Americans don’t hate science. Quite the contrary. In fact, 79 percent of Americans think science has made their lives easier, a 2014 Pew Research Center survey found. More than 60 percent of people also believe that government funding for science is essential to its success.

But should the United States spend more money on scientific research than it already does? A layperson’s answer to that question depends on how much that person thinks the government already spends on science, a new study shows. When people find out just how much — or rather, how little — of the federal budget goes to science, support for more funding suddenly jumps.

To see how people’s opinions of public science spending were influenced by accurate information, mechanical engineer Jillian Goldfarb and political scientist Douglas Kriner, both at Boston University, placed a small experiment into the 2014 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. The online survey was given to 1,000 Americans, carefully selected to represent the demographics of the United States. The questions were designed to be nonpartisan, and the survey itself was conducted in 2014, long before the 2016 election.

The survey was simple. First, participants were asked to estimate what percentage of the federal budget was spent on scientific research. Once they’d guessed, half of the participants were told the actual amount that the federal government allocates for nondefense spending on research and development. In 2014, that figure was 1.6 percent of the budget, or about $67 billion. Finally, all the participants were asked if federal spending on science should be increased, decreased or kept the same.

The majority of participants had no idea how much money the government spends on science, and wildly overestimated the actual amount. About half of the respondents estimated federal spending for research at somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of the budget. A quarter of participants estimated that figure was 20 percent of the budget — one very hefty chunk of change. The last 25 percent of respondents estimated that 1 to 2 percent of federal spending went to science.

When participants received no information about how much the United States spent on research, only about 40 percent of them supported more funding. But when they were confronted with the real numbers, support for more funding leapt from 40 to 60 percent.

Those two numbers hover on either side of 50 percent, but Kriner notes, “media coverage [would] go from ‘minority’ to ‘majority’” in favor of more funding — a potentially powerful message. What’s more, the support for science was present in Democrats and Republicans alike, Kriner and Goldfarb report February 1 in Science Communication.
“I think it contributes to our understanding of the aspects of federal spending that people don’t understand very well,” says Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University in Hanover, N.H. It’s not surprising that most people don’t know how much the government is spending on research. Nyhan points out that most people probably don’t know how much the government spends on education or foreign aid either.

When trying to gather more support for science funding, Goldfarb says, “tell people how little we spend, and how much they get in return.” Science as a whole isn’t that controversial. No one wants to stop exploring the universe or curing diseases, after all.

But when people — whether politicians or that guy in your Facebook feed — say they want to cut science funding, they won’t be speaking about science as a whole. “There’s a tendency to overgeneralize” and use a few controversial or perceived-to-be-wasteful projects to stand in for all of science, Nyhan warns.

When politicians want to cut funding, he notes, they focus on specific controversial studies or areas — such as climate change, stem cells or genetically modified organisms. They might highlight studies that seem silly, such as those that ended up in former Senator Tom Coburn’s “Wastebook,” (a mantle now taken up Senator Jeff Flake). Take those issues to the constituents, and funding might end up in jeopardy anyway.

Kriner hopes their study’s findings might prove useful even for controversial research areas. “One of the best safeguards against cuts is strong public support for a program,” he explains. “Building public support for science spending may help insulate it from budget cuts — and our research suggests a relatively simple way to increase public support for scientific research.”

But he worries that public support may not stay strong if science becomes too much of a political pawn. The study showed that both Republicans and Democrats supported more funding for science when they knew how little was spent. But “if the current administration increases its attacks on science spending writ large … it could potentially politicize federal support for all forms of scientific research,” Kriner says. And the stronger the politics, the more people on both sides of the aisle grow resistant to hearing arguments from the other side.

Politics aside, Goldfarb and Kriner’s data show that Americans really do like and support science. They want to pay for it. And they may even want to shell out some more money, when they know just how little they already spend.

Strapping tiny trackers called geolocators to the backs of birds can reveal a lot about where the birds go when they migrate, how they get there and what happens along the way. But ornithologists are finding that these cool backpacks could have not-so-cool consequences.

