According to AFP/Getty:

A full body scan is pictured on a computer screen at Manchester Airport in Manchester, north-west England, on October 13, 2009. The scanner works by bouncing x-rays off an individuals skin to produce an outline of the person's body which is then used to detect concealed, potentially dangerous objects. The image is then transmitted to a remote security officer who has no visual or verbal contact with the area where the machine is located.

Photo by PAUL ELLIS/AFP/Getty Images

UK paper The Independent spotted the trend first, in a post called "The Robots Are Coming":

Karl Lagerfeld himself did the robot this season – or at least, he did doll-faced dystopiennes who looked like they'd just stepped out of a souped-up DeLorean (flux capacitor as standard)....

The hyphenated buzzword this season is "retro-futurism", think "Rachael from Blade Runner . The British design duo Preen quoted the film as one of the main sources for their collection this season, where chic mini-dresses were slashed and reconfigured. It's the 1940s, as seen through the lens of modern-day, but interpreted with the future in mind. At Balmain, dresses came in intergalactic cobalt-blue sequins, with accentuated shoulders worthy of a glamorous space cadet. Kate Moss has been spotted in a silver version at parties recently.

Photos by Getty Images. [via New York Magazine]

Located in Montana and Wyoming, Yellowstone is famous for its geysers, including "Old Faithful," which blasts steam into the air like clockwork every day. Now geologists studying the recent mini-quakes in the park say we might be in for a big blast. Such blasts tend to come about once every 600 thousand years, and we haven't seen one for roughly that amount of time.

The last big explosion in Yellowstone, according to Scientific American, was roughly 640 thousand years ago, and it covered about 240 cubic miles in hot ash, scalding rocks, and magma. But don't worry yet, says SciAm's David Biello:

Although the earthquake swarm continues, according to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, the volcano alert level remains normal. And a slew of larger earthquakes have occurred throughout the western U.S., Alaska, Puerto Rico and even Pennsylvania in the past week without incident, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

In recent years, Yellowstone's caldera has been rising thanks to uplifting magma beneath it—leading to more cracks, hot springs and even more frequent eruptions of Steamboat Geysers. Paired with the earthquakes, such magma movement might presage an eruption—either big or small. Unfortunately, scientists can't really predict when the next such eruption will happen, and the range of possibilities is large: from later today to a million years from now.

How will we know if we should start worrying? The real warning signs will be rapid changes in the shape of the ground as well as volcanic gases leaking from the ground, neither of which have been sighted—yet.

Right now, in some dark Hollywood pitch meeting, Jerry Bruckheimer is mud-wrestling with Michael Bay over the rights to a movie about this potential explodey Yellowstone disaster.

SOURCE: Scientific American

Thanks, Robert Atlas!

Photo by Nina Raingold/Getty Images.

What you're seeing here is the launch on December 20 of the Ariane rocket from Kourou space center in French Guiana. Its payload was two Eutelsat communications satellites, Hot Bird 9 and W2M. Hot Bird 9 will beam television signals to Europe, the Middle East and North Africa while W2M will service central and eastern Europe as well as Indian Ocean islands.

We're sleeping today. But we'll be back tomorrow!

If you need a little reading material, check out the io9 2008 year in review!

Photo via MARTIN/AFP/Getty Images.

This photo is what resulted when Ecuadorian artist John Vargas presented a body paint model during the pre-opening of Colombia Exposhow-New York last week in Cali, department of Valle del Cauca, Columbia.

Photo by Luis Robayo via AFP/Getty Images.

It's long been known that the ancient Mayan ruling classes drilled holes in their teeth and put jewels in them. This was a popular practice at the height of the highly-advanced Mayan Empire, which lasted over a millennium before 900 AD, when it abruptly lost control over vast portions of Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

These jawbones, which scientists have identified as being from two individuals, showed up in a small box delivered to the Honduran Embassy in the Netherlands last week. Local authorities speculated that the bones had been stolen in Honduras after researchers at Leiden University ran an analysis on them.

According to the Latin American Herald Tribune:

After the bones were received at the embassy in the Netherlands, the government of that European country requested that they be examined at Leiden University to determine their origin and to document the dental adornment, the Honduran foreign relations secretariat said.

It added that the pieces were studied using strontium isotope analysis, which showed that the ratio of strontium in the tooth enamel was consistent with that found in the water of Honduras' Copan River.

The tests determined that the individuals to whom the remains belonged were from an area of western Honduras now known as the Copan ruins, the Central American country's most important archaeological site.

The bones were delivered anonymously to the embassy, and nobody has any idea who did it. Perhaps a Dutch collector who felt they should go to their country of origin? A guilt-wracked member of an international ring of archaeologist pirates?

Regardless of who it was, the bones have now been returned to Honduras, where they will remain at a research institute.

SOURCE: Latin American Herald Tribune

Photo by Orlando Sierra/AFP/Getty Images.

Though it is often difficult to tell when somebody with locked in syndrome is fully conscious, a team of doctors led by Frank Guenther of Boston University strongly suspected that the man was aware and longed to speak. They put their patient in an fMRI brain scanner and asked him to attempt to make vowel sounds. His brain showed the exact same patterns as an uninjured person making those sounds aloud.

So they knew his brain's speech centers were still functioning. They just needed a way to connect those speech centers to a speech synthesizer - an artificial mouth if you will. Researchers implanted a special kind of electrode in his brain, one that's "impregnated with neurotrophic factors" that encourage brain neurons to grow into and around the electrode. Essentially this electrode forms a very strong connection with brain neurons, which results in a strong signal that reliably comes from the same part of the patient's brain over time.

Over a period of weeks, Guenther and his team worked to decode the signals coming from the man's brain. Eventually, he was able "to produce three vowel sounds with good accuracy," said Guenther. The man produces these sounds as quickly as he would normal speech, and Guenther added, "The long-term goal within five years is to have him use the speech brain–computer interface to produce words directly."

According to Nature:

Their efforts are appreciated by the patient too. "When we first arrived to install this system he was obviously very excited — you can tell from his involuntary movements, and he was trying to look at us the whole time," Guenther says. As the man's father told the team, "he really has a new lease on life".

The team's next step is to train their computer decoder to recognize consonants so that patients can form whole words, and even sentences. They also hope that with developments in technology, they can implant more electrodes in their next patient to transmit a more detailed signal.

Other researchers are working on less-invasive techniques to achieve the same goal for other paralyzed patients. Their brain-computer interfaces sit on the outside of the skull, so there's no need to put an electrode into the brain itself.

Brain Implant Allows Mute Man to Speak [via Nature]

Image via Getty.

Instead of working rice paddies, Chinese farmers today care for solar cells that feed energy-hungry cities. Below, you can see smog-shrouded Xining looming over its new power station. The solar farm will expand considerably before it's complete.

Photo by China Photos/Getty Images.

The image above is of a ferrosilicon factory in Xining, China. Below is a piece of large public art that was on display in Hemlington, England.

Top two images via Patrick Landmann/Getty. Bottom art image via Oobject (where they have a ton of images of molten steel), with thanks to David for the tip.