases a person’s risk of Alzheimer’s and appears to be linked to beta-amyloid buildup.

Meanwhile there is bexarotene, a chemical used in cancer treatments (officially for cutaneous T-cell lymphoma but unofficially for some other cancers). Researchers at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine used bexarotene in mice that have a condition similar to human Alzheimer’s to change the relationship between ApoE and beta-amyloid. The drug caused plaques to be removed from much of the neural tissue. The behaviors of the mice on learning and memory tasks also changed in ways indicating that the effects of the Alzheimer’s-like condition was reversed, at least partially. A mere 72 hours of treatment with bexarotene “cured” misdirected nesting behavior and caused improvement in other tasks. Olfactory sense improved in some of the mice over a nine-day period.

There are reasons to be very positive about this result, but also reasons to be very cautious. Among the reasons to be cautious are:

• Mice are not humans, so there may be important but subtle differences in brain chemistry that will cause this treatment to not work the same way in humans.
• Although mice improved behaviorally, it is difficult to match mouse and human forms of “dementia,” so we must be cautious in interpreting the meaning of improvement in the mice.
• As far as I can tell, the effects of this treatment may be only short-term. Even though bexarotene has been used widely on humans, the dose and treatment approach needed for addressing human Alzheimer’s may be very different. It could even be dangerous or implausible.
• The ApoE contribution to Alzheimer’s is only one part of the disease. It may well be that the best-case scenario of a treatment based on this research would be only a partial cure, or only for some individuals.

Reasons to be optimistic include:

• The result seen in the mice was dramatic and fast. Half the plaques were removed in 72 hours, and over the long term, 75 percent were removed.
• Bexarotene is a drug already approved for use (in other areas of treatment) by the FDA, so the process of investigating this drug’s efficacy and safety is much more advanced than if it was some chemical not previously used on humans.
• Even if it turns out that this drug will not be usable on humans to treat this condition, a result like this strongly indicates a path for further research to develop similar treatments.

The researchers are optimistic. Paige Cramer, first author of the study, noted in a press release, “This is an unprecedented finding. Previously, the best existing treatment for Alzheimer’s disease in mice required several months to reduce plaque in the brain. Research team leader Gary Landreth notes that “this is a particularly exciting and rewarding study because of the new science we have discovered and the potential promise of a therapy for Alzheimer’s disease. We need to be clear; the drug works quite well in mouse models of the disease. Our next objective is to ascertain if it acts similarly in humans. We are at an early stage in translating this basic science discovery into a treatment.”

A lot of research related to disease seems to be reported in press releases and elsewhere with more optimism than deserved, but in my opinion this is a case where the new research is more closely linked to potential treatment than is often the case. Keep an eye on this story!

Cramer, Paige E. John R. Cirrito, Daniel W. Wesson, C. Y. Daniel Lee, J. Colleen Karlo, Adriana E. Zinn, Brad T.
Casali, Jessica L. Restivo, Whitney D. Goebel, Michael J. James, Kurt R. Brunden, Donald A. Wilson, Gary E. Landreth. (2012). ApoE-Directed Therapeutics Rapidly Clear β-Amyloid and Reverse Deficits in AD
Mouse Models. Science. Science Express 9 February 2012. DOI: 10.1126/science.1217697

Studies show most football coaches make poor decisions on fourth down. Does Bill Belichick have a secret advantage? Photo by flickr user Keith Allison

Read our other posts about the history of football, what to bring to your Super Bowl party, the innovations of television advertising and much more.

This Super Bowl Sunday, as you watch grizzled coaches pace the sideline and bark at players, feel free to play armchair quarterback—or even head coach. Despite the hours they spend scouting players, analyzing game tape and drawing up complex tactical schemes, a pair of recent scientific studies indicates that many football coaches are no better at making some in-game decisions than you or I would be.