Douglas Raybuck of Arkansas State University and his colleagues outfitted some Cerulean warblers (Setophaga cerulea) with geolocators and some with simple color tags to test the effects the locators might have on breeding and reproduction. This particular species globe-trots from its nesting grounds in the eastern United States to wintering grounds in South America and back each year. While the backpacks didn’t affect reproduction, birds wearing the devices were less likely than those wearing tags to return to the same breeding grounds the next year. The birds may have gotten off track, cut their trips short or died, possibly due to extra weight or drag from the backpack, the team reports May 3 in The Condor.

The study adds to conflicting evidence that geolocators affect some birds in negative ways, such as altering their breeding biology. At best, potential downsides vary from bird to bird and backpack to backpack. But that shouldn’t stop researchers from using geolocators to study migrating birds, the researchers argue, because the devices pinpoint areas crucial to migrating birds and can aid in conservation efforts.

The mystery of why birds’ eggs come in so many shapes has long been up in the air. Now new research suggests adaptations for flight may have helped shape the orbs.

Stronger fliers tend to lay more elongated eggs, researchers report in the June 23 Science. The finding comes from the first large analysis of the way egg shape varies across bird species, from the almost perfectly spherical egg of the brown hawk owl to the raindrop-shaped egg of the least sandpiper.
“Eggs fulfill such a specific role in birds — the egg is designed to protect and nourish the chick. Why there’s such diversity in form when there’s such a set function was a question that we found intriguing,” says study coauthor Mary Caswell Stoddard, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University.

Previous studies have suggested many possible advantages for different shapes. Perhaps cone-shaped eggs are less likely to roll out of the nest of cliff-dwelling birds; spherical eggs might be more resilient to damage in the nest. But no one had tested such hypotheses across a wide spectrum of birds.

Stoddard and her team analyzed almost 50,000 eggs from 1,400 species, representing about 14 percent of known bird species. The researchers boiled each egg down to its two-dimensional silhouette and then used an algorithm to describe each egg using two variables: how elliptical versus spherical the egg is and how asymmetrical it is — whether it’s pointier on one end than the other.

Next, the researchers looked at the way these two traits vary across the bird family tree. One pattern jumped out: Species that are stronger fliers, as measured by wing shape, tend to lay more elliptical or asymmetrical eggs, says study coauthor L. Mahadevan, a mathematician and biologist at Harvard University.
Mahadevan cautions that the data show only an association, but the researchers propose one possible explanation for the link between flying and egg shape. Adapting to flight streamlined bird bodies, perhaps also narrowing the reproductive tract. That narrowing would have limited the width of an egg that a female could lay. But since eggs provide nutrition for the chick growing inside, shrinking eggs too much would deprive the developing bird. Elongated eggs might have been a compromise between keeping egg volume up without increasing girth, Stoddard suggests. Asymmetry can increase egg volume in a similar way.

Testing a causal connection between flight ability and egg shape is tough “because of course we can’t replay the whole tape of life again,” says Claire Spottiswoode, a zoologist at the University of Cambridge who wrote a commentary accompanying the study. Still, Spottiswoode says the evidence is compelling: “It’s a very plausible argument.”

Santiago Claramunt, associate curator of ornithology at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, isn’t convinced that flight adaptations played a driving role in the evolution of egg shape. “Streamlining in birds is determined more by plumage than the shape of the body — high performing fliers can have rounded, bulky bodies” he says, which wouldn’t give elongated eggs the same advantage over other egg shapes. He cites frigate birds and swifts as examples, both of which make long-distance flights but have fairly broad bodies. “There’s certainly more going on there.”

Indeed, some orders of birds showed a much stronger link between flying and egg shape than others did. And while other factors — like where birds lay their eggs and how many they lay at once — weren’t significantly related to egg shape across birds as a whole, they could be important within certain branches of the bird family tree.

When my younger daughter was around 6 months old, we gave her mashed up prune. She grimaced and shivered a little, appearing to be absolutely disgusted. But then she grunted and reached for more.

Most babies are ready for solid food around 6 months of age, and feeding them can be fun. One of the more entertaining approaches does not involve a spoon. Called baby-led weaning, it involves allowing babies to feed themselves appropriate foods.

Proponents of the approach say that babies become more skilled eaters when allowed to explore on their own. They’re in charge of getting food into their own mouths, gumming it and swallowing it down — all skills that require muscle coordination. When the right foods are provided (yes to soft steamed broccoli; no to whole grapes), babies who feed themselves are no more likely to choke than their spoon-fed peers.

