Vine is hard to explain. It's an app that lets you make and share six-second videos, which sounds absurd. But it's kind of fun, and especially since being acquired by Twitter, it has grown in popularity, hitting 13 million users earlier this month, especially among the kids, a technical term meaning "anyone younger than me."

So what are people doing on Vine? John Muellerleile wanted to find out, and he crawled Twitter looking for links to Vines, and then pulled four million of them into a database he calls vinecrawler. (Vine user post 12 million videos a day to Twitter, so this is just a small sample.)

Now you can search through this selection of vines for everything from parents to Snapchat, cooking to drinking. There's also a considerable amount of porn in 6-second increments. 

Muellerleile sifted through all these vines in building his tool, and he discovered (to his apparent surprise) that lots of people outside Silicon Valley are using the tool. 

A lot of people use Vine. I'm not talking about us dopes here in Silicon Valley, I mean actual people. All different walks of life, geographies, incomes; all genders, ages, races, backgrounds. They use it in all kinds of ways, sometimes hilarious, ridiculous, or strange, but all decidedly human. There is also some kind of fixation with Jay-Z, and I approve...

What I really found was humanity; all shapes, sizes, colors, and places, all things. When I find that, in the way I've found it through Vine, in one place, using one simple thing, I'm reminded that when we get the technology right, top to bottom -- like pointing at something, in the moment, that you want to remember and share-- it spreads everywhere, it's natural, fundamentally intuitive to use, possibly magical in operation, like magnets, or gravity, or maybe even a little bit like life.

The thing that stands out to me, both in my earlier investigations and looking at vinecrawler, is the age of Viners. From what I have seen, Vine's got a higher teenage-to-adult ratio than the mall food court on a summer afternoon. I don't know quite what to make of it yet, but I have a feeling that Vine might be the first form of social media that makes late 20s/early 30s "digital natives" feel like they emigrated.

And while it might feel like Vine is some weird, porny, dadaist mistake of a media form, woe be unto the media analyst who ignores what the kids are into. While not every teenage/college craze goes mainstream, I'll give you three good examples of things that propagated from the kids outwards: Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Keep Vine on your radar, that's all I'm saying. Just look at this Vine of a pug doing the "Thriller" dance. Can you deny this genius?

"When it comes to fire," says physics professor Forman A. Williams, "we're just getting started."

Take the flame of a candle, the kind you might find on a birthday cake. The flame takes the familiar shape -- as, basically, a gaseous teardrop -- because of gravity. The hot air rises and draws fresh, cool air behind it. The buoyancy makes the flame shoot up and flicker.

So we know all that. What we know less about, though, is the way fire behaves ... IN SPACE. In microgravity, according to the NASA video above, flames behave differently than they do here on Earth. Instead of the tear shape we're used to from our birthday cakes or Yankee Candle samples or what have you, the gravity-challeged flames form ... fire balls. Seriously. Unlike Earth-bound flames, "which expand greedily when they need more fuel," the video says, "flame balls let the oxygen come to them." Oxygen and fuel combine in a narrow zone at the surface of the sphere, rather than "hither and yon throughout the flame."

Which is knowledge that might have practical applications here on Earth -- and, specifically, to Earth-bound automobiles and the combustion process they rely on for their energy. Williams and a colleague were conducting an ISS-based experiment called the Flame Extinguishment Experiment (yep: FLEX) when they made an accidental discovery: in space, droplets of fuel continued to burn. Even after their flames had extinguished.

Yep: the fuel burned without flames.

Or, more accurately, the fuel burned with flames that were so faint that they were almost impossible to see. The FLEX experiment ended up testing the behavior of "cool flames" in space. The flame balls (fueled, in this case, by heptane) started out hot-burning. As they cooled, however, a different kind of burning seemed to take over. Cool flames burn at a relatively low-temperature 400 - 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and their chemistry is completely different from that of a standard flame. While teardrop-shaped flames produce carbon dioxide, water, and soot, cool flames produce carbon monoxide and formaldehyde. And, importantly, while cool flames on Earth extinguish immediately, the cool flames tested on the space station burned for at least a minute.

Which could have, as the video points out, big implications for cars and other vehicles that rely on combustion. In the meantime, though, it's worth remembering: if you light some birthday candles in space, you will receive the gift of flame balls.

For more videos from NASA, visit http://www.nasa.gov/.

J. Telling

Last month, a paper published in Nature reported on some water that had been trapped 1.5 miles below the Earth's surface in Canada for a long while. How long? Based on an analysis of the isotopes of natural gases in the water, scientists believe it to be the oldest isolated water ever studied, at least 1 billion years old and maybe as old as 2.64 billion, slightly younger than the rocks that encased it.* For maybe half as long as the Earth's entire existence, this water has been sealed away, unexposed to the atmosphere.

The next question: Is it drinkable? The answer: Not really, but a sip won't kill you. According to an interview in the Los Angeles Times, one of the paper's authors, Barbara Sherwood Lollar, has tasted it, and it was "terrible," she reports. "It is much saltier than seawater."

Her description of its appearance doesn't make it sound very appetizing either:

What jumps out at you first is the saltiness. Because of the reactions between the water and the rock, it is extremely salty. It is more viscous than tap water. It has the consistency of a very light maple syrup. It doesn't have color when it comes out, but as soon as it comes into contact with oxygen it turns an orangy color because the minerals in it begin to form -- especially the iron.

But that didn't stop Lollar. She tasted it anyway -- for science. And because she wanted to know how salty it was. But because she is a lady and a scholar**, she took this one for the team, and did not allow her students to taste it.

Now onto the bigger questions: Is there life in this billion-year-old water? Lollar thinks it's possible. "The water has the same kind of energy that supports the microbial life found near deep-sea vents and in the South African gold mine," she the LA Times's Deborah Netburn, "We have shown these waters are habitable. The next question is whether or not they are inhabited." And if they are, the question will become what's living there and when did it arrive.

Lollar and her team are investigating, but she says it will be about a year before they have results.

*And before you say, isn't all water on Earth billions of years old, the case of the ancient Canadian water is different. This water has been isolated for all that time, never evaporating, never raining down from the skies, with no contact with the outside world, for a billion years, maybe more.

**The phrase "a gentleman and a scholar" is, unhappily, gender-specific, and this was the best equivalent I could come up with :(  Sarah Pavis suggests "gentlewoman" or "dame," both of which I like too.

Fiber optic cables (Reuters).

It's been two weeks since the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers began to publish their stories based on leaks and interviews with former NSA contractor, Edward Snowden. The leaks have continued, counterleaks have bubbled up, tech companies have responded, and debate about the man at the center of it all continues to rage.

Three big stories -- one from the AP, one from NPR, and another from the Post -- came out this weekend that mined the details of Snowden's disclosures, refining them with more extensive reporting. The New York Times contributed a deep profile of Snowden himself, who continues to provoke strong reactions, especially after he revealed some details about U.S. spying on China and Russia.

Following, we attempt to bring you up to speed with the most recent disclosures and best reporting on the hurlyburly.

One note before we get to the stories: Snowden's two big disclosures have tended to get conflated. First, Snowden leaked a secret order from the Foreign Intelligence Service Court giving the government broad powers to collect phone call metadata from Verizon Business Services. Senator Dianne Feinstein acknowledged the program and said it had been going on for years. The legal basis for the data collection comes from an interpretation of Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to take any "business records" it might want, and because phone calls are considered business transactions between a phone user and a phone network, such information falls under its purview. Civil liberties groups like the ACLU have decried this version of the rules.

Snowden's other big disclosure, published nearly simultaneously in the Guardian and Washington Post, was that the NSA had what was called "direct access" to servers at the big tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, and Yahoo through a program called Prism. The tech companies vociferously denied involvement in broad government surveillance of their users. A central problem is that "direct access" could mean a lot of things. Which brings us to our first story.

Putting Snowden's Disclosures in Context

The AP found sources willing to talk about the conception of the Prism program. Tech company sources said that what started as an unstructured mess of information flowing from tech companies to the government after 9/11 turned into a "streamlined, electronic process." That's Prism.

This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from Internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.

But the report also sought to put Prism's importance in the context of the type of spying that we've known the NSA has done for years: tapping into telecommunications servers that handle a very large percentage of the world's Internet traffic.

In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it's the broader operation on the Internet fiber optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.

In other words, the structured data that the NSA gets from searching small numbers of users aids its targeting within the massive amounts of Internet traffic it's hoovering up. And "direct access," in context, was probably intended to mean data from companies themselves as opposed to siphoned from telecom Internet traffic. 

The Washington Post had another big story by Barton Gellman documenting how four different NSA programs sprang from the Bush administration's STELLARWIND program. They are called MAINWAY, MARINA, NUCLEON, and PRISM. Gellman spoke with an anonymous "senior intelligence official," who provided some information on what the programs do and what policies regulate their use.

Two of the four collection programs, one each for telephony and the Internet, process trillions of "metadata" records for storage and analysis in systems called MAINWAY and MARINA, respectively. Metadata includes highly revealing information about the times, places, devices and participants in electronic communication, but not its contents. The bulk collection of telephone call records from Verizon Business Services, disclosed this month by the British newspaper the Guardian, is one source of raw intelligence for MAINWAY.

The other two types of collection, which operate on a much smaller scale, are aimed at content. One of them intercepts telephone calls and routes the spoken words to a system called ­NUCLEON.

For Internet content, the most important source collection is the PRISM project reported on June 6 by The Washington Post and the Guardian. It draws from data held by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and other Silicon Valley giants, collectively the richest depositories of personal information in history.

So how does PRISM work, technically?