A 2006 paper by David Romer (pdf), a University of California at Berkeley economist, started things off by looking at a choice frequently encountered by coaches on fourth down: kick a field goal or try for a touchdown? Using data from more than 700 NFL games, Romer calculated the average chance of winning generated by each choice at different positions on the field. He then compared the data to the actual choices made by NFL coaches.

The conclusion: most avoid risk to an irrational extent, often opting to kick a field goal when going for a touchdown would provide a better chance of winning. Why would coaches—with their salaries and job security determined by on-field success—depart from the best possible choice? Romer speculates:

Perhaps the decision makers are systematically imperfect maximizers. Many skills are more important to running a football team than a command of mathematical and statistical tools…thus the decision makers may want to maximize their teams’ chances of winning, but rely on experience and intuition rather than formal analysis.

Another possible interpretation: for job security, coaches may prefer closer losses, coming after seemingly safe decision-making, to blowouts. A 23-0 loss may get a coach fired faster than a 23-6 score, which gives coaches incentive to kicking meaningless field goals rather than going for touchdowns.

Soon after the Romer study, Indiana University scientist Chuck Bower and partners from the business world went one step further. Using a similar dataset of actual NFL games, they built ZEUS: a powerful computer program that can analyze in-game situations on the fly and provide high-volume data analysis to coaches in real time. Bower said:

ZEUS is a valuable addition to a coaching staff’s tools, and one that can provide that elusive edge over the competition. The ZEUS engine is powerful enough to simulate the equivalent of every game played in the history of the NFL in less than a second. ZEUS can objectively assess crucial play-calling decisions with startling accuracy.

Comparing live data from the game with the historical track record of the NFL, ZEUS can indicate the choice that leads to a better chance of winning for a number of situations: not just what to do on fourth down, but whether to accept or decline penalties, attempt onside kicks, or try for two-point conversions.

In designing ZEUS, Bowers’ team drew upon many of the principles used in building computer models for other games—such as backgammon or chess—and applied them to football. “While the physical nature of the game is very different, the situational nature is strikingly similar. A football coach is constantly making decisions with respect to multiple variables: score, field position, down, yards to a first down, etc.,” said Bowers, an expert backgammon player.

NFL head coaches are a notoriously secretive bunch when it comes to strategy, so if anyone is currently using ZEUS, we’d likely not hear about it. But ZEUS’ own analysis indicates that one coach in particular might be using the cutting-edge program: New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, set to coach in his 5th Super Bowl on Sunday.

The evidence? Belichick is famous for his unconventional decision-making, often opting to go for an aggressive play on fourth down when most coaches would punt or kick a field goal. The New York Times “Fifth Down” blog has used ZEUS to evaluate real-world decisions on a number of occasions. And when ZEUS was used to analyze a particularly controversial fourth down call made by Belichick—at the end of a crucial 2010 game against the Indianapolis Colts, he opted to go for it on his own 28-yard line, an unusually aggressive choice—ZEUS surprised many by saying he had, statistically, made the right call. The analysis indicated that, overall, it gave him team the best chance of winning.

Of course, statistical projections are not guarantees. In that case, the decision didn’t work out, and the Patriots lost the game. But if Belichick does have ZEUS on his sideline, it might give him that much better odds of being the winning coach on Sunday.

Perceptions of wealth are often more complicated than just net worth, a new study indicates. Photo courtesy of flickr user AMagill

A recent thread on the urban parenting site Urbanbaby.com asked a simple pair of questions: What is your household income, and how rich do you feel? The resulting contradictions of income and perceived wealth drew widespread remark—and some scorn. One commenter, from New York City’s Upper East Side, makes $350,000 per year and feels “so, so, so poor.” Another earns $1.2 million and feels upper-middle class, while a third, with an income in the $180,000 range in the D.C. suburbs, feels rich.

How is this all possible? Everyone knows the old platitude “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” A recent psychological study indicates that wealth is just the same. A new paper, published in the January issue of Psychological Science by Princeton researcher Abigail Sussman, demonstrates that total net worth is not the only thing that influences perceptions of wealth, whether for ourselves or others.