Some baby-led weaning proponents also suspected that the method might ward off obesity, and a small study suggested as much. The idea is that babies allowed to feed themselves might better learn how to regulate their food intake, letting hunger and fullness guide them to a reasonable calorie count. But a new study that looked at the BMIs of babies who fed themselves and those who didn’t found that babies grew similarly with either eating style.

A clinical trial of about 200 mother-baby pairs in New Zealand tracked two different approaches to eating and their impact on weight. Half of the moms were instructed to feed their babies as they normally would, which for most meant spoon-feeding their babies purees, at least early on. The other half was instructed that only breast milk or formula was best until 6 months of age, and after that, babies could be encouraged to feed themselves. These mothers also received breastfeeding support.

At the 1- and 2-year marks, the babies’ average BMI z-scores were similar, regardless of feeding method, researchers report July 10 in JAMA Pediatrics. (A BMI z-score takes age and sex into account.) And baby-led weaning actually produced slightly more overweight babies than the other approaches, but not enough to be meaningful. At age 2, 10.3 percent of baby-led weaning babies were considered overweight and 6.4 percent of traditionally-fed babies were overweight. The two groups of babies seemed to take in about the same energy from food, analyses of the nutritional value and amount of food eaten revealed.

The trial found a few other differences between the two groups. Babies who did baby-led weaning exclusively breastfed for longer, a median of about 22 weeks. Babies in the other group were exclusively breastfed for a median of about 17 weeks. Babies in the baby-led weaning group were also more likely to have held off on solid food until 6 months of age.

While baby-led weaning may not protect babies against being overweight, the study did uncover a few perks of the approach. Parents reported that babies who fed themselves seemed less fussy about foods. These babies also reportedly enjoyed eating more (though my daughter’s prune fake-out face is evidence that babies’ inner opinions can be hard to read). Even so, these data seem to point toward a more positive experience all around when using the baby-led weaning approach. That’s ideal for both experience-hungry babies and the parents who get to savor watching them eat.

I recently wrote about the power that adults’ words can have on young children. Today, I’m writing about the power of adults’ actions. Parents know, of course, that their children keep a close eye on them. But a new study provides a particularly good example of a watch-and-learn moment: Toddlers who saw an adult struggle before succeeding were more likely to persevere themselves.

Toddlers are “very capable learners,” says study coauthor Julia Leonard, a cognitive developmental psychologist at MIT. Scientists have found that these youngsters pick up on abstract concepts and new words after just a few exposures. But it wasn’t clear whether watching adults’ actions would actually change the way toddlers tackle a problem.

To see whether toddlers could soak up an adult’s persistence, Leonard and her colleagues tested 262 13- to 18-month-olds (the average age was 15 months). Some of the children watched an experimenter try to retrieve a toy stuck inside a container. In some cases, the experimenter quickly got the toy out three times within 30 seconds — easy. Other times, the experimenter struggled for the entire 30 seconds before finally getting the toy out. The experimenter then repeated the process for a different problem, removing a carabiner toy from a keychain. Some kids didn’t see any experimenter demonstration.

Just after watching an adult struggle (or not), the toddlers were given a light-up cube. It had a big, useless button on one side. Another button — small and hidden — actually controlled the lights. The kids knew the toy could light up, but didn’t know how to turn the lights on.

Though the big button did nothing, that didn’t stop the children from poking it. But here’s the interesting part: Compared with toddlers who had just watched an adult succeed effortlessly, or not watched an adult do anything at all, the toddlers who had seen the adult struggle pushed the button more. These kids persisted, even though they never found success.

The sight of an adult persevering nudged the children toward trying harder themselves, the researchers conclude in the Sept. 22 Science. Leonard cautions that it’s hard to pull parenting advice from a single laboratory-based study, but still, “there may be some value in letting children see you work hard to achieve your goals,” she says.

Observing the adults wasn’t the only thing that determined the toddlers’ persistence, not by a long shot. Some kids might simply be more tenacious than others. In the experiments, some of the children who didn’t see an experimenter attempt a task, or who saw an experimenter quickly succeed, were “incredibly gritty,” Leonard says. And some of the kids who watched a persistent adult still gave up quickly themselves. That’s not to mention the fact that these toddlers were occasionally tired, hungry and cranky, all of which can affect whether they give up easily. Despite all of this variation, the copycat effect remained, so that kids were more likely to persist when they had just seen a persistent adult.

