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• What Bees Really See
• Personal Charging
• When Conan Met Sarah
• Women Get in the Ring
• Makeup Secrets of the Queen
Will the Sky Fall in 2029?
Named for the Egyptian god of destruction, the asteroid Apophis is a "city buster" about the size of a 25-story building. Apophis is scheduled to fly close to Earth in 2029 and 2036, and the head of Russia's space agency says any impact with Earth could kill hundreds of thousands of people. (Apophis is three times the size of the Tunguska meteorite, believed to be the cause of a 1908 explosion in Siberia that flattened 80 million trees.) Russia's top space scientists think they can deflect Apophis, and are planning several possible missions, including striking the asteroid with missiles or positioning a spacecraft to change its trajectory. But NASA says Apophis's chances of hitting Earth have been downgraded since it was discovered in 2004. And Russell Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut, says that testing out deflection methods on Apophis could be disastrous. "It takes a very small change in the Apophis orbit," he says, "to cause it to impact Earth instead of missing it."
What Bees Really See
Next time you're tempted to swat at a buzzing bee, keep this in mind: Bees can recognize faces. In fact, they do it in much the same way that humans do, say biologists at the Université de Toulouse in France. Both bees and humans use a technique called configural processing, piecing together the parts of a face—eyes, ears, nose, mouth—to form a recognizable pattern. To test bees, the researchers created a display of hand-drawn images, some faces and some not. The faces had bowls of sugar water in front of them, while the non-faces were placed behind bowls containing plain water. After a few failed trips to the bowls with plain water, the bees kept returning to the bowls with sugar water. Overall, the bees learned to fly toward the faces they associated with the sugar water about 75 percent of the time.
Personal Charging
It seems that even the laziest of couch potatoes is a human power generator: Taking a breath and exhaling can produce about a watt of power, and walking briskly to the fridge can generate about 70 watts' worth. All that energy could be put to work—if there were a way to harness it. Now a team of scientists at Princeton University has come up with an approach that could start converting all that body motion into electricity: They printed piezoelectric crystals—which produce electric current when they're bent—onto a patch of a flexible, rubber-like material; tiny wires on the crystals allow the electricity to be harnessed. The patches might first be placed in shoes and could produce enough power to keep an iPod or cellphone charged. But the goal would be to make a non-toxic power generator that could actually be implanted in the chest or elsewhere in the body.
When Conan Met Sarah
In March, not long after he was fired from his gig on The Tonight Show, Conan O'Brien opened a Twitter account and decided to follow one person at random. He picked Sarah Killen, 19, of Fowlerville, Michigan. As a result, Killen now has more than 28,000 followers. (O'Brien has more than 800,000, and President Obama has more than 3.5 million.) "It really has changed my life completely," she told The New York Post. Killen, who is finishing up her high school requirements and hopes to attend college, is also engaged. Her Twitter fame has brought her numerous wedding gifts and helped her raise more than $2,500 for a breast-cancer charity walk in August. But Killen's fiancé, John Slowik, has just one more request: He'd like Conan to be his best man.
Women Get in the Ring
In a steamy gym in Trivandrum, a city on the southwest coast of India, the thud of boxing gloves echoes off the walls. The young women at this training camp punch hard: They're hoping for a chance to compete in the 2012 Olympic Games in London, which will include women's boxing for the first time. Many of the women at the training camp see boxing as a ticket to middle-class life: India rewards its top athletes with coveted government jobs, usually with the police or railroads. For others, boxing brings a new kind of freedom and the confidence to go out on the streets with less fear. The rise of women's boxing in India comes amid a wave of change in the lives of ordinary Indian women. Preeti Beniwal, a 22-year-old boxer from a small town in northern India, traces the change in her own family. In her mother's day, she says, young women had to know how to knit and cook to be considered good marriage prospects. "Today's generation is different," says Beniwal. "If a girl is self-dependent, she will get a good home, a good husband."