The New York Time's Claire Cain Miller reported that "in some cases, the data is transmitted to the government electronically, using a company's servers." Which makes sense, obviously, but left in question the actual method of transfer. Wired's Kim Zetter reports that, at least at Google, the company transfers files to the government using secure FTP. It's possible that other companies have different ways of getting information to the NSA.

The Tech Companies Respond

The string of events set off by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has led us to this: Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have released numbers on how often government officials request their users' data. The companies have released aggregate numbers for how many requests they've received from all levels of government, and the total number of user accounts that has affected.

For the last six months of 2012, Facebook and Microsoft say they've received between 9,000-10,000 and 6,000-7,000 government requests, respectively. Those requests covered 18,000-19,000 Facebook users and 31,000-32,000 Microsoft users. For the six months ended in May, Apple says that it received 4,000-5,000 government requests, which specified 9,000-10,000 accounts or devices.

No matter how you slice them, these numbers show that the data the NSA has requested is relatively limited in scope. For each service, a tiny sliver of users has been targeted.

On the other hand, it's still unclear how many users would ultimately be swept up in these data requests. Imagine that the government wanted to know all a particular users' friends, and then all of those friends' friends. Pew found that the median user's friends of friends network was over 30,000 people strong with some power users reaching over seven million. Go one step farther out and you'd be connecting in massive numbers of users.

Meanwhile, Google and Twitter maintain that the deal their competitors reached with the government on the data releases is a bad one. They want to be able to disaggregate the numbers and release orders differently, including those from the FISA court.

The Details of the NSA's Phone Call Metadata Collection, According to the Government

NPR spoke with a senior administration official who said the Obama administration was mulling declassifying a secret order that spelled out how and when the NSA could collect phone metadata. The key details confirmed in the report were that the NSA only stores metadata for five years and that the NSA says it doesn't use location data, even though it has the legal right to collect it. Procedurally, the administration official said that the standards for reasonable suspicion are approved by a court, but individual queries are not. Rather, there's an auditing program in place.

The senior administration official told NPR that the phone-call records can be kept only for five years and that the NSA does not use that program to keep data that would allow authorities to track where people are located when they're using their phones. The source said even though the NSA may have that power to collect the geolocation data under the law and the secret court's rulings, the NSA does not use it.

To query the huge pools of metadata, authorities say they need to have a reasonable, articulable suspicion of an association with a terrorism organization. That standard is approved by the FISA court but the court does not review each query. Rather, the senior administration official said, the queries are documented and a sample of them is audited by the Justice Department's National Security Division and the Director of National Intelligence.

Who is Edward Snowden?

I can't bring myself to link you to the bloviating about Snowden's position on the hero/"grandiose narcissist"/traitor, but the New York Times had a good, reported profile of Snowden from a friend at his high school, as well as later associates.

His act may have been a spectacular unintended consequence of the leak crackdown itself. It may also have reflected his own considerable ambition, disguised by his early drifting. From Mr. Snowden's friends and his own voluminous Web postings emerges a portrait of a talented young man who did not finish high school but bragged online that employers "fight over me."

Snowden, himself, answered questions in a live chat with The Guardian. Most noteworthy is that he denied having any contact with China, saying he only works with journalists.

Who is General Keith Alexander, the head of the NSA?

James Bamford, perhaps the foremost chronicler of the agency, has a massive Wired cover story out about Alexander, who has become one of the most powerful people in the world, despite his nearly nonexistent public profile.

Inside the government, the general is regarded with a mixture of respect and fear, not unlike J. Edgar Hoover, another security figure whose tenure spanned multiple presidencies. "We jokingly referred to him as Emperor Alexander--with good cause, because whatever Keith wants, Keith gets," says one former senior CIA official who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. "We would sit back literally in awe of what he was able to get from Congress, from the White House, and at the expense of everybody else."

Could NSA Spying Lead to 'Internet nationalism'?

The Internet is dominated by American companies, who are not operating solely in cybersapce but on American soil. While American citizens may have some protection from NSA spying, the rest of the world's people do not. CNN ran an opinion piece by Canadian political scientist Ronald Deibert, who argued that there will be blowback from the spying revelations. While Google, Facebook, and the rest might have been primarily seen as just Internet companies before, it will be harder to ignore that they're American Internet companies going forward.

The revelations that have emerged will undoubtedly trigger a reaction abroad as policymakers and ordinary users realize the huge disadvantages of their dependence on U.S.-controlled networks in social media, cloud computing, and telecommunications, and of the formidable resources that are deployed by U.S. national security agencies to mine and monitor those networks.

In 1850, the British inventor William O'Shaughnessy -- who would later become famous for his early experiments with medical cannabis -- sent a coded message over a telegraph line in India. His telegram would usher in a new age of communication in and for India, connecting the country in a way that had never before been possible. 

Now, sometime on July 14, 2013, someone in India will have a dubious honor: he or she will send the country's last telegram. The Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited, India's state-run telecom company, will shutter its telegram service, bringing the long era of Indian telegraphy from a dash ... to a full stop.

The shuttering comes seven years after Western Union ended its telegram service -- and nearly 170 years after Samuel Morse sent the United States's first telegraphic messages, between Washington and Baltimore, in 1844.

The shuttering of the service is not surprising. In a country that has quickly embraced, if not fully adopted, mobile technologies, the telegram has become largely redundant as a method of quick, long-distance communication. BSNL's telegram service had been losing money -- and lots of it -- for years. "We were incurring losses of over $23 million a year because SMS and smartphones have rendered this service redundant," Shamim Akhtar, general manager of BSNL's telegraph services, told the Christian Science Monitor.

And, indeed. As the Monitor notes:

At their peak in 1985, 60 million telegrams were being sent and received a year in India from 45,000 offices. Today, only 75 offices exist, though they are located in each of India's 671 districts through franchises. And an industry that once employed 12,500 people, today has only 998 workers.

Then again, though, a shrunken industry is not necessarily a dead industry. As V.A.N. Namboodiri, a spokesman for the union representing 250,000 employees of the state telecom, noted, telegrams "are still used by military personnel for official use and also for contacting their families from remote locations." Governments and banks still use them for official communication: in India, the Monitor reports, a whopping 65 percent of daily telegrams are sent by the government. And they're often used for legal communication and record-keeping, as well. 

Telegrams can also play a cultural role in India. "A number of telegrams are from runaway couples who marry secretly because their parents wouldn't let them marry in the wrong caste, class, or religion," the Monitor notes. The couples send telegrams not only to the families themselves, but also to the police and the National Human Rights Commission -- so that, if the family threatens violence against the unapproved marriage, there's a paper trail. The telegrams function, in this case, as a kind of insurance policy. 

Unions of the labor variety, given all that, have urged Indian telecom minister Kapil Sibal to keep the telegram service running, even as a shadow of its former self. "It is a valued service and should be kept as a skeleton service and preserved as a heritage," one union told The Hindu. But niche uses weren't enough to convince the BSNL to keep its doors -- and its telegraph lines -- open. The telegram service is a business. And like most businesses, an end to profitability means, simply an end. Or in this case: a STOP. 

Via @stevesilberman

But this little place on the Russian steppe, in the farmlands four hours southwest of the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, is where Valentina Tereshkova touched back down on the ground after spending three days in space, the first woman to orbit the Earth. She launched on this day, 50 years ago.

During her flight, which took place two years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space, Tereshkova circled the planet 48 times. Upon landing, she became "a poster image for Soviet space glory," and difficulties she encountered in space were carefully kept out of the public's view. Her achievement was a Soviet triumph, and on that little patch of Earth at 53°N, 80°E, a monument rose to commemorate it.

Wikimapia

Twenty years after Tereshkova's flight, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Since then, more than 50 women have flown in space, and astronaut Karen Nyberg is there right now.

When he was just a teenager he manned an aircraft carrier in the Pacific theater of World War II, then he served as a flight engineer during the Korean conflict. Decades later, when time and exertion had weathered his body, he showed us his favorite photo from the war: A plane that crashed on landing, but just managed to avoid sliding off the deck of the ship. He helped put out the fire.

After Korea, he was chief facilities engineer during the height of the cold war at Los Alamos National Labs maintaining buildings for classified nuclear research. He left the employ of the government and went to work for IBM, overseeing the construction of their big plant in South San Jose. A while back, the entire compound was razed. They replaced it with a Lowe's and a parking lot.

Such is the world of things.

Grandpa spent his life making and maintaining things, so he knew a lot about entropy: The second law of thermodynamics that guarantees everything will eventually wear out. Every day he built things; every evening, the sun set and entropy gnawed away at what he built. Not much, just a little.

But Grandpa was more efficient than entropy: He never stopped fixing, improving, and building. He built more in his lifetime than anyone else I know.

After IBM, he scraped together enough money to buy a cattle ranch in Powell Butte, Oregon. It was a life of hard, grueling days and relentless work. Every season was a struggle -- physically, mentally, and financially. Growing hay and cattle in the high altitude desert of Eastern Oregon is not easy.

In the mid-seventies after the cattle market crash, Grandpa knelt in the middle of his fields, crying out to God for a way to save the ranch and feed his family. They made it through by sheer force of will -- the will of a man who lived through the Depression and two wars. A man who believed in sweat, guts, and gumption. A man who refused to give way to entropy.

On the ranch, the new encroaches on the old. Grandpa's ranch is right next to Prineville, and the power lines leading to Facebook's new data center run over his land. My mother recalls playing hide and seek beneath the giant transmission towers that would someday power the future -- a world of code and silicon, not of things.