As Leonard says, this is just one study and it can’t explain the complex lives of toddlers. Still, one thing is clear, and it’s something that we would all do well to remember: “Infants are watching your behavior attentively and actively learning from what you do,” Leonard says.

Faced with a do-or-die situation in Game 5, the Warriors came up big.

A 121-106 win at Chase Center kept Golden State's season alive as they successfully avoided elimination at the hands of the Lakers. The series will now head back down to Los Angeles for Game 6, where LeBron James and Co. will have another chance to punch their ticket to the Western Conference Finals.

Stephen Curry led the way for the Warriors with 27 points and eight assists. Andrew Wiggins finished with 25 points and seven rebounds, while Draymond Green had one of his best games of the postseason with 20 points and 10 rebounds.

A bad night got even worse for LA when Anthony Davis was forced to leave the game late in the fourth quarter. He appeared to take a shot to the face from Golden State's Kevon Looney, and TNT's Chris Haynes reported that he was taken down the tunnel in a wheelchair. The Lakers now face an anxious wait to see whether he'll be good to go for a massive Game 6.

The Sporting News was tracking all the key moments as the Warriors defeated the Lakers in Game 5 of the Western Conference semifinals:

Lakers vs. Warriors score
Team Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Final
Lakers 28 31 23 24 106
Warriors 32 38 23 28 121
Lakers vs. Warriors live score, updates, highlights from Game 5
12:31 a.m. FINAL — The final buzzer rings out, and we're headed to a Game 6. Curry finishes with 27 points, Wiggins with 25 and Draymond Green with 20.

12:27 a.m. — Darvin Ham has raised the white flag and sent in his reserves. Golden State is going to get the win, and their season is going to continue. An excellent performance by the Warriors tonight with their backs against the wall.

12:24 a.m. — Both teams continue to trade blows, but with time ticking down, the Warriors look like they're going to cruise to a win here. Davis still hasn't returned to the court, and it sounds like he may be dealing with some dizziness and vision difficulties. He'll probably be sidelined for the rest of the game.

12:19 a.m. — Steph with a big shot! A triple from the corner extends the lead back to 14 points! It's Warriors 109, Lakers 95 as we enter the final minutes.

12:16 a.m. — Draymond gets the crowd on its feet with a nice jumper, but Austin Reaves answers at the other end with a three from way downtown! The Lakers have chipped away and the lead is now down to just nine points with 5:25 left.
12:14 a.m. — Davis is having to head down the tunnel and towards the locker room after that injury. TNT's Chris Haynes reported he looked a little shaky on his feet and needed some help to stay upright. Let's hope he's OK.

12:09 a.m. — Gary Payton II finishes with the hoop and harm over LeBron, and the crowd is loving it. To add insult to injury for the Lakers, Anthony Davis appeared to take an elbow to the face on the other end. He appears to be in significant discomfort, and he is forced to head to the bench.

12:03 a.m. — Any momentum the Lakers may have had has quickly vanished early in the fourth quarter. Curry drains a pull-up jumper with the shot clock winding down, then Wiggins converts on a running floater in the lane to stretch the lead back to 15 points. LA is running out of time here.
11:55 p.m. END OF THIRD QUARTER — The Lakers use a mini-run to cut into the lead slightly. LeBron converts on a layup with time winding down in the quarter, and we enter the final frame with Golden State up 93-82. James appeared to land on the foot of Wiggins on that last shot, and he was grimacing a little bit as he walked away. Something to keep an eye on.

11:49 p.m. — With the third quarter winding down, the Warriors are showing no signs of letting up. Curry just blew right by three defenders for an easy layup, and once again Darvin Ham has used a timeout to try and spark something from his team.

11:41 p.m. — How about Draymond Green in this game? He's been sensational so far, racking up 18 points on 6 of 10 shooting from the field. He just converted on another layup to make it 85-70, Warriors.

11:32 p.m. — The Lakers are off to a terrible start in this half, and in the blink of an eye the Warriors have stretched their lead to 18 points! Wiggins caps off a 9-2 Golden State flurry with a one-handed putback slam and Darvin Ham takes a timeout to stop the bleeding. That could be a huge momentum swing in this game.
11:27 p.m. START OF SECOND HALF — And away we go in the third quarter. Can the Warriors hold off the Lakers to stay alive?

