Halloween is the peak time to dwell on ghosts, spooky noises, weird premonitions and other "paranormal activities" — but despite that label, such phenomena are totally normal. You can even create them yourself.

That's the message of Richard Wiseman's latest book, "Paranormality: Why We See What Isn't There." Wiseman, who began his career as a magician and is now an experimental psychologist at the University of Hertfordshire, reveals the tricks of the paranormal trade — including the methods used by on-air psychics to make themselves seem, well, psychic. (To try them out, download Wiseman's "Instant Superhero Kit.") 

Wiseman wishes normal people had a better understanding of the psychology behind seemingly paranormal activities.

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"There's an enormous problem," he told me today, "actually more in America than in Britain, because the level of belief in the States is huge. We're talking about more than three-quarters of the population believing in some sort of paranormal phenomena — even with the rise in technology and science over the past 20 years or so. It's really quite staggering."

There are so many stories about chilling premonitions of doom, or alien visitations, or high-tech studies of haunted houses. Surely there must be some reality behind all those scary tales. It turns out that there is, but Wiseman says you don't have to turn to supernatural explanations. Here are five examples:

1. Selective memory: Can dreams predict future events? Actually, psychologists have found that people tend to have far more dreams than they consciously remember. A significant event — say, a death or dramatic change of fortune — can trigger the memory of a past dream that may seem to relate to that event. Also, you're more likely to hear about the one seemingly prophetic dream than about the many other dreams that went nowhere. In this essay for The Guardian, Wiseman delves more deeply into the selective nature of dream recall.

The  fact that we often hear only what we want to hear, or remember only what fits our expectations, also plays into psychic readings. Wiseman refers to this as "fishing and forking": The psychic throws out some generalities as a fishing expedition, watches to see which of those observations you pick up on, and then follows that fork in the road to build up the reading. The Skeptic's Dictionary outlines the process here.

2. Ideomotor action: Sometimes zombies really are in control of our brains — but those zombies are our own mental processes that buzz along beneath our consciousness. For example, experiments have shown that unconscious muscle movements can guide your hands to rock a table during a seance, or move a Ouija board pointer to spell out a message, or twist a dousing twig to point to an underground water source (or not). But it works only if your zombie brain can process the results of the motor movements. If you're blindfolded, the effect is spoiled. The Straight Dope provides further discussion of the Ouija connection.

3. Sleep paralysis: For thousands of years, tales have been told about strange beings who visit in the middle of the night and have their way with sleepers. In the old days, these were demons known as succubi and incubi. Nowadays, they're aliens or ghosts (like the ghosts in the "Paranormal Activity" movies). Such experiences are associated with a psychological phenomenon known as sleep paralysis, in which the brain hovers at the edge of consciousness but keeps the mind-body connection turned off (except for the connection to the genitalia, which may explain why those succubi were so sex-crazed). "The body paralyzes itself," Wiseman said.

Researchers recently reported that they were able to train volunteers to experience out-of-body experiences as well as alien encounters during their semi-waking states.

4. Cold spots and infrasound: Ghostbusters often report feeling "cold spots," or suddenly becoming anxious, or getting weird readings on high-tech sensors when a specter makes its presence known. Wiseman said such sudden changes are due to natural rather than supernatural causes. Ten years ago, he and his colleagues used an array of thermal cameras and air movement detectors to figure out what was behind a "haunting" at Hampton Court Palace, near London. It turned out that chilly drafts blowing through cracks in the palace's concealed doorways created the unsettling sounds and the plummeting temperatures.

Low-frequency sounds, created by changes in the weather or even appliances such as air conditioners, can also create a sense of uneasiness in listeners, even if they can't consciously sense the sound.  Wiseman conducted an experiment on the effects of "infrasound" during a concert and found that 22 percent of the listeners felt chills or other unusual sensations when they listened to music that was laced with the low-frequency tones. 

5. Hyper-vigilance: All these effects are accentuated when visitors think they're in a haunted house. "Basically, when we become afraid, we become very vigilant. ... It feeds on itself," Wiseman said. He and many other scientists believe that such hyper-vigilance came in handy when our ancestors were in the midst of a mammoth hunt or a host of unseen threats. The same hard-wired instinct may explains why we seek out an eek by visiting a haunted house or watching a scary movie. "It's the way we've evolved," Wiseman said.

Although Wiseman doesn't see anything supernatural in paranormal activities, he does see a lot of value in studying them. "Trying to understand why people have these experiences is very instructive," he said. In fact, research has shown that some concepts, such as mind-reading and out-of-body experiences, are rooted in solid neuroscience. Just as science fiction can give rise to real-life innovations, so can tales of the paranormal.

"Whenever science has done well, so has the paranormal. ... You get this interesting relationship," Wiseman said.

More Halloween tales from the Cosmic Log files:

• 2002: Ghostly mysteries solved
• 2003: Why we seek out an eek
• 2004: Sharing your scares
• 2005: Ghosts on the rise
• 2006: Bring me your ghost stories!
• 2007: The science of spooks
• 2008: Chasing phantoms on film
• 2008: The science of bloodsuckers
• 2009: Seven ghoulish discoveries
• 2010: Spooky stuff from NASA
• 2010: How your brain handles terror scares

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Check out Wiseman's "Paranormality" website for more about the book, plus lots of spooky photos and videos.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

The computer giant IBM sees a profitable future in high-tech analytical tools that could expedite and enhance the rollout of machines to turn the motion of the ocean into electricity.

Such machines, called wave energy converters, are under development around the world as a means to tap what appears to be a clean, green source of renewable energy — wave power.

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But there's no standard design for the machines or a consistent and reliable way to measure their environmental impact, according to Harry Kolar, a chief information technology architect with IBM's Smarter Planet initiative.

"In order for this industry to move forward, they have to do these environmental impact assessments, which include a lot of baseline studies in the case of noise," he told me.

Noisy technology
Scientists are concerned the noise generated by the machines could, for example, disturb marine mammals such as dolphins and whales that communicate with each other via sound waves and navigate via echo-location. 

"Basically, a lot of noise degrades the habitat of marine mammals, makes it harder for them to live their lives and they may go somewhere else if it becomes bad enough," Jim Thomson, an assistant professor in the department of environmental fluid dynamics at the University of Washington, explained to me.

Thomson is helping characterize the noise environment in Admiralty Inlet in Washington's northern Puget Sound for a pilot project with a local utility that will install underwater turbines to capture energy from the tides. The inlet has tidal currents that move as fast as 9 miles per hour.

As elsewhere around the world, researchers are concerned about the impact the turbines will have on marine life there, including orca whales. One of the largest concerns is noise, Thomson noted, which travels five times faster underwater than it does in the air and can go farther.

His team has done some data collection on the noise levels in Admiralty Inlet, where two turbines will be deployed in 2013, but he noted that the short duration of the projects and limited funds mean they lack a complete picture of the noise environment.

Real time analytics
The project with IBM and Sustainable Energy Ireland is unique in the sense that it will collect and analyze massive amounts of data on ocean noise in real-time. 

The system consists of an off-shore buoy that is loaded up with sensors such as underwater microphones that collect data on the ocean environment and the computing power to process that data and stream it to shore-based engineers in real time.

"We will be able to understand what's going on in a very dynamic environment," Kolar said. He and his team call this ability "real-time streaming analytics." 

Thomson, who is not involved with the project, likened this ability to a person sitting at a concert and analyzing the noise coming from the violins and base and other instruments all at the same time.

While this ability exists in separate pieces for ocean energy projects, the IBM collaboration is the first to bring all the technology together in the same place, at the same time, and with the ability to monitor continuously.

Ultimately, these data should allow for a comprehensive picture of the underwater noise environment that should ease along the environmental permitting process and also help companies refine their wave energy machines.

"To allow the industry to move forward, to deploy these machines, the faster they get in the water, the faster you get this clean energy piece," Kolar said.

Ocean energy services
IBM is hoping to employ its technology and expertise in characterizing the noise environment gained in Ireland to other countries and companies around the world looking to develop their own ocean energy industries.

According to Thomson, this is a smart business strategy, assuming governments continue to support renewable energy technologies.

"There's going to be a whole industry that crops up around it that's in support of it, that doesn't actually do the generation of the kilowatts, but that does all of the marine services, the environmental permitting and monitoring and all these things that surround the energy production," he said.

