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8 Things We’ve Learned Lately About Thunder and Lightning

Fri, 24 May 2013 01:17:00 GMT

Much about lightning remains a mystery . Photo courtesy of Flickr user Owen Zammit Summer in America unofficially begins this weekend, and with it come the late afternoon and middle-of-the-night thunderstorms that are Nature’s version of shock and awe. But as common as they are, much about thunder and lightning remains a mystery. In fact, scientists are still debating what actually causes those amazing flashes across the sky. Here are eight recent findings related to storm-watching: 1) Come to the dark side: The dazzling thunderbolts get all the attention, but within each thunderstorm are invisible intense bursts of gamma rays, which have become known as “dark lightning.

One Day Your Phone Will Know If You’re Happy or Sad

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:03:12 GMT

Facial analysis at work. Image courtesy of Affectiva As much time as we spend with our cell phones and laptops and tablets, it’s still pretty much a one-way relationship. We act, they respond. Sure, you can carry on a conversation with Siri on your iPhone, and while she is quick, it hardly qualifies as playful bantering. You ask questions, she gives answers. But what if these devices could really read our emotions? What if they could interpret every little gesture, every facial cue so that they can gauge our feelings as well as–maybe better than–our best friends? And then they respond, not with information, but what might pass for empathy. We’re not there yet,

Can Brain Scans Really Tell Us What Makes Something Beautiful?

Fri, 17 May 2013 02:21:56 GMT

It’s beautiful, but does it know art? Image courtesy of the Laboratory of Neuro Imaging at UCLA and Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH When art meets neuroscience, strange things happen. Consider the Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art in Oregon which features rugs and knitting based on a brain scan motif. Or the neuroscientist at the University of Nevada-Reno who scanned the brain of a portrait artist while he drew a picture of a face. And then there’s the ongoing war of words between scientists who think it’s possible to use analysis of brain activity to define beauty–or even art–and their critics who argue that it’s abs

10 New Things Science Says About Moms

Fri, 10 May 2013 01:37:00 GMT

What makes a 21st century mom? Photo courtesy of Flickr user Robert Whitehead To be honest, I’ve never associated motherhood with science. I assume this has everything to do with the fact that I’m one of eight kids, and while I’m sure we were a study in chaos theory, my mother didn’t have much time to nail the concept and work it into bedtime stories. That said, moms remain a subject of scientific inquiry because, no matter how constant they may seem to us, they’re always changing to keep up with the times. Here then are 10 recent studies or surveys that give a bit more insight into the institution of 21st century moms. 1) Have I got a story for you: A

What Phone Companies Are Doing With All That Data From Your Phone

Wed, 08 May 2013 01:02:32 GMT

Cell phones have become prolific data engines. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon Cell phones are so many things now–computer, map, clock, calculator, camera, shopping device, concierge, and occasionally, a phone. But more than anything, that little device that never leaves your person is one amazingly prolific data engine. Which is why last October, Verizon Wireless, the largest U.S, carrier with almost 100 million customers, launched a new division called Precision Market Insights. And why, at about the same time, Madrid-based Telefonica, one of the world’s largest mobile network providers, opened its own new business unit, Telefonica Dynamic Insights. The poin

The Secret to a Long Life May Be Deep Inside Your Brain

Fri, 03 May 2013 02:42:15 GMT

Scientists could be one step closer to slowing down aging. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Paolo Margari It may have been the word retrieval adventure I had the other night when I couldn’t remember the name of thinly sliced cured ham. (I nailed the “p,” but didn’t come close to conjuring up “prosciutto.”) Or it could have been the annoying pain I feel in a knuckle on my right hand these days. Probably both. All I know is that when I read about a recent study in which scientists were able to slow down the aging process in mice, I was more than a little intrigued. According to the researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, the

Look Ma, No Fuel! Flying Cross Country on Sun Power

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 04:31:58 GMT

The Solar Impulse flying over San Francisco at night. Photo courtesy of Jean Revillard/Solar Impulse Bet you didn’t know that Texas has more solar energy workers than ranchers and California has more of them than actors, and that more people now work in the solar industry in the U.S. than in coal mines. Or that in March, for the first time ever, 100 percent of the energy added to the U.S. power grid was solar. Okay, so now you know all that, but I’m guessing you’re no more aquiver over solar energy than you were five minutes ago. That’s the way it is in America these days. Most people think solar is a good thing, but how jazzed can you get about putting panels

How Big Data Will Mean the End to Job Interviews

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 01:09:55 GMT

Who makes a good call center worker? Big Data knows. Photo courtesy of Flickr user State Farm I have good news and bad news for anyone who will be looking for a job in the coming years. The good news is that some time in the future, job interviews may go away. Okay, maybe some companies will still do them for the sake of tradition, but they won’t matter all that much. Which leads me to the bad news–Big Data is more likely to determine if you get a job. Your dazzling smile, charming personality and awesome resume may count for something, but it’s algorithms and predictive analysis that will probably seal your fate. Here’s why. Enormously powerful computers ar

Eight New Things We’ve Learned About Music

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 01:33:09 GMT

Music works deep into our brains. Photo courtesy of Flickr user antonkawasaki In one those strange twists of modern life, we were reminded last week of the power of music–at a hockey game. It was at Boston’s TD Garden, two days after the explosions that contorted so many lives, and as singer Rene Rancourt began the Star Spangled Banner before the game between the hometown Bruins and the Buffalo Sabres, he noticed that many in the crowd were joining in. Rancourt got only as far as …”what so proudly we hailed” before he pulled the microphone away from his mouth and motioned to those in the stands to carry on. They did, in full voice, building to a stirring

Do Teachers Need Their Own “Bar Exam”?

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:56:42 GMT

Do teachers need to train more like doctors? Photo courtesy of Flickr user WoodleyWonderworks Question: What’s needed to raise the quality of school teachers in America? Answer: A bar exam? So say the head of the country’s most powerful teachers’ union, the governor of New York and the U.S. secretary of education, among others. Their contention is that the only way teachers can truly elevate their profession–and with it the level of public education–is if they follow the lead of doctors, lawyers and engineers and are required to pass a test to prove mastery of their subject matter and how to teach it. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federat

Should We Fall Out of Love with Robot Surgery?

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 03:35:41 GMT

A da Vinci robot zeroes in. Photo courtesy of Intuitive Surgical Last fall, shoppers outside a Macy’s store in Boston were given a chance to test drive a robot. They were invited, compliments of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, to sit at a console and move the machine’s arm the same way surgeons would in an operating room. And why not? What says cutting-edge medicine more than robotic surgery? Who wouldn’t be impressed with a hospital where robot arms, with all their precision, replace surgeons’ hands? The surgeons, of course, control the robots on computers where everything is magnified in 3D, but the actual cutting is done by machines. And that means smaller in

Do Wind Turbines Need a Rethink?

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:05:37 GMT

Imagine them without the blades. Photo courtesy of Flickr user “Caveman Chuck” Coker Bet you didn’t know that last year a record amount of wind power was installed around the planet. The U.S. set a record, too, and, once again, became the world leader in adding new wind power, pushing China into second place for the year. You’re not alone in being clueless about this. So was I. After all, this is a subject that gets about as much attention as 17-year-cicadas in a off year. What generally passes for energy coverage in the U.S. these days is the relentless cycle of gas-prices-up, gas-prices-down stories and the occasional foray into the natural-gas-fracking-is-a

10 New Things We Know About Food and Diets

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 12:55:37 GMT

New research says olive oil is one healthy fat. Courtesy of Flickr user renedepaula Usually, when we talk about innovation, it has to do with some whizzy new invention, like a robot ant colony, or a novel approach to solving a problem, say a wind turbine that doesn’t wipe out bats and birds. Rarely does it have to do with something as ancient, or prosaic, as olive oil. Sometimes, though, research tells us something new about something old and it forces us to view it with fresh appreciation. So it is with olive oil. In this case, it’s two studies. The first, done by the German Research Center for Food Chemistry, focused on whether it’s possible to lower the fat co

Free Online Courses Mean College Will Never Be the Same

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 02:12:28 GMT

Will going to class become quaint? Photo courtesy of Coursera. Depending on who you’re listening to, Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, are either the greatest boon to the spread of knowledge since Gutenberg cranked his first press or the biggest threat to learning on campus since the coming of cheap beer. No question that they are the most disruptive innovation to come out of universities in a very long time, although it’s still too soon to say if that’s “good” disruptive or bad. A quick refresher: Though free online courses, notably through Khan Academy, were already starting to build an audience, the first MOOC by a university professor popped up

How Digital Devices Change the Rules of Etiquette

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:27:57 GMT

Smartphones are changing our notion of acceptable behavior. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jennifer Conley I committed my first texting heresy a few years ago when my son was away at college. I had asked him about a class he was taking and had needed three, maybe four sentences to express myself. He responded with bemusement. Or maybe it was disgust. Who could tell? But his message was clear: If I continued to be so lame as to send texts longer than two sentences–using complete words, no less–he would have little choice but to stop answering. I was reminded of this less-than-tender father-son moment recently by a post by Nick Bilton for The New York Times’ Bits bl

The Bay Bridge Gets Its Glow On

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 01:42:28 GMT

Is the Bay Bridge now the cooler bridge in San Francisco? Photo courtesy of Leo Villareal Last week, for the first time in 75 years, the Bay Bridge, connecting San Francisco and Oakland, made the Golden Gate seem like just another bridge. Kudos to Leo Villareal. He’s an artist who works with lights, but also with algorithms. And his latest project, The Bay Lights, is probably the most spectacular example of that mix of art and tech that most of us have ever seen. Under Villareal’s direction, teams of electricians spent the past five months stringing 25,000 LED lights a foot apart–from the top of the bridge’s towers down to the deck–for the full length (a

Lousy Sleep Isn’t Good For Your Body, Either

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 01:58:56 GMT

A good night’s sleep is worth the effort. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Kaptain Kobold This weekend, most of us Americans will lose an hour of sleep when we push the clocks ahead to swing into Daylight Saving Time. That may not seem like much–the Academy Awards were three and a half times that long–but research suggests our bodies wouldn’t agree. A recent study by two Michigan hospitals found that they treated almost twice as many heart attack victims on the first day of Daylight Saving than on a typical Sunday. And if past behavior holds true, there will be a bump in traffic accidents on Monday because, as researchers have suggested, more people take “

How Smart Can a Watch Be?

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 05:48:26 GMT

It tells you what’s happening on your phone. And it tells time. Photo courtesy of Sony. It’s amazing how putting a lower case “i” in front of the name of a gadget can make it righteous. What that means, of course, is that Apple has deemed that particular piece of technology worthy of its attention. And with that comes both market credibility and geeky cool. So when rumors started swirling a few weeks ago that Apple could unveil an “iWatch” later this year, tech writers around the Web were quick to ponder if 2013 will become “The Year of the Smartwatch.” Maybe. Maybe not. The iGod has not yet spoken on the subject. At least not officia

The War on Cancer Goes Stealth

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 02:29:18 GMT

Zinc oxide nanoparticles. Courtesy of National Institutes of Health. So, we’re 42 years into the War on Cancer, and while the enemy remains formidable, our strategy is shifting into yet another phase. We’ve been through the equivalent of hand-to-hand combat–surgery–carpet bombing–radiation–and chemical warfare–chemotherapy. Now the fight is about stealth. Instead of concentrating on blasting away at cancer cells, or poisoning them, you’re more likely to hear cancer scientists talk about “Trojan horses” or “cloaking strategies” or “tricking” the immune system. All are cell-level ploys hatched through

Mapping How the Brain Thinks

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 02:20:00 GMT

The challenge is to figure out how all that wiring works. Image courtesy of Human Connectome Project A year and a half into his presidency, John F. Kennedy challenged U.S. scientists to get Americans to the moon by the end of the decade. At his recent State of the Union address, Barack Obama hinted at what could become his version of reaching for the moon–he’d like scientists to solve the mystery of the brain. Obama’s mission would be a heavier lift. He didn’t go into much detail, other than citing brain research as a stellar example of how government can “invest in the best ideas.” But last week a story in the New York Times by John Markoff fill

What Can We Do About Big Rocks From Space?

Tue, 19 Feb 2013 03:09:00 GMT

Last week’s asteroid pass was the closest ever predicted. Computer graphic courtesy of NASA Last Friday was, astronomically speaking, one of those days that comes along every 40 years. Actually, a lot less frequently than that. That’s how often, according to NASA estimates, an asteroid the size of the one that flew by Friday gets that close to hitting the Earth–it passed 17,000 miles away. But when you throw in the considerably smaller meteorite that exploded over Russia the same day and injured more than 1,000 people–that’s never happened before–you’re talking about one extremely unique moment in space rock history. Most of us have moved o

10 Fresh Looks at Love

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 05:45:27 GMT

Scientists are still wrestling with how love works. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Hamed Masoumi It should probably tell us something that the most frequently asked question on Google last year was “What is love?” Clearly, most of us are clueless on the matter; otherwise we wouldn’t be turning to algorithms for an explanation. Which explains why scientific research on love continues unabated. We want answers. So, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, here are 10 recent studies or surveys trying to make sense of matters of the heart. 1) You light up my brain: Researchers at Brown University in Rhode Island say that based on brain scans, they may be able to predict if

Can Machines Learn Morality?

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 02:44:12 GMT

Can drones be taught the rules of war? Photo courtesy of the Department of Defense When John Brennan, President Obama’s choice to be the next head of the CIA, appeared before a Senate committee yesterday, one question supplanted all others at his confirmation hearing: How are the decisions made to send killer drones after suspected terrorists? The how and, for that matter, the why of ordering specific drone strikes remains largely a mystery, but at least one thing is clear–the decisions are being made by humans who, one would hope, wrestle with the thought of sending a deadly missile into an occupied building. But what if humans weren’t involved? What if one day

Primal Screens: How Pro Football Is Amping Up Its Game

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 04:00:54 GMT

At football stadiums today, it’s all about the screens. Photo courtesy of Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Vision It’s the time of year when the National Football League gets a little bit smaller. Sure, the Super Bowl on Sunday is its championship game and more than 100 million people will be watching, but if the outcome isn’t decided in the last two minutes, more people on Monday will be talking about the funniest TV commercials or how Beyonce sang–or didn’t–at halftime or the post-game homage to the Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Lewis as he dances off into the sunset. It’s been this way for a while now. As the spectacle of everything around it ha

These Machines Will Be Able to Detect Smells Your Own Nose Cannot

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 07:17:45 GMT

A machine that sniffs out cancer. Photo courtesy of Metabolomx Admittedly, it’s a little hard to imagine smell scientists, but research published earlier this week has those who study the sense of smell taking sides. It comes down to how our noses detect odors. The long-standing explanation is that our noses have receptors that respond based on the shapes of odor molecules. Different molecules fit together with different receptors, the thinking goes, and when a match is made, the receptor tips off the brain that our nose has picked up a whiff of coffee or perhaps a very different smell emanating from the bottom of our shoe. But a conflicting and more exotic theory received a bo

Learning From Nature How to Deal With Nature

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 05:50:23 GMT

The greening of Lower Manhattan. Image courtesy of Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio During his inaugural speech Monday, President Barack Obama uttered a phrase that during last year’s presidential campaign were The-Words-That-Shall-Not-Be-Spoken. He mentioned climate change. In fact, President Obama didn’t just mention it, he declared that a failure to deal with climate change “would betray our children and future generations.” But ask any Washington pundit if Congress will do anything meaningful on the subject and they’ll tell you that that’s as likely as D.C. freezing over in July. Also this week, as it turns out, a study was releas

Can a Buzzing Fork Make You Lose Weight?

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 01:50:00 GMT

The HapiFork wants to make you less piggish. Photo courtesy of HapiLabs. Utensil history was made last week and I, for one, took pleasure in seeing that we had finally evolved beyond the spork or, as some of you may know it, the foon. But sadly, the unveiling of the HapiFork at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) was not universally greeted with great jubilation, but rather with a fair amount of ridicule. Produced by a Hong Kong company called HapiLabs, the HapiFork is curious little thing. It looks like a fork and works like a fork, but it vibrates like a cellphone. And why it buzzes is the reason the media largely responded with one big group eyeroll. See, the HapiFork is a fork

How Smart Should TVs Be?

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 02:05:39 GMT

Samsung TVs get smarter. Photo courtesy of Samsung Since the beginning of mankind, we’ve wanted our kids to get smarter. Since the beginning of the 21st century, we’ve wanted our phones to get smarter. So when are we going start wanting our TVs to get smarter? Or will we always be content with them being dumb, as long as they’re big and dumb? Okay, maybe not dumb, but most of us don’t yet feel a compelling need to have our TVs think like computers, as long as the picture looks pretty up there on the wall. Which always makes things interesting at the Great Gadgetpalooza also known as the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). For the past several years, the big ele

When Machines See

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 02:42:35 GMT

Pattern recognition of a butterfly wing. Image courtesy of Li Li Here in Washington we have heard of this thing you call “advance planning,” but we are not yet ready to embrace it. A bit too futuristic. Still, we can’t help but admire from afar those who attempt to predict what could happen more than a month from now. So I was impressed a few weeks ago when the big thinkers at IBM imagined the world five years hence and identified what they believe will be five areas of innovation that will have the greatest impact on our daily lives. They’ve been doing this for a few years now, but this time the wonky whizzes followed a theme--the five human senses. Not that

Six Innovators to Watch in 2013

Thu, 27 Dec 2012 06:25:00 GMT

Nanshu Lu’s electronic tattoo that reads your vital signs. Photo courtesy of Nanshu Lu In the spirit of the post-holiday season, allow me to present my final list of 2012: six innovators who are pushing technology in fresh directions, some to solve stubborn problems, others to make our lives a little fuller. Watch for more from all of them in the new year. 1. Keep your hands off my robot: We’ve all seem videos of adorably cute robots,, but when you actually have to work with one, they apparently can be less than lovable. That’s where Leila Takayama comes in. She’s a social scientist with Willow Garage, a San Francisco area company that develops robots, and h

The Best Inventions of 2012 You Haven’t Heard of Yet (Part 2)

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 02:08:00 GMT

Finally, a suitcase that follows you around. Photo courtesy of Hop! Earlier this week I rolled out the first half of a list of a dozen of the more innovative ideas of 2012. We’re not talking Google Glass or invisibility cloaks or other flashes from the future. No, these are less splashy things, yet, in their own ways, no less inspired and probably more likely to become a part of our daily lives. They’re the creations of people joined under a common maxim, namely, “There’s gotta be a better way.” So, muffled drum roll, please…the Fresh Ideas of 2012, Part 2: 7) While you’re at it, can you pick up a paper and some gum: Yes, suitcases with

The Best Inventions of 2012 You Haven’t Heard of Yet (Part 1)

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 02:33:00 GMT

An app that finds your keys. Or the cat. Photo courtesy of Stick-N-Find Within the next week or so, the year-end reviews will start rolling out like strips of prize tickets in a games arcade. Most will revisit events that we’ll all remember, albeit some we’d rather forget. My own list is a little different. I want to look back at ideas that haven’t received a lot of attention, but struck me as being particularly clever and ripe with potential. Chances are you haven’t heard of many of them. But chances also are you will. Here’s Part 1 of my list of a dozen ideas whose time is about to come: 1) Sadly, it does not say, “You’re getting warmer.