The Internet came a little too late for him. By that time, he was set in his ways -- unimpressed by highfalutin technological ideals. My brother's construction engineering courses always interested him more than my computer science education. I understood. Grandfather was a fan of the tangible: the feel of wood grain, the heft of a wrench, the smell of hay baking under the summer sun.

I was always in awe of what my grandfather could do. As I was growing up, when a faucet needed fixing or we needed a lighting fixture installed, it was my grandfather who did it. He brought his toolbox with him every time he came over. I remember being enthralled by his workshop, with his oddly large bandsaw and drawers of strange woodworking tools.

Like the tools and the wood that he worked, Grandfather was rough-hewn. He could be hard and gruff. As a child, his demeanor drove me to tears more than once. When I would accidentally interfere with his work, he would grunt, "Get out of my road." He wasn't offended by my presence, he just needed to get past me to get things done. Finishing the job was primary. All his intellectual effort went into finding the most efficient way to accomplish the task. Slight emotional casualties along the way were acceptable. It took me years to understand that.

But he was quietly affectionate in his own way. He never spoke praise, but you could see it in his eyes. I remember seeing that look on his face when I became an Eagle Scout, just as he had been so many years before. It was the first time I knew that Grandfather was proud of me.

We were of a different ilk -- me the gangly boy with his nose always buried deep in the Internet, him the silent stalwart with his hands always working the land he loved. But shades of my grandfather color every part of my existence.

I recently found some letters that my brother and I wrote in our early teens, thanking him for giving us some money for college. In his letter, my brother thanked Grandfather for taking us to Goodwill to buy broken electronics. The sole purpose of these expeditions? Disassembly and exploration. Teardowns are in my blood.

When I left for college, Grandpa gave me a hug and a toolbox. I was the only one in the dorms with tools, and I was constantly fixing things for people. (We also used them for more nefarious purposes, swapping bathroom signs and locking the resident advisor out of his room.) Those were the first tools that were truly my own. They were not the last.

"Never force it." That was Grandpa's advice for tinkering, and it's good advice for life. Work hard, but let things come. If what you're doing isn't working, try another way.

My grandfather died three years ago. But entropy loses again, because he lives on. In my tools and in my hands and in my heart. He instilled in me the spirit and blood of a tinkerer.

I visited his workshop the day of the funeral, to say goodbye. We were constantly joking with him about which tools would get inherited by each grandchild. I later found out that he actually wrote my name on some of the tools he wanted to reserve for me.

The last time he visited, I was able to show him my workshop. He didn't have much to say, but he looked satisfied. He talked about the usefulness of pneumatic tools and teased me about my undersized compressor.

Grandfather was a builder and he was a fixer. He believed in the labor of his hands -- that what you create with them is meaningful. It's popular these days to relegate men like my grandfather to the past. We passively opine the passing of a dying breed -- victims of progress and changing values -- and move on with our (mostly digital) lives. I don't think we should let that happen. Our world is in desperate need of men and women of action. People who always find a way to get things done. People who believe that what's broken can always be fixed.

And even though my grandfather was never quite comfortable with digital sprawl, I like to think that the same determination to fight against entropy that drove him is what also drives iFixit -- the free repair guide for everything. I wrote my first repair manual in college, with the same toolbox he gave me when I left for school.

I had hoped that he would live to see iFixit make repair meaningful again, even if the world now is mostly silicon and code. The last thing I sent him was an article, published the week before he died, about our plans for an online community of mechanics and tinkerers. His funeral was on April 22, 2010, the same day we launched.

Grandpa understood what we are trying to do. And although he wouldn't have said so, I know he would have been proud. For me, that is the greatest, most profound feeling in the world. He left me with a legacy to uphold: I will always aspire to be a builder, to fix the world in any way I can, and to fight entropy by whatever means possible.

I will be a man of action.

Astrophotographer Stéphane Guisard's latest work showcases the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, as seen at zenith from the Paranal Observatory in Chile's Atacama desert. Two of our neighboring galaxies, the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, also appear in the sky's upper left corner.

The Milky Way is what's known as a "barred spiral galaxy," which is pretty much like it sounds -- a spiral shape with a starry bar at the center. Here's a nice face-on view of one known as NGC 1300, some 69 million light years away:

A picture like that is a good proxy for what our own galaxy would look like if we could see it from afar. But this will never happen, at least not in any realistic foreseeable future. To get a picture like that, a full face-on view of the spiral, we'd need a spacecraft outside our galaxy, and we haven't even gotten one outside our own solar system (yet). The best images we do have of our galaxy come from our space telescopes, which are stationed very close to our planet, which itself is located in one of the spiral's arms. These images are gorgeous, but they don't show the spiral -- they can't, since they're taken from within it. Instead, they look like this: 

The galactic center. Composite of images from NASA's three "Great Observatories" -- Hubble, Spitzer, and Chandra. (NASA)

So remember: If anyone puts up a poster of a pretty spiral galaxy with a big "You are here" arrow, they are full of it.

We just have to make do with the beautiful sights of the Milky Way taken from observatories both here and in space, the images we have of other galaxies, and our imaginations. I think we can manage.

H/t Ross Andersen

Helen of Troy is believed to have walked there. So is her lover, Paris. The city known as Heracleion to the Greeks of the time and as Thonis by the Egyptians who built it was once a central part of ancient Egypt -- the port of entry to the empire for all ships coming from the Greek world. It was likely established in the eighth century BC, making it even more ancient than the so-famously-ancient city of Alexandria. 

There was one problem, though. "Constructing a huge city on the bank of a river and the shore of a sea," Nature Education puts it, "comes with a risk." And "Thonis took that risk but ultimately paid for it with its life."

Indeed. Sometime around the 8th century AD, Thonis sank into the sea. Most scientists believe that a combination of factors contributed to the cataclysm: a rise in sea level, coupled with a sudden collapse of the sediment-heavy earth on which the city was built.

Whatever the causes, though, the results were clear: Heracleion -- Thonis -- essentially collapsed into itself. The city built upon the water plunged into it.

And then it descended into myth. For hundreds of years, people assumed that, despite historical reports suggesting its existence, the city was nothing but a legend. And then, in 2000, a team of scientists rediscovered the sunken city. Led by the famous underwater archaeologist Franck Goddio, the team conducted a four-year-long geophysical survey of the area that would likely be the city's watery resting place. Finally, they found what they were seeking. Beneath the waters of modern-day Aboukir Bay, a mere 20 miles northeast of Alexandria, the team located the remains of a once-bustling city, silenced by he waters.

And now, 13 years later, the team is sharing the video culled from its underwater discovery. Click here for images of the team's discoveries; and watch above as humans living in the 21st century rediscover the relics of those who lived in the 8th.

During Apple's keynote at its Worldwide Developers Conference, it was all Apple all the time, except for one quick demo near the beginning of the event. The CEO of a relatively obscure company (as obscure as a company with $50 million in funding can be) came on stage with a plastic track and a bunch of little cars. They proceeded to race each other, controlled by AI running on an iPhone. There was a brief hiccup when one of the cars wouldn't run, but it got fixed and the demo finished well.

It was cool, but it was also a bit confounding. What was Apple trying to tell us about its future plans by showing us this particular company? Right after the keynote, one of the company's PR people emailed me to ask if I wanted to meet with Anki's CEO Boris Sofman, a Carnegie Mellon robotics guy (as are his two cofounders Hanns Tappeiner and Mark Palatucci). I accepted, mostly so I could find out what got Apple so excited about this little toy startup.

Of course, they'd hate to be called a toy startup. For Sofman, entertainment, toys, are merely the quickest way to get robotics into consumers' lives. He argues that their product is doing a lot of the same fundamental things that autonomous vehicles and other types of near-future consumer robots do. And that they're merely taking the bottom-up approach to building out these futuristic capabilities.

What follows is a lightly edited and condensed record of our conversation, which took place in a building on 4th and Market in San Francisco, on a floor high above the Ross department store at ground level.

We don't go into a lot of depth about the demo itself, but if you'd like to see it, go here and skipt to about 11 minutes into the presentation.

So, I saw the demo.

It was probably the longest 20 seconds of my life.

You guys were the only outside company at the keynote.

Only outside company this year. This might be the last time they try a wireless demo at WWDC.

I think it was Marco Arment who was tweeting that it was really interesting and kind of strange that they put you guys in there, given that it was such a packed 2 hours of Apple announcements. What do you think it was that got you onto the stage?

I think a big part of it was that there is a lot of overlap in what we're doing and Apple's motivations. We're a robotics and artificial intelligence company. Our focus is to bring these technologies to consumer products. For Anki Drive, mobile devices play a huge part of that. The phone becomes the brain for everything that's happening. We have a video game happening inside a phone that matches the physical world. For us, the phone is a huge advantage.

From Apple's standpoint, it wasn't just a neat product, but we're using their devices in a way that nobody ever has. What you saw was one phone connected to four simultaneous cars. When we do it on our end, you can have 6 cars and more devices. You'll have a phone that's juggling 5,6,7,8 Bluetooth low-energy connections and no one has ever done that before.

It caught their attention because it highlights what you can do with their product ecosystem in a way that no one's ever done before.

When the super car wouldn't get going during the demo, what was happening there?

What happened, when I was holding the car up, the light was green, that means it had disconnected already. That room had so much wireless interference and signal noise strength. We found out afterwards, it was four times anything they had tested or expected. That had never happened before. Once a Bluetooth low-energy connection is made, it's incredibly robust. It doesn't get dropped.

We really quickly restarted the app and reconnected and it held the second time through.

So when you held the car up, did you know that the connection had been been dropped already?

