bird flu

Crunching massive, geographical data visualizations used to require expensive mapping software and powerful computers. Now, Google Earth is becoming the go-to application for scientists who need a cheap way to animate huge sets of 3-D data right on their home desktop. These five projects show how a simple tool can reveal hidden patterns in everything from ash to emotions.

Click here for an illustrated guide to Mars Society founder Robert Zubrin´s six-step plan for inhabiting Mars, and for details on entering our contest to design the new flag of a freshly terraformed Red Planet-you could win a free subscription!

Like many of the working stiffs in New York City, I spend most of my day bathing in recirculated air in my large Manhattan office building, breathing in a thousand other peoples' germs. And let me tell you: When the first New Yorker is diagnosed with H5N1 bird flu, my apartment is going to become the PopSci Brooklyn satellite office, and anyone who wants to get in is going to have to wear a hazmat suit. I'll probably have to leave the house sometimes to pick up FRESЖA ingredients and beef jerky, and when I do, I will most likely sport a Fashion Flu Mask. (Even in a pandemic, that's how I roll.) These tarted-up respiratory protectors ($10 each) are modified N95-approved masks, the only ones the CDC recognizes as doing any good to protect against pandemic flu. Their designs are a little girlie, but I've e-mailed the company requesting a carbon-fiber-look variant. Hopefully it'll be ready by the time the flu kicks off. —Joe Brown

A few months AGO, when researchers analyzed the genome of the devastating 1918 influenza, they found it to be a direct descendant of a common bird-flu strain, with just a few disparate amino acids here and there. The finding cast a chilling new light on the most lethal modern bird flu, known as H5N1, which has already killed at least 70 people in Asia but isn't transmissible between humans-yet.