"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

The Post consulted various government agencies, none of which admitted to having deployed robotic insects.  The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, however, had actually tried to develop such a device back in the 1970s--the insectothopter robotic dragonfly, which contained a tiny gasoline engine that powered four flapping wings. Reportedly, the insectothopter actually managed to fly, but reported was scrapped because it could not handle crosswinds. Perhaps as a result, Pentagon researchers veered off in a different direction, and began looking at attaching micro-electrical mechanical systems, or MEMS, to insects to create swarms of tiny, remote-controlled cyborg secret agents, capable of flying or crawling into enemy territory. (Here's a blog post that I wrote on that idea, a few years back.)

But now, robotics researchers at Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering actually have succeeded in creating an actual robotic insect, which they call the RoboBee. It's half the size of a penny and weighs less than 1/10th of a gram, but is capable of hovering in the air and flapping its wings 120 times per second. thanks to a pair of tiny ceramic muscles that have piezoelectric properties--that is, they contract in response to an electrical field. Here's a video.  

As this Science News article explains, the real significance of the RoboBee is that it may help scientists to understand the naunces of insect aviation--how flies manage to dart out of a flyswatter's path or land on a surface in the midst of a strong wind, for example. The RoboBee doesn't have any on-board power, sensors or controls, so it has to remain tethered. It's going to take a lot of additional work to get to the point where such a robot can fly freely, but it's conceivable that they'll be buzzing around on their own in the near future. 

Meanwhile, scientists at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed a digital wide-angle camera with an "immense" depth of field that imitates the compound eyes found in dragonflies, bees, and other insects. The camera doesn't quite match nature in scale--it's slightly bigger in size than an entire bee--future miniaturized versions of the technology might give robotic insects the ability to produce some pretty detailed images. All of this could give being "bugged" a whole new meaning.

Want to see more flying bots? Check out these nano quadrotors from Outrageous Acts of Science!

As we move toward new and improved ways to interact with our 3D world new technologies will certainly change our daily lives. What are the implications on human interaction in the future? Check out the video below as Jonathan Strickland explains one possibility for the future of holograms.

Learn more about this series and catch more future-tech videos at the FW:Thinking website.

The last time UFOologists succeeded in getting any attention from Congress was in the late 1960s, when then-House minority leader Gerald Ford pushed for hearings after a spate of UFO sightings. The future President chided the U.S. Air Force for keeping its Project Blue Book findings under wraps, and proclaimed that "the American people are becoming alarmed by the UFO stories." But good luck getting anyone in office to issue a similar clarion call today.

A glance through the witness list suggests that the hearings probably won't break much new ground about UFOs, but instead will provide a sort of greatest-hits collection of evidence for extraterrestrial visitation. On Wednesday, for example, Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., author of a 2008 book on the Roswell incident, retold the story of how his father, a U.S. Army intelligence officer, brought home debris from the purported UFO crash site:

The debris consisted of three components: there was a very tough metallic foil; there was black plastic debris, like a broken phonograph record; but the strangest thing I saw was an I-beam in the wreckage. There were symbols written along the inside surface of it. They were of a purplish-violet hue, semi-reflective of light.

Former Maryland Congressman Bartlett admitted to his local paper, the Frederick Post, that he personally doubts that space aliens have landed on Earth, and that he's never seen any inklings of a government coverup. Nevertheless, he claims that he's got an open mind. "It's a huge universe out there," he said. "You have to be kind of presumptuous and arrogant to assume we're the only intelligent life in the universe."

Here's a Science Channel article on 10 tips for spotting UFOs and the top 10 alien sightings. Here's a look at the sort of propulsion an alien spacecraft might need to travel across interstellar space.

While I've written in the past about civil libertarians' concerns about RFID chips, I was tempted to poke fun at Norris for his conspiracy-minded alarmism, and question whether he'd been conked on the head a bit too hard while fighting a bear. That is, until I saw a recent article in the International Business Times, entitled "Invasion Of Privacy? RFID Tracking Kids On School Buses." The latter describes the Gordon Counta, Ga. school district's new pilot program to keep track of students on school buses through a system called StudentConnect, IBT reports that the technology combines Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology with a "passive" RFID chip--the sort that doesn't have its own power source and will only respond to a signal from a receiver device when it is nearby, rather than broadcasting a signal. (Here's a HowStuffWorks article on how RFID tagging works.)