No, because I was holding it up facing away from me. I would have gasped and not been able to finish my monologue. When I pushed it and it didn't snap on, it was because the connection had been dropped. When I saw the green light, I knew. You can hear me say, "Restart" and then I'm like tapdancing for 10 seconds waiting for it to pick up again. A little drama is perfectly fine as long as it works out. It took me like half the rest of the show to stop shaking. I mentally snapped back into it sometime during the iOS stuff.

Talk to me about the funding.

We closed our Series-A back with Andreesen Horowitz last March. We were 4 people back then. We walked in and Marc Andreesen was like a little kid, flicking the cars on the floor. He fell in love with it. he actually joined our board back then, which was humbling. From then, it's been an insanely crazy year, it's like strapping into a rollercoaster. We're now 35 people.

How'd you guys really get on stage?

Marc was the one who introduced us to Apple early on because that was a retail channel that was a good fit for what we wanted to do. We were just super happy to get the amazing response all the way through the [Apple] organization up to the executive team. I think they saw the great synergy between what we're doing and what they're doing.

What do you need all those people for?

It was three of us for a long time. It wasn't glamorous. We were sitting around a kitchen and hacking on nights and weekends. In the first three years, we were able to get really advanced advanced prototypes. It was the furthest you could go without some serious investment. Once you want to take it from an advanced prototype to an advanced product, it takes a lot of people.

For us, this is the first step of bringing this kind of robotics into people's lives, in this case entertainment. When you look at what goes into Anki Drive, what goes into this is: industrial design, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, embedded systems, low-level firmware development, control algorithms, dealing with sensors, wireless communications, core robotics, artificial intelligence, mobile development, game development. Just getting the product together is a huge chain. Even with 30 other people, we're really thin. There's only one person in each of those categories. Recently, we brought on a manufacturing team, who is working on sourcing all these parts.

As an artificial intelligence guy, what attracted you to this project?

When we were in grad school, we all worked on really cool projects. I'll give you an example. My project was a huge autonomous vehicle, like wheels up to my shoulders. Completely off-road. We'd go to different parts of the country, plop it down in a forest and give it a destination 10 kilometers away. He [the vehicle] would be using aerial data, GPS sensors on-board, pathfinding algorithms. He'd have 8 quadcore CPUs in his little hull. He'd decide where to go, which bushes to trample, and how to get ditches and trees. He'd be moving pretty quickly. We had a chase Hummer and we couldn't keep up with him sometimes.

That was incredible technology, but it's indicative of a lot of robotics. It's focused on space applications, on DARPA, on industrial, on agricultural, on health care. But nothing has penetrated consumer markets.

When we say robotics, it's not just the mechanical part of it. It's the artificial-intelligence side of it where we're using software to program physical things to be intelligence. And it's not just a remote-controlled object. It's something that understands where it is and reacts to its surroundings and has a purpose to it.

For us, there's a huge gap in consumer applications of these technologies. The problem is that everybody focuses on performance, but it doesn't matter to them if you use a $50,000 sensor to do it. So for us, entertainment was a really great place to start. It's familiar, it's friendly, it's fun. And in the case of cars, there's a cross-generational appeal. Two-year-olds and 92-year-olds like cars. It was a chance to showcase these technologies and bring them to life in a way that is familiar in the form of a racing game, but an entirely different entertainment experience, doing things that have never been possible in the physical world.

This becomes a first step in using these technologies. Internally, these are building blocks to robotics in the more general case. The core problems in robotics -- positioning, knowing where you are, reasoning, using that information to make intelligent decisions, planning searching, deciding what you need to do, and the execution where you need to move precisely in the real world -- those carry over into any application in the real world. So when we build modules for wireless communication or planning, we will reuse those in every product we make.

Were you influenced by the "situated robotics" guys like [MIT professor and iRobot co-founder, now CEO of Heartland robotics] Rodney Brooks? Because at some level, this is just a racing game. The computer's ability to race you is the least interesting part because we've been able to do that since ExciteBike. The interesting thing seems to be what changes when you take the racing game out of the virtual world into the physical world.

Rodney Brooks did some incredible things and I interned at iRobot before graduate school. But for us, we have a lot of influences. Here's how we're approaching it. You could take the top-down approach to robotics or the bottom-up approach... The bottom-up approach is taking the building blocks available today -- the most advanced technologies, components, and technological landscapes -- and making an incredible product and then using that to make products two, three, four, five, and six. And every single time, you're using what you built before, making product three only marginally more difficult than product one. Where, if you started with product three, it'd be an insurmountable challenge. 

But what does change when you pull the racing game out of the purely digital world? What's really different going on watching Anki Drive versus watching ExciteBike?

It's a completely different experience. You think about the toy industry. It's been pretty stagnant. In the '60s and '70s, the toys back then are like 90 percent of the toys today. But the real appeal that's made it a lasting element is that there is this appeal to the physical world. There's a built-in desire for people to connect with things they can touch. It's more social. It's not as natural to look at something on the screen. You'll never replicate the connection you can make with something you touch. The reason people are so attached to video games and they are so entertaining is that they take advantage of the fact that there are adaptive rules and structures. There are characters and those characters evolve. The world expands. The game changes over time and gets more challenging. But the biggest thing is that there are many characters and the interactions between characters keeps things fun. Nobody has been able to bring that into the physical world in the right way. So almost all physical entertainment is static or remote-controlled with only one-way feedback. When you close the loop, you can bring physical characters to life. You can give them a purpose, evolve over time, get more challenging, and get more capabilities because it's software driving the whole thing.

Early Nintendo games took a big jump in the sort of entertainment that was possible. To us, this feels like a huge leap forward in what you can do in the physical world and it's only the beginning. It goes way beyond racing games. We're giving physical characters the ability to know where they're located in an environment and what's around them and to be able to come to life and execute a person, intention, a personality. That's a platform in every sense of the word. We can bring characters to life in any context and the racing game happens to be a great place to start.

And the reason you're starting with a racing game is that you've got a track that you can control. This is an easier environment to perceive than an arbitrary environment.

In an arbitrary environment, everything changes. For us, the enabler behind this that typical physical products don't have is awareness of your position. The three fundamental challenges of robotics are positioning, reasoning, and execution. It doesn't matter what robotics problem you have, these are the problems you have to solve. You have to understand your position, think about what you want to do, and you have to do it. And that's really difficult because if you want to make something that is a mass producible product like this, you can't throw a $50,000 sensor on it.

And the reasoning part is the only part that racing games have always done.

If you look at a videogame, positioning is trivial because you know where everything is, execution is trivial because you have full control of the environment, and all that's left is the reasoning part. By solving the real world challenges to a really deep degree with artificial intelligence and unique combinations of components and computation, we are able to turn the physical world into a virtual world. We can take all these physical characters and abstract away everything physical about them and treat them as if they were virtual characters in a videogame on the phone. We have a virtual state in the phone that matches the physical world. If we want this one character to be more aggressive or intelligent, physically nothing changes in him. It's the software.

So what hardware goes into these cars?

There is no component in here that costs more than $1.20. We have cheap motors. A battery. A microcontroller, a 50 Mhz computer, and an optical sensor. Ironically [that sensor] is the front facing camera of an iPhone.

The selfie-cam is how this car senses where it is!

What makes this all possible is the commoditization of all these components has driven the cost down to where you can get more capable components at really low cost. And access to mobile devices -- the iPhone wasn't in the picture -- when we started working on this, you couldn't make an app because there was no such thing as an app. The original idea was to have a little box with a computer. But when the phone started gaining traction, it became obvious this was the way to go because for us, software defines the entire interaction. What we're doing with these cars is that they unlock very robust but basic capabilities. It can go 1.5 meters per second. It can sense its position. It can execute a trajectory. But fundamentally all the gameplay is defined in the app in the software on the phone. That means when we ship Anki Drive, that's just the first step.

Can you change the software on the car?

Yes we can. The phone can flash the software on the car. If you look at physical entertainment, it's always been defined by the physical side. Cheap plastics. Maybe sometimes there's some motion or remote control, but we're bringing software into physical entertainment.

I couldn't see the track well enough on the WWDC livestream, but if you've just got one downward facing camera, the track itself must have to have some kind of Kiva-like navigation tracking system embedded.

The track is very specifically designed to work with the cars. There's a really intricate system between the cars, the track, and the phone. What the cars are doing is sensing down on the track, and there is information embedded that gives them knowledge about where they are.

Just X, Y?

Well, and also which environment, because it's possible to have different types of environments. It tells them where they are, but also how well they're executing a [driving] trajectory. You've seen line following robots? Robots that follow a line to go wherever they want. It's doing the same thing except there is no line -- there's a virtualized line where we have sophisticated software that creates any maneuver we want and turns it into a virtual line that the car can follow as if it was physical line.

There's a lot of logic on the car. Five hundred times a second, it oscillates the motors to do sophisticated control algorithms. If we drive too fast, the car will drift and then recover and go back to following the line. We didn't do any drifting on stage, though. Five hundred items a second we're sensing our position and a subset of those times, we're communicating back to the device hosting the game. And we're doing that with components that cost a handful of dollars.

How do the cars come up with their racing strategies?

Inside the phone, we're doing a really deep search, like a chess game, thinking about what the car is going to do, and what the other cars are going to do forward into the future so that we can analyze thousands of these potential actions and come up with a plan that is more sophisticated than anything you'd come up with if you did an instantaneous gut reaction. In fact, [what we do] is a more rigorous way to think about AI than almost any videogame does. I was the one who worked on the early AI on this and I spent a lot of time talking to friends in the videogame industry and asking how people did AI in videogames and racing games. Surprisingly, most of it is relatively simple. If this, then this. It's a basic logic. If you have very basic logic, you'll never come up with an interesting solution to say, you're boxed in, and the best thing is to actually slow down and then come around, or having to do something sneaky.