IBM, it appears, is making a bet that ocean energy is an untapped space where it can be a major player.

More on ocean energy technology:

• Oregon coast could be wave energy hub
• $28 billion in wave energy projects proposed
• Air Force fully harnesses wave power
• Scientists tap motion in the ocean for energy
• Water currents tapped as renewable energy

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

GOP hopeful Mitt Romney slipped into scientific doublespeak this week when he told a rally that "we don’t know what’s causing climate change" — seemingly contradicting his earlier statement that "I believe humans have contributed" to the increase in global mean temperatures.

That’s par for the course when it comes to the intersection of politics and science, says Shawn Lawrence Otto, who addresses the topic at length in a new book titled "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America." Otto said Romney is simply betting that he'll be able to zigzag away from his previous views on climate policy, in order to appeal to the Republican base during the primary season.

"He's doubled down a little bit further," Otto told me today.

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Will Romney win the bet? It's hard to say at this point, but the fact that Romney is backing away from a view that has a fair amount of scientific evidence behind it doesn't bode well for the state of science policy ... and politics. "That is clear evidence to me of the level of anti-science among the Republican activists at the ground level," Otto said.

The theme of Otto's book — that politics and science usually don't mix — isn't exactly a bolt from the blue. Other books in the genre include "The Republican War on Science" and "Unscientific America," as well as "Merchants of Doubt," "The Body Politic," "Denialism" and many more. But Otto draws upon his experience on the front lines of the debate over science and politics. And when I say "debate," I mean that literally.

Otto's day job is in Hollywood, and he's perhaps best-known as the screenwriter and co-producer of "House of Sand and Fog" (and writer/director of the upcoming "Dreams of a Dying Heart"). But during the 2008 presidential campaign, he was the co-founder and CEO of Science Debate, a grass-roots effort aimed at getting the candidates to address the tough questions surrounding science and technology policy: What should be done about climate change? What about embryonic stem-cell research? How would you shore up American innovation and promote energy security and sustainability?

Otto and his colleagues didn't get the full-scale, onstage debate they were hoping for, but they did get Barack Obama and John McCain to answer 14 key questions about the science-based challenges facing America.

Otto thinks the candidates got as much out of the exercise as the voters did. "It's arguable that without that, Obama would not have had the science literacy that he had going into office," he said.

Three years after Obama won the White House, Otto says the president's record on those science-oriented issues is a "mixed bag." There are questions about environmental compromises, a less-than-transparent regulatory process and renewable-energy reversals. for example.

"We got on base, that's about all we managed to do," Otto said. "We didn't hit a home run."

But the big problem may be the state of the electorate. In his book, Otto outlines how today's political framework is based on "values" rather than facts, and how that has distorted the debate over issues that touch upon science and technology. If anything, America has slid backward over the past few decades, Otto said.

"In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy had to go out of his way to say that his religion would not interfere with his presidency," he said. "Now we're almost having candidates say the opposite: They're not going to let the science interfere with their religious convictions while they're in office. ... It's not family values that made America No. 1. It's our can-do spirit and our ability to deal with hardheaded science."

So what's the solution? Otto doesn't have any magic formula up his sleeve.

"To me, the question is whether knowledge is advancing to the point where democracy isn't able to handle making good decisions," he told me. "What happens when the level of knowledge required around all these issues that we have to be able to salve is so high that the general public really doesn't intersect with it? I don't really know the what the solution to that is, but it's very concerning."

He may not have the quick fix, but he does have some suggestions. For example, in the book he lays out an "American Science Pledge" that commits the signer to upholding scientific integrity and transparency, freedom of inquiry, open debate and policies based on knowledge rather than personal opinions.

To his credit, Otto avoids blaming religion for the sad state of scientific affairs. "This is a time for churches to reach out to scientists and to speak about science and politics, because these discussions are so important to the future," he writes. "We are in a moral crisis, and it matters little whether a preacher is conservative or progressive if he or she is incorporating knowledge into moral reflections."

Otto also calls upon scientists to get more involved in public engagement.

"I do think that scientists have the opinion that it's not really their job, but I think that's a mistake," he told me. "Right now, the public doesn't understand what they're getting for their money, and they don't appreciate what they're getting for their money. So right now there's a growing science gap, and scientists are the only ones who can do something about that."

You can bet these ideas will be coming to the fore during Science Debate 2012, which is just starting to get off the ground. How do you see the debate over science, technology, innovation and public policy shaping up? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Further reviews of 'Fool Me Twice':

• Harvard Law and Policy Review: Stop the backward slide
• Science: Eagle Scout's prescription for democracy and science
• Point of Inquiry: Shawn Otto and the assault on science

More on science and politics:

• Climate controversy spotlights GOP science policy
• Funny science sparks serious political spat
• Will our 'Sputnik moment' fizzle out?

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For more on the presidential campaign, check out msnbc.com's Politics section.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Head-counters around the world are marking Monday as the day when the world's population hits the 7 billion mark. It's a date that has served as the focus for musings on the problems and possibilities facing our species and our planet. But how do experts know that Oct. 31 is the precise day that the world's 7 billionth human being will be born?

"The answer is, we don't," said Omar Gharzeddine, a spokesman for the U.N. Population Fund. Even though the United Nations gathered the statistics pointing to the Day of 7 Billion, U.N. officials freely admit that Oct. 31 is merely the date that popped out of their population projections, and will serve as a symbolic rather than a statistically precise milestone.

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Every five years, the U.N.'s Population Division updates its country-by-country projections of demographic trends, and the computer models for 2010 were combined to yield a projection of Oct. 31. In the report, World Population Prospects, the U.N. analysts emphasize that there could be a 1 to 2 percent overall margin of error in the global tally, which translates into plus or minus six months or more for reaching the 7 billion mark.

Some folks are planning to identify a specific baby in India's Uttar Pradesh state or Russia's Kaliningrad region as the 7 billionth human on the planet, but Gharzeddine told me that the United Nations isn't giving official status to such publicity efforts. "There's no way that the U.N. or anyone could know where or at what minute on the 31st the 7 billionth baby will be born," he said.

The Day of 7 Billion could well be revised, even years later. That was the case for the Day of 6 Billion, Gharzeddine pointed out. "The U.N. marked the '6 billionth' [person] in 1999, and then a couple of years later the Population Division itself reassessed its calculations and said, actually, no, it was in 1998," he told me.

This time around, a lot of population experts suspect that we're actually months away from hitting the 7 billion mark. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, projects that the milestone won't be reached until March 12, 2012. And researchers at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis point to a time frame between February 2012 and July 2014.

Those same researchers say that the tally for the world's total population is "not the issue" that experts should be worrying about. Instead, they say the United Nations and other groups involved in global development should focus on imbalances in the distribution of various populations by age, education and health status.

Gharzeddine agreed that population policy should be about more than the big number. "It's a good occasion to highlight all these issues," he said. Among the issues on his list:

An estimated 1.8 billion people are between 10 and 24 years of age, meaning that this is the biggest generation of young people in history. But 90 percent of those youths live in the developing world and are in danger of missing out on the economic opportunities of the 21st century.  

About 215 million women live in areas of the world where access to family planning and contraception is restricted. That's one of the factors between the wide disparity in fertility rates, which range from 1.6 births per woman in east Asia to five births per woman in some parts of Africa.

What does the future hold? It's taken 13 years to go from 6 billion to 7 billion, but the United Nations estimates that we'll hit 8 billion by 2023, 9 billion by 2041 and 10 billion at some point after 2081. If you think there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the Day of 7 Billion, hold onto your hats: Relatively small increases in fertility rates could cause a doubling of the current population by 2100 (to 15.8 billion), while a small decrease could result in fewer people than we have today (6.2 billion by 2100).

More about global demographics:

• PhotoBlog: A shrinking water supply for a growing population
• Population boom heralds big global economic shifts
• Population study suggests we're still evolving
• Worries about the world in 2050

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For more about the Day of 7 Billion, click on over to the U.N. Population Fund, 7 Billion Actions and the 7 Billionth Person Project.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

 

Just in time for Halloween, a new image from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer puts some fangs on the Pacman Nebula.

The nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia, formally known as NGC 281, was given its more whimsical nickname years ago because, in visible light, it looks like the dot-chomping character from the "Pac-Man" video game (as you can see below in the picture from the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona).

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NGC 281 is a cloud of gas and dust about 9,200 light-years from Earth, with a cluster of hot stars in the center. The dust obscures much of the light coming from the central cluster, designated IC 1590, particularly in the dark, dusty wedge that represents the Pacman's "mouth."

The newly released infrared view from WISE cuts through the murk and reveals the hot stars at the center of the reddish-greenish nebula. The stars' ultraviolet radiation and stellar winds are blasting away at the surrounding dust from the inside out, giving the nebula a shell-like appearnce. Around the inner lining of the shell, you can see lots of eroded pillars of dust that point toward the center. Contained within the tips of those pillars are infant stars, squeezed into existence by the pressure of the radiation and the winds.

You can think of those jagged pillars as the teeth of the Pacman. And if they also happen to look like a jack o' lantern's teeth, so much the better. After all, this is the weekend for things that go bump (or, in this case, bang) in the night.

More cosmic treats for Halloween weekend:

• Vampire stars and other spooky space happenings
• Skywatching highlights for Halloween
• Slideshow: Month in Space Pictures
• Happy Halloween from Cassini

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Researchers in Japan have built an aluminum robot powered purely by forward momentum that can walk downhill seemingly forever.

In a test last year, for example, it walked on a slightly inclined treadmill for 13 hours, long enough to set a Guinness World Record. The human-sized pair of legs took 100,000 steps and covered 15 kilometers (9.3 miles).

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The robot contains only mechanical components that have been adjusted so that it has the same thigh and leg lengths as a person, and weighs the same, the developers at the Nagoya Institute of Technology's Sano Lab told video news site DigInfo.

The feet look kind of like golf clubs. In fact, the developers said that they plan to apply the principle of the technology to sports equipment. 

Perhaps they should consider building caddies for the Extreme 19th hole at the Legend Golf and Safari Resort in South Africa. After all, walking downhill is hard on the joints, especially when loaded down with a bag of clubs and balls.

Another potential use is as a type of prosthetic device. In this case, demonstrated at the end of the video, the legs are strapped onto a human, helping him take steps.

Robots that walk forever aren't entirely new. Earlier this summer, for example, we featured this robot that walked 40.5 miles non-stop around a track. Only, that robot had a small battery. The downhill walker, by contrast, is a slave to gravity.

More on walking robots:

• Robot walks 40.5 miles non-stop
• First robot marathon begins next week
• Robot suit for rent in Japan helps people walk
• Rolling robot inspired by caterpillar

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

DARPA's latest tech challenge is offering $50,000 for a task worthy of secret agents: piecing together messages that have been shredded into thousands of bits.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon think tank that previously brought you multimillion-dollar robo-car races and a nationwide hunt for red balloons, put five ripped-up puzzles online today to kick off its Shredder Challenge. If someone wins, and I'm betting that someone will, that would be good news and bad news for the Defense Department — and for folks like you and me.

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"The goal is to identify and assess potential capabilities that could be used by our warfighters operating in war zones, but might also create vulnerabilities to sensitive information that is protected through our own shredding practices throughout the U.S. national security community," DARPA said in its contest announcement.

Here's how the contest works: Participants register via the Shredder Challenge website, and then download five bunches of files that are essentially screenshots of shredded-up documents, plus instructions. They'll have to figure out how to put the documents back together, either by using computer analysis or by matching up itty-bitty pieces of printouts. Then they'll have to send DARPA an email with scans of the completed puzzles, the answers to questions about each puzzle ... and an explanation of the reasoning process that led to the solution.

Each of the puzzles carries a point value, and an online leader board will track the scores of the top contestants. DARPA will announce the winner and the amount of the prize awarded on Dec. 5, based on the points earned as well as the time stamps for submissions.

Hundreds sign up
"We are all pretty excited about this one," Dan Kaufman, director of the Information Innovation Office, told me in an email. So are puzzle fans: Soon after the competition opened, DARPA warned in a Twitter update that, "due to interest in the Shredder Challenge, there may be a delay accessing" the puzzle website. The Web traffic jam eased once DARPA beefed up its bandwidth.

Kaufman said this afternoon that "registrations were at 240 when I last checked, and not slowing down."

When I spoke with Kaufman, he said no one had yet submitted an entry. He couldn't predict whether it would take hours or days for puzzle sleuths to submit solutions. That's what makes the exercise interesting.

Kaufman's a veteran of 2009's Red Balloon Challenge, which asked participants to figure out the locations of 10 red balloons scattered around the country. He recalled that there was similar uncertainty about the outcome back then: "We were torn between 'It will never be solved' and 'Somebody's gotta solve this.'"

It turned out that researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab figured out the locations in just under nine hours, winning $40,000 in the process. A research paper published this week in the journal Science laid out the MIT team's winning strategy: a system of "recursive incentives" that promised payoffs for those who discovered the balloons, as well as those who recruited the discoverers.

MIT's Alexander Pentland and his colleagues said the recursive-reward arrangement could be used for life-and-death searches — for example, to look for a missing child, a criminal at large or the survivors of a natural disaster.

Good news, bad news
Kaufman told me that the winner of the Shredder Challenge may well use a method that DARPA's own researchers haven't thought of. Such methods could be used to read documents that have been shredded by the bad guys, such as al-Qaida operatives in Afghanistan. "Currently, this process is much too slow and too labor-intensive, particularly if the documents are hand-written," Kaufman said in a news release. "We are looking to the Shredder Challenge to generate some leap-ahead thinking in this area."

Better message-demangling methods also could be used by bad guys to reconstruct financial statements, credit card reports and other sensitive documents that consumers thought had been safely disposed of.

"I'm concerned about the privacy implications," my colleague at msnbc.com's Red Tape Chronicles, Bob Sullivan, told me today.

Kaufman acknowledged that the contest's outcome might make you feel less secure about what happens to their shredded documents. But if that's the case, it's better to know that up front instead of burying your head in the sand. "I would say the 'ostrich defense' is not a good one," he told me.

Who knows? Maybe the first thing to come out of DARPA's latest challenge will be a rush to buy shredders that grind paper into powder. What do you think? Weigh in with your comments below.

Other challenges from DARPA:

• 2005: Stanford robo-car wins $2 million desert road race
• 2007: Driverless SUV wins $2 million Urban Challenge
• 2009: Balloon hunt nets $40,000 for MIT-led team
• 2011: DARPA wants to recycle space junk into satellites

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Clean, accessible, reliable and renewable energy equivalent to 10 times the installed capacity of coal power plants in the U.S. is available from the hot rocks under our feet, according to the results of a new mapping study.

The energy, called geothermal, is generated from heat found deep below the Earth's surface. While there's some geothermal developed in the western U.S., it was previously thought lacking in the eastern portion of the country.

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Now, researchers at Southern Methodist University, with funding from Google.org, have compiled geological data from 35,000 sites across the U.S. and found that there's massive potential all across the country, including significant portions of the eastern two-thirds of the U.S.

What's more, the energy can be tapped with existing technology, according to the researchers. That's largely due the recent development of drilling techniques that make methods such as enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) possible.

In EGS, a well is drilled several miles into the Earth's crust, water is injected down that well to fracture hot rocks, creating thousands of small pathways for the water to flow and be heated. This hot water and steam is then piped to the surface, where it powers a turbine to generate electricity.

Key to addressing some of the environmental concerns about excess water usage, the used water is recycled back down the well, creating a closed loop, as Google explains in this introductory video below.

Other concerns associated with the technology include the potential to create earthquakes. When the hot rock is broken apart, it induces seismicity — generates earthquakes — that can be felt at the surface. It could also trigger a larger quake.

For a good overview of this risk, read this editorial from Domenico Giardi, director of the Swiss Seismological Service, published in the journal Nature. Earthquakes stopped an EGS project in Basel, Switzerland, in 2009.

A protocol for monitoring and mitigating earthquake problems associated with EGS has been developed, and the new mapping results are compliant with that protocol, according to the SMU researchers. 

All of this should help nudge along development of this energy resource, which isn't subject to the fickleness of the weather that hampers wind and solar. And with more than 3 million megawatts of accessible geothermal mapped, the potential seems tempting.