PHOTOS: Getting Ready for the World’s Largest Radio Telescope

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

In Chile’s Atacama Desert, astronomers are preparing for a new array that will stretch across 10 miles

A More Human Artificial Brain

Fri, 14 Dec 2012 02:40:00 GMT

Meet Spaun, a computer model that mimics brain behavior. Image courtesy of Chris Eliasmith There are times when I wonder why so many scientists are spending so much time trying to recreate something as fickle and full of fogginess as the human brain. But who am I kidding? Those dyspeptic moments inevitably pass, as anyone who’s been following this blog knows. Every few months, it seems, I’m back writing about the latest attempt to build machines that can learn to recognize objects or even develop cognitive skills. And now there’s Spaun. Staying on task Its full name is the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network, but Spaun sounds way more epic. It’s

Your Cell Phone Could Soon Become Part of a Massive Earthquake Detection System

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 06:11:00 GMT

A seismograph in Hawaii recorded the seismic waves of the 2011 Japan earthquake. Photo: Joe Parks Many new cell phones are bristling with an array of sensors—a compass, a gyroscope, a GPS sensor and an accelerometer—that help the phone figure out where it is and which way it’s pointing, a boon when using mapping or other location-based applications. But the potential wrapped up in these well-equipped, connected and increasingly ubiquitous devices seems to falling sort of flat, since all we really tend to use these high-tech detectors for is driving in circles in racing games or checking in to yet another Starbucks on Foursquare. University of California, Berkeley, gra

10 Gifts to Celebrate Innovation

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 02:43:00 GMT

Part rocking chair, part charging station. Photo courtesy of Micasa Laboratories Yes, this is the time of year for getting together with family and friends and chowing down like you’re eating for all of them. It’s also a time when, during the height of shopping madness, we get a chance to reflect on just how clever we humans can be. The truth is, though, not all of us got around to inventing something this year. Let the following list serve as inspiration for 2013. 1) Every move you make, every step you take, I’ll be tracking you: Sometimes you follow your heart, other times you listen to your wrist. So it goes with the Nike+ Fuelband, a slick little bracelet that

Take Two Pills and Charge Me in the Morning

Tue, 04 Dec 2012 03:27:00 GMT

So this is what a 21st century tricorder looks like? Photo courtesy of Scanadu It was a moment that would have brought a smile–a sardonic one, of course–to the face of Bones McCoy. Last week, the California-based firm Scanadu announced that by the end of next year, it will begin selling a device called Scout. The little gadget, which fits in the palm of your hand, will, in conjunction with your smartphone, be able to tell you your temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, breathing rate and the level of oxygen in your blood–all within 10 to 15 seconds. In other words, it will be the closest thing we’ll have to that bulky but nifty tricorder that McCoy wielded

8 Ways People Are Taking Twitter Seriously

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 01:26:00 GMT

The doodle that became Twitter. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Jack Dorsey A little refresher: Back in late 2005, the guys running a small San Francisco startup named Odeo were feeling desperate. They had planned to make it big in the podcasting business, but Apple had just announced that iTunes would include a podcasting platform built into every iPod. So the Odeo group started scrambling to come up with a new plan. One of the employees, a guy named Jack Dorsey, came up with the idea of a system where you could send a text message to a number and it would be delivered to all of your friends. Someone came up with the code name twttr–a takeoff on Flickr–and when they look

The 2012 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Awards Liveblog

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 03:37:00 GMT

Last week we launched our Smithsonian American Ingenuity Awards special section, honoring innovators in nine fields, ranging from technology to social progress to historical scholarship. Tonight, at a gala in Washington, DC, we celebrate our award winners: Elon Musk, Esperanza Spalding, Bryan Stevenson, Benh Zeitlin, Anne Kelly Knowles, Pardis Sabeti, Jack Andraka, Jim Anderson and Sebastian Thrun. Follow along as we liveblog quotes, interviews, photos and special updates from the gala as we champion the best in innovation. We look forward to seeing you tonight at 7:45 p.m. ET! Sign up below in the CoverItLive liveblog to get an email reminder, or just come back to this spot at 7:45 p.

Shopping Gets Personal

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 03:38:00 GMT

A mannequin that gathers intelligence about customers. Photo courtesy of Almax. Black Thriday is over. So is Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday. Today, in case you didn’t know, is either Green Tuesday or Giving Tuesday, depending on whether you feel like eco-shopping or giving to charity. Not sure what tomorrow may bring (How about Weird Relative Gift Wednesday?), but I suppose shopping does feel less chaotic if someone’s organizing it into theme days, although that doesn’t always stop it from devolving into a contact sport. Can you imagine American shoppers embracing something like iButterfly, a mobile app popular in Asia where customers earn coupons by trac

The Ozone Problem is Back – And Worse Than Ever

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

“Bull!” said Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at MIT. Jim Anderson of Harvard University was showing him some weird data he had collected. Since 2001, Anderson and his team had been studying powerful thunderstorms by packing instruments into repurposed spy planes and B-57 bombers, among the only planes capable of flying into the storms “without having their wings ripped off,” Anderson said. To his puzzlement, the instruments detected surprisingly high concentrations of water molecules in the stratosphere, the usually drier-than-dust uppermost layer of the atmosphere. They found the water over thunderstorms above Florida, and they found it over thunderstorms

Open-Fire Stoves Kill Millions. How Do We Fix it?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Making dinner shouldn’t be fatal. But millions of people in the developing world die each year from illnesses linked to smoke spewing out of crude stoves—a scourge that has frustrated experts for decades. Now a Washington, D.C.-based group with a new approach hopes to place “green” stoves in 100 million homes worldwide by 2020. Part aid organization, part venture-capital broker, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves has raised $158 million to help develop, market and distribute clean-burning cookstoves. Championed by celebrities such as Julia Roberts, the initiative is ramping up in Bangladesh, China, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. “Cooking kills, and

Dr. NakaMats, the Man With 3300 Patents to His Name

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

One of the oldest chestnuts about inventions involves a 19th-century patent official who resigned because he thought nothing was left to invent. The yarn, which periodically pops up in print, is patently preposterous. “The story was an invention,” says Yoshiro Nakamatsu. “An invention built to last.” He should know. Nakamatsu—Dr. NakaMats, if you prefer, or, as he prefers, Sir Dr. NakaMats—is an inveterate and inexorable inventor whose biggest claim to fame is the floppy disk. “I became father of the apparatus in 1950,” says Dr. NakaMats, who conceived it at the University of Tokyo while listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. “

10 Ways Travel Is Getting Better

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:26:00 GMT

Are you ready for some travel? Photo courtesy of Flickr user Mastery of Maps Most Americans have already kicked into Thanksgiving mode, looking ahead to Thursday when they’ll sit down with family and friends, pile an unfathomable amount of food on their plates and then sleep it off to the soothing sound of supersized men smacking helmets on TV. But between now and then madness lies. There will be traffic jams and long security lines and countless other aggravations that will make you wish that this year you had stayed home and opened a can of tuna. Don’t despair. Believe it or not, traveling is getting easier. Here are 10 innovations that can help you now or give you hop

Elon Musk, the Rocket Man With a Sweet Ride

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

“Five, four, three...” At T-minus three seconds white flames explode from the 22-story rocket. “Two, one. Liftoff.” The night sky erupts with light and fire and clouds of smoke, as nine engines generating 1,320,000 pounds of thrust push the vehicle skyward at NASA’s storied Cape Canaveral launchpad. The road to orbit is short but marked with a series of technical miracles, and the rocket hits them all: 17,000 miles per hour to break from Earth’s atmosphere. First and second stage separation. Second stage ignition. In minutes it’s over: The capsule carrying 1,000 pounds of cargo is in orbit, racing toward a docking with the International Space Stati

In Space, Flames Behave in Ways Nobody Thought Possible

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Recent tests aboard the International Space Station have shown that fire in space can be less predictable and potentially more lethal than it is on Earth. “There have been experiments,” says NASA aerospace engineer Dan Dietrich, “where we observed fires that we didn’t think could exist, but did.” That fire continues to surprise us is itself surprising when you consider that combustion is likely humanity’s oldest chemistry experiment, consisting of just three basic ingredients: oxygen, heat and fuel. Here on Earth, when a flame burns, it heats the surrounding atmosphere, causing the air to expand and become less dense. The pull of gravity draws colder,

Why Give an Award on Ingenuity?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

It is no exaggeration to say that America was founded on innovation. It’s right there in the Constitution, itself an invention, which empowers Congress to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” “Our country was built on a culture of revolution and innovation,” is the way Art Molella puts it, and he should know. Molella is the founding director of the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Molella, a historian of science, has an interesting history himself. He is the son of a General Elect

Can We Ever Stop Worrying About Blackouts?

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 04:54:00 GMT

A dark Manhattan after Superstorm Sandy. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ekonon While it’s still not possible to definitively predict the course a nasty storm will take, we can say with absolute certainty that once it does arrive, two things will happen. First, we will be treated to the last remaining example of slapstick on TV–weather reporters trying to remain upright in a gale. And second, we’ll see footage of a convoy of utility vehicles headed to the scene of the storm, the cavalry as bucket trucks. The former is always loony, the latter usually reassuring. Yet there’s something oddly low tech about waiting for help from people driving hundreds and sometim

The Sharing of the Screens

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 04:03:00 GMT

The trend is toward a syncing of screens. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Mr. Tea. This is what election night is like in America these days: I had gathered with about dozen other people, ostensibly to watch the results on TV. But the TV received, at best, divided attention. To my left, my wife Carol had fired up her laptop and was foraging for results on websites that might have vote totals more current than what was on the big screen. To her left, another woman was zeroed in on her smart phone and to my right, two more guests were doing the same. So was I, for that matter. I kept one eye on the TV so I didn’t miss any states changing color, but my good eye was focused on my

We Can Bank Online. Why Can’t We Vote Online?

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 12:03:00 GMT

In Estonia, citizens have had the option to vote online since 2005. Courtesy of European Parliament/Pietro Naj-Oleari. “Every four years, we start a mechanism up where about 130 or 140 million people go and do something all at once,” says David Becker. “What other business does that in the world?” Becker, the director of election initiatives at the Pew Center on the States, is talking about the act of voting in a presidential election. “Think about how you set that up, how you get that all taken care of,” he adds. “Election officials in this country do a pretty darn good job.” That said, Becker and Thad Hall, an associate professor of

Are Your Political Beliefs Hardwired?

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 02:46:00 GMT

Can a brain be Republican or Democrat? Photo courtesy of National Institute of Mental Health. A vote in tomorrow’s presidential election could be viewed one of two ways. It’s either the culmination of months of weighing the arguments on countless issues and making a choice based on a commingling of knowledge and personal principle. Or you voted Republican or Democratic because, to paraphrase accidental pundit Lady Gaga, you were born that way. Okay, in the spirit of punditry, the latter is a bit of an oversimplification, but it does reflect the thinking of an emerging field called political neuroscience. Its focus has been on using brain scans to see if people of differ

Should Cities Prepare For the Worst?

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 01:41:00 GMT

Superstorm Sandy settles in over New York. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Guigno Talk about being prescient. Not quite two months ago Mireya Navarro wrote the following in the New York Times: “With a 520-mile-long coast lined largely by teeming roads and fragile infrastructure, New York City is gingerly facing up to the intertwined threats posed by rising seas and ever-more-severe storm flooding.” She also noted that critics say “New York is moving too slowly to address the potential for flooding that could paralyze transportation, cripple the low-lying financial district and temporarily drive hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.” Actu

Tracking the Twists and Turns of Hurricanes

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 12:34:00 GMT

The monster storm cometh. Image courtesy of National Weather Service I was having one of those moments of modern life disconnect. I looked down and saw on the weather map the massive nasty-looking swirl headed this way. I looked up and saw the gentle flickering of the leaves on the maple tree out back. It was a strange feeling, sitting in the quiet while gazing at the likely path of destruction and power outage misery Hurricane Sandy will follow over the next few days. But for all the anxiety that brought, it was better to know than not. Everyone on the East Coast has had three whole days to buy batteries and toilet paper. Probably some people near the ocean who were told to evacuat

Turning Your Hand Into a Remote Control

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 03:00:00 GMT

Digits takes motion control to a new level. Photo courtesy of Microsoft Research Yes, Microsoft rolled out Windows 8 yesterday and yes, it’s the company’s biggest high-stakes launch in a long time and yes, it’s its first real plunge into the world of tablets and smart phones. Plenty of others are already covering that ground. I’d rather talk about a little device Microsoft unveiled earlier this month, something far lower on the hoopla scale. It’s called Digits and it’s one special bracelet. But this is not some flashy bangle that dangles; this is a wrist sensor capable of turning your hand into a control unit. Created by a team of Microsoft resea

The Sun’s Swirling Green Gases of Wonder

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 06:16:35 GMT

As NASA’s Hi-C telescope launched into space aboard a rocket on July 11, astrophysicist Leon Golub sat in a control room at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Soon monitors lit up; temperature readings scrolled across a screen. “It was a big relief once we started to see data, because there are so many ways that things can go wrong,” says Golub of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A few hours later, once the rocket returned to Earth and the six-foot-long telescope had been opened, Golub and his colleagues were staring at the sharpest—and most alluring—pictures ever taken of the Sun’s

Take That, Cancer!

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 04:22:00 GMT

Know the enemy: Cancer cells at work. Image courtesy of the National Cancer Institute As we come to the end of Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’ve learned that sometimes you can have too much awareness. A friend died of breast cancer last week and the truth is I didn’t want to hear much more about it. On second thought, though, maybe it helps to look cancer in the eyes and show that it’s not the monster it can seem to be, that slowly progress continues to be made in moving toward a cure. My friend Trish used to say, “Take that, cancer!” in those times when it seemed that she was winning the battle. So here’s a “Take that, cancer!” list

One Step Closer to a Brain

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 02:23:00 GMT

The cat face created by Google’s computer brain. Image courtesy of Google. A few months ago Google shared with us another challenge it had taken on. It wasn’t as fanciful as a driverless car or as geekily sexy as augmented reality glasses, but in the end, it could be bigger than both. In fact, it likely will make both of them even more dynamic. What Google did was create a synthetic brain, or at least the part of it that processes visual information. Technically, it built a mechanical version of a neural network, a small army of 16,000 computer processors that, by working together, was actually able to learn. At the time, most of the attention focused on what all those

Drawing the Line on Drones

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 12:40:00 GMT

Meet the Qube drone, specially designed for police departments. Photo courtesy of AeroVironment, Inc. The International Association of Police Chiefs held its convention in San Diego earlier this month and one of the booths drawing a lot of attention belonged to a California company called AeroVironment, Inc. It’s in the business of building drones. One of its models–the Raven–weighs less than five pounds and is the most popular military spy drone in the world. More than 19,000 have been sold. Another of its robot planes–the Switchblade–is seen as the kamikaze drone of the future, one small enough to fit into a soldier’s backpack. But AeroVironmen

The Trouble With Trees

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 01:07:00 GMT

A color show in Oregon. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ian Sane It’s the time of year when trees refuse to be ignored. Behold our fabulous hues, ponder our falling leaves, they goad us. And many of us do pay attention for a bit, only to lose interest when the show is over. We know the cycle will begin again next spring and peak again in the fall, trees being one of the truer things in modern life. I mean, what’s more reliable than an oak? But scientists will tell you that, like the oceans, the world’s trees are going through some serious changes, and not in a good way. A dry run Consider the impact of the drought that’s been desiccating America’s South

Patient, Heal Thyself

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 03:52:00 GMT

An ear grown from human cells. Photo courtesy of Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center. Until last week, I don’t think I’d ever heard of the African spiny mouse. I’m guessing I’m probably not alone. Apparently, they’re nice pets if you prefer an other-side-of-the-glass relationship. No question they’re cute things, only six inches or so long if you count their tails, and they have a rep for sucking down a lot of water. Oh, and you’re not supposed to pick them up by their tails. Turns out the tail thing–namely that it can come off with great ease–is why this little furball was in the news. It’s also the reason the African spiny

Can You Change Your Political Beliefs?