So, for us, it's a huge advantage to have a physical videogame because all videogames end up piping a lot of their computation into the graphics. And they have to because that's differentiator. And for us, 90% of our computation goes to the planning side. We can do a much more rigorous approach that's driven by a robotics background. We can come up with really sophisticated actions, thinking forward into the future about what these characters are going to do.

How hard is getting the cars to actually do what you want in the physical world?

Execution should not be underestimated. That is really hard because we have to deal with the real world. There's drift, there's physics, there's high-speed driving, there's dust that settles on the tires, and what we're using is two cheap motors that are less than a dollar each and they all vary slightly and change over time. The tires change over time. You can't control something like this precisely without a lot of intelligence and computation. Five hundred times a second, we're oscillating the speeds of the rear to stick like glue to the virtual line. 

It was really complicated development, but we've gotten very precise. We're geeks and we actually did the math to see how precise we are now. Extrapolated out to real-world size, it'd be the equivalent of you taking your car and driving down 101 at 250 miles per hour with a concrete wall on either side within a tenth of an inch of your mirrors and being able to stay inside those boundaries. So, even when you are driving a car, the software is still running and doing the same things for you, so it's able to help you drive well beyond your means. And it makes you feel like you are driving with ridiculous precision and ability, which is a core part of the game. That's what levels the playing field. The entire time you're controlling the car, you're getting assistance. All of this robotics and AI and dealing with uncertainty. All of that is such that at some point we started to forget that it is a physical game and we are really programming a videogame that takes place in the real world.

Up and away they go, humans sailing off this Earth and into space. The first half of the video is a joy, a testament to the ingenuity and courage that has repeatedly lifted astronauts right off the planet. The second half is heartbreak, as every little square but one fades out, successful -- all except that little patch of blue where the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in the sky in 1986.

In the second row from the bottom, eight from the left, you can also see the 2003 launch of Columbia. Though its launch was successful, that mission too ended in tragedy when the shuttle disintegrated upon reentry 16 days later. 

(And yes, this video has been around for a while, but I'd never seen it before and I'm probably not the only one.)

For more work by McLean Fahnestock, visit http://www.mcleanfahnestock.com/.

Middle Devonian silica shale, pyrite fossils (jsj1771/Flickr)

Roughly 375 million years ago, the Earth underwent one of the most mysterious disasters in geological history. Over a period of several million years, the number of species on the planet dropped off by 75 percent. But that's not the weird part -- mass extinctions have wiped out similar numbers of creatures, in even shorter time frames, at least five times in the past 500 million years. What's strange about this particular mass extinction is that it doesn't seem to have been caused by a spike in the number of species dying out. Instead, new species weren't evolving. For hundreds of thousands of years, there were almost no new life forms replacing the ones that were going extinct at a typical rate.

Paleobiologists call this unusual scenario a depression in speciation. It happened at the end of the Devonian period, a geological timeframe when Earth's ecosystems were in such chaos that it was as if evolution ground to a halt. In a healthy ecosystem, you expect to see about one species in a million go extinct every year. You also expect that some species will speciate, or evolve into one or more new species, too. The constant evolution of new species keeps ecosystems diverse, with a relatively stable balance between predator and prey animals, along with many plants and other life forms. But during the late Devonian, biodiversity plummeted. Not enough species were evolving to replace the ones that died out.

So what happened? This is a point of some debate among scientists who study the period, but we have a few compelling pieces of evidence that suggest the problem was not a natural disaster like an asteroid impact or supervolcano. Instead, the proliferation of new life forms, including trees on land and invasive fish in the oceans, may have caused the evolutionary equivalent of a baby bust.

I learned about this while researching my new book, Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction. Before we survive, however, we need to understand what destroyed the world in previous eons.

The Devonian was a time when life on Earth was evolving very rapidly. Some paleontologists have called it the "age of fishes," because the seas were filled with huge, rapidly diversifying fish -- some fully plated in armor, and many with long, sharp teeth. Enormous reefs created their own ecosystems that wound in long, sinuous curves across the ocean floors. Most of these reefs were dominated by sponges, and they might have looked a lot smoother than today's coral reef systems. The seas were a big part of continental life too. Massive inland oceans covered large parts of the continents, such as the area we now call the Great Basin in the Americas.

But ocean life wasn't the only game in town. The Devonian was also the period when trees evolved. Plants that had been relatively small and ocean-dependent developed vascular systems, roots, and seeds. This allowed them to grow into giants that survived far from the coastal regions and oceans that had once been the main provenance of Earth's flora. As trees spread all across the continents, their root systems broke up the topsoil and created unprecedented amounts of nutrient runoff into the water -- in some ways similar to runoff from factory farms today. Trees began to change the environment, and then the climate.

There were moments during the Devonian when temperatures fluctuated dramatically, causing sea levels to rise and fall. Paleobotanists believe that the trees may have enriched the atmosphere with so much oxygen that temperatures dropped, causing an ice age that locked up seawater in ice. At that point, sea levels would have fallen and killed off many coastal species. But there were also cycles of hot, greenhouse conditions in which ocean levels rose even as the waters became acidic, killing off all of the reef systems and the lifeforms that depended on them.

New species would be less likely to evolve in habitats where conditions are changing too fast for creatures to adapt to them. Indeed, we are seeing extinctions on Earth for this reason right now: habitat change is causing amphibian dieoffs in the Americas, and ocean acidification is wrecking reef life.

Still, these kinds of climate changes are not enough to explain the dramatic dropoff in species diversity we see at the end of the Devonian period.

One paleobiologist, Alycia Stigall, believes that Devonian sea-level fluctuations may have caused another problem, too: Invasive species. Many of the inland oceans were full of "specialist species," creatures and plants that thrive in very specific habitats. They may only be able to survive when temperatures are in a certain range, or they may eat only one kind of food that lives in just one place. Contained ecosystems, like an inland sea or an island, are usually packed with specialist species. Generalist species, like sharks (whose ancestors lived during the Devonian), are able to live in a wide range of environments and eat many kinds of food.

Stigall believes that it's possible the rising sea levels connected inland oceans for long periods of time, allowing generalist species to move between these contained ecosystems. Soon, every inland ocean would have been packed with sharks and other generalists, who dominated food webs -- the web of connections between predator and prey -- and pushed specialist species to the margins. There was a kind of environmental homogenization. Instead of speciating, or evolving into several new species, the generalists just moved into new environments. And the specialists died out at a natural rate, leaving no evolutionary heirs because their specialist niches had been overrun by the generalists.

The Devonian ended with a slow-motion apocalypse in which life destroyed life. Trees transformed both the landscape and the climate, and as a result invasive species froze the evolutionary processes that kept life diverse in the oceans.

There are a lot of parallels between the world of 375 million years ago and the world of today. Humans have moved many invasive species around, from rats to kudzu, and made it hard for specialist species to survive. Our food webs are unraveling. And a world of homogenous ecosystems is primed for disaster, Stigall warns. Without biodiversity, a healthy mix of specialist and generalist species, a single plant disease could wipe out all the grass in a vast region. Plant loss would be intense. That would kill off grass-eating animals, and in turn kill off the predators that feed on them. We'd be looking at a future scarred by famines, all across the planet's ecosystems.

For scientists like Stigall, problems with invasive species today could be a harbinger of planetary demise on the scale of a mass extinction. Of course, eventually Earth's biodiversity recovered. We know that it's possible to restore ecosystems from near-collapse. The question is whether humans can prevent a Devonian-style depression from hitting again.

"It took four years," Mike Olbinski writes, "but I finally got it."

What he got, in this case, was an amazing -- and, quite literally, awesome -- timelapse of a supercell: a rotating thunderstorm that is almost, but not quite, a tornado. The storm here was "not just a rotating supercell," Olbinski notes, "but one with insane structure and amazing movement."

This particular storm occurred in Texas -- near the town of Booker, in the northeasternmost corner of the state. Olbinski, a wedding photographer and part-time storm chaser, has been visiting the Central Plains, he says, since 2010. And on his fourth trip to the region, he came upon the storm.

Here's how Olbinski turned "raging storm" into "numinous video":

We chased this storm from the wrong side (north) and it took us going through hail and torrential rains to burst through on the south side. And when we did ... this monster cloud was hanging over Texas and rotating like something out of Close Encounters.

The timelapse was shot on a Canon 5D Mark II with a Rokinon 14mm 2.8 lens. It's broken up into four parts. The first section ends because it started pouring on us. We should have been further south when we started filming but you never know how long these things will last, so I started the timelapse as soon as I could.

One thing to note early on in the first part is the way the rain is coming down on the right and actually being sucked back into the rotation. Amazing.

A few miles south is where part two picks up. And I didn't realize how fast it was moving south, so part three is just me panning the camera to the left. During that third part you can see dust along the cornfield being pulled into the storm as well...part of the strong inflow.

The final part is when the storm had started dying out and we shot lightning as it passed over us.

Between the third and fourth portions we drove through Booker, Texas where tornado sirens were going off ... it was creepy as all heck. And intense.

What's amazing, though, is how Olbinski's medium has transformed the storm into something whose creepiness -- and even whose intensity -- are easy to forget. A storm in proximity is much different from a storm seen through the comforting distance of a lens and a laptop; through Olbinski's rendering, with help from Kevin MacLeod's score, the supercell becomes an object of aesthetic wonder. You have to remind yourself that, to people who lack the luxury of a screen, a storm like this is not merely wondrous. It is also terrifying.

