Science

Sometimes at night, scientists stare out at the vast universe, and they wonder whats out there. They wonder if its wondering about us. They wonder if whatever's out there is, at that very moment, looking down and marveling at the Great Wall of China or the glimmering lights of our magnificent cities. Or the giant faces of our fast-food mascots.

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It will be almost silent, nearly invisible to enemy radar-and capable of dropping six powerful missiles simultaneously on a single target up to 95 miles away. But the most important feature of the DDG1000 Zumwalt, the Navy's first new destroyer in 30years, could be its versatility. The 600-foot-long ship will be just as comfortable in the deep ocean as in the mine-infested shallows of the Persian Gulf.

The British branch of the online automotive auctioneer eBay Motors is tackling one of the more curious potential problems of global warming: dirty cars. As England suffered through one of its hottest summers in more than a century-one in which draconian water-use restrictions went into place in drought-stricken areas-eBay decided to challenge a U.K.-based automotive think tank to find a way to keep cars squeaky-clean with less water.

Though men do seem to be getting better at playing stay-at-home dad, they still can´t claim to be the best fathers in the animal kingdom. Among primates, that honor may belong to marmosets, small tree-dwelling monkeys whose males spend 70 percent of their time caring for newborns. The result of all this baby time, according to new research, adds up to more than just a sensitive monkey. The nurturing actually boosts mental activity.

Grace LeClair had just finished eating dinner with friends when she got the phone call every parent dreads. The chaplain at the Medical College of Virginia was on the other end. "Your daughter has been in a serious accident. You should come to Richmond right away." LeClair was in Virginia Beach at the time, a two-hour drive from 20-year-old Bess-Lyn, who was now lying in a coma in a Richmond hospital bed.

The friend who was with Bess-Lyn has since filled in the details of that day in March. The two women were bicycling down a steep hill, headed toward a busy intersection, when Bess-Lyn yelled that her brakes weren't working and she couldn't slow down. Her friend screamed for her to turn into an alley just before the intersection. But Bess-Lyn didn't turn sharply enough and crashed, headfirst, into a concrete wall. She wasn't wearing a helmet. By the time the ambulance reached the hospital, Bess-Lyn was officially counted among the 1.5 million Americans who will suffer a traumatic brain injury (TBI) this year.

Photo by lovely lemur

One summer a few years ago, I worked as a keeper at the Miami Metro Zoo. I may remember those halcyon days for the times that I spent scratching the belly of a tapir, petting bongo antelopes that made your hands look like you had eaten a bag of Cheetos, helping name a baby dama, or trying to quiet down a howler monkey that didnt like me much. But the fact is, most of my days were spent dealing with crap. Shoveling crap. Scooping crap. Raking crap. Spraying down crap. Wheelbarrowing crap. Lots and lots of—well, you get the idea.

So it comes as no surprise that crap was fresh in the minds of the folks at the Miami zoo when they rolled out their new exhibit, The Scoop on Poop. Based on a book of the same name and the self-proclaimed largest exhibition ever mounted about the science of scat, the exhibit explores the many ways that animals—and people—use poop in their everyday lives. Visitors can learn the names of poop types from around the world, find out how long it would take (down to the minute) for an elephant to excrete a humans body weight in poop, challenge each other to dung-beetle races, and even touch some fossilized dinosaur poop, all in the name of understanding a rarely talked about but important by-product of life.

One of the highlights of the exhibit is Dung Boots, in which visitors watch a rhinoceros kick and stomp its dung, marking its territory with a trail of smelly footprints. How do I know that the rhino is on to something? Its trail definitely wont be disappearing anytime soon—rhino crap is some hard stuff to clean up, let me tell you.

The Scoop on Poop runs through January 10 at the Miami Metro Zoo. —Dan Smith

Even though theres war raging on several fronts and an election coming up, like many American males, Ive spent the past few weeks thinking mostly about the Major League Baseball playoffs. The draw of our national pastime was seemingly the same in 1921, when, despite World War I finally coming to an end and the first successful BCG vaccinations against tuberculosis, the question on everyones lips was: How the heck can Babe Ruth hit so many home runs?

As it turns out, our pre-war study might have been ahead of its time. For more on similar tests done with modern technology on Cardinals slugger Albert Pujols, click here.

The game was over. Babe, who had made one of his famous drives that day, was tired and wanted to go home. "Not tonight, Babe," I said. "Tonight you go to college with me. You're going to take scientific tests which will reveal your secret."

In our October issue, we reported on the theoretical and practical work being done to make the fantasy of invisibility a reality [read the article online here]. Yesterday one of those teams of researchers—a Duke University group led by David Smith—announced that they had demonstrated the worlds first working invisibility cloak. And unlike other cloaks, which use images projected onto the surface of the item to be hidden, Smiths actually bends light around the object, making the light behave as if the object isnt even there.

The cloak, which is less than five inches long, is a synthetic structure composed of copper rings and wires placed onto sheets of fiberglass. Its applicability is limited: It works for only two dimensions and only against a microwave beam. The technology to create an invisibility cloak for regular light, which is made of many different wavelengths, is still decades away. See a video of the new cloak here. —Abby Seiff

Related:The First Invisibility Shield

Brilliant Photoshopping courtesy Philadelphia Will Do

Its comforting to know that our elected officials can really grasp a nuanced concept and break it down into terms we common folk can understand. Take global terrorism, for example: In comments made earlier this week, U.S. Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA) equated terrorists to the Eye of Mordor trying to harass the hobbits scaling Mount Doom (no kidding—read it here) and went on to say that right now, the Eye of Mordor (ed.: Dont you mean the Eye of Sauron, Rick?) has been drawn away from the U.S. to Iraq. Hooray! Were safe! Mission accomplished!

First of all, if the terrorists are Sauron and the U.S. hobbits, then who the heck is Saruman? The Fighting Uruk-hai? Gollum? Where is Mount Doom? How does Gandalf fit in here, and what does Tom Bombadil really stand for?

And if this is the best analogy—the best thinking—a U.S. legislator can do on a subject, can we possibly trust his judgment when looking at such a nuanced and fraught issue as stem-cell research? I cant wait to hear the analogy he comes up with for that (Perhaps the evil chest creature from Alien exploding out of the great stomach that is America?).

If you have any other ideas as to who belongs where (Osama bin Laden? Tony Blair? Poland?) in the Santorum LotR mythos, please let us know. And frankly, Im dying to hear some more fantasy/sci-fi metaphors for the big issues of today. So we common folk can understand, see? —Martha Harbison