More on geothermal energy:

• Hot rocks, water heat this town
• MIT study: Get more energy from Earth's heat
• Geothermal energy boom? U.S. to open lands
• Energy from hot rocks? What out for quakes

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

Some balls bounce on water, and some do it better than others. The best in class is the trademarked Waboba, which stands for water bouncing ball. And now a team of mechanical engineers has figured out why the Waboba works so well.

The team led by Michael Wright at Brigham Young University's Splash Lab in Provo, Utah, did this by attempting to skip three types of balls across the water, videotaping the activity, and analyzing the footage. Their results are posted on arXiv.org, including a video that explains it all.

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The tests involved a Superball, a racquetball and, of course, the Waboba. 

"The way balls 'bounce' out of the water is they make a cavity that forms a sort of jump to allow them to rise out of the cavity," Tadd Truscott, the Splash Lab's director, explained to me in an email. "The Waboba is special because it is so deformable."

When it hits the water, it flattens out inside the cavity so that it becomes more like a skipping stone. 

"Stones skip out of the cavities they make because they sort of slip across the surface and up the jump," Truscott said. "The Waboba does the same thing because it can flatten out so well."

By contrast, the Superball and racquetball don't deform as much and so aren't able to increase their surface area as they form the cavity, making it more difficult to skip out.

In fact, the Superball, which is a solid, stiff, and has a large ratio of mass relative to its size, plunged underwater even when thrown at a shallow angle, as we learned to do when skipping stones. It doesn't bounce at all.

The racquetball, which is hollow and has a much lower mass ratio, creates a small cavity and then rebounds quickly, but it kicks up a wave that it has to bust through, which slows it down. It bounces a little.

Meanwhile, the Waboba skips supremely across the water like a child let out of school for the summer. 

"When you throw a Waboba, you can almost feel the difference or hear the difference as it hits the water, and it piqued my curiosity," Truscott noted, explaining what led him to do the experiment. "I wanted to know why it was behaving more like a stone than a ball."

While the study tickled the researchers' curiosities, the findings could also have real-world applications, he added, such as developing better landing craft for vehicles "that could both fly and move on the water surface." 

More on skipping across the water:

• Rock on! Man breaks stone-skipping record
• The science of skipping stones
• Engineer builds robot that walks on water
• 12-legged robot walks on water

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Last updated at 8:00 am PT Oct. 28.

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

A flying car that's rugged enough for hardcore off-road driving, able to survive small-arms fire and can quickly take off and land is potentially just a few years shy of reality, according to reports sourced from DARPA, the U.S. military's future-oriented research arm.

Aerospace companies Lockheed Martin and AAI Corporation have presented "feasible designs" to the military's Transformer program, reports Aviation Week's Ares blog, and have advanced to the next phase, which is to begin work on prototypes of the contraptions.

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Formal contracts for Phase 2 have yet to be awarded, AAI spokeswoman Sharon Corna told me in an email, but "it is my understanding that DARPA intends to proceed with us."

Presentation of prototypes of the so-called "flying Humvees" is expected at the end of fiscal 2012. If DARPA selects one of the designs for Phase 3, ground and flight demonstrations of a flying Humvee could occur in 2015.

Regular folks may soon be able to drive around Terrafugia's Transition roadable aircraft, which cleared regulatory hurdles this July. But that car, which is more like an airplane that drives and must take off and land at airports, is a far cry from what DARPA has in mind.

The military envisions a vehicle that can carry four soldiers and gear, take off and land vertically, be flown more than 250 miles on a tank of gas, and be operated by a "typical soldier," according to DARPA's program description. 

"Meeting these requirements is pushing the state of the art in lightweight materials and structure, high power-to-weight engines, and autonomous flight controls," Aviation Week notes.

More on flying cars:

• Flying car cleared for the road
• Flying car goes to market
• 7 flights of fancy that fizzled
• Dude, where's my flying car and jetpack?

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

An unmanned twin-balloon airship rose to nearly 100,000 feet over the weekend — marking the latest milestone for an all-volunteer group that's aiming to send balloon-borne payloads into space.

"The big aerospace firms have been trying to do this for decades, spending hundreds of millions of dollars," John Powell, president of California-based JP Aerospace, said today in a news release. "We've spent about $30,000 and the past five years developing Tandem."

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The remote-controlled Tandem airship was launched from Nevada's Black Rock Desert on Saturday, rose through extreme turbulence at an altitude of 40,000 to 60,000 feet, and reached the 95,085-foot mark, Powell said. A pilot on the ground used remote control to turn on two electric-powered, 6-foot-long propellers and guide the craft through a series of maneuvers. At the end of the mission, one of the balloons burst and the other balloon was released. Tandem descended to a soft landing, eased down by a row of five parachutes, Powell said.

Research balloons have risen to heights in excess of 135,000 feet (42 kilometers), but JP Aerospace claims that Tandem set an altitude record for a powered, steerable airship. "The highest before ours was the Army's sounder / HiSentinel, that went to 74,000 feet a few years ago," Powell told me in an email.

The entire Tandem craft weighed 80 pounds, with the balloons accounting for 20 pounds of that weight.

Powell said Tandem is being developed as a "high-altitude backhoe" that can be used as a launch platform for small research rockets, a mothership for hypersonic craft, a construction platform for high-altitude research stations and a precursor for JP Aerospace's "Airship to Orbit" program.

More about balloons and near space:

• Balloons built for future frontiers
• Students reach high for launch photos
• Chair floats toward the final frontier
• Huge space balloon crashes in Australia

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Researchers have used state-of-the-art machine translation software — and some old-fashioned hunches — to crack the code used by a secret society in Germany three centuries ago. The results shed light on the tricks of the cryptographic process as well as on the bizarre history of such societies, which were all the rage in the 18th century.

It turns out that the 105-page, 75,000-character manuscript, known as the Copiale Cipher, provided a detailed description for setting up initiation ceremonies — including the techniques used to throw a scare into the initiates. It also revealed the methods that members used to identify each other in the outside world, and delved into the comparisons and rivalries surrounding Masonic-like rites in different countries.

"This opens up a window for people who study the history of ideas and the history of secret societies," Kevin Knight, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute, said in a news release issued today. "Historians believe that secret societies have had a role in revolutions, but all that is yet to be worked out, and a big part of the reason is because so many documents are enciphered."

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Knight and his colleagues are now turning their attention to other, better-known cryptographic puzzles — such as the brain-teasing Kryptos sculpture on the CIA's grounds, the cipher used by the Zodiac Killer in 1969, and the totally baffling 15th-century Voynich Manuscript. But veteran code-breakers say those puzzles will be far tougher to solve. "Generally, that type of decryption has already been tried on those ciphers," said Elonka Dunin, whose website keeps tab on the world's top cryptological puzzles.

Knight said the work could eventually lead to better translation tools for non-Latin languages such as Pashto, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean, "which have been a big challenge for machines."

How the code was cracked
Tracking down the handwritten Copiale manuscript (which gets its name from one of the two readable words on the pages) was the first challenge facing Knight and two colleagues from Sweden's Uppsala University, Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer. The book, bound in green and gold paper, turned up in the East Berlin Academy after the Cold War and is now in a private collection.

The researchers transcribed a machine-readable version of the coded text and put it through computerized statistical analysis. The software looked for patterns in the different combinations of coded characters, including Roman and Greek letters as well as abstract symbols.

At first, Knight and his colleagues focused on the Roman and Greek characters and tried to match them up with words from 80 different languages. "It took quite a long time, and resulted in complete failure," Knight said.

Then they played a hunch: Maybe those characters were actually meaningless "nulls," and the true code was contained in the abstract symbols. When they ran the symbols through statistical analysis, they came up with a German text titled "Ceremonie der Aufnahme" ... "Ceremonies of Initiation." Soon they had pages and pages of deciphered lore.

What the manuscript says
The text, apparently written in the 1760-1780 time frame, is "obviously related to an 18th-century secret society, namely the 'oculist order,'" the researchers say. The volume is inscribed "Phillipp 1866," perhaps suggesting that it passed into the hands of an owner named Phillipp in that year.

The manuscript, available in several formats from Uppsala University's website, describes the procedure for initiating new members of the society. At one point, candidates are asked to read the writing on a blank piece of paper. When they can't, they're told to put on eyeglasses, and then they undergo an "operation" that involves plucking a hair from the eyebrow. After the operation, the blank paper is replaced by a document laying out "the entire teaching for the apprentices."

Later, "the left part of the chest and the right knee get uncovered, the eyes are being tied, and all sorts of words of comfort are spoken, which raise even more fear." The candidates are told, "Prepare yourself to die" — but that's just a scare tactic.  No injuries are inflicted in the course of the ceremony.

Another section of the book describes how members can recognize each other. When one member asks how "Hans" is, the other should respond by mentioning a name that begins with the second letter of the first name — for example, "He's with Anton."

Other passages discuss how much members at various levels of the secret society should know about the codes and customs. The manuscript notes that secret societies were established in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, "but because they practiced more evil than good, they have been destroyed." In Germany, societies in different cities are associated with different hand signs: a forefinger on the mouth for Berlin; the middle finger on the right eye and a thumb on the ear for Frankfurt; a forefinger on the chin for Marburg.

Some passages even take on political issues, referring to a three-headed monster as symbolizing "rule and governance which, by means of power and perfidy, deprive man of his natural freedom and enjoyment of the timely things and [that which] we human beings need." Such passages could help historians trace the influence of secret societies on the political movements of the time, which were notable for their focus on natural rights. The natural-rights concept set the stage for the American Revolution as well as the French Revolution.

What next?
Knight wants to use his machine-translation software on the Kryptos, Zodiac Killer and Voynich ciphers, but the cryptographers who have been working on those puzzles for years suspect that machines alone can't crack the code. Nick Pelling, an expert on the Voynich Manuscript and other ciphers, pointed out that human intuition played a big role in figuring out the Copiale Cipher.

"The story they outline in the paper is a classic hunch-based cipher-cracking sequence," Pelling told me. "They guessed one way, and then it turned out to be the other way. These are great hunches, and they tell a great story about how they followed these hunches and got to the end of the line."

He doubted that the work done on the Copiale Cipher could be adapted easily for the Voynich Manuscript. "It's pretty clear that it's a different type of cipher from the Copiale Cipher," he said. In fact, he suspects the manuscript, whose content is completely unknown, may be a combination of ciphers and idiosyncratic abbreviations that would be devilishly hard to untangle.

Dunin, who is the co-leader of a group trying to crack the Kryptos code, was similarly pessimistic about the researchers' chances for success. "They're welcome to try, but many machines have already been pointed at Kryptos," she told me.

Klaus Schmeh, a German crypto expert, said that even though the Copiale Cipher has been around for 250 years or so, it hadn't gotten much attention in the past. "In my view, this cipher wasn't known at all to the public," Schmeh said. He saluted the researchers for their work, but echoed Pelling's view that the effort fit the standard pattern for breaking secret codes.

"It's pretty much the way cryptography is done," he said. "It was certainly not an easy puzzle, but I'm sure that other cryptographers would have solved it."

Update for 6:55 p.m. ET: Knight responded via email to a few follow-up questions I sent him:

Cosmic Log: The Daily Mail suggests that the cipher was solved using the Google Translate software, but I'm assuming that it was a more specialized program.

Knight: The Daily Mail made a mistake.  Anyway, we used a bunch of software derived from our own statistical language translation algorithms.  We apply those original algorithms to the translation of Chinese and Arabic into English.

Q: Was the Copiale Cipher a straight substitution cipher, or was it something more complex?

A: It was a substitution cipher, but not a simple one-for-one type.  The cipher alphabet has many more than 26 letters.  So there are many ways to encode "E," for example.  Also, sometimes whole sequences of plaintext letters, for example "SCH," are encoded with a single cipher letter.  Lastly, there are some "logograms," cipher letters that stand for whole words, such as the name of the secret society.

Q: How could this method be applied to Voynich, Kryptos and other ciphers? Are there any wider applications for military code-making and code-breaking? Are there particular types of ciphers that the machine translation software is best suited for?

A: When you think about language translation, you can think about substituting a word in one language (like "boy" in English) with a word in another language (like "nanhaizi" in Chinese).  But sometimes whole phrases are substituted for whole phrases.  Also, there is reordering -- "transposition," in cryptographic jargon.  We pretend Chinese is a code for English -- a substitution/transposition cipher.  So there is a deep connection between translation and classical cryptography.  Of course, modern militaries use new cipher systems based on number theory now, so a lot of the classical work is not relevant anymore to them.  But it's super-relevant to us working on more accurate language translation algorithms.

Q: It sounds as if humans still played a key role...

A: Yes, it was a human/machine collaboration.  The machine has incredible patience, but it only looks for what you tell it.  We could tell it to decipher against 80 possible plaintext languages (Latin, English, German, etc.), and it had a slight preference for German, but it didn't know, for example, that a single cipher letter could stand for a sequence of three plaintext letters ("SCH"), because we didn't tell it that could happen.  But as a human, you are very flexible and can spot what is happening.

More secret messages:

• FBI can't crack murder code — can you?
• Computer program helps decode ancient texts
• Voynich Manuscript dated to the 15th century
• CIA sculpture still baffles cryptologists
• Has amateur cracked Zodiac Killer code?

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

The public is surprisingly aware of the fact that humans could deliberately hack the planet's climate to reduce or offset changes due to greenhouse gas emissions, according to a first-of-its kind survey.

What's more, 72 percent of the 3,105 respondents think scientists should be allowed to study ways to do this that involve managing the amount of solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface, such as injecting tiny particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's energy back into space.

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This field of science is technically known as geoengineering, though the survey found that more people have a better idea of what it's all about when the tem "climate engineering" is used, according to the results, which were presented Monday in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Growing recognition
Scientists have batted around the concept since the 1960s, though it remained on the periphery of the climate debate until the last few years largely due to fears that public discussion would lessen incentives for political action to curb emissions, note the researchers.

But in recent years the concept has gained traction due in part to the fact that the prominent scientist Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel for his work on the ozone hole, has urged systematic study of solar radiation management. 

As well, news media coverage of geoengineering has spiked and bookshelves have begun to creak under the weight of tomes dedicated to the idea, such as Eli Kintisch's "Hack the Planet" and Jeff Goodell's "How to Cool the Planet".

Given the growing recognition, the researchers felt the time is ripe to collect data on public opinions and awareness on the subject. 

Survey results
According to the results, 8 percent of the respondents correctly described geoengineering and 45 percent correctly described the interchangeable term "climate engineering," adding weight to the argument that the term geoengineering is misleading and difficult to understand. 

While 72 percent of the respondents support studying solar radiation management, uncertainty about using the technique to stop a climate emergency now or deploying it immediately was considerable.

"Overall the support for [solar radiation management] is surprisingly high," the team writes. "Our own view, and our impression of the dominant opinion within the research and policy community, is that near term use of SRM would be reckless."

The research team, which includes David Keith, an expert on scientific study of geoengineering at Harvard University and the University of Calgary, was pleased to also find broad public trust in university researchers to dispense honest information about the field.

In fact, 75 percent or respondents ranked university researchers as trustworthy. 

"As future policy and governance debates concerning SRM continue, scientists are likely in a unique and trusted position of influence … ensuring that the science remains disentangled from the politics will help to preserve the public's trust in scientists on the topic of SRM," they conclude.

Less than trustworthy
Less than a third, however, trust information about geoengineering from the government. The media is an even less trustworthy source of information (26 percent).

There's also a subset of people out there who believe governments or scientists are already distributing chemicals in the atmosphere for purposes ranging from culling the population to mind control.

"We found that 2.6 percent of the subjects believe that it is completely true that the government has a secret program that uses airplanes to put harmful chemicals into the air and 14 percent of the sample believe that this is partly true," the team notes.

More on geoengineering:

• The planet-hackers are coming
• Should we geoengineer the Earth's climate?
• Willing to give up blue skies for climate fix?
• Tweaking the climate to save it: Who decides?

 

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more information of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

 

A spherical flying machine that can take off and land just about anywhere, roll along walls and hover like a helicopter was recently unveiled by Japan's Ministry of Defense. 

The beach-ball-size machine consists of commercially available parts that cost about U.S. $1,400. The researchers built it to study a problem associated with their aircraft R&D, as explained in the video above from DigInfo. 

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"We have a plane that can stand up vertically after flying horizontally. But the problem with that plane is take-off and landing are very difficult," the researcher explains. "As one idea to solve that problem, we thought of making the exterior round."

Since the flying ball works like a propeller plane, it can fly forward at high speed using wings, which a helicopter can't do, DigInfo notes. And three gyro sensors keeps it moving along even after bumping into an obstacle.

Ultimately, an aircraft developed with this technology could be used for search-and-rescue missions in otherwise hard-to-reach places. For more information, check out the video above. 

More on defense robots:

• Robots hook up to fly as a single unit
• Man flies with jet pack at the London boat show
• Robotic insects take flight on wings made using printers
• Dude, where's my flying car and jetpack?

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more of our Future of Technology series, watch the featured video below.

 

A solar outburst sparked surprising displays of the northern lights as far south as Arkansas, Mississippi and North Carolina tonight, marking one of the farthest-reaching auroral shows in years.

As word spread about the geomagnetic storm, photos streamed onto the Web from the usual places, such as Norway, Sweden and Iceland, but also from locales that are typically too far south to see the northern lights: Oklahoma ... Kansas ... Kentucky ... Tennessee ... Virginia.

Among the websites tracking the fireworks are SpaceWeather.com, the Weather Channel and Universe Today.

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Arkansas photographer Brian Emfinger was alerted to the northern lights by SpaceWeather.com's aurora alert. "I ran out and put my camera out and immediately saw reddish aurora," he wrote. "I ran out into the field, and within a few minutes the aurora went crazy!"

Photographer Randy Halverson captured a whole string of auroral pictures from a vantage point west of Madison, Wis., with his 16-year-old son, River. Father and son were amazed to see how bright the lights were. "At one point they were so bright they lit up the ground," Randy wrote.

Richard Miller, a resident of London, was visiting Washington Court House, Ohio, when he snapped a picture of the red glow over the neighborhood. "Seeing the Aurora Borealis on my family visit to Ohio made the trip one to remember," Miller told me in an email. "As an amateur astronomer, I've never seen anything like it before."

David DelaGardelle, who's a full-time blacksmith/swordmaker/artisan in Indiana, was driving home from his Mad Dwarf Workshop when he saw the spectacle. He said he was awestruck by the sight of "blood-red northern lights aflame in the night sky."

Jeff Berkes, a Pennsylvania photographer who shared a photo of the Orionid meteor shower with us earlier today, also sent in a quick snapshot of the northern lights. "They were only out for a few minutes, and I was only able to get off five shots, two of which were blurry from the car shaking," he wrote in an email.

The cause of the show was a coronal mass ejection from the sun that hit Earth's magnetosphere at about 2 p.m. ET, SpaceWeather.com reported.

The impact caused a strong compression in the magnetic field, allowing electrically charged particles from the solar wind to penetrate down to geosynchronous orbit (22,000 miles or 35,000 kilometers in altitude). That means Earth-orbiting satellites could have been exposed to the solar storm, analysts said.

Solar activity is on the upswing toward an expected peak of the sun's 11-year cycle in 2013, and the past few months have been marked by strong auroral activity. Here's a picture of an aurora as seen from the International Space Station on Sept. 29 as it flew over the midwestern United States.

Consult NASA's Earth Observatory website to get your bearings, and watch this QuickTime video for a moving experience of the space station's flyover:

All these pictures may be pretty, but stronger solar storms can have a significant downside: They could disrupt satellite communication as well as power grids. There were no immediate indications that tonight's bout of space weather caused significant problems.

More auroral glories:

• Spaceships bask in aurora's glow
• Red sky at night, astronaut's delight
• Fly over the southern lights
• Beautiful blasts from solar storms
• Southern lights are sweeter in space
• Month in Space: Still more beautiful blasts

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Want to get a head start on a mind-bending TV miniseries about space, time and the multiverse? There's an app for that.

Eight years after PBS aired "The Elegant Universe," a series based on Columbia physicist Brian Greene's best-selling book about string theory, the public-TV network is gearing up for the sequel. "The Fabric of the Cosmos," a four-parter from the "Nova" documentary team, focuses on the mysteries surrounding all the cosmic stuff that surrounds us.

The show premieres on Nov. 2, and it'll be streamed on PBS' video website — but if you have an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch and are of a mind to download the PBS app, you can watch the first hour right now.

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"Brian Greene's 'The Fabric of the Cosmos' is an amazing journey into some truly astounding theories of our universe," Jason Seiken, senior vice president for interactive, product development and innovation, said today in a news release. "On mobile, viewers get a sneak preview of the series' futuristic concepts and graphics leading up to the broadcast premiere and can continue their scientific exploration throughout the series."

It's been seven years since book version of "The Fabric of the Cosmos" was published, but the theme of the TV show is basically the same: Everything you know about space and time just might be wrong.

"We really see how our understanding of space and time from Newton until today has gone through remarkable changes," Greene told me back in 2004, "and most importantly, how so many things that we have in our intuition about space and time, their properties and so forth, are just not true to how the world actually works."

For example, consider space. Most of the universe is made up of empty space, and I'm not just talking about outer space. During the program, Greene uses computer graphics to bring the point home: If you could remove all the empty space from New York's Empire State Building, you would be left with a clump of smashed-together subatomic particles that was no bigger than a grain of rice — but still weighed hundreds of millions of pounds.

Greene isn't the only one gob-smacked by the weirdness of the space-time continuum. During the program, University of Maryland physicist S. James Gates says the nature of space "is one of the deepest mysteries in physics."

During the course of the miniseries, Greene manages to work in some of the ideas from "The Hidden Reality," the book that came after "The Fabric of the Cosmos." The last episode dwells on the concept of the multiverse — the idea that our universe might be just one of the myriads of cosmic bubbles floating in an larger extradimensional reality. Some of those bubbles might even be exactly like the one we inhabit — except, perhaps, that I'm the brainy physicist and Brian Greene is the befuddled journalist.

In this cosmic bubble, Greene and his brainy friends are planning lots of activities tied to the series. The World Science Festival, "Nova" and Columbia University have set up a special screening of the opening episode at 9 p.m. ET Nov. 2 at Columbia's Miller Theatre. After the show, the World Science Festival is planning a live webcast of a conversation with Greene and other guests, including newly named Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter.

"Nova" has also teamed up with the American Society of Physics Students to create a special series of science cafes, focusing on the out-of-this-world ideas raised by "The Fabric of the Cosmos." Check out this map to find the nearest Cosmic Cafe. Maybe I'll see you at the Seattle event.

More about space, time and the multiverse:

• What? Could our universe be just one of many?
• Probe confirms that we live in a space-time warp
• Interactive: Looking beyond the big bang
• Can we dodge the arrow of time?
• Physics prize highlights cosmic puzzles
• Physicist introduces you to 'The Hidden Reality'
• YouTube: Brian Greene at New York Comic Con

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to a circle on Google+. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This year's "Dance Your Ph.D." winners include a "love story" about titanium alloy and bone tissue as well as performances inspired by fruit-fly sex, pigeon courtship and X-ray chromatography.

If you think these dances sound too dorky, they're not. They're funny. Beautiful. Even sexy.

That's not to say "Microstructure-Property Relationships in Ti2448 Components Produced by Selective Laser Melting" is anything like a spangly samba on "Dancing With the Stars." The science dance is far cleverer.

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Joel Miller, a biomedical engineer at the University of Western Australia in Perth, got together with some high-stepping friends and shot 2,200 still images that were converted into a stop-action animation. "We didn't have a video camera," he told ScienceNOW's John Bohannon, the organizer of the "Dance Your Ph.D." contest.

The resulting 4-minute video tells the story of Titanium Man (played by Miller) and Bone Woman (Sara Fontaine), and how a blend of titanium's alpha and beta crystalline forms makes a perfect match for bone tissue. The laser-heated alloy could bring about a happy ending for the love story: better, longer-lasting hip and knee replacements.

Bohannon created the Ph.D. dance contest in 2008, under the sponsorship of the journal Science, to give doctoral students a chance to transform their research into dance routines. This year, a record 55 dance videos were entered.

Miller's biomedical love story earned him not only the top spot in the physics category, but also the grand prize of $1,000 and a free trip to TEDx Brussels, a gathering of scientists, artists and business leaders in Belgium.

Three other videos won $500 prizes:

Cedric Kai Wei Tan, a biologist at the University of Oxford, won the biology category with his depiction of the fruit fly's mating dance. It turns out that females prefer to mate with brothers who are recognized by scent.

"Females preferentially mate with males that are related to the first mates because there might be immunological and survival costs associated with mating with males that are unrelated to their first mate," Tan says.

The Ph.D. dance traces the complex sequence of sniffing, licking and chasing that goes into the fruit fly's mating ritual. Let's see them try that on "Dancing With the Stars":

FoSheng Hsu, a structural biologist at Cornell University, was tops in the chemistry category for his solo interpretation of the time-consuming process for extracting proteins from E. coli bacteria and determining their structure through X-ray crystallography.

To get the gist, you have to read the description of each step of the process as you watch the video.

During the different stages of the dance, Hsu portrays the E. coli, the affinity beads used during purification, the scientist doing the crystallization, the screen for X-ray diffraction images and even the three-dimensional structure of the protein being studied.

The tricky procedure "is crucial for not just understanding the cellular function but also provides a fundamental step to drug design," Hsu says. To tell the truth, I don't know which is trickier ... X-ray crystallography or X-ray choreography:

Emma Ware, a behavioral biologist at Queen's University in Canada, won the social science prize for a dance mimicking the interactions of pigeons during courtship. Ware tinkered with the pigeons' perceptions by showing the males time-delayed video of the females' movements. If the delays were more than a few seconds, the males were thrown off their rhythm and the courtship dance was disrupted.

There's yet another twist: The delays didn't have much effect on male-male or female-female interactions. "There is something 'special' about courtship dynamics," Ware reported in her dance video.

Bohannon said Ware's ability to replicate the pigeon experiment with a human dance partner was an "impressive choreographic feat." See if you agree:

 

More dancing with the scientists: 

• 2010 winners: Chemistry you can dance to
• Dancing gators reveal sonic secrets
• Dolphins join in on tail-walking fad
• How the 'Dancing' vote was hacked

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Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to a circle on Google+. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Bread loaded with beta-carotene, the stuff that makes carrots orange and helps prevent blindness, could improve the health of millions of people, thanks to a strain of genetically enhanced yeast developed by undergraduate students.

"It looks exactly like normal bread," Arjun Khakhar, a junior biomedical engineering student at Johns Hopkins University, told me Monday. "There's no orange color or anything because the yeast only makes up a very small part of the bread."

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Due to government regulations that prohibit human consumption of non-approved genetically modified foods, Khakhar noted that he and his team haven't actually tasted the bread. 

iGEM competition
The VitaYeast, as the strain is called, is one of 60 projects that have advanced to final round of the 2011 International Genetically Engineered Machine competition scheduled for Nov. 5-7 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The competition draws students from around the world who are engaged in the emerging field of synthetic biology where bits of DNA and other biological material are manipulated to create systems that carry out new tasks.

The yeast, for example, includes a piece of beta-carotene producing DNA that was synthesized by the Johns Hopkins University team and integrated with genes in a cell of baker's yeast.

The modified yeast strain does what yeast has done for bread for thousands of years — make it rise — but it also triggers a series of biochemical reactions that produces beta-carotene. When eaten, beta-carotene turns into vitamin A.

Khakhar and his team tout it is a relatively simple way to help hundreds of thousands of people who are suffering from malnutrition due to inadequate access to fruits and vegetables.

"People in developing countries can just eat the bread and get their daily requirement of vitamin A," he said.

Genetic parts list
Teams that register for the competition are provided with a kit of standard genetic parts that can be mixed and matched — and they are encouraged to design their own parts as well —  as they build biological systems and operate them in living cells.

The program began in 2003 with a month-long course at MIT where students designed systems to make cells blink. The course grew to a competition in 2004 and has since opened up to international groups and grown rapidly in the ensuing years. 

Last year, 130 teams competed with projects ranging from an arsenic biosensor to banana and wintergreen smelling bacteria. This year, 160 teams from 30 countries entered the competition. Among the other finalists are:

• An Imperial College London team of students has created bacteria that accelerate plant root development to help combat soil erosion.
• Students at the University of Washington created bacteria that produce constituents of diesel fuel and breakdown glutens.
• The Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology team produced a strain of E. coli that cleans up heavy metals from the environment.

Finding a market
Whether any of these projects will become a marketplace success is unknown, but the field of synthetic biology is flush with innovation and these students are learning the skills necessary to be market leaders, according to MIT's Technology Review.

Khakhar is well aware that gaining acceptance of genetically modified organisms is difficult, whether or not his team wins the competition. His team has already put together a survey to help gauge public opinion about bread baked with modified yeast.

"We want people to accept it," he said, noting the failure a few years ago in Africa of golden rice, which is strain of rice engineered to produce beta-carotene. "It is useless to develop something if nobody uses it."

That's actually one of the reasons he and his team settled on making bread with their yeast and not beer, where yeast also plays a crucial role.

Key to the decision to focus on bread are plans to engineer VitaYeast to produce other nutrients such as vitamin C and folic acid.

"Folic acid is important for pregnant women and you don't want to be asking pregnant women to drink a beer," Khakar noted. "But it can absolutely be used for beer as well."

More on genetic manipulation:

• Hobbyists try genetic engineering at home
• One third of Americans back ban on synthetic biology
• It's alive! Artificial DNA controls life
• First synthetic life form holds promise, peril

More from the Future of Technology series:

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. 

Today's countdown to the predicted end of the world was a bit like watching a rerun of reality TV … been there, done that doomsday. Nevertheless, radio preacher Harold Camping's Rapture rerun provided a good opportunity to revive the old jokes and prepare for the new doomsday hype ahead in 2012.

The hype was a lot heavier five months ago, when Camping set a high-profile date for a biblical-style ascension of the elect to heaven. Millions of dollars were spent by Camping's Family Radio International as well as followers who spent their savings to get out the word about the end of the world. During this week's spaceflight conference in New Mexico, one of my colleagues on the space beat, Jeff Foust, happened to mention that he saw a billboard that still touted Judgment Day's approach on May 21.

The hubbub sparked a backlash of black humor — ranging from animated cartoons to "Rapture bombs," which involved setting out clothes and shoes, as if the wearer had been transported (nude) to the pearly gates. The Sociolatte and Mashable websites revived some of the best of the bombs, including "Rapture Dad," a photo that shows Kyle Riesenbeck surrounded by the leavings of his luckier family members. (Kyle kept the meme going, but according to his Twitter account, Rapture Dad has "decided to take it easy on the Rapture this time around.")

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That's just one of the signs that the Rapture has really run its course. Camping may well come up with yet another explanation for why prophecy failed, and yet another set of arcane calculations that reveal doomsday is just a little further down the road. But based on the weak ratings for today's Rapture rerun, the 90-year-old Camping is finished as a prophet of doom. The Freedom From Religion Foundation is even capitalizing on his past pronouncements in a new "Fool Me Once" billboard campaign.

Still more evidence of Rapture fatigue comes from a Crimson Hexagon analysis of 55,537 Twitter mentions related to Camping's October prophecy, gathered from Oct. 16 to today:

• 14 percent of the mentions expressed negativity toward Camping, many indicating they thought he was crazy or an idiot.
• 26 percent shared jokes or were sarcastic about the rapture and Camping’s predictions.
• 18 percent mentioned that Camping was at it again, and dubbed this prediction as Rapture 2.0 or Rapture2s.
• 13 percent expressed excitement for the end of the world and saw it as an excuse to throw a party.
• 14 percent shared the report that today was the predicted date of the Rapture.
• 8 percent voiced a religious response, such as saying Camping was a false prophet.
• 7 percent wondered whether the Rapture was for real this time.

For years, doomsayers have been talking about the prospects for a 2012 apocalypse foretold by the Mayan "long-count" calendar, even though there's really no scientific or even anthropological basis for the alarm. I've tried to provide some reality checks for the 2012 worries — including concerns about solar storms and the supposed return of Planet X. But today's non-Rapture may be an even more valuable lesson for anyone who's concerned about 12/21/2012: Just because someone makes a big to-do about the end of the world doesn't mean that it's coming.

So what do you think about the Rapture and other doomsdays? Heard any good end-of-the-world jokes lately? Feel free to add your comments below.

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Review all of the postings from Rapture 1.0 by checking CosmicLog.com/Rapture. You can also connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to a circle on Google+. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Scientists at a government lab in New Mexico have created what appear to be magnetic algae, a breakthrough that could lower the cost of harvesting biofuels from the microscopic plants.

The trick involved transferring to algae a gene from soil bacteria that align themselves with Earth's magnetic field, explained Pulak Nath at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory.

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"We expressed that gene in algae and it started making what we think are magnetic particles," he told me Friday. "We still have to confirm that, but we could put a magnet next to those algae and see these algae getting attracted."

Magnetism studies
Scientists have studied the soil-living so-called magnetotacic bacteria since the 1970s, primarily as a model to understand how birds are able to migrate thousands of miles each year.

"The whole idea is that they probably have some sort of compass in their brains," Nath said. As a DOE-funded scientist, he turned to those studies in search of an application to cost efficiently harvest algae for biofuels.

Current techniques for extracting algae from the ponds where they are grown include sound waves and the addition of chemicals that cause the algae to clump together, a process known as flocculation.

These techniques account for about 30 percent of the total cost of algae-based biofuel production, Nath noted, and "is one of the limiting steps for algae fuel from becoming cost competitive to fossil fuels." 

Using magnets
Permanent magnets are inexpensive. In theory, algae biofuel systems could flow algae-filled water through a tank lined with the magnets and the algae will get separated from the water, Nath explained.

"And that won't cost us any money in terms of energy input because we are using these permanent magnets and the energy from these permanent magnets — other than the material — is free," he said.

The research, he cautioned, is in the early stages. So far, they've created one species of magnetic algae. Going forward, they will try to transfer the gene to more candidates for algae biofuel production.

The lab's ultimate goal, Nath said, is to take the technique to the proof-of-concept stage and then have someone else "take this technology and take it forward."

To take the research forward, there is incentive in the government push to derive 36 billion gallons a year from a mix of biofuels by the year 2022. 

Other factors that must be tackled for the efficient scale-up of algae biofuels include ways to reduce their need for massive amounts of water and land. 

More stories on algae biofuels:

• Is algae biofuel too thirsty?
• It's pond scum, but algae could be green fuel
• Algae attracts investors, but obstacles remain
• NASA grows algae for biofuel, treats waste

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John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com. To learn more about him, check out his website. For more information about energy in our ongoing Future of Technology series, watch the video below.

 

If NASA can't provide as much support for U.S. spaceship-builders as it's hoping for, it'll have to keep paying the Russians $450 million for every year of delay, the space agency's No. 2 official said today.

NASA's deputy administrator, Lori Garver, laid out that "pay now or pay later" message at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in Las Cruces, N.M.

With the retirement of the space shuttle fleet, NASA has to rely on the Russians to get U.S. astronauts to and from the International Space Station, at a cost due to escalate to $63 million per seat in 2015. By around that time, NASA is hoping that U.S.-made commercial spaceships will take on that role. The would-be providers — including Blue Origin, the Boeing Co., SpaceX and Sierra Nevada Corp. — say that they can match the Russians' price tag, but that they need assistance for developing the new craft.

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Toward that end, NASA has paid out or set aside a total of $388 million to support the development of those private-sector spaceships. The agency is providing another $800 million for unmanned, cargo-carrying spacecraft, to be provided by
SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. All these figures pale in comparison with the estimated $35 billion expected to be spent over the next decade on a heavy-lift rocket and crew capsule designed for trips beyond Earth orbit.

How much for the next phase?
Now NASA is getting ready for the next phase of the commercial crew vehicle development effort, and asking for $850 million to fund it. Congress is setting aside significantly less: $312 million in the House version, $500 million in the Senate version. During today's talk, Garver used an insurance salesman's strategy to argue for a higher figure.

If the full $850 million is provided, Garver said, "by 2016, certainly we will be able to end outsourcing of this capability from the Russians. If we don’t get full funding in 2012, this is at risk."

Each year of delay means that NASA will have to pay another $450 million to the Russians, she said. The implication was that paying U.S. companies an extra $350 million now (over the Senate's allotment) would be better than paying the Russians an extra $450 million in 2016. NASA would probably still be spending that $450 million per year in 2016 and beyond, but it would be going to U.S. companies rather than the Russian space effort.

Even if NASA gets the $850 million in 2012, that wouldn't be the end of the story. NASA projects that the cost of crew vehicle development will go up, going forward. "We have an analysis that says we believe we would require $6 billion over five years," Garver said. In the past, members of Congress have been resistant to approving that much money for commercial spaceship-builders.

After her talk, Garver told me that the negotiations over funding the next phase of its commercialization initiative would continue. The House Science, Space and Technology Committee has scheduled a hearing on the subject next Wednesday.

NASA has already issued a draft request for proposals for this phase, known as CCDev 3 (that is, the third phase of the Commercial Crew Development program). However, the final request — and the pot of money that will be available — would have to be specified in legislation that has yet to be passed. If there's no resolution, NASA spending would most likely be frozen at current levels, and CCDev 3 could languish in legislative limbo.

During this week's conference, there were repeated calls for Congress to provide full funding for CCDev 3 — from Bigelow Aerospace's billionaire founder, Robert Bigelow; from former shuttle program director Wayne Hale; and from George Nield, the Federal Aviation Administration's associate administrator for commercial spaceflight.

Nield said he worried that reduced funding levels for CCDev would send the message that the United States was not serious about developing near-term replacements for the space shuttle. "I'd love to see them get what they're asking for," he told me.

'Mammals' vs. 'dinosaurs'
During her talk, Garver played to the home crowd by touting entrepreneurs as "small mammals" pitted against the "dinosaurs" and "vested interests" of the space industry. But during our conversation afterward, she refrained from saying specifically which vested interests she had in mind.

I asked her whether some of the long-established dinosaurs of the space program were turning into entrepreneurial mammals. "Lots of 'em, yes," she replied, "and we welcome it."

Garver's talk at the annual ISPCS conference also featured a "top-ten list of ways we'll know we've succeeded." To wit:

10. Instead of "occupying Wall Street," people will be occupying multiple space stations.

9. U.S. astronauts will be leading an international expedition to a near-Earth asteroid.

8. NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will detect an extrasolar planet with a blue ocean.

7. It'll take a half-day to get to the ISPCS conference from anywhere in the world, thanks to point-to-point suborbital space travel.

6. The conference will outgrow its current venue in Las Cruces, and be conducted instead at New Mexico's Spaceport America facility, near "the Whitesides, a new five-star hotel." (That's a reference to George Whitesides, who was once chief of staff for NASA's administrator and is currently Virgin Galactic's chief executive officer.)

5. Smartphone users will get real-time readings on space weather, thanks to mobile apps.

4. Ninety percent of hazardous near-Earth asteroids will be identified and tracked.

3. U.S. private ventures will be taking advantage of lunar resources.

2. NASA will be making further advances in technology, research and innovation.

1. The president of the United States will be taking Garver's place as keynote speaker, "and she will also be wearing fabulous boots."

OK, so maybe some of those points aren't serious (though I'm totally looking forward to those fabulous boots). What would you put on a top-ten list of future space achievements? Feel free to leave your suggestions as comments below.

Update for 3:45 p.m. ET: During her talk, Garver referred to a 1961 essay by GE Chairman Ralph Cordiner, titled "Competitive Private Enterprise in Space." Even though it was written 50 years ago, the essay is prescient is sketching out the challenges and benefits of a more entrepreneurial space effort. Garver referred specifically to this passage: "A certain percentage — perhaps as much as 5 percent — of the technical work of the space program is best done in government laboratories." It's recommended reading for anyone interested in the commercial space frontier.

More about the commercial space frontier:

• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race
• How tycoons will fuel future spaceflight
• Big questions about big rockets
• Cosmic Log archive on the new space race

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Stay tuned for further reports about the space frontier from the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight. We'll also be featuring some of the leaders of the private-sector space effort, including Sierra Nevada Corp.'s Mark Sirangelo, SpaceX's Elon Musk and Virgin Galactic's Richard Branson, in an upcoming installment of our "Future of Technology" series.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.