For more work by Mike Olbinski, visit http://www.mikeolbinski.com/.

Cyborgs are here -- or, at least, they're in DARPA laboratories.

For a while now, the Defense Department agency, alongside civilian researchers, has been working to develop prosthetic limbs that can be controlled by the brains -- as in, the thoughts -- of their wearers.

And one of the most promising of those prosthetic devices, especially for near-term, practical application, has been something that emphasizes the "man" in "bionic man." (Or, of course, the "woman" in "bionic woman.") DARPA, through its Reliable Neural-Interface Technology (RE-NET) program, has developed a prosthetic interface that relies on "targeted muscle re-innervation." TMR works, DARPA says, by essentially "rewiring nerves from amputated limbs," allowing the wearer of a given prosthetic to control the device with his or her existing muscles. The approach relies on signals, from nerves or muscles or both at the same time, to control the prosthetics and provide direct sensory feedback to the wearer. Limb to brain and back again.

The Department of Defense, which both knows of and has a vested interest in such things, sums up RE-NET's limb-inal efforts like so: "Basically, they're working on a bionic limb interface that will allow amputees to control their bionic limbs with their brains."

Yep, basically. The interface, at this point, is not necessarily graceful. It is not necessarily foolproof. But it offers a way for amputees to interact with their environment much more readily -- and much more meaningfully -- than they might otherwise be able to. Things like a one-handed pick-up of a coffee cup could now be, quite literally, within an amputee's grasp.

In the video above, former Army Staff Sgt. Glen Lehman, who was injured in Iraq, demonstrates the new-and-improved TMR technology. Scroll ahead to the 30-second mark to watch Lehman almost effortlessly grasp a scarf with his mechanical hand. Which is pretty amazing, when you think about it.

In most pictures of a solar eclipse, the face of the moon you see is a black sphere, as in the image above. With the sun directly on the other side of the moon from us, the side we see is entirely in the shadows, a black hole.

Visualization specialists at NASA decided to fill in that space. Working off an image collected on October 7, 2010, Scott Wiessinger and Ernie Wright matched imagery of the lunar landscape directly onto where it would have appeared had there been any light shining on it. They were extremely precise -- using animation software to get the angles, distances, and features all into their proper places around the sphere. In the end, according to a NASA press release, "The two images were put together and the overlay was exact. The mountains and valleys on the horizon of the LRO [Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter] picture fit right into the shadows seen by SDO [Solar Dynamics Observatory]."

The resulting image doesn't look quite real -- and of course, by a certain definition, it's not: You could never see this during an eclipse. And yet, that is what's there, and thanks to a little computer software and a lot of careful observation, we can see it.

For a side-by-side comparison:

Facebook has a billion users -- and they're about to start seeing hashtags, you know, #these #things. The practice of putting a pound symbol before a key word or phrase or acronym began on Twitter, when one guy, Chris Messina, suggested that Twitter allow them. 

On August 25, 2007, Messina wrote up his proposal and posted it to his blog. Here's how he framed it. "I do think that there is certainly some merit to improving contextualization, content filtering and exploratory serendipity within Twitter," he said. "This is a rather messy proposal to that effect."

While people around him were talking about creating official "groups" on Twitter, Messina said he was "more interested in simply having a better eavesdropping experience on Twitter." So, looking around the web landscape at the time, which was quite different, he came up with a simple system that drew on preexisting conventions to create new functionality within Twitter. He imagined that each hashtag would create a (temporary) channel, analogous to an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel. Here's his condensed set of arguments for creating this new convention:

it is easily accessible adapting current Twitter syntax and convention, it's easy to learn and lightweight, it's very flexible and entirely folksonomic and works with people's current behaviors, rather than forcing anyone to learn anything radically new. It also keeps the interface aspects to a minimum (as I'll soon explain), invents little by borrowing from age old IRC conventions also adopted by an existing web application and, from what Britt said so far, actually works consistently on cell phones (whereas, for example, the star key does not).

Now, the rest of his proposal goes into a lot more detail, and what he initially envisioned was more robust than what Twitter actually implemented. But wow, was Messina onto something. Hashtags have gone to become an integral part (perhaps too integral a part) of many people's Twitter experiences. And now Facebook, the largest social network on the planet, is going to adopt them.

The history of any invention is complicated, as Messina's foundational post details, but this is one case in which some individual human being -- in the right place at the right time with the right contacts -- came up with something new and watched the whole (online) world adopt it. That's pretty amazing when you think about it.

Update: Wired's Sonal Chokshi reminded me that Messina didn't actually name the hash tag. The closest he came was, "To join a channel, simply add a tag hash (#)" in his suggested usage. The honor for the name goes to Stowe Boyd, who Tweeted on August 25, "I support the hash tag convention."

Eventually people got rid of the space, and "hashtag" was born. Ben Zimmer has all the details.

NASA

Sometimes an unusual landscape here on our little planet prompts Earthlings to exclaim, "It looks like Mars!" And it's true, some of Earth's redder and dustier haunts do resemble our neighbor planet. But Mars also has certain features that could never appear on Earth, and one of those is something called "linear gullies," and they're pretty beautiful.

NASA

What are these things? Well, that's what NASA scientists were wondering, too. On Earth, when water flows down a slope it will leave a triangular deposit known as a "debris apron." But these furrows on Mars could run for more than a mile, and then end suddenly in a pit. What caused these gashes, and where did whatever it was go?

The culprit, scientists believe, was frozen carbon dioxide and it turned into a gas. According to a new report, the lines were carved out by dry ice, frozen during the Martian winter. As the ice sublimated, the gas acted as a sort of cushion for the solid piece as it slid down the Martian hillside. "This process wouldn't happen on Earth," said NASA scientist Serina Diniega in a press release. "You don't get blocks of dry ice on Earth unless you go buy them."

"I have always dreamed of going to Mars," Diniega mused. "Now I dream of snowboarding down a Martian sand dune on a block of dry ice."

A video from NASA shows the scientists recreating the process on some terrestrial dunes:

Marcin Wichary/Flickr

Last month, the Navy personnel chief sent out a note on behalf of Fleet CyberCommand with an important message: ALL-CAPS COMMUNIQUES WERE NO LONGER NECESSARY.

Since the middle of the 19th century, Naval messages have been typed in just the upper-case, Navy Times reported, but that era finally, mercifully, came to an end. Though not everybody's happy about it.

"You have a lot of folks that have been around for a long time and are used to uppercase and they just prefer that it stay there because of the standardized look of it," James McCarty, a messaging program manager at Fleet Cyber Command told the Times.

My question was: Why use all-caps text at all? It turns out that it's a vestige of the machines that were once used to create and send messages. The Navy was an early adopter of teletype machines, which used a five-bit character to represent letters. The so-called Baudot code only gave them 32 options (2^5), as you can see here, so each and every character was precious. In those limited circumstances, why would you have two identical libraries of letters differing only in case? Well, you wouldn't, and so they didn't.

Of course, we no longer have those limitations and haven't for decades, but in tech, old habits die hard.

Honey bees are having a hard time of it. They're facing pesticides that can gradually weaken their bodies. They're dealing with parasitic mites that can impede young bees' development. They're existing within human monocultures that limit their nutritional diversity. All those things combined can lead to colony collapse disorder, a phenomenon in which worker bees abruptly disappear, dooming the entire hive -- and threatening agricultural stability in the process.

Researchers at Washington State University think they've found a possible solution to those problems. It involves bees from both the United States and Europe. It involves liquid nitrogen. And it involves a sperm bank. One that is, probably, really, really tiny.

Technically, the thing will be known as a "bee genome repository" -- a sperm bank that will make use of liquid nitrogen to freeze semen gathered from different colonies of honey bees. 

"We're trying to diversify the U.S. honey bee gene pool," explains Washington State's Susan Cobey. There are 28 recognized subspecies of honey bee, spread across Europe, Africa, and Asia. And the best chance bees have to fight the threats they're facing is to interbreed, producing offspring that might stand a better chance of fighting parasites and infections. 

But in 1922, the U.S., in an effort to halt the spread of a previous bee-killer, restricted the importation of live honey bees into the country. Which means that the colonies based in the U.S. and those based elsewhere have been -- both by law and by accident -- genetically removed from each other.

So Cobey and her team are planning to do in a lab what can't currently be done in the field. Genetic cross-breeding methods, they hope, will produce more diverse, resilient honey bee subspecies -- and the existence of those beneficiaries of hybrid vigor could in turn help to thwart the nation's current colony collapse crisis.

So, then. How does one go about ... collecting the bee semen? According to Sue Cobey: "In general terms, if you apply a tiny amount of pressure to a mature drone's abdomen, it will push out the semen, which can be collected in a syringe equipped with a capillary tube."

Live semen will survive at room temperature for about 10-14 days, allowing Cobey to collect it and transport it back to her laboratory, where it can be frozen or injected into a selected queen bee's oviduct, to fertilize it.

The semen will be collected from the strongest and best stock in Europe, then injected into the strongest and best queen bee stock from the United States, thereby helping to strengthen and diversify U.S. bee colonies.

The question of how to store honey bee genetic material for years, as is already the practice with other animals of agricultural importance, has been solved with the help of Sheppard's graduate student Brandon Hopkins. Hopkins discovered that liquid nitrogen maintains the semen viability for decades, helping preserve imperiled subspecies in a honey bee genetic repository.

Reuters

Facebook's future depends on succeeding on mobile phones, as questions about Facebook Home at the company's shareholder meeting once again made clear. Whatever Facebook says about the product now, they sold Home hard, and it has not lived up to its billing.

There's a simple, almost mechanical reason that it's hard for Facebook to be as good and user-satisfying on the phone as it is on the desktop: feedback.

On the desktop, Facebook is a machine designed to make itself better. They hoover up data about how you're using every piece of the service. They A/B (or A/X) test every single part of the user experience. Based on all that feedback, they tweak and tweak and tweak. Then, they do it all over again. Disputes can be settled by simply testing alternatives on a small base of users: may the best data win. And they can do all this quickly because on the web, Facebook can change the code any time they damn well please (although mostly once a week on Tuesdays).

Now, think about the mobile world. Apple and Google control distribution. You have to send your app to them and get it approved. You can't send one app to 0.1 percent of your users and then another app to the other 99.9. You can't iterate on your own schedule. In short, they know less and can do less.

Put it all together: the Facebook innovation machine, the most successful engagement machine the web has ever known, does not work in mobile. Some of the company's key success factors are just missing or not possible within the current corporate and technological constraints. And the numbers show that: on the Google Play store, Instagram rates a 4.6, Twitter rates a 4.0. Facebook's apps: the standard mobile app and Home, come in at 3.6 and 3.0. It's not that Facebook is making bad apps, only that their apps are not -- as the website has been -- dominant.

Facebook has to go by feel now. Before a big product release like Home, they mostly can only test on their own employees. And that's a problem. Facebook employees are essentially required to live on Facebook. Unlike many normal people, who spread their presence across many networks -- Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, LinkedIn, G+ -- Facebook's employees tend to concentrate their usage within Facebook. When they try something like Facebook Home out, it may be great for them because they mostly want access to Facebook.

I wonder if Facebook employees have actually done *too much* dogfooding, a artful term that means using one's own product. Just to keep the metaphor going: they've developed a palate that doesn't reflect what normal canines might want.

On the web, that didn't matter as much, intuitions could be tested easily and robustly. On mobile, what feels right to Facebook's designers and engineers does matter because there's less data to win arguments with.

For me, that's the best argument for the Instagram acquisition. Kevin Systrom and his team have a great feel for what people want to do on their phones. Can they successfully transfer that phronesis, that "practical wisdom," to Facebook? And if they do, will they be able to retain their independence?

Internet, there is a new meme among us. It is beefy. It is fluffy. It is adorable. Its name is #fluffycow.

Well, technically, the thing should really be named #fluffybull: the animals in question here tend to be male. They're show steer. But as Farm Progress sensibly notes, "'fluffy bulls' doesn't have quite the same ring to it." Plus, the name could be seen as "a little emasculating to the bull."

So what do you need to know about the phenomenon that challenges so many of our conventional assumptions about cattle, coats, and the proper use of hair products? Nothing. But what might you want to know about it? If you're anything like me, a lot. Below, a brief explainer: 

So what, exactly, is a #fluffycow?

Basically, it's a cow or bull (or adorable, adorable calf) that has been primped and pampered into fluffiness. To delighful -- and sometimes slightly terrifying -- effect.

How did the #fluffycow meme start?

It started with a farm in Iowa called Lautner Farms, which regularly participates in stock shows. One of Lautner's pictures of a fluffed-up show entrant was posted to Reddit (thread: "Check out these fluffy ass cows!"), where it made an understandably quick trip to wider audiences. From there, the #fluffycow meme trended on Twitter. And, earlier today, it was documented in a Buzzfeed listicle headlined "11 Reasons Fluffy Cows Are The New Micropigs."

How do the cattle get so fluffy? Are they bred to be that way?

Again, pampered into fluffiness. The coifs the creatures are sporting are the result of some painstaking hairstyling. The ranchers, rather than nature, have created the amazing hairdos you see on the fluffy cows. With the help of young members of organizations like 4-H and Future Farmers of America, the ranchers are doubling as bovine aestheticians. 

And their strategy is, like so many winning beauty routines, a matter of ongoing maintenance. It can take months of "daily care" (and sometimes twice-daily care) to coax the cattle into their full, fluffy-coated glory. There's the washing. And the clipping. And the special oils (meant to give cows' coats that special touchable, fluffable softness). 

Oh, and the blow-drying. And the hairspray. (The hairspray!) "Styling a cow for showtime," per one report, "can take around 2 hours and requires hairspray to keep all that fuzz in place and oil to make their coats shine."

So, wait. If they're getting primped for shows ... that means the fluffy cows are going to be auctioned off to the highest bidder? They're getting all fancied up just be sold to be eaten?

Yes. (Sorry.) As Lautner Farms explains it, the intricate beauty routine "is all in an effort to earn the attention of a judge, who evaluates the animals -- not just for the presentation of their hair, but for other merits like carcass quality (for market animals) or breeding traits (for heifers and bulls)."

And, to be clear:

At the end of the day, programs like 4-H, FFA and junior breed associations are not only teaching youth how to prepare for a big event and present their animals to the best of their abilities, but these kids also learn from a young age that these cattle will ultimately provide tender steaks, juicy burgers and beef by-products (like insulin for diabetics, for example, or simple things like makeup and deodorants) to feed and nourish families.

What do ranchers think of all the #fluffycows stuff?

Actually, the whole thing has caused some vehement debate in the cattle-raising industry. One the one hand, publicity! On the other hand ... it might not be in the best interest of cattle ranchers to have "beef" and "adorable" used in such close proximity to one another.  "Not everyone associated with the beef industry," Farm Progress puts it, "was pleased to have the attention of the media and John Q. Public focused squarely on the beef biz -- or more to the point, on the show cattle segment in particular."

As Beef Magazine asked on its Beef Daily blog: "Should We Fear Lovable Fluffy Cows?" (The answer: sort of. "In my opinion," wrote the columnist, "we're doing ourselves a huge disservice by referring to our show stock as 'cute,' 'fluffy' or any other affectionate tag you might use to describe a kitten, puppy or baby. However, I do believe this is an opportunity to speak to our consumers now that we've got their attention. Let's seize this chance to direct the conversation where we want it to go.")

Wait, #fluffycow reminds me of something, but I can't quite remember what ...

That would probably be Emo Cows, a meme from the early 2000s. You're welcome.

NLshop/Shutterstock

For some liberals, last week's Senate panel on corporate taxes might have caused a double take. As Apple CEO Timothy Cook testified about its global tax avoidance practices, Republican Senator Rand Paul stood up to defend the company. Huh? Isn't it liberal Democrats who are supposed to support Silicon Valley tech companies? Google chairman Eric Schmidt has deep ties to the current administration. Hillary Clinton's State Department asked favors of Twitter, and it complied. Obama is the first president ever to appoint a chief technology officer.

Just a week earlier, George Packer kicked off an interesting conversation about Silicon Valley's politics in The New Yorker. Based on observations about tech oligarchs bypassing traditional politics, Packer suggests that there's a deeply libertarian streak running through the Valley. Writer Steven Johnson disagrees, noting that Bay Area residents vote overwhelmingly Democrat, and suggesting an alternate narrative of "peer progressivism," in which fiscally liberal citizens solve societal problems in a decentralized, (digitally) networked way.

Packer and Johnson both throw insightful darts, but neither has quite hit the mark. That's because the central political value that animates Silicon Valley is neither libertarianism nor progressivism. It's meritocracy. Meritocracy can appear to be socially liberal, because it doesn't discriminate on the basis of race, religion, politics, socio-economic background, sexual orientation, or nation of origin. And, meritocracy can look libertarian because it abhors anything -- be it government, social convention, or four years of college -- obstructing talent's rise to the top. And where do these forces intersect? In immigration reform, where the meritocratic impulse is to crush both nationalist and unionist opposition to importing high-end skill.

But while meritocracy is a vast improvement over discrimination by traditional prejudices, it still privileges some people over others. And in Silicon Valley, privilege is heaped upon individualistic entrepreneurial capacity.

Where does that leave progressivism? Well, one thing to note is that as much as young liberals may love their digital gadgets, tech companies -- as corporations, not as aggregates of employed individuals -- are just as politically promiscuous as other corporations. As if to underscore this point, The New York Times ran a story a few days ago about Google's lobbying efforts, which lean slightly Republican. Susan Molinari, Google's chief lobbyist in D.C. is a "brassy, well-connected New York Republican who served seven years in the House." Large corporations -- even Silicon Valley darlings headed by privately left-leaning CEOs -- are equal-opportunity peddlers of political influence. As Packer notes in a follow-up article, technology companies are just like oil companies in being another special interest.

But putting aside corporate political straddling, are Silicon Valley's values ultimately aligned with liberal values? Here, it's useful to extrapolate to what might happen under a Silicon Valley meritocracy. Wealth and power would go to the smartest, most entrepreneurial people while less smart, less capable people would be jobless or relegated to low-paid labor. Under a tech-industry meritocracy, the axis of inequality would differ from more traditional discrimination by class, race, or religion, but the fact of inequality would remain, and possibly be aggravated. In fact, Packer's article amply demonstrates how this is already true in and around Palo Alto.

But don't we want our decision makers to be smart, productive people? What's wrong with a world in which greater intellects hold more power and win greater rewards? At least two things: First, intelligence and productivity are important, but they're secondary virtues, compared with goodness and sincerity. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions marred by stupidity, but bad intentions backed by brains are hypersonic jet transport to fire and brimstone. The difference was on full display when Cook testified. The Apple CEO is undoubtedly very smart, and on the Senate panel, he revealed a razor sharp social intelligence to boot. Yet, the words that came out of his mouth must rank with "we didn't know tobacco was bad for you" in their insincerity: "We not only comply with the laws, but we comply with the spirit of the laws. We don't depend on tax gimmicks." Really?

The second is that a meritocracy can be just as bad as any other "-ocracy" in reinforcing inequalities unless each generation ensures a fair distribution of merit. Unfortunately, American institutions for nurturing merit -- such as its system of formal education -- are only becoming less and less egalitarian. Public school funding remains linked to local property taxes, causing cumulative disadvantage; private schooling is becoming the default for rich, "meritocratic" parents, who then care less about what happens in the public system; college is increasingly unaffordable for even the firmly middle class.

So, are Silicon Valley millionaires and billionaires are ultimately different from other millionaires and billionaires? On the one hand, as Alec MacGillis astutely calls out at the New Republic, there is their great hypocrisy: How can tech firms lobby for immigration reform on the basis of insufficient homegrown talent, all while avoiding the taxes that would foster homegrown talent? But Steven Johnson is also right: There is a strong progressive core among elite tech politics. The problem so far has been that private values don't seep through into public-facing corporate policy. Will tech titans use their newfound influence in politics to restructure a fairer base of merit? Or will they, like robber barons of previous generations, rig the game to reward their own "merit"? The jury is still out. But, I hope for once that their hearts win out over their brilliance in catering to "shareholder value."

nickboos/Flickr

As people have tried to make sense of the recent revelations about the government's mass data-collection efforts, one classic text is experiencing a spike in popularity: George Orwell's 1984 has seen a 7,000 percent increase in sales over the last 24 hours.*

But wait! This is the wrong piece of literature for understanding the NSA's programs, argues legal scholar Daniel J. Solove. In his book, The Digital Person, Solove writes that the troubles with the collection of massive amounts of personal data in databases are distinct from those of government surveillance, the latter being the focus of 1984. He summed up his argument in a later paper (emphasis added):

Many commentators had been using the metaphor of George Orwell's 1984 to describe the problems created by the collection and use of personal data. I contended that the Orwell metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance (such as inhibition and social control) might be apt to describe law enforcement's monitoring of citizens. But much of the data gathered in computer databases is not particularly sensitive, such as one's race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status. Many people do not care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own or rent, or the kind of beverages they drink. People often do not take many steps to keep such information secret. Frequently, though not always, people's activities would not be inhibited if others knew this information.

I suggested a different metaphor to capture the problems: Franz Kafka's The Trial, which depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people's information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used. The problems captured by the Kafka metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition or chilling. Instead, they are problems of information processing--the storage, use, or analysis of data--rather than information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but they also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

This reframing that Solove proposes is important not as a matter of literary criticism but because it more precisely pinpoints the problems the NSA programs could create. Politically, the traditional explanations -- that this is a violation of our privacy -- don't seem convincing to many people. According to a new Pew poll, 56 percent of Americans approve of the NSA's phone-data collection and 45 percent of email monitoring. Sixty-two percent say it is more important to investigate terror threats than it is to avoid privacy intrusions.

The most convincing reasoning for the majority's position is, in Solove's view, "formidable." He writes, "The NSA surveillance, data mining, or other government informationgathering programs will result in the disclosure of particular pieces of information to a few government officials, or perhaps only to government computers. This very limited disclosure of the particular information involved is not likely to be threatening to the privacy of law-abiding citizens." In other words, for many Americans, digital data collection, analyzed by algorithm, does not amount to a serious invasion of their privacy. In this calculation, the amount of privacy traded away is small, and the potential security gains great. This is a trade many Americans are willing to make, and not irrationally.

So, why then are the NSA's programs troubling? It's not so much in the collection of the data per se (the surveillance part) but the holding and processing of that data in perpetuity. As Solove writes (emphasis added):

The NSA program involves a massive database of information that individuals cannot access. Indeed, the very existence of the program was kept secret for years. This kind of information processing, which forbids people's knowledge or involvement, resembles in some ways a kind of due process problem. It is a structural problem involving the way people are treated by government institutions. Moreover, it creates a power imbalance between individuals and the government. To what extent should the Executive Branch and an agency such as the NSA, which is relatively insulated from the political process and public accountability, have a significant power over citizens? This issue is not about whether the information gathered is something people want to hide, but rather about the power and the structure of government.

Privacy is hard to define and even harder to defend. The legal scholar Arthur Miller called it "exasperatingly vague and evanescent." Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis famously described it as the "right to be let alone" (something that the NSA's programs can only very indirectly be characterized as violating, since they operate without interfering with us pretty much at all). In Solove's formulation, we should ease off the privacy hand-wringing and turn our attention to something much more fundamental: how we relate as citizens to our government and how much power we have in that relationship. 

Take this rainbow of lines that captures the incoming audience to TheAtlantic.com in a recent month. The blue line tracks users who type in our Web address or bookmark our site directly; the purple line follows those who arrived via search; the red line reports links from other sites; the green line monitors referrals from social media.

That seems clear enough. But it turns out we (and no doubt other publishers) are only getting part of the picture. What's missing in this data--or, to be more accurate, what's captured in this data but not broken out in any useful way--is traffic that comes from sharing but is not generated by the familiar pillars of the so-called sharing economy: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, Digg, StumbleUpon.

The stories that fall between the cracks are those that are passed around in casual ways, outside the social media super-structure, millions of times a day. "Most of the time," writes Alexis Madrigal, "someone Gchatted someone a link, or it came in on a big email distribution list, or your dad sent it to you."

Alexis, who is the tech editor at TheAtlantic.com, gave a name to this black hole of traffic: dark social. These sorts of referrals are not broken out in the chart above. But they represent a large part of the audiences we all receive. At The Atlantic, our director of analytics, Adam Felder, estimates that dark social accounts for about one-quarter of all referrals to our sites.

So where's it coming from? Since those four lines in the graph add up to all of our traffic, readers arriving under cover of dark social are stealing market share from one of the other categories. Specifically, dark social is coming out of typed/bookmarked category, which is the catch-all bucket for sources of traffic that can't really be traced. Adjusting for that fact suggests the true power of user sharing: nearly half of The Atlantic's traffic, as an example, is coming through the combination of traditional and dark social.

None of this surprised Alexis. Growing up in rural Washington, he spent a lot of time in the pre-Twitter social world: bulletin boards, ICQ, and other virtual hangouts of tech-minded mid-90s adolescents. So more than a decade later, he wasn't buying the idea that social networks had somehow birthed a new social Web. Sharing was sharing; the tools were just getting better.

Then Alexis saw how Chartbeat was dividing visitors who showed up without referrer data into two categories. The first group was people who were going to a home page or landing page. The second was people going to any other page. This second set, Chartbeat figured, were users following a link, because nobody actually types in http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/what-the-man-who-first-summited-everest-thought-of-the-first-american-to-orbit-earth/276305/, for example. Chartbeat called them direct social. Madrigal was ecstatic. "They'd found a way to quantify dark social, even if they'd given it a lamer name!"

So why should we care about dark social? As editors and publishers, we need a clear understanding of where our audiences are coming from. There's a false sense of security in believing a greater portion of our audience is coming in through typed/bookmarked than is really the case. Our audience, it turns out, may not be loyal repeat visitors after all.

On the other hand, if there are more visitors coming in through the social side door--the Facebook/Twitter axis plus everyday dark social--well, that tells us something about the content we are creating: It works! People are sharing it. People want others to see it. In the sharing economy, quality wins. And if that sharing economy is bigger than we realized, quality matters more than ever.

Our new understanding of dark social comes just as analytics gurus are coming to realize there's something quirky going on with search referrals. BuzzFeed, in a post titled "Where Did All the Search Traffic Go," notes that traffic from search engines to digital publishers has dropped 30 percent from September 2012 to April 2013. Some of that is an actual decline in the power of search as the sharing economy takes off. But some, alas, is the result of incomplete data.

As Digiday's Jack Marshall explains, Safari and Firefox - in certain circumstances--are not passing along accurate referral information when users click through from search. That means search is undercounted, and no one knows quite how much. Danny Sullivan, the search engine expert and consultant, has dubbed this delta, of course, Dark Google.

The challenge now is to find a way out of all this darkness. If we can't see where we are, we can't know where we're going.

Ackerman's unofficial title for his piece of photographic artwork? "WWDC explained in one photo." And, indeed. Though Tim Cook et al might beg to differ, the image certainly does explain at least one noteworthy aspect of such a developer's conference: specifically, its dearth of ladyfolk.

Which is why this particular type of photo -- evidence of one particular part of, er, technology's sausage being made -- has become a trope at tech-related confabs. The images document something funny and a little bit sad. They're evidence and wry commentary at the same time. They're the photographic version of the delightful Twitter account @WomenInLine, which exists to promote women in tech, it says, "so we can achieve the ultimate goal of having to wait in line at a software conference ladies' room."

Here's another entry in the genre, this one from the 2013 Consumer Electronics Show and shot by Kelly Clay:

And here's one from what looks to be the 2012 WWCD:

And here's one of the men's room alone shot at an unnamed "tech trade show" by Sarah Silbert:

And here's this year's Google I/O, this one from Engadget's Darren Murph:

And here's a shot from a 2012 Google Publishers Conference. It was taken by Callie Schweitzer, who noted that there was "no line for the ladies room":

And here's a men's room line from the 2009 Big Omaha conference for entrepreneurs and investors:

And here's the "endless men's room line," via Jeffrey Zeldman, at the 2012 South by Southwest:

And here's a shot of the 2011 TechEd conference. (Per the photographer, Kasia Lorenc, "Only at TechEd is there a line to the men's room and NOT the woman's room.")

Aaaaand ... here's a shot from the 2009 TED conference. It was taken by Katrina Alcorn, who noted with a mix of regret and delight that "the women's line only had 3 people":