Mon, 01 Oct 2012 12:51:00 GMT

A rally round the flag in Washington. Photo courtesy of Flickr user theqspeaks With the first presidential debate scheduled for Wednesday night, we’re about to hit the whitewater of the campaign, the time when any slip, any rock beneath the surface, can turn the boat over. And though it doesn’t seem possible, the political advertising will shift into an even higher gear. Last week alone Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and outside political groups spent an estimated $55 million to drum their messages into the minds of voters. But whose minds might they be? Must be the undecideds–that 2 to 8 percent of American voters who remain uncommitted and, it turns out, are largely

How Brains Make Money

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:46:00 GMT

Does greed live here? Image courtesy of National Institute of Mental Health You and I would look at Wall Street and see the epitome of capitalism, a place where the marketplace, while more manic than in times past, still drives decisions. But a group of scientists gathering today for a conference in Miami would see it differently. They would argue that if you really want to understand why investors and traders behave the way they do, you need to look inside their brains. Meet the neuroeconomists, pioneers of sorts in an emerging field based on the notion that financial decisions have their roots in neuron connections. They’re building a science around using brain scans to try

Hope and Change: 5 Innovation Updates

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 01:42:00 GMT

Baxter, a robot that can work with humans. Photo courtesy of Rethink Robotics About a year ago I wrote about the first meeting of the 100 Year Starship Symposium (100YSS), a conference designed to keep scientists focused on what it will take for humans to be able to travel outside our solar system. Luckily, they still have about a century to figure it out. NASA and DARPA, the research arm of the Defense Department, are behind the project, and the latter has kicked in $500,000 to start wrestling with the ridiculously difficult challenge of traveling trillions of miles in space by 2100. Last week, at the second 100YSS meeting, there actually was a bit of progress to note. Along with

Getting Smart About Traffic

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 01:12:00 GMT

The road more traveled. Photo courtesy of Flickr user K2D2vaca Usually I walk to work, but earlier this week, after another apocalyptic forecast of torrential rains and head-twisting winds, I fell prey to weather dread and drove in. In no time, I was reminded of why Washington D.C. has the worst drivers in the U.S.–Allstate verified it–and also why it’s among the Top 10 congested cities in the country. The latest estimate is that drivers here waste an average of 45 hours a year in traffic jams. I don’t know if anyone’s come up with a comparable analysis of how much time the stress of sitting in gridlock takes off your life, but I’m guessing I said

How Dogs Fight Cancer

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 01:44:00 GMT

A dog named Maz collects on his psychic debt. Photo courtesy of Carol Ryder. If, like me, you have dog that can sense when you are feeling particularly indebted, you might want to make sure he or she isn’t in the room when you read this. Because now their species is becoming a key weapon in fighting human diseases, particularly cancer. As William Grimes pointed out in The New York Times last week, doctors and veterinarians are working together more than they ever have before, exchanging notes and insights about their research and seemingly dissimilar patients. One reason is that treatments that work on mice and rats too often are frustratingly ineffective on humans. At the s

Introducing the USS Zumwalt, the Stealth Destroyer

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

By the end of the decade, 60 percent of U.S. naval forces will be stationed in the Pacific—a historic high that reflects Asia’s increasing strategic importance to the United States, as well as concerns over China flexing its power in the region. The expanded U.S. presence will include the Navy’s next-generation warship, the DDG-1000 Zumwalt class destroyer, named after the former chief of naval operations Adm. Elmo Zumwalt Jr. The first of these 600-foot, 15,000-ton vessels is being built by General Dynamics in Maine at the Bath Iron Works, which had to construct a $40 million facility to accommodate the project. The new destroyer was designed to operate both in the ope

Forget the Volt, Make Way for Electric Trucks

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

When you press the accelerator of a Smith truck, it moves forward briskly, smoothly and in eerie quiet.There are no tailpipe emissions, because there is no tailpipe, and no tank for gas or diesel. Smith trucks are powered by batteries—the same technology, basically, that General Motors, Toyota and a handful of start-up companies are struggling to bring to a mass market in automobiles. When and if they get there, they will find—if Smith CEO Bryan Hansel is correct—a fleet of hundreds of thousands of electric trucks already on the road. The electric car, despite its enormous advantages in operating cost, efficiency, environmental impact and social cachet, suffers from a ch

Wearable Tech Makes a Fashion Statement

Thu, 13 Sep 2012 01:07:00 GMT

A dress that tweets, by Microsoft. Photo courtesy of Microsoft A new movie premieres in New York today and chances are none of you will ever see it. It’s a short film titled “DVF Through Glass” and it’s video that models working for designer Diane von Furstenberg shot during New York’s Fashion Week using Google glasses they were wearing. (Google prefers to call its augmented reality devices Google Glass to distinguish them from actual glasses because they contain no glass. Got that?) They’re the frames that caused such a stir last spring when Google unveiled them, wearable computers that can shoot videos and photos and tell you where the neares

10 Inventions You Haven’t Heard About

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:39:00 GMT

Wind turbines a bird could love. Photo courtesy of Catching Wind Power This Wednesday, Apple, with great fanfare, will present the iPhone 5 to the world. Much will be written about its 4G speed, taller screen, longer battery life, thinner shape and two-tone look. And much will be said about whether or not it is Steve Jobs’ final legacy. Was he actually weighing in on the new model until his dying day? Or is that story being floated to ensure the iPhone 5 cult classic status in the devout Apple community? No doubt this will be the big tech innovation story of the month–although, as MIT’s Technology Review pointed out last week, we’ve reached the point with sm

NASA Sparks Its Imagination

Fri, 07 Sep 2012 02:32:00 GMT

Flying into the future. Image courtesy of the University of Miami It’s been a month since Curiosity’s remarkable soft landing on the surface of Mars. (Video) Remember the massive, supersonic parachute that slowed the spacecraft’s descent from 1,000 down to 200 miles per hour, and the sky crane that lowered the rover on 20-foot long cables the rest of the way, touching down at a speed of under two miles per hour? And who can forget the unnerving “Seven Minutes of Terror,” the time that would pass before NASA scientists here on Earth would know if they had pulled it off or trashed a $350 million vehicle. Science and drama? Now that’s a special occ

Rare People Who Remember Everything

Tue, 04 Sep 2012 12:29:00 GMT

Memory is a collaborative effort within the brain. Image courtesy of Flickr user alles-schlumpf At last count, at least 33 people in the world could tell you what they ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner, on February 20, 1998. Or who they talked to on October 28, 1986. Pick any date and they can pull from their memory the most prosaic details of that thin slice of their personal history. Others, no doubt, have this remarkable ability, but so far only those 33 have been confirmed by scientific research. The most famous is probably actress Marilu Henner, who showed off her stunning recall of autobiographical minutiae on “60 Minutes” a few years ago. What makes this condi

Attack of the Superbugs

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 12:35:00 GMT

The superbug behind a deadly outbreak. Courtesy of the Centers for Disease Control Everybody, it seems, has a story of a friend or family member who became sicker after they went to the hospital. It’s become a dark slice of conventional wisdom: If a disease doesn’t kill you, the hospital just might. At heart, though, I think most of us don’t want to believe that. We want to hold on to the notion that hospitals are a safe haven, a place where smart and experienced people are dedicated to keeping us safe. How could we not get better?. But the ugly truth is that hospitals are a bacterial war zone and the recent story about an outbreak at the National Institutes of He

What is the Future of College Education?

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 01:07:00 GMT

The college classroom of the future? Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon. It was a just about a year ago that a handful of Stanford professors began hatching a revolution in college education. Sebastian Thrun, more widely known as the head of the team behind Google’s driverless car, decided that he and colleague Peter Norvig would start making their popular course in artificial intelligence available online. Free of charge. To anyone in the world. About 160,000 people signed up. A few weeks later, another Google researcher/Stanford computer scientist, Andrew Ng, followed suit, offering his equally popular course, “Machine Learning” for free. More than 100,000

Is That a Computer in Your Shoe?

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 01:16:00 GMT

Can sensors make you jump higher? Photo courtesy of Nike. It’s not often that shoes make news and when they do, it usually has something to do with Nike and latest sports deity whose feet it has shod. So it was again earlier this week when The Wall Street Journal reported that when Nike rolls out its LeBron X Nike Plus model this fall, sneakers could break the $300 barrier. For that tidy sum, you’ll get the same type of shoes LeBron James wore in the Olympics gold medal basketball game in London and you get sensors–four scientifically-placed sensors embedded under each sole. They will measure downward pressure from different points on your foot and, together with a

The Accidental History of the @ Symbol

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 02:32:45 GMT

Called the “snail” by Italians and the “monkey tail” by the Dutch, @ is the sine qua non of electronic communication, thanks to e-mail addresses and Twitter handles. @ has even been inducted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which cited its modern use as an example of “elegance, economy, intellectual transparency, and a sense of the possible future directions that are embedded in the arts of our time.” The origin of the symbol itself, one of the most graceful characters on the keyboard, is something of a mystery. One theory is that medieval monks, looking for shortcuts while copying manuscripts, converted the Latin word for&thin

How the Pogo Stick Leapt From Classic Toy to Extreme Sport

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 02:25:56 GMT

The pogo stick may never upend the wheel as a means of locomotion. But as inventions go, they share something: Once built, there wasn’t a whole lot anyone could seem to do to improve the basic design. In the more than eight decades since a Russian immigrant named George B. Hansburg introduced the pogo stick to America, the device had scarcely changed: a homely stilt with foot pegs and a steel coil spring that bopped riders a few inches off the ground. And bopped. And bopped. And bopped. Some kids fell off so many times they gave up, tossing the pogo next to the dinged hula hoops and unicycle deep in the garage. Others just outgrew it, gaining enough weight as teenagers to snap the st

Cooking With Robots

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 05:11:00 GMT

Kitchen tech teaches chefs to cut along a virtual line. Photo courtesy of Kyoto Sangyo University Last week The Voice was back. I’m not referring to the treacly TV show or the latest crooner chased down by TMZ. I’m talking about Julia Child. In honor of what would have been her 100th birthday, America’s first real TV chef was all over the airwaves. Or at least her voice was, a voice that, on first hearing, sounded like it could set off car alarms, or maybe was a car alarm. But it was all part of the package, a presence as genuine as it was gangly. There was nothing snooty about Julia as she taught Americans French cooking. If you dropped a piece of lamb and you

What the Discovery of Hundreds of New Planets Means for Astronomy—and Philosophy

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 04:23:17 GMT

The other night I trained my telescope on a few stars that resemble the Sun and are now known to have planets—inconspicuous and previously unheralded stars such as 61 Virginis and 47 Ursae Majoris, each found to be orbited by at least three planets, and HD 81040, home to a gas giant six times as massive as mighty Jupiter. I could see none of the actual planets—lost in the glare of their stars, exoplanets can only rarely be discerned through even the largest telescopes—but just knowing they were there enhanced the experience. Watching those yellow stars dancing in the eyepiece, I found myself grinning widely in the dark, like an interstellar Peeping Tom. When I was a boy

Brain Science: 10 New Studies That Get Inside Your Head

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 04:04:00 GMT

Brain research is now part of the daily news. Image courtesy of National Institute of Mental Health We know so much more about our brains than we once did. Some would suggest too much. Because neuroscience, once a subject confined to academia and research labs, now belongs to all of us. Every day, it seems, there’s a story in the mainstream media about a study providing fresh insights on how our brain functions or what we do to make it perform better or worse. Scientists can caution all they want that this is a maddeningly complex subject, but in our search to understand why we do the things we do, we more often look for overly simple answers deep inside our heads. So we tend

A Sneak Peek at the First Commercial Spaceport

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

For 300 years, explorers and settlers crossed New Mexico by way of the Camino Real trail. If you travel that route today, you can view the latest phase of human exploration: Spaceport America, the world’s first purpose-built commercial space launch facility. The sprawling 670,000-square-foot complex is the hub for billionaire Richard Branson’s company Virgin Galactic, which advertises affordable access to space for scientific missions, small satellites and tourists. At the heart of the facility is the terminal hangar “Gateway to Space,” which houses a 4,000-square-foot gallery where visitors can watch launches. The rest of the complex is due for completion next year

Augmented Reality Livens up Museums

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 01:39:00 GMT

Augmented reality puts flesh on dinosaur bones. Photo courtesy of Meld Media. Chances are you think you already have enough information in your life. Why, oh why, would you want to add more layers? Yet there’s something intriguing about the concept of augmented reality, the notion of enhancing objects in the real world with virtual sounds and images and additional info. And when Google revealed earlier this year that it was developing glasses that will be part wearable computer, part digital assistant that flashes relevant data right before your eyes, augmented reality (AR) no longer seemed such a digital parlor trick. The geek gods had spoken. In fact, recent analysis by the

Smartphone as Doctor

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 12:19:00 GMT

Just one of 13,000 mobile health apps out there. Photo courtesy of iHealth If there’s any doubt that mobile apps are taking health care in directions unimaginable a few years ago, consider a few tidbits from just the past few weeks. First, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) just gave the green light to something called an “ingestible sensor.” It’s a tiny computer chip embedded inside a pill. You swallow that pill when you take your other meds and the ingested chip goes to work, recording when the dose went down and transmitting that data to a stick-on patch on your body. The patch then sends it to your smartphone. And to your doctor’s office, if you

How Olympians Could Beat the Competition by Tweaking Their Genes

Tue, 07 Aug 2012 02:20:55 GMT

Take a close look at the athletes competing in this year's Summer Olympic Games in London—their musculature will tell you a lot about how they achieved their elite status. Endless hours of training and commitment to their sport played a big role in building the bodies that got them to the world's premier athletic competition. Take an even closer look—this one requires microscopy—and you'll see something else, something embedded in the genetic blueprints of these young men and women that's just as important to their success. In nearly all cases, these athletes have realized the full potential laid out by those genes. And that potential may be much greater to begin with th

Cars With Benefits

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 05:58:00 GMT

HondaLink brings connected cars into the mainstream. Image courtesy of Honda If you’re over 50 and bought a new car recently, you’ve no doubt had the same reaction to the dashboard that I did, which was: “What is all this?” I realize that these days data is to be revered and that a moment without infotainment or, perish the thought, a Web connection, is viewed as life not worth living. Yet I can’t shake the notion that the point of getting in a car is to drive it somewhere and that this has generally not required that I be so well-informed or emotionally fulfilled. The above statement, of course, lowers me deep into the pit of fogeyishness and I know th

Scenes From a Changing Planet

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 02:13:00 GMT

Landsat image of Alaska’s Yukon Delta. Photo courtesy of NASA For 40 years Landsat satellites have been circling the Earth, taking pictures from roughly 440 miles above us. Each loop lasts about 99 minutes and it takes about 16 days to capture the entire planet. Which means that Landsats have been recording, in 16-day intervals, the ebb and flow of our relationship with the planet since the early 1970s. It’s been, as they say in the relationship business, a rough stretch, but for most of it, only scientists have been paying much attention. These were people tracking the explosion of cities or the scarring of rainforests or the melting of glaciers. As for the rest of us,

New Tech May Have Athletes Climbing the Walls

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 05:13:02 GMT

This climbing wall doubles as a piece of art work when not in use. Image courtesy of LUNAR Europe. Walking into an indoor rock climbing gym can be overwhelming: Climbers dangle from the ceiling like an army of Spiderman clones, leaving a cloud of chalk in their wake. And as they scramble up walls speckled in colored, polyurethane holds that mimic the rock formations found in nature, good luck finding a route that’s open after 6 p.m. on a weeknight. Earlier this summer, LUNAR Europe, a Munich-based design studio, thought it came up with a solution to the crowded-gym doldrums: Why not bring the climbing wall to your living room and make it pretty? The new in-home climbing system, the No

Gooooal! Two Technologies Compete to Sense Soccer Goals

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 04:14:59 GMT

In the 39th minute of a 2010 second-round World Cup soccer game, England's Frank Lampard shot the ball at Germany's goal. The ball hit the crossbar of the goal net, bounced down to the ground and back up to the bar again before the German goalie grabbed it out of harm's way. The officials called it a no-goal, because the ball had not fully crossed the white goal line on the pitch that runs parallel to the cross bar. But it had. Video replay showed clearly that Lampard's shot had hit the ground nearly a third of a meter inside the goal line before bouncing back up. But the call was final, and the Germans had the ball. England lost that game and was eliminated from the World Cup. Lampard's

The Message War

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 12:36:00 GMT

The protests in Egypt fit right into the counterterrorism narrative. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Mosa’aberising Not long ago, banner ads showing coffins draped with American flags started appearing on websites in Yemen. They had been placed by supporters of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Their message was that Americans were the enemy and Al Qaeda was killing them. A few days later people working for the U.S. State Department posted banners on the same websites, only this time the coffins were covered with Yemeni flags, photoshopped into the image. The message also had changed. This time it said that most of the people killed by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula were Yeme

50 Shades of Green

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 12:46:45 GMT

A slice of “vegitecture” in Barcelona. Photo courtesy of Capella Garcia Architectura Over the next few days you’re going to see a lot of the London Eye, the giant slow-spinning Ferris wheel along the Thames River, particularly since during the Olympics it will be portrayed as a massive mood ring, changing color every night to reflect what people have been tweeting about the Games. If tweeters are feeling good about what’s going on, it will glow yellow. If not, it will turn morosely purple. What you’re less likely to see is the vertical garden covering the corner of the Athenaeum Hotel in Mayfair or the one at the Edgeware Road Underground station or the

How We Travel: 10 Fresh Ideas

Mon, 23 Jul 2012 04:05:14 GMT

Foldable cars are in our future. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia. Nothing like a hot, sticky July day to make you think that driving would have been one of the circles of Hell had Dante had a bad commute. These are the days when the grind can seen eternal, when it feels that life has become an endless trail of brake lights leading to the horizon, and that it shall always be so. But take heart, my friends. To keep hope alive, I’ve compiled a sampling of some of the freshest thinking about changing the experience of getting around, and not just in cars. Some are imminent, others may never reach fruition. Yet most are focused on making this slice of our lives a little more bearable.

An Answer for Alzheimer’s?

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 08:44:20 GMT

What a deteriorating brain looks like. Image courtesy of National Institute on Aging It’s been called the holy grail of medical research, a discovery that could profoundly change what it means to grow old. The personal costs of Alzheimer’s disease to its victims, and the family and friends who have to watch its insidious assault on their loved ones, is enormous. The financial costs are equally staggering. The cost of caring for the more than 5 million Americans with Alzheimer’s–there are 35 million worldwide–already is estimated to be $200 billion a year. By 2050, it’s expected to top a trillion dollars. But the search for a treatment that cures Al

Can Computers Predict Crimes?

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 12:09:00 GMT

Computers predict a city’s crime hot spots. Image courtesy of PredPol Columbo would have hated the latest trend in crime-fighting. And it definitely would have made Dirty Harry even more unhinged. But Sherlock Holmes, now he would have been impressed. The logic, the science, the compilation of data–all the stuff of Holmesian detective work. I’m talking about something known as predictive policing–gathering loads of data and applying algorithms to deduce where and when crimes are most likely to occur. Late last month, the Los Angeles Police Department announced that it will be expanding its use of software created by a California startup named PredPol. For th

10 Ways Tech Makes Old Age Easier

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 01:45:51 GMT

Taizo the robot gets seniors to exercise. Photo courtesy of General Robotix Yesterday the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, as it had 32 times before, voted to repeal what’s become known as Obamacare. There is no chance the Democratic Senate will follow suit. So, until the November election, it looks like health care at the national level will pretty much live in the Land of Swirling Rhetoric and Symbolic Gestures. This is unfortunate because it’s a slice of our future that’s pockmarked with some ugly realities. Here’s a personal favorite: Two years ago, more than 40 million people 65 years or older lived in the U.S. By mid-century, more than twi

Going to Extremes

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 06:40:47 GMT

Nasty weather over Oslo, Norway. Photo courtesy of Flickr user ldrose Remember the moment in The Wizard of Oz when Glinda, the good witch, warns the Wicked Witch of the West that someone might drop a house on her, too. For a fleeting instant, the wicked one is all vulnerability, glancing nervously at the sky for signs of another descending domecile. That’s the image that popped into my brain this weekend when a guy on the radio mentioned the threat of “severe thunderstorms” later in the day. It probably helped that at that moment I was across the street from a house upon which a huge elm had toppled during the freakish derecho a week earlier. Most of the tree had bee

Our Daily Juice

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 01:22:17 GMT

Spray paint turns ceramic tiles into a battery. Photo courtesy of Rice University Until a week ago, my relationship with batteries had been purely prosaic. Sure, I charged cell phone and laptop batteries every night, but with no more deliberation than brushing my teeth or skipping past Jay Leno’s monologue. Then came the Derecho of 2012, and I, like millions of other Americans, lost power for days that seemed like weeks. And I, like so many others, succumbed to juice hysteria, an obsession with staking claims to working outlets in public places–Starbucks, libraries, shopping mall food courts–so that we could bring our devices back to life. Today I have power again.

Food, Modified Food

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 02:57:02 GMT

Most corn grown in the U.S. is genetically modified. Photo courtesy of Flickr user AlicePopkorn If the weather outside didn’t make us feel like we’re on a tanning bed cranked up to fry, this would be a big weekend for grilling. Imagine cooking salmon steaks from fish that grow twice as fast as normal. Or even better, imagine following them up with a slice of cake containing the same Omega-3 fatty oil that makes the salmon so good for your heart. Both of the above are well within the realm of possibility. In fact, the growth-spurting fish already are swimming in pens in Massachusetts. And agriculture giant Monsanto is close to marketing soybeans that can be converted into o

Where Do All Those Facebook Photos Go?

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

With 900 million members worldwide and growing, Facebook is building its first European data storage facility—60 miles south of the Arctic Circle in Lulea, Sweden. The reason: natural air conditioning. Some Internet “server farms” spend as much to cool the machines as power them. Facebook’s Nordic operation—which will eventually expand to three 290,000- square-foot buildings, each housing tens of thousands of servers—will save millions of dollars on electricity. Plus, the buildings are designed to capture some heat from the servers and use it to warm employee offices. The estimated cost of building the facilities is more than $700 million. Sweden hopes t

The Future of Cheating in Sports

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

One clue to where doping is headed is the case of Thomas Springstein, a German track coach notorious for trying to get his hands on an experimental gene therapy for anemia. “Repoxygen is hard to get,” he wrote to a Dutch doctor in an e-mail revealed at a criminal trial in 2006. “Please give me new instructions soon so that I can order the product before Christmas.” Repoxygen never made it out of the lab, and Springstein doesn’t seem to have obtained any. Instead, he eventually received a 16-month suspended jail sentence for supplying doping products to a minor, and the athletes he supplied drugs to were banned from competition. But his effort to obtain Repoxy

Spanx on Steroids: How Speedo Created the New Record-Breaking Swimsuit

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

In 2009, Speedo’s research team began to brainstorm innovative ways to help swimmers go faster. The polyurethane bodysuits that contributed to an astonishing number of swimming world records over the previous 18 months had been banned. To think outside the box, the Speedo representatives met outside the lab, joining academics, coaches and research consultants at hotels, conference centers and even an English country house to spawn ideas, ideas inspired more by Captain Avenger than Mark Spitz. “Lots of conversation was had around wild and wacky ideas,” says Joe Santry, the research manager for Speedo’s Aqualab in Nottingham, England. “Some of the initial ske

The Top Athletes Looking for an Edge and the Scientists Trying to Stop Them

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

DeeDee Trotter was on an airplane in 2006 when she overheard a passenger seated behind her discussing the steroids scandal. Federal investigators in the Balco case, named for a lab that produced supplements, would eventually implicate more than two dozen athletes for the use of performance-enhancing drugs, including Barry Bonds, baseball’s home run king, and Marion Jones, the track-and-field star, who would end up in jail, stripped of five Olympic medals. “This guy was reading the newspaper and he said, ‘Oh, they’re all on drugs,’” recalls Trotter, a runner who won a gold medal in the 4 x 400 meter relay at the 2004 Olympics. She was furious. “I t

Prepare to Go Underground

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 05:25:38 GMT

Mexico City's proposed upside-down skyscraper. Photo courtesy of BNKR Arquitectura The planet probably won’t become dramatically more sustainable as a result of what happened last week at the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro. Yes, lofty speeches were delivered and hundreds of billions of dollars of pledges were made, but the chance of a meaningful climate change treaty coming out of one of these events is now none and noner. Yet one thing that has become painfully clearer with each passing U.N. climate summit is that the key to sustaining life on Earth is to get smarter about how we develop and reshape cities. Today, more than half of the world&#

Man or Computer? Can You Tell the Difference?

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 06:01:30 GMT

It’s not every day you have to persuade a panel of scientists that you’re human. But this was the position I found myself in at the Loebner Prize competition, an annual Turing test, in which artificial intelligence programs attempt to pass themselves off as people. The British mathematician Alan Turing probed one of computing’s biggest theoretical questions: Could machines possess a mind? If so, how would we know? In 1950, he proposed an experiment: If judges in typed conversations with a person and a computer program couldn’t tell them apart, we’d come to consider the machine as “thinking.” He predicted that programs would be capable of fooling j

Robots Enter the Job Market

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 02:43:53 GMT

Robots are moving to center stage. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Andy Miah For all the speech lines we hear about jobs these days, rarely does anyone mention robots. They do occasionally, but usually it’s saved for the “innovation” speeches. This is understandable. If you’re running for office, better to keep the two ideas separated, because while jobs are good because they’re, well, jobs, and robots are good because they mean progress, mix the two together and soon enough people will start asking how you’ll be able to create a lot of jobs if these really smart machines are doing more and more of the work. No, I’m not going all Luddite on you

The Allure of Brain Scans

Mon, 18 Jun 2012 02:26:28 GMT

More clues than answers? Image courtesy of the National Institute of Mental Health Science is rarely pretty. Stunning, yes. Provocative and enlightening, of course. But pretty? Not so much. But brain scans are a different story. Once they’ve been splashed with vibrant purples and reds and yellows, they can look downright ravishing. Makes you want you want to pat yourself on the head and say, “Stay beautiful in there.” Alas, therein lies a problem. Not only has technology made it possible to see our brains as something they’re not–a fiesta of technicolor–but it also has made it easier to draw absurdly simple conclusions about a ridiculously complex

Deconstructing Dad

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 02:22:00 GMT

Old man and the sea Photo courtesy of Flickr user mikebaird Having children changes a man. All of us know examples of that. I’m pretty sure, for instance, that the only time I ever saw my father sing was to his kids. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was pure Dad. But is there something about fatherhood that actually changes the male brain? Studies suggest that it does, including one published a few years ago which found that new sets of neurons formed in brains of mouse dads that stayed around the nest after their pups were born. Still, there’s much yet to be learned about the effects of being a father. And so scientists continue to explore the eternal question: &ld

It’s a Long Story

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 02:12:19 GMT

The Atavist is refining multimedia storytelling. Image courtesy of The Atavist These are tough times for storytelling. While they’ve proven that brevity is not always the soul of wit, Twitter and Facebook have transformed what it means to communicate. We now write in quick bursts, sometimes completing thoughts, often not, with the goal always of cutting to the chase. No need for nuance or complexity. No reason for meandering twists to add flavor and depth or slow builds that unfold a story rather than eject it. What hope in this world is there for the great long narrative, such as Jon Krakauer’s “Into Thin Air” or even more so, John Hersey’s 31,000-word

Roiling in the Deep

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 01:16:00 GMT

Strange things are happening in the ocean. Photo courtesy of Flickr user TimboDon You may soon, if you haven’t already, be making your first visit to the beach since last summer. A lot has happened out in the ocean since then, although most of us probably haven’t been paying much attention. Truth is, the sea doesn’t get a whole lot of press, unless a tsunami or shark attack happens. But, like I said, a lot of unusual things are going on in the ocean these days. Scientists have been doing some innovative research to a get handle on where all this is headed, but they are truly in uncharted waters. As marine biologist Callum Roberts wrote in Newsweek, “With an e

Combinatorial Creativity and the Myth of Originality

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 09:06:00 GMT

Celebrated creators have always known the power of the synthesizing mind. Illustration by Ikon Images / Corbis Editor’s Note: The Innovations blog welcomes this “guest post” by Maria Popova, creator of the Brain Pickings blog. There is a curious cultural disconnect between our mythology of spontaneous ideation – the Eureka! moment, the stroke of genius, the proverbial light bulb – and how “new” ideas actually take shape, amalgamated into existence by the combinatorial nature of creativity. To create is to combine existing bits of insight, knowledge, ideas, and memories into new material and new interpretations of the world, to connect the see

The Evolution of the Homepage

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 07:40:46 GMT

Using the WayBack Machine, we looked back at how the homepage has changed since the early days of the Internet

Taking Control of Your Dreams

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 02:40:18 GMT

Technology may help you shape your dreams. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Kaptain Kobold Two summers ago the concept of lucid dreaming took a spin in the swirl of pop culture when the movie Inception hit the big screen. Its core premise is that a master corporate spy, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, could not only hack into the dreams of other people to steal secrets, but also manipulate their subconscious thinking. Unfortunately, what most people remember about the film is the scene featured in the ad campaign in which DiCaprio demonstrates the notion of shared dreaming to co-star Ellen Page by exploding, in beautifully choreographed slow-motion, the streetscape around them–suggest

Talking With Machines

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:38:44 GMT

Siri is just the beginning of voice recognition. Photo courtesy of Flickr user AcidZero Voice recognition software, most of us would probably agree, is a pretty cool thing. But the talking to machines part–be it smartphone, TV screen or dashboard–well, not so much. Asking advice of a device? Reeks of geek. Enunciating each word so you can be understood? How cool can you really be? But Apple, true to form, has taken this head on by hiring three icons of cool to star in their latest ad campaign for Siri, the voice of the iPhone 4S. There’s Zooey Deschanel (Adorable Cool) and John Malkovich (Cerebral Cool) and Samuel L. Jackson (Ultimate Cool), and all make engaging in

The Genome That Keeps on Giving

Tue, 29 May 2012 04:56:17 GMT

Genome sequencing will soon be part of everyday medicine. Image courtesy of Brigham Young University Last week the Smithsonian’s National Museum Of Natural History announced that in June, 2013, it will open a big exhibit on the human genome to mark the 10th anniversary of the mapping of the human body’s genetic blueprint. That was no small accomplishment back in the spring of 2003 when the Human Genome Project completed its mission of identifying and determining the sequencing of the roughly 20,000 genes in our DNA. It took at least a billion dollars and 13 years to decipher the puzzle. To get a sense of how far and how fast the technology has advanced in the past decade,

What’s Going On With Ice Cream?

Thu, 24 May 2012 02:16:00 GMT

Our relationship with ice cream is getting complicated. Photo courtesy of Flickr user wautierp This weekend Men in Black 3 opens just about anywhere there’s a screen, but I’ll bet you didn’t know that not one, not two, but three ice cream treats have been chosen to mark the occasion. Since the beginning of the month, in fact, Baskin-Robbins has, in recognition of this cinema event, been serving up something called “Pink Surprise Cake,” supposedly inspired by a scene in the movie, along with two sundaes, “Lunar Lander” and “Agent 31.” Both are built on scoops of “lunar cheesecake” ice cream–a flavor last sold when

When Cities Run Themselves

Mon, 21 May 2012 03:52:13 GMT

London's a leader among smart cities. Photo courtesy of Flickr user UGArdener The torch relay for the London Olympics began in England over the weekend. Officially, this hearkens back to the original Olympics in Ancient Greece, when a flame was lit to commemorate the theft of fire by Prometheus from top god Zeus. Unofficially, this is when the people running the Games go into panic mode because they have just over two months to make sure everything works. It will be one of the first big tests of the modern “smart” city. Roughly 11 million people are expected to visit London later this summer, with 3 million more “car trips” added on the busiest days. The c

The Rise of the Bionic Human

Thu, 17 May 2012 02:33:11 GMT

Body suits are allowing paralyzed people to stand and move. Photo courtesy of Ekso Bionics Chances are you saw the video of a woman named Claire Lomas finishing a marathon in London last week. If not, I should tell you that it did not end with the classic pose—head back in exhaustion, arms raised in joy. No, Lomas’ head was down as she watched herself literally place one foot in front of the other. Her arms were down, too, holding on to metal braces. Directly behind, husband Dan moved in stride, steadying her with his hands. And Lomas wore something never seen before in a marathon–a body suit of sensors and motors, which, along with a small computer on her back, moved her legs f

Is Facebook Good For TV?

Mon, 14 May 2012 02:20:04 GMT

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg thinks watching TV should be a social experience. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Feinberg Today Mark Zuckerberg turns 28. Friday, he turns billionaire. That’s when his creation, Facebook, is scheduled to go public, a move that, by some estimates, will make Zuckerberg worth about $19 billion. Not a bad week, eh? But with all that fortune comes some pain. Soon every move he makes will be subject to Wall Street’s unsparing scrutiny, every misstep analyzed as more proof that he’s still closer to his Harvard dorm room than a CEO suite. He sought to reassure the skeptics and rouse the boosters at a pre-IPO roadshow last week, starting

What Makes a 21st Century Mom?

Thu, 10 May 2012 02:35:00 GMT

Moms will be moms. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Sean Dreilinger It’s never been easy to be a mom. I don’t speak from personal experience, of course, but my mother had eight kids and, as I remember it, that was no slice of heaven. You could make the case that all the technology we now have, all the whizzy whiz conveniences have made the job easier. But with that has come a pace that can be equal parts maddening and discombobulating. So what does it mean to be a 21st century mom? You got me. But maybe science can provide some clues. Here are 10 of the latest studies and surveys on modern motherhood: You’re giving me a big head: Of course, most moms nail the nurtu

Top Ten Mysteries of the Universe

Tue, 08 May 2012 04:15:22 GMT

1. What Are Fermi Bubbles? No, this is not a rare digestive disorder. The bubbles are massive, mysterious structures that emanate from the Milky Ways center and extend roughly 20,000 light-years above and below the galactic plane. The strange phenomenon, first discovered in 2010, is made up of super-high-energy gamma-ray and X-ray emissions, invisible to the naked eye. Scientists have hypothesized that the gamma rays might be shock waves from stars being consumed by the massive black hole at the center of the galaxy. 2. Rectangular Galaxy “Look, up in the sky! It’s a…rectangle?” Earlier this year, astronomers spotted a celestial body, roughly 70 million light-ye

Big Data or Too Much Information?

Mon, 07 May 2012 04:35:00 GMT

Big Data is getting bigger at a stunning rate. Photo courtesy of Flickr user mrflip We all know there’s a whole lot more information in our worlds than there used to be. As to how much more, well, most of of us are pretty clueless. Here’s a priceless nugget about all that info, compliments of Dave Turek, the guy in charge of supercomputer development at IBM: From the year 2003 and working backwards to the beginning of human history, we generated, according to IBM’s calculations, five exabytes–that’s five billion gigabytes–of information. By last year, we were cranking out that much data every two days. By next year, predicts Turek, we’ll be d

Medicine Goes Small

Wed, 02 May 2012 04:07:00 GMT

Meet the Domino, a little chip that can diagnose your health. Photo courtesy of University of Alberta Let’s start by agreeing that nanotechnology is magical science. Most of us know that it’s about scientists operating at a molecular level. Many of us understand that it usually involves the tiniest of “machines” assembling themselves through chemical interactions. But when researchers start talking about creating molecule-sized robots that can repair cells inside our bodies, they’ve moved so far beyond my comprehension that I’m reduced to blubbering, “Sounds good…keep ‘em coming.” One thing even I can understand, though,

Will America ever love electric bikes?

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 02:20:59 GMT

Look for more people riding on battery power. Photo courtesy of Busetti The United States and China are different in so many ways. We borrow, they lend. We like to fly solo, they value their roles in larger groups. We follow the exploits of people named Snooki, they do not know the depths of Snookiness. Then there are electric bikes. China loves them, America, not so much. Actually, hardly at all. Let’s run the numbers: Last year, about 25 million e-bikes were sold in China; in the U.S. the number was under 100,000. According to Pike Research, U.S. sales might climb over 100,000 this year and could reach as high as 350,000 in 2018. But that would still be a sliver of proje

What Is on Voyager’s Golden Record?

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 08:00:04 GMT

“I thought it was a brilliant idea from the beginning,” says Timothy Ferris. Produce a phonograph record containing the sounds and images of humankind and fling it out into the solar system. By the 1970s, astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake already had some experience with sending messages out into space. They had created two gold-anodized aluminum plaques that were affixed to the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft. Linda Salzman Sagan, an artist and Carl’s wife, etched an illustration onto them of a nude man and woman with an indication of the time and location of our civilization. The “Golden Record” would be an upgrade to Pioneer’s plaques. Mou

To the Asteroids and Beyond

Mon, 23 Apr 2012 02:07:00 GMT

Is mining asteroids the next space frontier? Photo courtesy of European Space Agency A strange thing happened in Washington last week. This normally is a pretty jaded place, but when the space shuttle Discovery did its victory lap over the city atop a 747 Tuesday morning, people poured out of government buildings or raced to office windows to take one long, last look. Most fired away on their cell phone cameras, knowing that they weren’t likely to get a great shot, but equally sure they had to try. It was a moment that revived awe, if only for fleeting minutes, one that screamed “Turning point!” in a way that history rarely does. Some, such as the Washington Post c

Next Up? The Smart Watch

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 01:56:33 GMT

The Pebble smart watch is on a roll. Photo courtesy of Allerta Remember how excited everyone got a few weeks ago when Google started sharing details about the augmented reality glasses it’s developing. Project Glass, as it’s called, seemed sure to be the next big thing in wearable tech–glasses that work like a smart phone, giving you directions, taking photos, connecting to the Web, pinging you with reminders, buying tickets, and generally acting like a concierge wrapped around your head. Now that all seems soooo early April. Because this week the new new thing is a smart watch called the Pebble. Not that smart watches are new–they’ve been around for

When Innovation Flows Uphill

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 02:14:47 GMT

Reverse innovation in action: An ultrasound scanner shrinks to smartphone size. Photo courtesy of GE Here’s the story we’ve been hearing for years: Back in 1965 the coach of the University of Florida football team was befuddled that no matter how much water his players drank, they still became badly dehydrated in the brutal Florida heat and humidity. He asked doctors at the college for advice and one of them, James Robert Cade, devised a concoction of sucrose, glucose, sodium and potassium. Unfortunately, it tasted worse than a bucket of sweat. Cade’s wife suggested adding lemon juice and soon the world would be gulping Gatorade. The part of the tale we never hea

Fast Forward: The Dark Energy Camera

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Ever since the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, the universe has been expanding. Astronomers once believed this growth spurt would gradually slow down, but in 1998 they discovered that distant galaxies were actually moving away from one another faster than ever. Instead of hitting the brakes, the universe is flooring the gas pedal. A new project representing 23 scientific institutions is investigating this mysterious cosmic propellant, called dark energy. The centerpiece is the Dark Energy Camera, which will be operational in July after it is installed in the telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The “lens” of the 5.5-ton camera consists of

Timothy Ferris on Voyagers' Never-Ending Journey

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Exploration is one thing, science another—but they’ve come together rather nicely in the Voyager mission to the outer planets, outbound for the past 35 years yet still making discoveries. The twin Voyager probes are currently poised on the brink of interstellar space. Both are immersed in the foamy walls of the transparent “heliospheric bubble,” where the solar wind, consisting of particles blown off the Sun, stalls against the stellar winds that permeate the rest of the galaxy. Astronomers don’t know how thick the bubble walls are—that’s for the Voyagers to ascertain—but they expect the probes to burst free and begin reporting from the grea

E-Book Recreates a Monster

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 07:34:31 GMT

Frankenstein is the same. It's his story that changes. In two weeks Frankenstein returns…and this time it’s personal. At least for you it could be. Mary Shelley’s tale of monstrous obsession and an obsessive monster is being revived as an interactive book, specifically an app for iPads and iPhones. What that means isn’t absolutely clear. But one of the people responsible for reconstituting the novel in digital form, author Dave Morris, says it’s not simply a matter of a reader making choices that change the story. It’s more nuanced than that, he insists. While a reader of the interactive Frankenstein will make decisions that affect the story, they

When Animals Inspire Inventions

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 05:08:40 GMT

It's not pretty, but it could inspire an amazing medical innovation. Photo courtesy of NOAA If you had to pick an animal that could end up as the inspiration for one of the more ingenious medical tools of the future, which do you think it would be? Ants, with their amazing sensing skills? What about salamanders, which can replace a lost tail like we would a cell phone? Or bats? They nailed echolocation before our ancestors were walking. Wrong, wrong and wrong. No, it’s the slimy sea lamprey, a bizarre-looking creature with a round, tooth-filled sucking disk where its face should be. It has no vertebrae, no jaw and a nervous system about as primitive as anything in the s

Welcome to the 21st Century Ballpark

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 03:04:05 GMT

The ballpark of the future in Miami. Photo courtesy of Miami Marlins The 2012 Major League Baseball season kicked off in Miami last night with a 4-1 win by the St. Louis Cardinals over the hometown Marlins. But that’s a footnote. The real show was the stage–a flashy new stadium that’s as much about technology and art and whimsy as it is about playing ball. Some are saying that Marlins Park is the first baseball stadium of a new era, one that makes a clean break from the long run of nostalgia parks, charming places of brick and steel meant to feel intimate and quirky and a slice of simpler times. Camden Yards in Baltimore was the iconic model for the many that foll

The Brain is Full of Surprises

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 02:10:49 GMT

The brain is more grid than tangle of spaghetti. Image courtesy of Human Connectome Project. Maybe you heard about the study published last week that compared the brain’s wiring to the streets of Manhattan. It made me wonder if this had anything to do with how active my brain’s fear center gets when I’m in the back of a New York taxi, but apparently the scientists did not see the value of this line of research. They did, however, find that the connections in our brains seem to follow a fairly basic design, that instead of resembling a bowl of tangled spaghetti, as once thought, they’re laid out like a grid. (Well, that’s reassuring.) And, says the study&#

Time to Reinvent the Parking Lot

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 08:40:21 GMT

Some things never change: Disneyland's parking lot in the '50s. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Aroid In his new book, “Rethinking a Lot: The Design and Culture of Parking,” MIT professor Eran Ben-Joseph asks a simple question: “Have you seen a great parking lot lately?” which is kind of like asking if you’ve enjoyed a plate of runny eggs lately. Not that parking lots have ever been a testament to innovative thinking. I mean, we’re talking about paving over dirt. This has never been a big brain-drainer. But Ben-Joseph says it’s time to give these big, drab open spaces their moment to shine, beyond their oil spots glistening in the sun

A Little Less Friction, Please

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 07:34:41 GMT

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pitches the power of frictionless sharing. Photo courtesy of Facebook. Think fast: What do you wish you had less of in your life? Stress? Debt? Traffic? Questions like this? Wrong. The correct answer is friction. Yes, I’m being ridiculously presumptuous. But in a swelling part of our daily lives, the world of smart phones and social networks, friction is considered the bane of modern existence. Or more accurately, utopia, as now envisioned, is one “frictionless” place. This notion, that friction is something we’d be better off without, has its roots in engineering, of course-think of all the awesome perpetual motion machines we&#

When Robots Get Morals

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 07:14:26 GMT

How long before robots show a full range of emotions? Image courtesy of Flickr user Solo It’s been a humbling year since the total beatdown of two former Jeopardy champions on national TV by a supercomputer named Watson. Sure, the machine gave an occasional lame answer, but in the land of game shows, we were a conquered species. Last weekend we had our revenge. At the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn, a computer program named Dr. Fill went up against a roomful of puzzle masters and this time the machine proved human. It finished 141st among 600 contestants, disappointing its inventor, Matthew Ginsberg, who thought it would end up in the top 50. Our glory, howev

Top Ten Most-Destructive Computer Viruses

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Computer viruses have come a long way from the early days of personal computers, when teenage hackers competed for bragging rights, creating malware designed for mischief or random mayhem. Now, the hackers have gone professional, and their ambitions have grown; rather than amateurs working out of their parents' basement, malware creators are often part of an underworld criminal gang, or working directly for a foreign government or intelligence agency. As the stakes have grown, so too has the potential damage and destruction brought on by malware. 1) Stuxnet (2009-2010) The arrival of Stuxnet was like a cartoon villain come to life: it was the first computer virus designed specifically to

When Cameras Trick Us and We Love It

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 07:36:04 GMT

Where time speeds up and motion slows down, Frozen Planet photo courtesy of BBC Every so often, when I’m disappointed that I don’t have superpowers, I’ve found that it helps to watch a nature documentary. Not that it makes me fly or see through walls or fly through walls I’m seeing through, but usually it does let me speed up time or slow down motion and that’s not too shabby. It happened again the other night when the latest BBC nature mega-series, Frozen Planet began airing on the Discovery Channel. It’s from the same team that brought us Planet Earth, which became the best-selling high-def DVD of all time. This time they’ve focused exclusi

Ten Inventions Inspired by Science Fiction

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 06:32:43 GMT

The innovators behind objects like the cellphone or the helicopter took inspiration from works like "Star Trek" and War of the Worlds

Dear Science Fiction Writers: Stop Being So Pessimistic!

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 06:32:56 GMT

Neal Stephenson has seen the future—and he doesn’t like it. Today’s science fiction, he argues, is fixated on nihilism and apocalyptic scenarios—think recent films such as The Road and TV series like “The Walking Dead.” Gone are the hopeful visions prevalent in the mid-20th century. That’s a problem, says Stephenson, author of modern sci-fi classics such as Snow Crash. He fears that no one will be inspired to build the next great space vessel or find a way to completely end dependence on fossil fuels when our stories about the future promise a shattered world. So, in fall 2011, Stephenson launched the Hieroglyph project to rally writers to infuse s

Is There More to Obesity Than Too Much Food?

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 05:27:15 GMT

Is more than overeating to blame? Image courtesy of Tobyotter Obesity, it would seem, is one big “My bad,” a painfully visible failure in personal responsibility. If you regularly chow down a pizza and a pint of ice cream for dinner, and your idea of a vigorous workout is twisting off caps on two-liter bottles of Coke, well, it’s pretty hard to give yourself a pass for packing on pounds. Certainly, most doctors and dieticians still believe that being overweight is a matter of too many calories in, and not enough calories out, or put more bluntly, way too much food and way too little exercise. It’s all about overconsumption, right? End of story. Except the plot

Before the Jetsons, Arthur Radebaugh Illustrated the Future

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:46:50 GMT

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, no one shaped Americans’ expectations of the future quite like Arthur Radebaugh, the illustrator of the popular newspaper comic “Closer Than We Think” as well as countless advertisements and magazine covers. “We all dream of a better, brighter, more exciting future where the wonders of technology are there to serve and entertain us,” and Radebaugh “made that fabulous world of tomorrow seem practically at our fingertips,” says Todd Kimmell, the director of the Lost Highways Archives and Research Library, which is dedicated to American road culture. An exhibition that Kimmell co-curated in 2003 traveled from

The Origins of Futurism

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:46:29 GMT

Modern futurism began at the dawn of the 20th century with a series of essays by H.G. Wells, which he called “Anticipations.” Wells proposed that serious thinkers should write soberly, factually and objectively about the great “mechanical and scientific progress” transforming human affairs. But if the goal of futurism is to shed enlightenment over the dark forces of historical change, then we must recall that history is one of the humanities, not a hard science. Tomorrow obeys a futurist the way lightning obeys a weatherman. Still, while it might be impossible to know the future, that hasn’t stopped people from forecasting it—and sometimes in ways that

Bruce McCall Illustrates the Future That Wasn't

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 06:47:04 GMT

According to past predictions, we should be living in an era of flying cars and other marvels. But be glad that some advances haven't happened

Need a Little Social Discovery in Your Life?

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 02:48:50 GMT

A screengrab of the Highlight app for the iPhone Before you become consumed with filling out your bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament, consider for a moment the other March Madness, where people talk for hours about smart phone apps, not point guards, and debate rages about neither Kentucky nor Syracuse, but rather Highlight and Glancee. I’m talking about the gala to geekdom known as the South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Conference, which has been going on in Austin, Texas, since last Friday. In it early days, the digital part of the SXSW Music and Film Festival was where geeks gathered to show off their new toys. But then, five years ago, Twitter had its coming out p

Building a Human Brain

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 05:11:47 GMT

Will we see an artificial version? Image courtesy of jj_judes Last week I wrote about scientists thinking big. And they are thinking big. But compared to Henry Markram, they’re idea lilliputians. His dream is to build a human brain. Not a real brain of tissue and blood vessels and neurons–but the ultimate super computer, an enormously sophisticated model that would function like a brain, able to learn new behavior and develop cognitive skills. It would be, he says, ”the Hubble telescope for the brain.” Markram, a neuroscientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, has been on this track for a while, at least back to mid-1990s. But his quest picked

Somebody’s Tracking You

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 04:56:06 GMT

How much of your information is shared online? Photo courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon. Last week your world got more connected. Not that you had anything to do with it. This was Google’s play and as with all things Google, its impact is both potentially huge and shrouded in digital mystery. On March 1, Google rolled out a new policy in which it will start weaving together all the data it gathers about our online behavior on its various properties. So what it learns about our preferences on Google Search will be combined with what it gleans from what we watch on YouTube and how we use GMail and Android smart phones and Google Maps. Add to that all the personal stuff that us

Welcome to the Feel Good Future

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 06:34:27 GMT

The Makani Airborne Wind Turbine Let’s think big thoughts. Everyone else is. Out in Long Beach, they’re in the middle of the 2012 TED conference, where really smart people pay $7,000 to hear other really smart people talk about things that make them sound really, really smart. In February, Google rolled out its own version of geek gab, with a name that screams high school math club: “Solve for X.” And earlier this week Microsoft staged its annual TechForum, where it showcased its contributions to the cutting edge. Even the Department of Energy joined the prototype party a few days ago, with a conference in Washington designed to highlight bright ideas that may

Will High Gas Prices Jolt Electric Cars?

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 05:28:40 GMT

The Ford Focus Electric will be hitting the markets later this year Now that gas prices are scooting back up to $4 a gallon in the U.S. and some are predicting they’ll hit $5 by the end of the year, people are starting to ask questions again about electric cars. And not just “Why would anyone call a car a Leaf?” So where are we with the Volt, the Leaf, the Tesla and all the other electric or electric/hybrid models hitting the market this year? Will more Americans begin to take them seriously? Let’s take a reality check. Fewer than 18,000 Chevy Volts and Nissan Leafs were sold in the U.S. last year. President Obama still hasn’t backed away from his goal of

Pain and the Brain

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 03:56:34 GMT

Is there a way to make the pain go away? Courtesy of Flickr user jox. Fresh pain is bad enough. But at least when you wear ridiculous shoes or head-butt a door, you know you kinda deserve it. Old pain, though, when you can’t remember what caused it in the first place, well, that’s just not right. The problem is that for all the wonderful things our brain does, it has a hard time forgetting pain. In fact, research shows that any pain lasting more than a few minutes leaves a trace in the nervous system. Which is why we should give a round of applause–gently, please–to a team of researchers at McGill University in Montreal who say they’ve discovered how t

Is the U.S. Out of Love with Cutting-Edge Transit?

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 10:34:04 GMT

Will personal rapid transit -- or "pods" -- ever come to the United States? Fifty years ago, we sure did love the monorail. It was sleek, shiny, seemingly safe and, not surprisingly, a centerpiece of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. Two years later, it starred again at the New York World’s Fair, as newsreel video gushed about its being the “train of the future.” Yes, as America moved forward into the 21st century, this was going to be our ride. But, as we know, it didn’t work out that way. To get a sense, though, of how much the thrill is gone–and not just with the monorail, but all public transportation–consider that next week the Hou

The Race For an Alzheimer’s Miracle

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 06:46:43 GMT

Is there an end in sight for Alzheimer's? Image courtesy of Flickr user Susan NYC If you made it through the Grammy Awards Sunday night, you probably saw onetime country pop star Glen Campbell. And you may know that, like almost every singer who had a few hits in the 1970s, Campbell’s in the middle of a farewell tour. But this isn’t some Rolling Stones’ “I-can-still-dance-and-wear-tight-pants” spectacle. This is a real Farewell Tour. Because Campbell, now 75, has Alzheimer’s disease. And it won’t be long before he won’t remember lyrics or how to play the songs he’s performed thousands of times. Then things will get considerably w

What’s Science Got to Do With It?

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 03:21:40 GMT

Image courtey of Flickr user clarescupcakes.co.uk Applying science to love is a fool’s game. As much as we want there to be rules that always hold true, romance continues to confound us. And yet the quest goes on, with scientists checking hormone levels, doing brain scans, taking countless surveys with the goal of making love and attraction a little less inscrutable and knowing that our appetite for answers never wanes. Take, for instance, the new book, “The Science of Relationships: Answers to Your Questions About Dating, Marriage and Family, and its companion website. It’s all about the science, compiling research on the subject of love, while acknowledging, as co-a

How Smart Does a TV Need to Be?

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 06:10:42 GMT

The Samsung Smart TV Pity your poor TV. Just a few years ago, it owned Super Bowl Sunday. For hour after hour, it held every eye, every ear at every party. But last Sunday things were different. The TV was still in center ring, but there was all this other stuff going on. Someone was playing “Words With Friends” over there, someone else was tweeting to pretend polar bears over there. What’s up with that? How could a TV lose the room during the Super Bowl? The truth is that our TVs are now badly outnumbered by the other screens in our lives, screens on devices that, whether we like it or not, know a lot more about us. In fact, research released today by Nielsen c

10 Bright Ideas to Get You Through February

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:26:18 GMT

3D contact lenses are already being designed for the U.S. military The Super Bowl is over and now we have to face an ugly reality. It’s February and we’re only one week in. With the hope of lifting your spirits, here are 10 examples of innovative thinking to remind you that better things are coming. The movie inside my head: Here’s something you could use some grim February afternoon, although alas, not this month. But by 2014 we could have contact lenses that display computer-generated, panoramic 3D images that make the real world go away. They’re being developed for the U.S. military by the Washington State company Innovega, with the idea that soldiers could h

An Astronomer’s Solution to Global Warming

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:17:02 GMT

Roger Angel is an astronomer whose innovative designs for telescope mirrors have radically transformed the way we see the stars and galaxies. He developed lightweight, honeycombed mirrors for the world’s largest and most powerful telescopes, including the Large Binocular Telescope on Mount Graham in Arizona and the Giant Magellan Telescope currently under construction in Chile. He is a Regents Professor and head of the Steward Observatory Mirror Lab at the University of Arizona (UA), and a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellow. In 2010 he won the prestigious Kavli Prize for Astrophysics,. But lately he’s been thinking more about life on our own planet. “I had been

The Super Bowl Goes Social

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 08:06:06 GMT

The Coca-Cola polar bears are making another appearance at this year's telecast of the Super Bowl Remember when no one would leave the room during Super Bowl commercials, how everyone would share that moment when, for the first time, a TV ad faced the nation. That is so over. Chances are you’ve already seen a handful of this year’s ads; a lot have been out on the Web for a week or longer. One spot for Volkswagen, titled “The Bark Side,” featuring a chorus of dogs barking out the Darth Vader theme from Star Wars, has already been viewed nearly 11 million times on YouTube. Another, for Honda, in which actor Matthew Broderick channels Ferris Bueller from e

Going to the Moon…Or Not

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:34:12 GMT

Who is headed to the Moon next? Image courtesy of Flickr user Arjan Almekinders In a week where a series of solar storms created spectacular aurora borealis light shows and two Canadian teenagers launched a Lego astronaut in a homemade balloon 80,000 feet into the atmosphere, the space story that grabbed the most media attention in the U.S. turned out to be Newt Gingrich’s pledge to establish a colony on the moon by 2020. He promised that, if he’s elected president, not only would America settle the lunar surface before China, but als0 that that community on the moon could become the first U.S. state in space. Great stump speech stuff, particularly in a region hurt by the sh

Teacher’s Got a Brand New Bag

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:59:30 GMT

Are Apple's digital textbooks going to change the industry? Last week Steve Jobs came back to life. Or at least his aura did. At an “education event” in New York’s Guggenheim Museum, Apple proclaimed that the time has come to “reinvent the textbook” and who better to do it than Apple. The mythic leader himself had put a Jobsian spin on the matter during one of his interviews with writer Walter Issacson for the best-selling biography, Steve Jobs. Textbook publishing, Jobs pronounced, was “an $8 billion industry ripe for digital destruction.” Let the sacking begin. In a time when your cell phone can tell you the weather forecast and you

Space Garbage: The Dark Cloud Above

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:11:07 GMT

Earler this month, Russia’s failed space probe Phobos-Grunt crashed to earth, likely somewhere in the Pacific Ocean; despite long odds, millions of people around the planet worried that it would spell their doom. This past September, similar concerns surfaced about where the remnants from a falling NASA research satellite would land. But the greater danger, experts say, isn’t the occasional stray object that re-enters the earth’s atmosphere. It’s the enormous cloud of nuts, bolts, shards of metal, satellite fragments and empty rocket thrusters that is floating invisibly above our planet. After decades of space exploration, there are now more than 500,000 pieces of

So What Do We Do With All This Data?

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:06:18 GMT

The BodyMedia Armband is yet another tool to help you track your health with personalized data. Someday, probably sooner than we think, much of our lives will be recorded by sensors. Whether it’s armbands tracking our heartbeats or dashboards monitoring our driving or smart phones pinpointing where we are at all times, we, as defined by our preferences and habits, are becoming part of the staggering swirl of data already out there in cyberspace. With so much personal information now in play, a lot of people are nervous about who owns it and what they’ll do with it. As they should be. But there’s also the question of how to make sense of it all. Can all this seemingly ra

Are Your Eyes Also a Window to Your Brain?

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 03:42:13 GMT

What can eye-tracking teach us? Image courtesy of Flickr user Michele Catania Tracking the eye movements of people as they peruse an item or advertisement or web page has long been a staple of marketers. The goal, of course, is to see where their eyes move and where they linger and then devise ways to get them to linger longer. It’s always felt a little creepy to me. So it curbed my inner curmudgeon to read recently about research showing you can learn a few things about someone by watching where they’re looking. For instance, a study published in Cognition magazine this month suggests that who a person is relates to how they move their eyes. In this case, the scientists foun

Innovators to Watch in 2012

Tue, 17 Jan 2012 08:15:50 GMT

Most innovators aren’t inventors. We were reminded of that again last year during the swirl of coverage of Steve Jobs, who achieved his godlike status largely through his unique ability to distill, refine and, above all, execute the ideas of others. As the new year begins to pick up speed, it’s a good time to take a look at some young entrepreneurs whose innovative thinking, rather than pure invention, has them poised for big things in 2012. (Read about great historians and food writers to follow in 2012) Daniel EK of Spotify, photo courtesy of Flickr user leweb11 Can’t stop the music: The recording industry has been in a death spiral for awhile now, dating back

Can This Invention Save Cameras?

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 08:17:26 GMT

Product shot of the Lytro Every once in a while a story comes along that seems as likely as cats and dogs playing poker. Last week the Wall Street Journal ran an article suggesting that Kodak was on the brink of bankruptcy. That’s right, Kodak, the company once so iconic it was able to equate its brand with stopping time, aka the “Kodak moment.” It’s not like Kodak slept through the digital revolution. Heck, one of its engineers invented digital photography in 1975, although back then they called it “film-less photography.” By 2005, Kodak was the top-selling digital camera brand in the U.S. No, this is a case of death by smartphone. According to th

A Preview of CES: When Cars Become Smartphones

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 06:23:03 GMT

Will the Ford EVOS remain just a concept car? It’s time again for the Super Bowl of Stuff. Its official name is the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) and this is the week when Las Vegas gets its wonk on, filling up with people who prefer gizmos over G-strings and find nothing quite so ravishing as a TV screen big enough to need two zip codes. CES brings its own kind of decadence to Sin City, one that cranks up consumption by making the gadgets you got last month already feel retro. But it also has been the event where we’ve taken our first looks at tech that quickly moved into our daily lives–the VCR in 1970, the camcorder and CD player in 1981, DVRs and high-definition

Just How Free is Free Will?

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:32:54 GMT

How does free will function in the brain? Image courtesy of Flickr user alles-schlumpf If you have, so far, held true to your New Year’s resolutions, I salute you and wish you much success in this noble endeavor. If, however, you have already tossed them aside like scolding squatters in your psyche, do I have a blog post for you. Turns out that the more scientists learn about how our brain functions, the less they think we’re as much in control of our behavior as we’d like to believe. Our genetic wiring apparently is a very powerful thing, so powerful that it starts to calls into question just how much we really do control our destiny. Who doesn’t want to believe that if you really

The ABCs of 2012, Part II

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 08:07:17 GMT

The X-Box Kinect is one of the ABCs to watch in 2012. Image courtesy of Flickr user popculturegeek.com Seeing that one of my New Year’s resolutions is to finish what I start, here’s Part II of the ABCs of 2012, a list of innovations you’ll hear more about this year. In case you missed it, here’s Part I. Near Field Communication (NFC): A wonkish name for the digital voodoo that will let you buy things with your cell phone. As yet, most smartphones don’t have the NFC chip they need to communicate with digital readers in stores or restaurants. But a lot of people think that will start to change this year, especially if the iPhone 5 comes with an NFC chip, as expecte

The ABCs of 2012, Part I

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 06:18:53 GMT

Will 2012 be the year the electric car takes off? Image courtesy of Flickr user Dominic's Pics Part II of the ABCs of 2012. It’s customary this time of year to write paeans to the past 12 months and get all mushy about things you’d pretty much forgotten. But we don’t need that, right? We’re all forward-thinkers here, aren’t we? So I’ve created an alphabetical list of things you’ll likely hear about more often in the months ahead. At the very least, you’ll have some new words to drop into conversations at the New Year’s Eve party to show how much you’re already plugged into next year. Here you go, the ABC’s of 2012 (Part I): Augmented reality: Sure, it’s been aro

The Twelve Days of Gadgets

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:34:44 GMT

I like “The Twelve Days of Christmas” as much as the next guy. Well, actually, that’s not true. I think I’d be perfectly fine if I never heard it again. Believe me, I’ve tried to make it part of my Christmas canon. I’m okay with the first few verses, but then it goes all 18th century on me, with the milking maids and the leaping lords, and then I’d rather be listening to dogs barking “Jingle Bells.” So in the spirit of innovation, I figured I’d roll out a new gift list for the “Twelve Days of Christmas”, assuming your true love lives wants to give you something a little more useful than 11 pipers piping. Day 1: Yes, you’d be the only person on your block wi

One Step Closer to Beating Old Age

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 05:30:17 GMT

How close are we to living to 150 years old? Image courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon Now that Jimmy Stewart will be reminding us again that it’s a wonderful life—although I’m still waiting for my neighbors to show up with a basket of cash—allow me to pose a question: If it’s so wonderful, how long do you want it to last? Until you’re 90? 100? 150? I’m serious about living to 150. Recent research is making scientists increasingly bullish about slowing the aging process. I’m not referring to some little pill that will make you stop craving the Grand Slam breakfast at Denny’s or thinking that jogging your memory qualifies as exercise. I’m talking about a treatment that could actually st

So Many Gadgets, So Little Time

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 07:47:49 GMT

How much technology is too much? Image courtesy of Flickr user caribb If you haven’t already, sometime in the next week or so you will buy a gadget or some electronic device and you’ll likely have one of two reactions: Didn’t I just buy this? Or, when did this thing happen? Not that the sprint of technology kicks into another gear this time of year; it’s just that this is when most of us get loopy with gadget overload and wonder how we’re going to keep up with the pace. And at least some of us still aren’t sure if change at warp speed is such a good thing. Take the group of people who were surveyed recently in the U.S., Germany, India and China by Underwriters Laboratories, the p

My Name is Presto and I’ll Be Your Waiter

Tue, 13 Dec 2011 03:49:17 GMT

The Presto ordering system. Image courtesy of E La Carte. I have seen the future of restaurant dining and it does not involve a waiter named Justin telling me about the rockfish. No, it’s more like ordering a steak from a vending machine, only it takes longer to come down the chute. Okay, I may be exaggerating—slightly—but we’re starting to see the touch-screen culture encroach into the world where we tell actual people what we’d like to eat. Exhibit A is a device called Presto, produced by a Silicon Valley company called E la Carte and the brainchild of Rajat Suri, who dropped out of MIT to turn it into a business. It’s a tablet—one that actually preceded the iPad—that allows diners

Inviting Writing: Must-Have Holiday Foods

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 03:47:52 GMT

A plate of pizzelle. Image courtesy of Flickr user flaurella. ‘Tis the season for specialty foods that grace store shelves and dining tables but once a year. And for some people, certain times of the year just don’t seem quite right unless the table is graced by those unique edibles. Have you ever gone to ridiculous lengths to make sure that you and yours could have that one, prized food on your stomachs? For this month’s Inviting Writing, tell us about the distances you traveled, the favors you called in, the sleepless nights, the hours spent slaving in the kitchen and whatever else you had to do to secure a special dish. Send your true, original essays to FoodandThink@

When a Smartphone Becomes a Wallet

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 03:00:05 GMT

The future of your wallet. Image courtesy of Flickr user feuilllu I think my wallet’s depressed. Not that it’s said anything, but when you’ve been with something for so long, you know these things. Can’t say that I blame it. Remember how when you wanted to show off pictures of your kids, you always reached for your wallet. Now you go straight to your cell phone. There are tons of photos there—along with emails, text messages, videos, games. The closest thing I ever came to playing a game with my wallet was Find the AAA Card and as I remember, it wasn’t that much fun. And now, the unkindest cut: Mobile wallets which use a technology called Near Field Communication to turn smart phones

A Game Where Nice Guys Finish First

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 02:57:00 GMT

The kindness of strangers can pay dividends. Courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon It’s time again for the old “Naughty or Nice” meme. It is, as we all know, the essence of Santa Claus’ annual performance review, and to his credit, he has kept things simple. (Personally, I prefer the more age-appropriate “Dyspeptic or Nice,” but, as yet, no one’s been able to work it into a holiday jingle.) The conventional wisdom is that Nice is tanking. Spend 30 seconds reading comments on most websites and you’ll feel a need to delouse. Or hear the latest spouting of spite from Capitol Hill and it’s hard not to believe that civility isn’t just dead, it’s mummified. So it gives me great pleasure to sha

How Hackers Made Kinect a Game Changer

Fri, 02 Dec 2011 01:42:44 GMT

Did Kinect hackers inspire a new breakthrough in technology? Image courtesy of Flickr user Atsushi Takoro Remember that scene in Minority Report when Tom Cruise manipulates 3-D images in mid-air simply by moving his hands. It’s a moment when you forget the plot, the setting, the sci-fi theme and you just sit there and think, “That is soooo cool.” Flash forward to last fall when Microsoft rolled out its Kinect motion-sensing devices for the Xbox 360. At the time you didn’t hear many people say “This changes everything.” It was mainly seen as Microsoft’s answer to Nintendo, a Wii without the wand that allowed people to play games simply by moving their bodies. That’s clearly what Microso

Are Mind-Enhancing Drugs a Good Idea?

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 05:49:04 GMT

Are there drugs that can enhance your memory? Image courtesy of Flickr user vissago I know memory is a very fickle friend, but firing blanks three times in one day when I tried to remember a name was ridiculous. So when I heard about new research into a so-called “memory pill,” I thought, “Can we fast-track this thing?” Scientists would call it a “cognitive enhancer,” which has come to mean drugs that can sharpen the brain’s focus, such as Ritalin or Adderall. In the recent study the drug was Modafinil, designed originally to treat narcolepsy, but in this case given to a group of sleep-deprived surgeons. While the medication didn’t seem to improve the performance of the doctors in simula

Will Flying Get Its Mojo Back?

Tue, 22 Nov 2011 08:02:05 GMT

Where is air travel headed? Image courtesy of Flickr user bfraz Remember when a trip to the airport was a little bit special—you know, when lines didn’t stretch to the horizon and you could keep your shoes on and no one, man or woman, would think of wearing sweatpants? Been awhile, eh? So allow me to offer a little good news: Technology is coming that experts say should dramatically reduce delays and cancellations, cut flight times, increase safety and slash fuel costs and carbon emissions. But, alas, a few discouraging words: How quickly this technology comes on board is largely dependent on Congress, which hasn’t passed a long-term budget for the Federal Aviation Administration (F

Snooze Science Yields Doze Apps

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:09:16 GMT

New smart phone apps highlight the importance of good sleep. Image courtesy of Flickr user amirjina This past weekend I was awakened by raccoons on the roof. It’s not a happy sound, because I know what they are capable of doing with their little roof-chewing mouths. This made me wonder if there’s anything I can do to ease my sleeping mind, you know, make it a little less twitchy. Lack of sleep not only can cause us to fumfer through conversation; according to a study released last week, it also can make us struggle to learn anything the next day. Working with brain scans of sleep-deprived flies—now there’s a phrase I’d never imagined writing—neuroscientist Chiara Cirelli found that if t

In the Military, Inventiveness of All Kinds Is a Weapon

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 02:56:41 GMT

Boston Dynamic's Big Dog robot would carry supplies in the battlefield. A week or so ago I asked my 20-year-old son why there was so much hype around the latest shootapalooza game, “Call of Duty, MW3.” “You have no idea,” he said. He was right. Within a day of its release last Tuesday, Activision sold 6.5 million games in North America and the U.K., prompting the company to declare the first-day take of $400 million as the “biggest entertainment launch of all time,” bigger than the openings of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. For the uninitiated, the MW stands for Modern Warfare, although it’s more like World War II with 21st century weapons. The battlegrounds are mainly Europ

Robots Get the Human Touch

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 01:28:16 GMT

Honda's Asimo robot I’ve always thought the Tin Man got stiffed. At the end of The Wizard of Oz, when the wizard rewards Dorothy and her friends for turning the Wicked Witch of the West into a puddle, he hands the Cowardly Lion an epic medal and the Scarecrow a diploma—which today may not seem like much more than a license to embrace debt, but back in the day was a big deal. And what did he give the Tin Man? A ticking heart trinket that looked like something he picked up at the Oz Walmart. With robots we’re still struggling with the heart thing. Some can do remarkable physical feats, such as sprint. Others have been programmed to teach themselves how to control their own bodies.

Don’t Curse the Darkness, Get One of the Bright New Lights

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 07:34:27 GMT

The Geobulb LED light bulb Some may be bothered that not everyone at an Apple Genius Bar is really a genius. Or that sliced bread is no longer a standard of greatness. What irks my wife is Eastern Standard Time. All weekend, when TV anchors reminded us to set the clocks back, what I heard was “another hour of sleep.” What she heard was, “Come to the dark side.” I’m sure she’s not the only person unhappy to have it feel that it now gets dark right after lunch. A new study, in fact, found that this begins the time of year when people start to avoid taking financial risks; other research says the time shift even gets to pets. But I will not curse the darkness. Rather I say we should

Engineering the Climate

Wed, 02 Nov 2011 07:28:55 GMT

The Silver Lining Project that pumps sea water into the sky to create sun-reflecting clouds. Imagine, if you will, a giant helium balloon, the size of a stadium, floating high above the Earth, and dangling from it is a hose 12 miles long that sprays aerosols into the stratosphere—all with the intent of slowing global warming. When you’re in the planet-saving business, you need to think big. But big and crazy? Now massive geoengineering projects—once derided as high-risk lunacy by climate scientists and the height of scientific arrogance by many others—are being taken more seriously these days. According to a survey published last week, about three out of four respondents in the Uni

Where Fear Lives

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:22:10 GMT

What causes fear? Image courtesy of Flickr user stuant63 Forget about zombies, paranormal possession or the Greek economy. If you want to know terror, you must travel deep inside the brain to the almond-shaped region known as the amygdala. That is where fear lives. Technically, it’s one of the parts of the brain that processes memory and emotional responses. In that capacity, it’s been front and center in two of the odder brain studies done in the past year—one concluding that conservatives have larger amygdalas than liberals, seemingly backing up previous research finding that those leaning right are more likely to respond to threatening situations with aggression. The second study, r

Nine Inventions Whose Time Has Come

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 04:03:25 GMT

Hand gestures could replace your house keys. Image courtesy of Flickr user Smeerch Over the past few months I’ve talked about the potential of crowdsourcing, whether technology is dumbing us down and why creative people don’t feel the love. Sometimes, though, you just need to cut to the chase and talk about cool things. Here are nine recent inventions that have caught my imagination. Some are ingenious, some long overdue and some a bit strange. What do you think? 1) The bend is near: I’ve never had a strong desire to bend my phone, but maybe that’s just me. Anyhow, researchers at the Queens University Human Media Lab in Ontario have created a prototype of a device that woul

Can Crowdsourcing Really Spark Innovation?

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 06:51:25 GMT

Gamers using FoldIt solved a riddle about the AIDS epidemic. Image courtesy of Nature. New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki seemed quite the contrarian back in 2004 when he came out with a book titled “The Wisdom of Crowds.” Clearly, he had never been to a pro football game or gone shopping the day after Thanksgiving. In fairness to Surowiecki, he wasn’t talking about mindless mob mentality, but rather the notion that diverse opinions within a group, when aggregated, can result in better decisions than the smartest person in the group would make. He won over plenty of believers with his anecdotal evidence. Unfortunately, more than one company wishfully thoug

3D Printers Are Building the Future, One Part at a Time

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 07:44:42 GMT

Makerbot shot glasses, image courtesy of Flickr user jabella Used to be that when you heard “3D,” you thought of goofy gimmicks and glasses that would go well with a lampshade on your head. Not any more. In just the past week, news articles detailed important advances made with 3D laser scans: Scientists concluded that teenage T. rex were pretty hefty. Engineers identified which parts of Venice are most at risk of sinking. And police have recreated accident scenes. But the coolest thing happening with the third dimension involves printers. Yes, printers. A 3D printer works much like your inkjet printer does, only instead of creating a two-dimensional image on a sheet of paper, it builds

Seven Reasons to Believe Electric Cars Are Getting in Gear

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 05:31:35 GMT

The Chevy Spark Sunday was National Plug In Day. Missed it? So did just about everyone else in America. For a few thousand people, though, it was a chance to stand up and shout, “I drive an electric car and I’m not half as crazy as you think I am.” A few cities in California held oddly quiet electric vehicle parades; other places staged tailpipe-free tailgate parties. But you have to keep things in perspective. Through September, Nissan had sold a little more than 7,000 all-electric Leafs in the U.S., while fewer than 4,000 people have bought GM’s semi-electric Volt. And no more than 2,000 high-end Teslas have been sold around the world since 2008. By contrast, Ford sells more than 10,0

Pop-Up Relief in Kenya’s Slums

Thu, 13 Oct 2011 10:02:06 GMT

Goats were grazing on a patch of grass littered with plastic garbage when Phylis Mueni passed by. She carried three 20-liter jerrycans that once held vegetable oil, one a bright yellow that matched her oversize T-shirt. Everything else was a wash of browns and reds—the rusted metal of corrugated roofing, the labyrinth of mud houses, the drainage ditch that ran along the gullied path. Mueni is a resident of Korogocho (which means “shoulder-to-shoulder” in Swahili) one of Nairobi’s largest and roughest slums. She was in pursuit of a most basic element: water. No one in places like this has running water. On a good day, locals travel 300 feet to fill up their cans for

Why We Don’t Like Creativity

Wed, 12 Oct 2011 05:37:35 GMT

What do we have against creativity? Photo courtesy of Flickr user moriza Who doesn’t love innovation? It means progress and dynamism and brighter days ahead, right? What’s not to love? Except, apparently, it’s the idea of innovation of which people are so enamored. The engine that drives it, not so much. So concludes a new study by scientists from Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina. It found that when it comes right down to it, people are pretty conflicted about creativity. In fact, here are some of the words that study subjects associated with creativity: agony, poison and vomit. Vomit? So much for brighter days ahead. The reality

How Smart Can a City Get?

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 02:20:40 GMT

The Singapore skyline, image courtesy of Flickr user chooyutshing The web’s been full of Steve Jobs’ wisdom the past week, but one insight you didn’t see very often was his 2001 prediction that the Segway would be bigger than the personal computer. In fairness, he did hate the way it looked. It was inelegant. It was too traditional. Or, as Jobs put it, “It sucks.” That said, the Segway got the engineering right and Jobs wasn’t the only one who saw it as an answer to urban congestion. Obviously, it hasn’t worked out that way—Segways are still about as common on city sidewalks as potty-trained pigeons. (Only 30,000 of the two-wheelers were sold in its first seven years on the market.) And

Space Travel in the 22nd Century

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 05:42:04 GMT

What will be the future of spaceflight? Credit: NASA/Glenn Research Center Yesterday the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to three scientists who discovered that the universe is being blown apart. Well, it was a good run. The upside is that we still have some time before all the energy is sucked out of the universe. So all the brainstorming at a conference in Florida this past weekend about space travel in the 22nd century was not for naught. The purpose of the 100-Year Starship Symposium was to get a hall full of scientists imagining a trip to another solar system. (And some people say no one thinks big any more.) Not surprisingly, something so challenging and so beyond our expe

Pet Tech Gears Up

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 05:19:58 GMT

New apps and gizmos are helping pets out. Image courtesy of Flickr user VerseVend Usually when I write this blog, our dog Maz is lying somewhere nearby. He doesn’t say much, but I’ve come to take his silence as approval. Some may scoff that such a cross-species mind meld is possible, but just the other day, as I read that a new study found that people typically spend more than $26,000 on a pet in its lifetime, Maz sensed a great disturbance in the Force and discreetly left the room. Not that he needed to worry. I’m not likely to indulge him any less. And now that digital technology has been thrown into the mix, that’s only going to ratchet up. Take pet GPS. The recent tale of Willow, th

Opening Strange Portals in Physics

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 07:44:11 GMT

In her new book, Knocking on Heaven's Door, Harvard University theorist Lisa Randall explores how physics may transform our understanding of the fundamental nature of the world. She thinks an extra dimension may exist close to our familiar reality, hidden except for a bizarre sapping of the strength of gravity as we see it. She also ponders the makeup of dark matter, unseen particles that have shaped the growth of the entire cosmos. These ideas, once the sole province of fiction writers, face real tests in a new generation of experiments. Sensitive detectors now sniff for dark matter, while the most complex scientific machine ever created, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), beneath the borde

Drones Get Smarter

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 04:20:24 GMT

There are as many as 7,000 drones in service; apparently manufacturers are struggling to keep up with demand. Courtesy of Department of Defense. Last spring, when he was still Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates told cadets at the Air Force Academy that they needed to “shed the nostalgia” for “air-to-air combat and strategic bombing.” Not that they were surprised, but they weren’t exactly tickled, either. Because in all the times they had watched “Top Gun,” not once did Tom Cruise turn into a “joystick pilot.” It’s one of the not-so-affectionate terms they have for someone who remotely operates an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), otherwise known as a drone. That’s in the card

Are Machines Dumbing Us Down?

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 02:03:30 GMT

Are these machines making us stupid? Image courtesy of Flickr user aranath Once upon a time a man did something that made many parents happy. He invented a mobile app. Not just any mobile app, but a special one that helped adults create bedtime stories that made kids feel their parents were wise and wonderful. And everyone lived happily, at least until the next morning. This magical app, called “The Infinite Adventure Machine,” is the work of Frenchman David Benque, who figured that if he provided the basic components of any righteous adventure story—the hero leaves home, meets villain, gets tricked by villain, learns lessons about himself or herself, vanquishes villain, basks in hero w

Can Solar Survive the Solyndra Swirl?

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 04:09:34 GMT

Solyndra offices, courtesy of Flickr user Monica's Dad “Solyndra… I once made a loan to Solyndra And suddenly I found How hideous a loan can be.” –Sung to the melody of “Maria” from West Side Story Okay, that’s not quite how Stephen Sondheim wrote it, but as company names go, Solyndra is a pretty sweet sound. Until a few weeks ago. Now it’s the dirtiest word in the clean energy business. It’s also a sure bet that Barack Obama doesn’t break into song when he thinks about it. On the last day of August, Solyndra declared bankruptcy, laid off 1,100 workers and walked away from a $535 million government loan. A quick refresher: Solyndra was a California outfit that devised an

When Patents Cramp Innovation

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 05:50:47 GMT

Apple accused Samsung of copying their tablet design. Courtesy of Frederico Gambarini / Newscom Let’s talk patent law. WAIT! I know your head’s telling you to flee and your heart’s telling you to flee, but hear me out. This is a story with trolls and $12 billion deals and even a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It starts with the passage of a law on Capitol Hill, which only adds to the fairy tale quality. Late last week the Senate passed the America Invents Act, and when President Obama signs it, our patent laws will get their first significant reform in 60 years. Proponents say that by streamlining the process and making it harder for people to sue, more inventions would turn int

How Technology Fights Terrorism

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 03:33:04 GMT

Face recognition software is making a leap forward from 2-D to 3-D scanning. Courtesy of Product Reviews. Yesterday we reflected on 9/11 and honored the thousands killed in New York, Washington, D.C. and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. It was an intensely personal day, one that crescendoed into a chorus of shared emotion and remembrance. The commitment to ensure that such a catastrophic act of terror never happens again involves not just preventing a repeat of the past, but also imagining what else is possible and making sure that doesn’t happen either. This has spurred innovation in many directions, from processing and analyzing data at speeds we couldn’t have imagined a decade

Football Tech to Protect Players

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 04:29:31 GMT

The smart helmets of the future? Image courtesy of Riddell With the National Football League season getting underway tonight, we’ll soon be treated to video replays in super-slow motion of ridiculously violent collisions that would make the rest of us want to wear bubble wrap for a few years. What we won’t see is what’s going on inside those helmets, or actually the skulls inside those helmets, when those man-crashes occur. Inevitably, someone’s brain will shake liked grooved Jell-o, and if last season’s pace holds up, one player in the game will likely end up with a concussion. Long football’s dirty little secret, concussions have been getting almost as much attention as point spreads

Will Sharing Replace Buying?

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 05:55:50 GMT

Car sharing in Rome, image courtesy of Flickr user GwenFlickr To hear Lisa Gansky tell it, sharing is making a big comeback. In her book, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing, and on her website, Gansky contends it has become much bigger than swapping snippets on Facebook. It is, she insists, a savvy business strategy. Think about it. Social media and wireless networks allow us to track down almost anything in a matter of minutes. That’s the basis of Gansky’s truism: “Access trumps ownership.” Why buy something you don’t use that often when you can find it when you need it? And if you do own something and aren’t constantly using it, why not make some money during the down time

E-Books Get a Soundtrack

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 06:30:45 GMT

Your book, now with sound. Image courtesy of Booktracks Curl up with your iPad and start reading Gone with the Wind—go with me on this for a minute—and as you visualize Scarlett O’ Hara gliding across the room, you actually can hear the swish of her petticoats. Or you’re plowing through The Da Vinci Code and suddenly you’re jolted by the two-note whine of Paris police sirens. As disorienting as it may seem, the experience of reading to a soundtrack took a big leap forward last week with the launch of a new software application called Booktrack. The company, with a U.S. office in New York City, is about to start rolling out versions of e-books that come not only with music but also

Can We Do Something About This Weather?

Mon, 29 Aug 2011 03:23:22 GMT

Hurricane Irene makes landfall. Image courtesy of NASA The week started with an earthquake, which led to the surreal scene of thousands of people standing on sidewalks in downtown Washington, realizing collectively that no one could get through on their cell phones and we’d have to talk to each other about our shared 15 seconds of shake, rattle and roll. It ended with recurring reports of how it was going to rain cats and dogs and flying monkeys and how the power would probably go out, resulting in long lines of people buying enough batteries to light Vegas. Usually, I love raging nature. It’s the great leveler, rendering us awed, thrown off our routines and scrambling like ants lugging

Before Steve Jobs: 5 Corporate Innovators who Shaped Our World

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 08:08:33 GMT

The former head of Apple comes from a long line of American innovators who changed society

Steve Jobs Gets a Standing O

Thu, 25 Aug 2011 08:40:55 GMT

Steve Jobs -- no longer the CEO at Apple. Image courtesy of Flickr user leolambertini It will be a long time before we see again a CEO go out with all the attention that Steve Jobs has received from a chorus of worshipful essays, blogs, slideshows and videos in the past 24 hours. There’s no question Jobs has been that rare thing—an innovator who understood the ripple effect of the cult of personality. He was as much a logo as a CEO. But that doesn’t take away from his accomplishments as a marketer, businessman and trendsetter. Here’s a smattering of the tributes, in print and images, to Apple’s core: Tim Fernholz, Good: “He earned his place in the pantheon

When Computers Get Brains

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 05:45:50 GMT

Computers are coming closer and closer to mimicking the human brain. Image courtesy of Wikicommons So much happened last week, what with Wall Street in need of a sedative and Gerard Depardieu in need of a bathroom, you probably missed the news that a team led by IBM has created a computer chip that mimics how a brain works. Big deal, right? Hadn’t they already created the computer that delivered a smackdown of those two “Jeopardy” whizzes turned hapless humans? Actually, this latest creation is something very different and potentially more momentous. Watson, the “Jeopardy” god, is a ridiculously powerful computer that, nonetheless, operated in a fairly conventional way—except it wa

A Cheat Sheet to Help Schools Foster Creativity

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 03:36:37 GMT

What can our schools do to better prepare students for the workplace? Image courtesy of Flickr user Old Shoe Woman As campuses begin to fill, it seems fitting to ask: When so many corporate execs say they want employees who are creative, critical thinkers who know how to collaborate, why are the chief measures of future performance standardized tests for which there is only one right answer for every problem and working together is, to put it mildly, frowned upon? Education has always been a laggard to innovation. That reality is made clear in a new book about attention and the brain, Now You See It, by Cathy Davidson. She estimates that as many as 65 percent of the kids now in grade sch

How Nature Makes Us Smarter

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 07:00:03 GMT

An underwater system generates power through blades that mimic the swaying motion of coral and kelp. Image courtesy of Biowave Ever since my wife and I bought a cottage near the Shenandoah Mountains in Virginia I’ve noticed that when I’m out in the country, I’m much more likely to (a) bring up snakes in conversation and (b) spend a great deal of time staring at butterflies and spider webs. While so many things said to be awesome aren’t even close, much of what I see out there on a daily basis actually is. Or as the scientist Janine Benyus put it in her popular TED talk, it’s like being “surrounded by genius.” Benyus was referring to nature, the world’s greatest headline act.

How to Enjoy National Relaxation Day

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 03:08:44 GMT

An ideal spot for relaxation, courtesy of Flickr user erix! I’m willing to bet that International Pancake Day blew right by in March and you didn’t have the decency to chow down a short stack. And I’ll go out on a limb and wonder aloud if anyone reading this actually hugged a tree last Arbor Day, let alone planted one. But today, my friends, you have a chance to make things right. For today is National Relaxation Day. You could go old-school chill—you know, kick back with a green tea and watch a few hours of C-Span. Or you could try a fresh way to get your veg on. You might start with a tall glass of Vacation in a Bottle (VIB). It’s one of the new “relaxation drinks” being ballyhooe

Brand New

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 03:29:32 GMT

Google.com's interactive Les Paul doodle. Click through to play along A little less than a year ago, Gap got caught with its pants down. After 20 years, the company had decided it was time to roll out a new logo. So, with next to no fanfare, it replaced on its website the familiar white letters on navy blue background with a fresh look. A Gap exec described the new logo as “current and contemporary.” Sadly, a lot of people didn’t agree. In fact, it was as if Gap had announced that anyone who had worn Gap jeans—ever–would be audited. The offended gathered their modern-day version of torches and pitchforks—tweets and status updates—and expressed digital outrage. Gap backpe

Clothes Encounters

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 05:46:21 GMT

The M-dress, courtesy of Cutecircuit I had a talk with my shirt today. It wasn’t pretty. Usually I get along fine with my clothes, but lately I’ve been feeling that they’re coasting, that they could be doing so much more for me. In fairness, these are new feelings. I used to be perfectly happy if things matched. But since I started reading about wearable tech, I’ve come to expect my shirt to give me directions and my pants to make all the lights turn green. Nanotechnology, which has the potential to transform lives (and save them, with miniaturized medical diagnostics labs), has also made it possible for clothing to serve us in new ways. And while that’s still largely a novelty, it

A Fine Fix or, All You Need Is Gov?

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 03:09:16 GMT

A pothole is the gateway drug to civic engagement. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Spree2010 Greetings from the most hated town in America. No one has much good to say about Washington lately. I get that. But for old times’ sake, I’m here to nurture a little “gov love.” Not for the feds here in D.C.—hey, I’m not a miracle worker. No, to start rebuilding our faith in government, we need to go local. And yes, there’s an app for that. Actually, there are several. The one that’s been around the longest is the beautifully simple SeeClickFix. It’s the brainchild of a programmer named Ben Berkowitz , who grew frustrated with the graffiti sprayed on a house in his New Haven, Connecticut neigh

Me, My Data and I

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 02:58:17 GMT

Body hackers can get all sorts of information about their personal health. Image courtesy of Flickr user juhansonin To treat almost any injury, I heard my father say “Rub dirt on it” often enough that, against all logic, I still believe in the healing power of soil. As for preventative medicine, in my family, it meant avoiding lepers and trying not to eat a whole cake by yourself. Let’s just say we weren’t exactly forward-thinkers when it came to taking care of ourselves. So I’m fascinated by those intensely self-involved geeks known as “self-quantifiers.” Put simply, they want to know everything about themselves, at least everything that can be expressed in data

Google Hits the Road

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:05:51 GMT

Google founders Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and Larry Page in their company's driverless car I’d like to say that my fascination with driverless cars has nothing to do with my son having a learner’s permit. I’d also like to say my hand gestures to other drivers are meant as a sign of peace. Not that my son’s a bad driver; he’s actually pretty good. But there still are times when we’d both be happier if the potential for human error wasn’t in the mix. I wouldn’t be pushing my phantom brake pedal to the floor. And he wouldn’t have to keep reminding me that my co-braking was helping neither his confidence nor his ability to slow down the car. So I was intrigued to read that Nevada h

Welcome to the Department of Innovation

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 12:00:07 GMT

The Department of Innovation logo by Jamie Simon Editor’s note, August 19, 2011: Read about our new name and logo here. Seems a long time ago, but it was only back in January when Barack Obama told us that America had reached a “Sputnik moment.” He was referring to the competition with China to be the Big Dog of the 21st century global economy, but the subtext was that the country needs an attitude adjustment, that we need to start channeling Silicon Valley, a place where people may pledge to “Do no evil” but the true religion is innovation. It made for one fine sound bite. But it hasn’t exactly inspired a bunch of innovation rallies and bake sales. So in the spirit of ba

Turning Bamboo Into a Bicycle

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:02:22 GMT

Bicycle designer Craig Calfee likes to talk about the time a film crew tried to stress-test one of his bamboo bike frames. Three men—each weighing about 200 pounds—piled onto one of the two-wheelers in his California showroom, and off they went. The ride didn’t last very long. “The bamboo frame held up just fine,” Calfee recalls with a grin. “But the wheels collapsed.“ For the next test, Calfee supplemented the wheels’ metal spokes with bamboo struts: Problem solved. Calfee, 49, grew up in Cape Cod. He worked as a bike messenger while attending the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and helped fabricate Olympic-class kayaks in the mid-1980s. Thos

The Physics of Cheating in Baseball

Fri, 24 Jun 2011 07:06:41 GMT

Cheating in sports might be as old as the race between the tortoise and the hare. But not all trickery actually works, especially in baseball. A corked bat can hit the ball farther, right? That’s a myth, say physicists studying the national pastime. And can making a baseball moister really thwart a slugger from putting one in the bleachers? Well, maybe—depending on how hot it is outside. To separate fact from fiction, four scientists from three universities spent days firing baseballs at bats. The results are published in “Corked Bats, Juiced Balls, and Humidors: The Physics of Cheating in Baseball” in the June issue of the American Journal of Physics. To Cork or

A 3-D Map of the Universe, No Glasses Required

Thu, 19 May 2011 05:17:09 GMT

For most people, the term “3-D” probably brings to mind cheap, clunky glasses and hefty movie-ticket prices, but seeing the world—or universe—in three dimensions has uses well beyond popcorn entertainment. One of astronomy’s greatest challenges is determining how far away various points are from Earth. By envisioning the universe in 3-D, astronomers can track how it has changed since it began with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, and perhaps solve some of the universe’s greatest mysteries. Investigators with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have created the biggest 3-D map of the distant universe ever made, and they’ve done so using a novel approa

Drones are Ready for Takeoff

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

During a test flight last year off the Pacific coast of Latin America, an aerial drone launched from the USS McInerney relayed back to the ship video of an open skiff speeding across the water. The frigate’s crew had long experience chasing drug smugglers, so they knew what they were seeing. The skiff was 20 miles ahead of the frigate and moving away as the sun went down. In the flight control room, operators instructed the drone to take up the chase. Over the next three hours, the skiff stopped twice and shut down its engine—standard practice among smugglers listening for law enforcement aircraft. The drone, a 23-foot-long helicopter trailing a mile or two behind, was quiet e

Ten Enduring Myths About the U.S. Space Program

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 05:39:47 GMT

1. “The U.S. space program enjoyed broad, enthusiastic support during the race to land a man on the Moon.” Throughout the 1960s, public opinion polls indicated that 45 to 60 percent of Americans felt that the government was spending too much money on space exploration. Even after Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind,” only a lukewarm 53 percent of the public believed that the historic event had been worth the cost. “The decision to proceed with Apollo was not made because it was enormously popular with the public, despite general acquiescence, but for hard-edged political reasons,” writes Roger D. Launius, the senior curator at Smithsonian&rs

Something New Under the Sun

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

On an uncharacteristically tropical morning in the San Francisco Bay Area, the ground shimmers with waves of heat, and it’s impossible to look to the sky without squinting. But the real heat is inside the Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto. There, in a dark room stacked with computer processors, a high-definition view of the Sun fills nine conjoined TV screens to create a seven-foot-wide, theater-quality solar extravaganza. Solar physicist Karel Schrijver types commands to start the show: an accelerated movie of a sequence of explosions that wracked the Sun on August 1, 2010. “This is one of the most stunning days I’ve ever seen on the Sun,&rd

Brilliant Space Photos From Chandra and Spitzer

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:00:00 GMT

To human eyes, the night sky is a confetti of stars. Powerful telescopes show us the remote planets and faraway galaxies that our puny retinas cannot see. But even the Hubble Space Telescope can’t reveal everything that’s out there. Many objects—the fizzled stars known as brown dwarfs, for instance—are too cool to give off visible light, which represents only a tiny sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. They do, however, emit energy in an invisible form: longer wavelengths known as infrared radiation. Incredibly hot objects, like massive exploding stars called supernovas, give off much of their energy in shorter wavelengths that also are invisible: gamma rays and

Jane McGonigal on How Computer Games Make You Smarter

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Far from rotting your brain, computer games can make people smarter and help humanity, says Jane McGonigal, 33, who creates “alternate reality games,” which take place in virtual environments yet encourage players to take real actions. She makes her unconventional case in a new book, Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World (Penguin Press). She spoke with assistant editor Amanda Bensen. How do you describe what you do? I make games that try to improve people’s lives or solve real problems. I take play very seriously. You recently created a social network called Gameful. What’s that? It’s a network for game developers. &l

Lunar Bat-men, the Planet Vulcan and Martian Canals

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 03:50:38 GMT

Bat-Men On The Moon! One August morning in 1835, readers of the New York Sun were astonished to learn that the Moon was inhabited. Three-quarters of the newspaper's front page was devoted to the story, the first in a series entitled "Great Astronomical Discoveries Lately Made by Sir John Herschel, L.L.D, F.R.S, &c At The Cape of Good Hope." Herschel, a well-known British astronomer, was able "by means of a telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle," the paper reported, to view objects on the Moon as though they were "at the distance of a hundred yards." Each new story in the six-part series reported discoveries more fantastic than the last. Herschel's telescope revea

Ready for Contact

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 05:49:33 GMT

As far as we know, we are alone in the universe. Earth is the only planet known to be inhabited by life, and humans are the only intelligent beings. There are, of course, rumors of alien contacts. There's Area 51, the Air Force base in Nevada, where the government supposedly stores aliens in freezers. And there was that mysterious crash landing in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947—and mutilated cows in Colorado. In a recent poll, one in four Americans said they believed the planet has already been visited by an extraterrestrial. For the rest of us, though, aliens are relegated to the realm of fiction, and UFO sightings are simply hoaxes or events that have some unknown but natural explan

Looking for Neutrinos, Nature's Ghost Particles

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:00:00 GMT

We’re awash in neutrinos. They’re among the lightest of the two dozen or so known subatomic particles and they come from all directions: from the Big Bang that began the universe, from exploding stars and, most of all, from the sun. They come straight through the earth at nearly the speed of light, all the time, day and night, in enormous numbers. About 100 trillion neutrinos pass through our bodies every second. The problem for physicists is that neutrinos are impossible to see and difficult to detect. Any instrument designed to do so may feel solid to the touch, but to neutrinos, even stainless steel is mostly empty space, as wide open as a solar system is to a comet. What&r

Q and A: Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:00:00 GMT

In recognition of his heralded emergency landing on the Hudson River on January 15, 2009, Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger and the crew of US Airways Flight 1549 were awarded the National Air and Space Museum’s highest honor: the 2010 Current Achievement Trophy. He spoke with the magazine’s Megan Gambino. What can other pilots learn from your experience? One of the things I encourage other pilots to think about is that—out of a 43-year career—my entire life is being judged on the basis of those 3 minutes and 28 seconds. We never know which flight will test us. So it’s incumbent on each of us to be vigilant and avoid complacency. I had gotten to

Testing the Hope Diamond

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:00:00 GMT

At first, Evalyn Walsh McLean, an heiress living in Washington, D.C., didn’t want to buy the Hope Diamond. She was unhappy with the setting surrounding the precious blue stone that had once belonged to King Louis XIV and asked jeweler Pierre Cartier to create a new one: a circle of 16 clear diamonds, shaped like squares and pears. That was in 1910, and for much of the past century the Hope Diamond remained in its Cartier setting. But several months ago, it was taken from the National Museum of Natural History’s gem hall for an overnight stay in the mineralogy lab. There, geologists conducted an experiment to learn precisely why the Hope Diamond is so blue. Every gem has its ow

Invisible Engineering

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Angela Belcher, a materials chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is using nanotechnology to grow batteries. Out of viruses. Batteries that could last weeks or months and be thinner than a credit card. How did she get such an idea? Abalone shells. “I’m really interested in how biology makes materials,” Belcher says. “I’ve always been fascinated, for instance, with shells.” Abalone seashells are made up mostly of calcium carbonate but because of how abalones mix that soft material with proteins at nanoscale sizes, the shells form a nearly unbreakable armor. “A lot of objects controlled at the nanoscale have unusual properties based

Vinton Cerf on Where the Internet Will Take Us

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

In the late 1960s, when Vinton Cerf was a UCLA graduate student in computer science, he helped design ARPAnet, a predecessor of the Internet. He’s now a vice president of engineering at Google, the search engine giant that owns YouTube and is extending its reach to mobile devices, publishing and journalism. He spoke with associate Web editor Brian Wolly about how the Web will evolve. Ten or more years from now, how will we communicate with one another? It’s very possible we will be more continuously connected. Even today, people have Bluetooth things hanging in their ears. There’s no reason they won’t have a video camera located in a buttonhole, maybe even a video

Can Nanotechnology Save Lives?

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Finding George Whitesides is often tricky even for George Whitesides. So he keeps an envelope in his jacket pocket. “I don’t actually know where I am in general until I look at it,” he says, “and then I find that I’m in Terre Haute, and then the question really is, ‘What’s next?’” During a recent stretch, the envelope revealed that he was in Boston, Abu Dhabi, Mumbai, Delhi, Basel, Geneva, Boston, Copenhagen, Boston, Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles and Boston. The reason Boston shows up so frequently, although not as often as his wife prefers, is that Whitesides is a professor of chemistry at Harvard University, and Boston Logan is his ho

Asteroid Hunters

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Most of us do what we can for the environment, but Rik Hill’s actual job is to protect the planet. “Whoa, look at that!” he says, pointing at a moving blip of light on a computer screen. “It’s an unknown object. We just discovered one.” We’re in an observatory on the summit of Mount Lemmon, a 9,000-foot peak north of Tucson, Arizona. Hill’s boss, Ed Beshore, leans in and nods. “That’s an N-E-O,” he says, referring to a near Earth object. “It’s a nice one. It’s bright, and it’s moving fast.” Hill, an astronomer, sends an e-mail to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massach

What's Next in Space?

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

“I am convinced we will find past or present life in the solar system or on a planet surrounding another star in the next 40 years,” says Edward Weiler, an astrophysicist and associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. Weiler’s prediction is based partly on recent discoveries of creatures living in extreme environments previously considered uninhabitable, such as 600 feet beneath the ice in Antarctica, where a shrimp-like critter has been found. “As long as we have water, energy and organic material,” Weiler says, “the potential for life is everywhere.” He hopes the imminent discovery of extr

Richard Branson on Space Travel

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Richard Branson was born in Surrey, England, and founded Virgin Records in 1970 at age 20. The brand now includes more than 300 companies, including Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Trains and Virgin Galactic, a venture that, by 2012, is expected to ferry six passengers 68 miles above the Earth at a cost of $200,000 each. Sir Richard, who conducts business from a private island in the British Virgin Islands, exchanged e-mails with the magazine’s Megan Gambino. Why commercial space travel? Industrial and scientific development in the void of space that surrounds our delicate planet will help us carry on living on Earth over the next century. Satellites already deliver information (th

Charging Ahead With a New Electric Car

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 03:38:39 GMT

In the middle of 2007, Shai Agassi, a software multimillionaire turned environmental entrepreneur, was pondering how to make an electric car affordable to the average Joe. At that point, the all-electric vehicle—as opposed to electric-gasoline hybrids such as the Toyota Prius—was widely derided as impractical. General Motor’s EV1 had appeared in 1996 and, despite its cultlike following, the company stopped producing it after three years, saying the program was not commercially successful. The most advanced electric vehicle, the Tesla Roadster, was about to be released; it would travel some 200 miles on a fully charged battery, but at $109,000, the sleek sports car would

Dark Energy: The Biggest Mystery in the Universe

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Twice a day, seven days a week, from February to November for the past four years, two researchers have layered themselves with thermal underwear and outerwear, with fleece, flannel, double gloves, double socks, padded overalls and puffy red parkas, mummifying themselves until they look like twin Michelin Men. Then they step outside, trading the warmth and modern conveniences of a science station (foosball, fitness center, 24-hour cafeteria) for a minus-100-degree Fahrenheit featureless landscape, flatter than Kansas and one of the coldest places on the planet. They trudge in darkness nearly a mile, across a plateau of snow and ice, until they discern, against the backdrop of more stars th

Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:28:37 GMT

Medical researchers use laboratory-grown human cells to learn the intricacies of how cells work and test theories about the causes and treatment of diseases. The cell lines they need are “immortal”—they can grow indefinitely, be frozen for decades, divided into different batches and shared among scientists. In 1951, a scientist at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, created the first immortal human cell line with a tissue sample taken from a young black woman with cervical cancer. Those cells, called HeLa cells, quickly became invaluable to medical research—though their donor remained a mystery for decades. In her new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta

The Secrets Within Cosmic Dust

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:00:00 GMT

At the threshold of a sterile lab at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, I pull on a white clean-room suit, a surgical cap and mask, booties and latex gloves. My host, a mineralogist named Mike Zolensky, swabs my digital voice recorder with alcohol to remove flakes of skin and pocket lint. He doesn't want any detritus to contaminate the precious dust in the room. Once inside, Zolensky retrieves a palm-size glass box from a cabinet. The box holds a rectangular chunk, less than two inches across, of eerily translucent material. I lean in and squint at it but can't quite focus on anything. Zolensky turns off the lights and hands me a laser pointer. The red beam reveals thin streaks in th

Fantastic Photos of our Solar System

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:00:00 GMT

We've been looking at other planets through telescopes for four centuries. But if you really want to get to know a place, there's no substitute for being there. And in the past decade, more than 20 spacecraft have ventured into the deepest reaches of our solar system. These probes, unlike the Hubble Space Telescope and other observatories that merely orbit Earth, have actually traveled to other planets and approached the Sun, sending back pictures that humble or awe, even as they advance astronomers' understanding of our corner of the universe. "The past decade has been spectacular in terms of achievements," says Sean Solomon, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a

Galileo's Vision

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Inside a glass case was a plain-looking tube, worn and scuffed. Lying in the street, it would have looked like a length of old pipe. But as I approached it, Derrick Pitts—only half in jest—commanded: "Bow down!" The unremarkable-looking object is in fact one of the most important artifacts in the history of science: it's one of only two surviving telescopes known to have been made by Galileo Galilei, the man who helped revolutionize our conception of the universe. The telescope was the centerpiece of "Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy," an exhibition at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in 2009. Pitts, who runs the institute's planetarium and other astronomy p

Apollo 11's Giant Leap for Mankind

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 06:02:23 GMT

The Eagle landed on July 20, 1969. For those who watched the Apollo 11 astronauts park their lunar lander on Tranquility Base—in my case, on a grainy black-and-white television in a small house in the hills above Los Angeles—the fact that Neil Armstrong's "one giant leap for mankind" took place 40 years ago can only come as a shock. Slowly down the ladder went the first human being to step onto the moon, clumsy in his spacesuit, and we knew we were witnessing a moment we would never forget. The lunar module that transported Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the gritty surface of the moon was a two-section invention built by the Grumman Corporation. The bottom unit consist

Sylvia Pagán Westphal on “High Hopes for a New Kind of Gene”

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:03:26 GMT

Sylvia Pagán Westphal, a former staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, New Scientist and the Los Angeles Times, currently writes about science and health for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. “High Hopes for a New Kind of Gene” is her first feature published in Smithsonian. You have a PhD in genetics from Harvard Medical and then went on to study science journalism at Boston University. What made you want to go into science writing? I have always loved writing but when I was young I never thought it could be my career. Then when I was close to finishing my PhD and I started thinking about the next steps in my life, it became clear to me I didn’t w

Elizabeth Rusch on “Catching a Wave”

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:57:53 GMT

Elizabeth Rusch got her start in journalism as a writer and editor for Teacher magazine, a national magazine on education reform in Washington, D.C., where she reported on educational issues and innovations around the country. Now based in Portland, Oregon, she freelances for Smithsonian, Backpacker, Parenting and Portland Monthly and writes children’s books. What drew you to this story about wave energy? The ocean itself drew me. As a child, I bodysurfed in the Atlantic. I’d stand in the break zone feeling currents pull at my legs as a crest rose up. I’d dive forward with the wall of the wave at my back, tuck my head and feel the wave hurtle me forward, water roiling a

A Salute to the Wheel

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:00:00 GMT

It’s fair to say that when an advertisement describes a septic tank as “the best invention since the wheel,” we’ve begun to take our round, load-bearing companion for granted. In light of Smithsonian’s special July coverage of the frontiers of innovation, we thought this would be an appropriate time to pay tribute to one of the origins of innovation by sharing some intriguing, little-known facts about the wheel. No wheels exist in nature. Throughout history, most inventions were inspired by the natural world. The idea for the pitchfork and table fork came from forked sticks; the airplane from gliding birds. But the wheel is one hundred percent homo sapien i

High Hopes for a New Kind of Gene

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:00:00 GMT

I clutch the seat as the Ferrari halts abruptly at an intersection, then purrs impatiently until the light changes. When it takes off, the roar feels oddly extravagant for the quiet streets of suburban Columbus, Ohio. The driver is Carlo Croce, a 64-year-old Italian scientist with a big voice, disheveled curly hair and expressive dark eyes. He heads the Human Cancer Genetics Program at Ohio State University, and his silver Scaglietti Ferrari is a fitting symbol of his approach to science: grand, high-powered and, these days especially, sizzling hot. Croce, who grew up in Rome as the only child of a mechanical engineer father and a homemaker mother, went to medical school at the Universit

Catching a Wave, Powering an Electrical Grid?

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:55:01 GMT

She was in the water when the epiphany struck. Of course, Annette von Jouanne was always in the water, swimming in lakes and pools as she was growing up around Seattle, and swimming distance freestyle competitively in high-school and college meets. There's even an exercise pool in her basement, where she and her husband (a former Olympic swimmer for Portugal) and their three kids have spent a great deal of time...swimming. But in December 1995 she was bodysurfing in Hawaii over the holidays. She'd just begun working as an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Oregon State University. She was 26 years old and eager to make a difference—to find or improve upon a useful sour

Robot Babies

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Einstein the robot has enchanting eyes, the color of honey in sunlight. They are fringed with drugstore-variety false eyelashes and framed by matted gray brows made from real human hair. "What is that, makeup?" a visiting engineer asks, and, indeed, on closer examination I can see black eyeliner smeared beneath Einstein's lower lids, à la David Bowie in 1971. The machine's gaze is expressive—soulful, almost. David Hanson, Einstein's creator, is visiting from Texas to help scientists here at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) prepare the robot for an upcoming conference. Hanson switches the robot on—really just a head and neck—and runs it th

Stem Cell Pioneers

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:15:24 GMT

As Irving Weissman drives past Cannery Row in Monterey, California, in a light rain, he waves an open palm like an impresario, showing off the picturesque bay and craggy coastline. "Spectacular," Weissman says as he pulls onto the grounds of the Hopkins Marine Station. He's a distinguished immunologist, best known for his studies of blood cells, but he's also a straight-shooting Montana native who sports the type of rugged beard you might expect on a fur trader, his father's profession. When he sees David Epel walking by, Weissman stops his black Lexus sedan and lowers a window. "How can you sleep at night?" asks Epel, a marine biologist who investigates fertilization

The Hubble Space Telescope’s Finest Photos

Wed, 06 May 2009 03:00:54 GMT

Now that the telescope has received its final upgrades, we look back on Hubble's most memorable images from space

Booting Up a Computer Pioneer’s 200-Year-Old Design

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 07:54:51 GMT

When today’s number crunchers want to make quick calculations, they reach for their smartphone, a device practically unimaginable two centuries ago. But in the 1820s, at least one forward-thinking mathematician envisioned a calculating machine, albeit far from portable. Frustrated by the human errors he found in printed numerical tables, English inventor Charles Babbage designed a machine to perform mathematical functions and automatically print the results. His initial design, which called for 25,000 parts, would have weighed 15 tons and been about the size of a horse-drawn carriage. The plans looked good on paper, but Babbage was never able to build his machine. More than a centur

Jocelyn Kaiser on "Gene Therapy in a New Light"

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:00:00 GMT

After graduating from Princeton University in 1988 with a degree in chemical engineering, Jocelyn Kaiser worked for General Electric. But she soon found that she enjoyed writing and traveling over chemical engineering and enrolled in a journalism masters program at Indiana University. At first, she planned on being a foreign correspondent in South America, but she says, "In the end science writing turned out to be a comfortable fit." Kaiser joined Science as an intern in 1994 and now covers biomedical research and policy for the magazine. I recently caught up with her to talk about her experience reporting "Gene Therapy in a New Light," her feature story in Smithsonian'

Gene Therapy in a New Light

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:00:00 GMT

The small, windowless space at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia looks like any eye doctor's examining room, with an adjustable chair and half a dozen machines for testing vision. The 20-year-old patient, however, has not come all the way from Albuquerque to get new glasses. Alisha Bacoccini, who has short, blond-streaked hair and green eyes, was born with a disorder caused by a malfunctioning gene in her retina cells that has been diminishing her sight since birth. Now she sees only pale and blurry shapes. "If I look at you I can't see eye color or acne or your eyebrows, but I can see that someone's there," she says. Her seeing eye dog, Tundra, a black Labrador retriever, sits at he