11:20 p.m. — Davis leads all scorers with 18 points at the half while Wiggins leads Golden State with 16. James has 17 and Curry has 12, including that buzzer-beater to make it an eleven-point game.

11:11 p.m. END OF FIRST HALF — Stephen Curry lights up Chase Center with a three to beat the buzzer! That's just his second trey of the night, but it sends the Warriors into the locker room with a 70-59 lead! They ended the half on a 16-5 run to take control of Game 5.
11:03 p.m. — We knew a run was coming from one of these teams, and this time it has come from the Warriors! Poole connects from deep, then Wiggins follows it up with a triple of his own. After a Lakers timeout, the home team leads 64-56 with less than two minutes left in the half.

10:56 p.m. — LeBron isn't cooling off, and he drives for a layup then knocks down a three moments later to tie things up at 50 apiece. Back and forth we go.

10:51 p.m. — Andrew Wiggins gets a bucket and a foul, then does it again less than 40 seconds later! That pair of three-point plays puts the Warriors back in the lead by five with seven minutes remaining in the first half.

10:45 p.m. — Now LeBron is starting to get going! He buries a pair of three-pointers to take his tally to 12 points on the night and give the Lakers the lead. After he sinks a pair of free throws, it's 41-40, LA.
10:37 p.m. END OF FIRST QUARTER — Whew, time to catch your breath! A Jordan Poole floater with six seconds left on the clock has made it 32-28 Warriors at the end of the first quarter. They could really use a good performance from him tonight. If the game continues like this, we're in for a treat.

10:35 p.m. — This game has been fast-paced and a lot of fun so far. Davis continues to fill it up and he's up to 13 points as we near the end of the first quarter. But 20-year-old Moses Moody has knocked down a pair of threes to keep Golden State's lead intact. They're up 30-26 with just over a minute left in the period.

10:27 p.m. — But here come the Lakers! Anthony Davis is getting himself involved, and his putback dunk cuts the Warriors' lead to just five points. He has nine points already in the early going.

10:20 p.m. — This has been one heck of a start by the Warriors. Gary Payton II drains a three, Draymond converts on another layup and then Stephen Curry opens his account for the night with a three from way downtown. The home team is out to a 17-5 lead less than five minutes into the game.
10:17 p.m. — Draymond Green is off to a fast start! He buries a three to get the Warriors on the board, and his layup through contact draws a foul and leads to a three-point play. Golden State leads 9-3 early.

10:12 p.m. — And there's the opening tip. We are underway in San Francisco.

10:07 p.m. — Knicks-Heat just wrapped up. meaning Warriors-Lakers is up next on TNT. Can Golden State do what New York did and stave off elimination at home in Game 5?

9:59 p.m. — Steph was doing Steph things in pregame warmups.
9:52 p.m. — No surprises from the Lakers with their starting lineup.
9:46 p.m. — For the second game in a row, Gary Payton II gets the start for Golden State.
What channel is Lakers vs. Warriors on?
Date: Wednesday, May 10
TV channel: TNT
Live streaming: Sling TV
Lakers vs. Warriors will air on TNT. Viewers can also stream the game on Sling TV.

Fans in the U.S. can watch the NBA Playoffs on Sling TV, which is now offering HALF OFF your first month! Stream Sling Orange for $20 in your first month to catch all the games on TNT, ESPN & ABC. For games on NBA TV, subscribe to Sling Orange & Sports Extra for $27.50 in your first month. Local regional blackout restrictions apply.

SIGN UP FOR SLING: English | Spanish

What time is Lakers vs. Warriors tonight?
Date: Wednesday, May 10
Time: 10 p.m. ET | 7 p.m. PT
Lakers vs. Warriors will tip off around 10 p.m. ET (7 p.m. local time) on Wednesday, May 10. The game will be played at the Chase Center in San Francisco.

Lakers vs. Warriors odds
Golden State is a 7.5-point favorite heading into Game 5.

 Warriors    Lakers

Spread -7.5 +7.5
Moneyline -350 +260
For the full market, check out BetMGM.