If you were asked to consider two individuals—Mr. Blue, who has $120,200 in assets and $40,200 in debt, and Ms. Green, who has $80,200 in assets and just $200 in debt—who do you think is better off? Of participants in the study, 79% said Ms. Green, although net worth is the same for both. When assessing those with positive net worth, having a lower degree of both assets and debt was seen as better than having more of each.

On the other hand, when considering a pair of individuals with equal negative net worth—say, Mr. Red, with $42,400 in assets and $82,400 in debt, and Ms. Gray, with just $400 in assets and $42,000 in debt—77% of respondents more often said that Mr. Red was wealthier. Having more assets, as well as more debt, was generally perceived as better.

What’s going on? Why do the trends move in opposite directions depending on whether the individuals were in the black or red? Sussman explains:

People generally like assets and dislike debt, but they tend to focus more on one or the other depending on their net worth. We find that if you have positive net worth, your attention is more likely to be drawn to debt, which stands out against the positive background. On the other hand, when things are bad, people find comfort in their assets, which get more attention.

These findings are more than just interesting—they seem likely to affect real lending and borrowing patterns. A second part of the study asked participants to imagine themselves in each of the scenarios, and then say how willing they would be to borrow money for purchases like a bathroom renovation or television. Again, people with positive net worth saw themselves as wealthier—and more willing to take on a loan—if they had fewer assets and debt to start with, and the reverse held true for those with negative net worth.

The study’s conclusions challenge traditional assumptions of classical economics—and, Sussman says, can be crucial in understanding otherwise puzzling economical choices we see in the real world.

A sample of highly enriched uranium (via wikimedia commons)

Enriched uranium is back in the news with a report that Iran has begun creating the stuff at a heavily fortified site in the north of that country. But what is enriched uranium?

Uranium is element 92 on the periodic table–every molecule has 92 protons in its nucleus. The number of neutrons can vary, and that’s the difference between the three isotopes of uranium that we find here on Earth. Uranium-238 (92 protons plus 146 neutrons) is the most abundant form, and about 99.3 percent of all uranium is U-238. The rest is U-235 (0.7 percent), with a trace amount of U-234.

Uranium has a bad reputation (it is radioactive, after all), but U-238 has a very long half-life, meaning that it can be handled fairly safely as long as precautions are taken (as seen in the video below). More importantly here, though, U-238 isn’t fissile–it can’t start a nuclear reaction and sustain it.

U-235, however, is fissile; it can start a nuclear reaction and sustain it. But that 0.7 percent in naturally occurring uranium isn’t enough to make a bomb or even a nuclear reactor for a power plant. A power plant requires uranium with three to four percent U-235 (this is known as low-enriched or reactor-grade uranium), and a bomb needs uranium with a whopping 90 percent U-235 (highly enriched uranium).

Uranium enrichment, then, is the process by which a sample of uranium has its proportion of U-235 increased.

The first people to figure out how to do this were the scientists of the Manhattan Project during World War II. They came up with four methods to separate the U-235 from uranium ore: gaseous diffusion, electromagnetic separation, liquid thermal diffusion and centrifugation, though at the time they deemed centrifugation not practical for large-scale enrichment.

The most common methods for enriching uranium today are centrifugation (decades of development have made this method more efficient than it was during WWII) and gaseous diffusion. And other methods are being developed, including several based on laser techniques.

Highly enriched uranium, the type used in bombs, is expensive and difficult to create, which is why it remains a barrier, though not an insurmountable one, for countries wishing to develop nuclear weapons. And once a nation develops the capability for enriching uranium beyond reactor grade (Iran has reportedly begun to produce uranium enriched up to 20 percent), the path to weapons-grade uranium is significantly sped up.

Find out more about nuclear concerns in Iran from Arms Control Wonk, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and ISIS NuclearIran, from the Institute for Science and International Security.

And learn more about the element uranium, including depleted uranium, in this selection from the Periodic Table of Videos: