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Involuntarily? Yes. On purpose? Maybe. In February, for instance, Swedish snowmobilers found a man who had been trapped under snow in his car for two months with barely any food. After he was rescued, local doctors suggested that he had survived by adjusting his core body temperature downward to about 88ºF and keeping still, the same process bears use to hibernate.

Some people, such as those who practice meditation, can enter a hibernation-like state on purpose. When a person falls asleep, his body's oxygen use typically drops by only about 6 percent. Herbert Benson, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, has studied Tibetan monks in deep meditation and found that they can decrease their oxygen needs by as much as 64 percent.

And doctors may someday induce a drastically low body metabolism and temperature to keep trauma patients alive. Reducing oxygen needs could decrease tissue damage in cases where the body can't get as much oxygen as usual, for example during a heart attack. Mark Roth, a biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, is working on a suspended-animation treatment that could do just that. He has shown that having mice inhale air infused with hydrogen sulfide decreases their breathing rate by 92 percent and also drops their body temperature. After he revives them, they recover completely and behave normally.

Have a burning science question you'd like to see answered in our FYI section? Email it to fyi@popsci.com.

Today in pretty space pics: Hubble snaps the northern half of spiral galaxy NGC 981 in profile. The central galactic bulge is just out of frame to the lower left, leaving us with a close-up spanning roughly 100,000 light years that lets us look right through its plane of gas and dust.

Situated some 30 million light years from Earth, NCG 891 belongs to the constellation Andromeda and was long thought to be very similar to our own Milky Way galaxy. But on closer inspection--the kind of inspection enabled by images like these--astronomers have found that filaments of dust and gas stretching hundreds of light years out of the plane suggest that material is being ejected violently from the galaxy--either by supernova or by some serious star-birthing activity.

The brighter stars you see are actually in the foreground and belong to the Milky Way. To the lower right you can actually see some distant elliptical galaxies. The image was captured with the Hubble Space Telescopes Advanced Camera for Surveys.

[PhysOrg]

The promise of Microsoft's Kinect was never simply to allow us to play games sans peripherals, but that one day an entirely new peripheral-free language would arise between us and our machines (many writers might pause here to mention the film Minority Report, but we're going to refrain). We're not all the way there yet, but a San Francisco startup is making a sub-$100 attempt at throwing open the door. Leap Motion's Leap 3D system will allow users to control their computers with hundredth-of-a-millimeter accuracy using touch-free gestural cues.

The system is built on a small USB input device and a lot of sophisticated software, which the company plans to begin retailing next year for $70. For the price, users will be able to manipulate their machines with the kinds of gestures that are becoming more and more ubiquitous thanks to the explosion in touchscreen technologies--things like pinch to zoom, swiping between screens, or scrolling with the flick of a finger. The difference is that the user touches nothing; Leap 3D creates a four-cubic-foot interaction space in front of any computer that is more responsive than either a touchscreen or a mouse (and offers increased capacity for control by adding a Z axis to the touchscreen's X and Y axes).

In contrast to the Kinect, which Microsoft sought to keep under its own proprietary control, Leap Motion is already reaching out to developers to hack its system. Company execs see applications for their interface upgrade across the board, from engineering and architecture to medicine to simple Web browsing. The company envisions an app store as well, where users can purchase software designed around its system to use on their desktops. The company already has more than 1,000 inquiries from developers--a number it thinks will explode as word gets out about the system.

Eventually the company plans to send out between 15,000 and 20,000 dev kits, with applications being accepted starting now. That's a lot of developer kits and a lot of potential applications, so keep an eye on this space. Click through to CNET to see a video demonstration of Leap 3D in action.

[CNET]

Of all the ways planets can die--consumed by their host stars, for instance, or obliterated by a collision with another planet or asteroid--evaporation isn't one that had crossed many astronomer's minds. But data from the exoplanet-hunting Kepler observatory has revealed a nearby planet--just 1,500 light years from Earth--that appears to be evaporating before our very eyes. Over the next 100 million years, the planet will completely disintegrate.

The planet is orbiting a star cataloged as KIC 12557548 so closely that it makes a complete circuit in just 15 hours--one of the shortest orbital periods ever observed. That close proximity to its star generates temperatures of up to 3,600 degrees on the planets surface--temperatures that are literally causing rocky material to evaporate straight from the surface, forming a wind that carries it into space as gas and dust.

Kepler found this strange case of slow planetary death by observing a plume or tail that seems to be trailing behind the planetary body as it races around the star. At first scientists thought the data might be showing a planetary duo, with the planets orbiting each other as they both orbit the star. But further investigation led to a different conclusion: that the high temperatures produced by a single planet's close proximity to the host star is actually causing the planet to shed material into its wake.

That's interesting enough on its own, but perhaps the real news here is that astronomers were able to see this planet at all, given its small size (it's roughly the size of Mercury) and the fact that it is so close to its parent star. The teams analyzing Kepler data continue to get better and better at pulling meaningful observations from the noise, and the catalog of exoplanets continues to grow accordingly. And, as the case of the evaporating planet clearly exhibits, every now and then we see something that we've never before had the chance to observe.

[Universe Today]

Here's the the question: you can charge an iPhone with any AC-to-USB adapter. So how does Apple get off charging $29 for theirs? Ken Shirriff took one completely apart to figure it out, and it turns out, Apple's charger goes above and beyond what's needed--it's legitimately more complex and sturdier and more capable than other chargers. Upgrades include "super-strong AC prongs, and the complex over-temperature / over-voltage shutdown circuit," as well as a bunch of hardware designed to keep electromagnetic interference to a minimum. Of course, the added hardware probably costs a dollar, and Apple sells it for $20 more than competitors, but still! Teardowns: so useful! [via @mattbuchanan]

Most robots are designed to do a couple specific things, which is one reason why the adaptability requirements in DARPA's robotics challenge will be so interesting. But not everyone has the funds or know-how to build a robot that can do anything. Instead, the robotics whiz teams at ETH Zurich are giving robots the ability to build any new tool for itself, whenever the need might arise. It just comes with a hot glue gun, which the robot uses like a low-tech 3-D printer.

Other robots have used hot glue guns before, primarily to climb up walls - Israeli researchers and the ETH researchers themselves are among those who've built such surface-scaling bots. But if you've ever played with a hot glue gun, you know the tool can be used to do much more than form an adhesive - you could make any shape you want and simply let it cool, hardening into an milky-looking object of your design. That's what this new robot does.

It uses hot glue to form a base and sides of a cup one layer at a time, much like a 3-D printer would sinter materials one layer at a time. The robot also builds a handle and attaches it to the cup so it can tote the water vessel between two separate containers. It takes about an hour. All the tasks were performed autonomously, reports IEEE Spectrum, which spotted the bot at the ICRA conference over the weekend. But the cup design was pre-programmed.

Ideally, future versions of this robot would be able to figure out exactly what type of tool is needed for a given task, and be able to design and build said tool. It certainly works more slowly than a 3-D printer, but it's much simpler, too. Watch in the video below.

[via IEEE Spectrum]