Lakers vs. Warriors schedule
Here is the complete schedule for the second-round series between Los Angeles and Golden State:

Date Game Time (ET) TV channel
May 2 Lakers 117, Warriors 112 10 p.m. TNT
May 4 Warriors 127, Lakers 100 9 p.m. ESPN
May 6 Lakers 127, Warriors 97 8:30 p.m. ABC
May 8 Lakers 104, Warriors 101 10 p.m. TNT
May 10 Game 5 10 p.m. TNT
May 12 Game 6* TBD ESPN
May 14 Game 7* TBD ABC

It’s three for the price of one. A trio of mysterious high-energy particles could all have the same source: active black holes embedded in galaxy clusters, researchers suggest January 22 in Nature Physics.

Scientists have been unable to figure out the origins of the three types of particles — gamma rays that give a background glow to the universe, cosmic neutrinos and ultrahigh energy cosmic rays. Each carries a huge amount of energy, from about a billion electron volts for a gamma ray to 100 billion billion electron volts for some cosmic rays.
Strangely, each particle type seems to contribute the same total amount of energy to the universe as the other two. That’s a clue that all three may be powered by the same engine, says physicist Kohta Murase of Penn State.

“We can explain the data of these three messengers with one single picture,” Murase says.

First, a black hole accelerates charged particles to extreme energies in a powerful jet (SN: 9/16/17, p. 16). These jets “are one of the most promising candidate sources of ultrahigh energy cosmic rays,” Murase says. The most energetic cosmic rays escape the jet and immediately plow through a sea of magnetized gas within the galaxy cluster.

Some rays escape the gas as well and zip towards Earth. But less energetic rays are trapped in the cluster for up to a billion years. There, they interact with the gas and create high-energy neutrinos that then escape the cluster.
Meanwhile, the cosmic rays that escaped travel through intergalactic space and interact with photons to produce the glow of gamma rays.

Murase and astrophysicist Ke Fang of the University of Maryland in College Park found that computer simulations of this scenario lined up with observations of how many cosmic rays, neutrinos and gamma rays reached Earth.

“It’s a nice piece of unification of many ideas,” says physicist Francis Halzen of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, where the highest energy neutrinos have been observed.

There are other possible sources for the particles — for one, IceCube has already traced an especially high-energy neutrino to a single active black hole that may not be in a cluster (SN Online: 4/7/16). The observatory could eventually trace neutrinos back to galaxy clusters. “That’s the ultimate test,” Halzen says. “This could be tomorrow, could be God knows when.”

Knocking out an animal 15 times your size — no problem. A newly identified toxin in the venom of a tropical centipede helps the arthropod to overpower giant prey in about 30 seconds.

Insight into how this venom overwhelms lab mice could lead to an antidote for people who suffer excruciatingly painful, reportedly even fatal, centipede bites, an international research team reports the week of January 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In Hawaii, centipede bites account for about 400 emergency room visits a year, according to data from 2004 to 2008. The main threat there is Scolopendra subspinipes, an agile species almost as long as a human hand.
The subspecies S. subspinipes mutilans starred in studies at the Kunming Institute of Zoology in China and collaborating labs. Researchers there found a small peptide, now named “spooky toxin,” largely responsible for venom misery.

This toxin blocks a molecular channel that normally lets potassium flow through cell membranes. A huge amount of the biochemistry of staying alive involves potassium, so clogging some of what are called KCNQ channels caused mayhem in mice: slow and gasping breath, high blood pressure, frizzling nerve dysfunctions and so on. Administering the epilepsy drug retigabine opened the potassium channels and counteracted much of the toxin’s effects, raising hopes of a treatment for these bites.

Now there’s a way to tell if a drone is spying on someone.

Researchers have devised a method to tell what a drone is recording — without having to decrypt the video data that the device streams to the pilot’s smartphone. This technique, described January 9 at arXiv.org, could help military bases detect unwanted surveillance and civilians protect their privacy as more commercial drones take to the skies.

“People have already worked on detecting [the presence of] drones, but no one had solved the problem of, ‘Is the drone actually recording something in my direction?’” says Ahmad Javaid, a cybersecurity researcher at the University of Toledo in Ohio, who was not involved in the work.
Ben Nassi, a software engineer at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, and colleagues realized that changing the appearance of objects in a drone’s field of view influences the stream of encrypted data the drone sends to its smartphone controller. That’s because the more pixels that change from one video frame to the next, the more data bits the drone sends per second. So rapidly switching the appearance of a person or house and seeing whether those alterations correspond to higher drone-to-phone Wi-Fi traffic can reveal whether a drone is snooping.

Nassi’s team tested this idea by covering a house window with a smart film that could switch between transparent and nearly opaque, and aiming a drone with a video camera at the window from 40 meters away. Every two seconds, the researchers either flickered the smart film back and forth or left it transparent. They pointed a radio frequency scanner at the drone to intercept its outgoing Wi-Fi signals and found that its traffic spiked whenever the smart film flickered.

Story continues after graph
For people without such radio equipment, it’s also possible to intercept Wi-Fi signals with a laptop or computer with a wireless card, says Simon Birnbach, a computer scientist at the University of Oxford not involved in the work.

In another test, a drone recorded someone wearing a strand of LED lights from about 20 meters’ distance. At five-second intervals, the person either flipped the LED lights on and off, or left them off. The drone camera’s data stream peaked whenever the LED lights flickered.

This strategy to discern a drone camera’s target is “a very cool idea,” says Thomas Ristenpart, a computer scientist at Cornell University not involved in the work. But the researchers need to test whether the method works in a wider range of settings and find ways to alter a drone’s view without cumbersome equipment, he says. “I don’t think anyone is going to want to wear a [light-up] shirt on the off chance a drone may fly by.”

Javaid agrees that this prototype system must be made more user-friendly to achieve widespread use. For home security, he imagines a small device stuck to a window that flashes a light and intercepts a drone’s Wi-Fi signals whenever it detects one nearby. The device could alert the homeowner if a drone is found scoping out the house.

Still, identifying a nosy drone may not always be enough to know who’s flying it. “It’s sort of the equivalent of knowing that an unmarked van pulled up and waited outside of your house,” says Drew Davidson, a computer scientist at Tala Security, Inc. in Dallas, who was not involved in the study. “Better to know than not, but not exactly enough for the police to find a suspect.”

Something is giving small, pristine stars extra lithium. A dozen newly discovered stars contain more of the element than astronomers can explain.

Some of the newfound stars are earlier in their life cycles than stars previously found with too much lithium, researchers report in the Jan. 10 Astrophysical Journal Letters. Finding young lithium-rich stars could help explain where the extra material comes from without having to tinker with well-accepted stellar evolution rules.

The first stars in the Milky Way formed from the hydrogen, helium and small amounts of lithium that were produced in the Big Bang, so most of this ancient cohort have low lithium levels at the surface (SN: 11/14/15, p. 12). As the stars age, they usually lose even more.
Mysteriously, some aging stars have unusually high amounts of lithium. About a dozen red giant stars — the end-of-life stage for a sunlike star — have been spotted over the last few decades with extra lithium at their surfaces. It’s not enough lithium to explain a different cosmic conundrum, in which the universe overall seems to have a lot less lithium than it should (SN: 10/18/14, p. 15). But it’s enough to confuse astronomers. Red giants usually dredge up material that is light on lithium from their cores, making their surfaces look even more depleted in the element.

Finding lithium-enriched red giants “is not expected from standard models of low-mass star evolution, which is usually regarded as a relatively well-established field in astrophysics,” says astronomer Wako Aoki of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Tokyo. A red giant with lots of lithium must have had a huge amount of lithium in its former life, or imply a tweak is needed to some fundamental rule of stellar evolution.

Aoki and his colleagues used the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii to find the 12 new lithium-rich stars, all about 0.8 times the mass of the sun. Five of the stars seem to be relatively early in their life cycles — a little older than regular sunlike stars but a little younger than red giants.
That suggests lithium-rich stars somehow picked up the extra lithium early in their lives, though it’s not clear from where. The stars could have stolen material from companion stars, or eaten unfortunate planets (SN: 5/19/01, p. 310). But there are reasons to think they did neither — for one thing, they don’t have an excess of any other elements.

“This is a mystery,” Aoki says.

Further complicating the picture is the possibility that the five youngish stars could be red giants after all, thanks to uncertainties in the measurements of their sizes, says astronomer Evan Kirby of Caltech. Future surveys should check stars that are definitely in the same stage of life as the sun.

Still, the new results are “tantalizing,” Kirby says. “It’s a puzzle that’s been around for almost 40 years now, and so far there’s no explanation that has satisfying observational support.”