Andrej Jeremic, executive for East Coast Diversified Corp,the company that makes the technology, told IBT that it is not a tracking device, but that it only notifies parents and school officials if a student deviates from his or her normal schedule: "If little Johnny is off playing in the arcade instead of on the bus, we can let his parents know he's not where he's supposed to be." But the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a civil-liberties group, contends that there's a slippery slope to RFID. "What you're doing is telling kids it's normal to be tracked," EPIC's Khaliah Barnes warned.

It turns out that Gordon County isn't the first place to use RFID to track students. School districts in California and Texas began using RFID badges to monitor students on school buses back in the mid-2000s. Moreover, in San Antonio, 4,200 high school and middle school students now are carrying a ID cards with embedded RFID chips, which allow school officials to identify them and track their movements inside their schools. As this 2012 San Antonio Express-News article details, school administrators hope to keep a better handle on attendance and to make campus services more efficient. Indeed, some high school students are happy with the badges, saying that the card reader in the school cafeteria speeds up the line, giving them more time to eat lunch. And they like being able to check out books from the library without waiting for the school's lone library staffer to help them.

Not everybody, though, likes the tags. In January, a federal judge ruled against a student who filed suit after being suspended from school for refusing to wear the badge. (The district did relent and give her permission to wear a RFID-free card.) Others wonder about whether the school district is holding onto the data it gathers, and what uses it might eventually put that information.

Again, these RFID chips are embedded in ID cards, not in the kids themselves, which should give some comfort to the conspiracy theorists worried about bearing the mark of the beast. Implantation in humans is something that a lot of futurists worried about a few years back, after a device called the VeriChip was cleared by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for medical patient identification in 2004. But it doesn't seem to have caught on, though the Israeli military bought some of the chips in 2011.

So what do you think? Should RFID be used to track school children? Or is it the first step toward a surveillance society? Express your opinion below.

Image Credit: © Sonja Pacho/Corbis

This Saturday at 10PM, Outrageous Acts of Science features people who've used themselves as guinea pigs as strange experiments -- including a man who volunteered to be tickled excessively, to the point where he appeared to pass out. As biologist Carin Bondar explains on the show, the subject appears to have suffered overstimulation of the vagus nerve, which can divert blood away from the brain and into the digestive system.

As unadvisable as this particular little stunt may seem, you might be surprised to know that bona fide scientists at times actually have performed much more dangerous experiments upon themselves. Back in 1933, for example, Dr. Allen Walker Blair an assistant professor at the University of Alabama school of medicine, became curious about the potency of the black widow spider's poisonous bite.

A sharp pain shot through his hand, quickly spread up to his shoulder. Violent abdominal cramps doubled him up. His blood pressure plummeted. Gasping with pain, Professor Blair insisted on having his heart action recorded on a cardiograph before he would take narcotics. Two days in a hospital gave him time to reflect on the "black widow's" virulency.

In a sense, though, Blair's experiment was successful, in that it yielded a definitive answer to the question. The effects of a black widow bite turned out to be similar to the symptoms of serious conditions such as a ruptured appendix, and extremely dangerous. But while Blair got a lot of notoriety for his daring research, there was a downside. According to this 1989 Tuscaloosa News article, he also ended up dying at the relatively young age  of 47, which some attribute to permanent damage to his heart caused by the black widow toxin. 

Plenty of other researchers have served as their own experimental subjects and risked their lives in the process, as this article from HowStuffWorks.com details. There was pioneering British neurologist Sir Henry Head, who in 1903, volunteered to have the radial nerve in his left arm severed and the two ends tied together, in an effort to see whether they would regenerate, and enable him to feel pain in his arm. (They did.) Czech monk-turned-physician Jan Purkinje deliberately ingested foxglove, a plant that slows the heart and can kill in large enough doses, so that he could describe its effects on vision. After Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann accidentally ingested LSD-25 in his lab in 1943 and discovered that it had mind-altering effects, he deliberately took a dose of 250 micrograms. On his bike ride home, Hofmann had a bizarre hallucinatory trip full of "extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors." Fortunately, he made it home alive. 

This Wall Street Journal article also mentions the case of Japanese pediatrician Shimesu Koino, who ate 2,000 eggs of an intestinal roundworm in order to study the life cycle of the organism firsthand. He became so severely ill that he began to cough up worms from his lungs. That article also cites two British doctors, Herbert Woollard and Edward Carmichael, who in the 1930s piled weights on their scrotums in order to study how the pain spread through their bodies. (They might not have gone through with it, if they'd have known that years later, a scientific journal would describe their painful work as "relatively informative."

While researchers talk about the "publish or perish" syndrome, it's mind-boggling to think of someone deliberately subjecting himself to severe pain and possibly grave injury, or even death, just to get an article into a scientific journal. But self-experimenters see themselves as performing a valuable service. Not only are they gathering difficult-to-obtain, often high-value information, but they're doing it without endangering other people. In Lawrence K. Altman's 1986 book Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine, bacteriologist Dr. Stephen D. Elek offers this rationale for injecting himself with a highly dangerous bacteria: 

We had to do it on ourselves before we did it on others, because we were venturing into the unknown...If anything goes wrong and [an experimental subject] dies, and the experimenter has not done the experiment upon himself, he is liable for murder. It's as simple as that. A man is entitled to risk his own life. He is not entitled to risk somebody else's.

But others see a paradoxical problem with this sort of seeming nobility: By taking risks with their own lives, critics argue, researchers may become inured to the notion of risk, so that they're more willing to expose experimental subjects to it. Here's an article about a 2004 Harvard University panel discussion in which some of these criticisms were raised. I can't help but think of the 1980s cult flick Repo Man, in which a crazed scientist drives around with radioactive extraterrestrial corpses in his trunk, and explains to a passenger: "Everybody could stand 100 chest x-rays a year. They ought to have them, too."

So what do you think about scientific self-experimentation? Express your opinion below.

Image Credit: Jono Smith

You've probably heard self-help gurus talk about the importance of clearing your mind, but Stanford University researchers have figured out a way to do that, literally. In a just-published paper in the scientific journal Nature, they describe a new process that they've invented for making a cadaver mouse brain transparent, so that scientists can get a three-dimensional look inside it without a computer simulation. To greatly simplify, the CLARITY process, as they've named it, involves washing away the fat that normally blocks the view of the brain's cells and replacing it with a see-through gel that holds the brain's structures in place so that they can be studied.

As a Stanford press release explains, neuroscientists no longer will have to make do with slices of brain tissue. Instead, they can examine brain's fine wiring of nerves and molecular structures, and measure and probe them at will with both visible light and chemical tests. So far, they've only tried the process on slivers of human brain tissue, but it's only a matter of time before they render a cadaver human brain transparent as well. 

A Los Angeles Times story on the research predicts that it will have a massive, transformational effect on neuroscience, generating mountains of data what will enable researchers to understand the brain's anatomy and how it is altered by diseases such as Alzheimer's or schizophrenia. Already, researchers have used CLARITY to peruse a tissue sample from the brain of a person with autism, and discovered a deeply buried neuron that "looped back on itself," in the words of Karl Deisseroth, the Stanford bioengineer who led the team. Though it will take a lot more work to figure out whether that abnormality has genuine significance, there's at least a glimmer of hope that it might turn out to provide an explanation for the disorder.

Here's a video from Nature's YouTube channel that illustrates how it all works.  

 Pretty amazing, huh? Probably the only thing that would be cooler would be if we could peer into a living brain. I'm waiting for transhumanist body hackers to come up with a clear plastic replacement for the skull and the skin that covers it, so that some adverturous soul can transform himself into something akin to the Revell Visible Man model that I had when I was a lad.

I was reminded of this when Griff's hoverboard recently turned up on eBay, where it's being offered for the bargain price of $9,995. (There already have been a number of presumably lower offers, all declined by the seller.)

The drawback, of course, is that the hoverboard is just a prop, rather than an actual working hoverboard. Back in 2001, when inventor Dean Kamen was on the verge of announcing what he promised would be a revolutionary new transportation device, there were rumors across the webisphere that he had developed an actual working hoverboard. Instead, to our disappointment, he gave us the Segway.

The movie's director, Bob Zemeckis, joked in a 1989 interview that that hoverboards actually had been around for years but that protests from parents' groups about safety had kept them off the market. According to Snopes.com, that led would-be hoverboards to inundate toy maker Mattel with calls, in an effort to find out if and when hoverboards would go on sale. 

So when are we going to get an actual hoverboard? Well, probably not by 2015, the date envisioned in the movie. As Zemeckis explained: 

A hoverboard is a board that hovers on magnetic energy. And it works just like a skateboard except that it doesn't have any wheels and you don't have to have any pavement.

That makes it sound a bit like a maglev train, a technology that employs powerful electromagnets to make trains float over tracks rather than roll, thus reducing friction and allowing for super high speeds. There have been a few small, demonstration maglev train lines built already; in Shanghai, for example, one currently transports travelers between the city and a nearby airport at a speed of 250 miles per hour. One thing that's cool about the Shanghai maglev is that it can float in a motionless position, though only 10 to 15 centimeters over the track.

But unlike a maglev train, which floats over a track with magnetized metal coils, a hoverboard would have to be able to float over ordinary ground, aspalt or water (that is, if it's going to be able to perform the manuevers depicted in the movie). So a hoverboard probably isn't going to utilize magnetic power.

I'm wondering if riding on an air cushion, in the fashion of marine and amphibious hovercraft, might be a viable alternative. There already is a single-rider air hovercraft called the Airboard on the market, which is available from various Web retailers for around $15,000 (only slightly more than the Back to the Future prop).

Even so, I don't think it can do the sort of manuevers that Marty McFly performs in the movie, and it's a lot bigger and bulkier--more like a jetski than a skateboard. And as this Gizmodo article notes, it won't work over water, sand, or ground with a lot of stones.

So I think that to get anywhere close to an actual hoverboard of the Back to the Future variety, we're going to need  antigravity propulsion. And unless you believe the conspiracy theories about the U.S. goverment secretly possessing technology captured from Nazi scientists during World War II, we're nowhere close to having that.

So what do you think about hoverboards? Are they a realistic possibility for the future, or just a movie fantasy? Express your opinion below.

If you've ever seen the 1951 sci-fi classic The Day The Earth Stood Still, you may remember the scene in which the flying saucer lands in Washington, and Klaatu the alien emerges, holding in his hand what looks to the terrified humans like a weapon. After a soldier shoots Klaatu, Gort the robot emerges from the spaceship, and employs his otherworldly powers to disarm the soldiers and reduce a tank to scrap metal. It's only then that the wounded Klaatu rises to reveal that what he had in his hand was a miniature telescope, capable of seeing father into space than existing human observatories. From the script:

KLAATU: It was a gift. For your president. (Glances at the broken object ruefully) With this, he could have studied life on other planets.

Okay, that was just from a movie. But the paradox that the scene raises might well turn out to be a real one, if we ever actually make contact with terrestrials, who most likely will come from a vastly more advanced civilization. While we're likely to fear aliens, assuming that they're out to conquer and/or destroy us, it well be that they're actually benevolent creatures who want to share with us what they know. And what they know might have the potential to help us an enormous deal. 

In a 1995 report, the U.S. Naval Observatory's Steven J. Dick wrote that discovery of an extraterrestrial civilization also would have potentially mind-blowing impact upon science and our view of reality, comparable to Europe's rediscovery (through the Arab world) of classical Greek science in the 12th and 13th centuries, orCopernicus' discovery in the early 1500s that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of our solar system.

Here are a few areas in which I think we could make enormous progress as a result of contact with an extraterrestrial civilization:

• Unlocking the secret of faster-than-light travel. Presumably, aliens who visited our planet would come from an enormous distance across interstellar space, since even the nearest potentially habitable planet is probably at least 13 light years away. That might mean that they have developed a technology similar to the warp drive envisioned by theoretical physicist Miguel Alcubierre, or something else that is at this point beyond the human imagination. They may also possess antigravity technology as well, since UFOs (assuming that at least some of them actually are alien spacecraft) have been observed to perform seemingly impossible aerobatic feats. 
• Freedom from the limitations of our biology. Humans already are beginning to dabble in transhumanism--that is, augmenting ourselves with powered exoskeletons and electronic gadgetry such as microchip implants that enhance vision. But if an intelligent extraterrestrial species has been around for longer than us, it may well be that they've become completely post-biological creatures whose brains merge natural and artificial intelligence. They may even have discarded their meat bodies completely to live within machines of their own creation (which hopefully don't look like circa 1991 Arnold Schwarzenegger--that would be too weird). Here's a 2006 paper by NASA scientist Steven Dick on that subject. We could make a quantum leap forward toward transhumanism with their help.
• Reversing environmental damage. It's conceivable that extraterrestrials from a far more advanced civilization have mastered planetary engineering--that is, the ability to make major intentional alterations in the environment. (Here's a paper that Carl Sagan co-authored on that subject years ago.)  That might enable them to fix our atmosphere and reverse the destructive process of climate change. 
•  Conflict resolution. International conflicts are killing people at a far lower rate than in the past--about 55,000 people are dying worldwide from warfare each year in the 2010s, according to Foreign Policy magazine, about a third of the fatal casualty rate in the 1980s. But humans still possess an alarming propensity for slaughtering one another, as evidence by the estimated 468,000 homicides committed worldwide in 2011, according to United Nations research. If an intelligent extraterrestrial species has been around for longer than us, most likely they've developed lethal technology at least as potent as ours, and possibly even more so--imagine something along the lines of the Death Star from the Star Wars fictional universe. But the aliens' continued existence would mean that they also have some advanced method for resolving differences without violence. We might be able to get them to share that method with us--or perhaps, as a last resort, to send a legion of Klaatus and Gorts to force us to stop the killing.

For researchers involved in SETI--the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence--the ultimate dream is to discover, at last, a signal that is an unmistakeable, ambiguous signal from a distant civilization that is attempting to contact us. But imagine that someday, one of them does find such a message from space--a verifiable, repeating equivalent of the Wow signal picked up by a radio telescope in Ohio in 1977.

But after the immediate excitement of knowing that we are alone wears off, another difficult question arises. What should we do then? Should the scientists try to signal back and alert the extraterrestrials that we've received their message, and want to communicate? Or should we follow Stephen Hawking's 2010 admonition to avoid contact, in order to avoid the danger of being attacked by extraterrestrials?

It's a question that scientists have been wrestling with for a long time. Back in 1960, the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, prepared an advisory paper for NASA that, in part, dealt with potential risks of having contact with aliens.

The consequences for attitudes and values are unpredictable, but would vary profoundly in different cultures and between groups within complex societies; a crucial factor would be the nature of the communication between us and other beings. Whether or not earth would be inspired to an all-out space effort by such a discovery is moot: Societies sure of their own place in the universe have disintegrated when confronted by a superior society, and others have survived even though changed. Clearly, the better we can come to understand the factors involved in responding to such crises, the better prepared we may be.

Brookings advised that US government leaders carefully consider the potential public reaction to such a discovery--which might range from a newfound sense of solidarity among humans, to a disorienting, paralyzing anxiety and panic from peoplealready conditioned to fear aliens by 1950s sci-fi movies such as War of the Worlds and The Day the Earth Stood Still. Brookings suggested studying how past civilizations on Earth had dealt with such unsettling discoveries, before deciding how to present the news--or, perhaps, whether to keep the discovery secret.

But in the decades that followed, scientists realized that the discovery of aliens was too momentous of an event for one nation to deal with by itself, and they started trying to coordinate an international response. In 1989, SETI researchers adopted this protocol for extraterrestrial contact, which was modified in 2010. Here are the most important principles:

1. Anyone who discovers a signal should verify that the most plausible explanation is extraterrestrial intelligence, rather than some natural or human origin, before going to step 2.
2. Before going public, the discoverer should secretly notify other SETI researchers, so that they can confirm the existence of the signal and set up a global effort to monitor it.
3. The discoverer should notify the International Astronomical Union and the Secretary General of the United Nations.
4. No response to a signal should be made until international authorities have consulted about what to do.

At a 1993 SETI conference for scientists from both the U.S. and the then-Soviet Union, NASA official John Billingham presented this paper, entited "SETI Post-Detection Protocols: What Do You Do After Detecting A Signal?" Billingham observed that the issue of how to respond might possibly be even more tricky, because of the likelihood that aliens already have known about our existence for a while, and thus had more time to conduct surveillance and figure us out than we've had with them. He proposed that scientists and governments of nations across the world agree to follow an alien contact protocol. Anyone who communicates with aliens should do so only on behalf of all mankind, and that communication should follow a pre-established protocol. The actual message should explain that intelligent life is present on Earth, and that we've received and understood a signal from another civilization. It also would contain details about what sort of organisms, including people, exist upon Earth, and encourage the aliens to send additional messages and establish a dialogue.

In 2010, the UN's Office for Outer Space Affairs reportedly began working on crafting an actual international agreement on an alien contact protocol. The space office's head, Malaysian astrophysicist Mazlan Othman--whom one British space law expert has descrbed as "the nearest thing we have to a take-me-to-your-leader person"--told fellow scientists that it now seems more likely that intelligent beings exist elsewhere in the universe, judging from the vast number of planets we now know to exist outside our solar system. "When we do [make contact], we should have in place a co-ordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject," she was quoted as saying in the Guardian, a British newspaper. "The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such co-ordination."

But even once a complete contact protocol is in place, scientists and political leaders still will face a dilemma that humans haven't experienced since Native Americans and Europeans had their first encounter at the end of the 15th Century. We're still haunted by the historical knowledge of how disastrous that meeting turned out to be for the less technologically advanced, more trusting group. In this 2011 paper entitled "Fear, Pandemonium, Equanimity and Delight: Human Responses to Extra-Terrestrial Life," University of California-Davis psychologist Albert Harrison notes that we've already imagined archetypes for aliens, and our societal reaction to them is contingent upon which one comes closest to fitting the reality. If they turn out to be "wise, kind and friendly" creatures intent on helping human society achieve a new golden age, it's all good. On the other hand, in the "catastrophic model," aliens would be "menacing, imperialistic and oriented toward the use of threat, bluff and force," and intent on exploiting our world and its inhabitants, or annihilating it. He also proposes a third possibility: Aliens may be a "postbiological" species that has replaced its meat bodies with robotics and artificial intelligence, and perhaps even has achieved immortality. To me, that might turn out to be the most unsettling scenario for humans, since it might force us to abandon our concept of life and death, and to reexamine the religious beliefs that have long guided us.

The east coast was abuzz last night, and it wasn't just the stunning upset in this year's NCAA basketball tournament. Around 8PM on March 22nd, skygazers noticed a large, vibrant light in the sky. While many speculated about this fireball, Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environmental Office confirmed to the Associated Press that the flash was likely a "a single meteor event."

Sightings were recorded from North Carolina to Massachusetts, with the highest concentration based in the northeast corridor. Unlike the Russian meteor one month earlier, there were no reported injuries from this event. While it was exciting for those who witnessed the meteor, just how rare are such sightings?

According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Earth is bombarded with more than 100 tons of dust and sand-sized particles every day. Smaller meteors enter Earth's atmosphere every few weeks, and larger meteorites — like last month's Russian meteorite — happen very few decades.

Did you see the meteor last night? Check out the sightings logged by the American Meteor Society, and watch this video below to learn more about meteorites and shooting stars.