Dominic Doyle, Frank Block / Vanderbilt

An artist's conception shows a microbrain reactor being developed at Vanderbilt University. The bioreactor is aimed at reproducing the brain's microenvironment in a device about the size of a grain of rice.

Many medications and treatments, even after years of research, fail in the final phase of review — when they're actually tested in humans. Despite having performed well in the lab, in mice, and perhaps in closer human analogues like monkeys, drugs occasionally turn out to be ineffective or toxic when used by the humans they're meant to help. To improve this process, and limit the risks to human testers, the National Institutes of Health and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency are together pledging up to up to $132 million for creating "organ-on-a-chip" systems, with the eventual goal of simulating the entire human body.

The tissue-chip project is a natural outgrowth (so to speak) of existing lab testing on human tissue. Each of the projects being funded is aimed at isolating a small, living piece of a human being. It may be just a few cells, but those cells would grow and function as if they were in their native habitat, the human body. And surrounding those cells would be sensors for detecting microscopic changes in the test environment.

Each type of cell and organ must be approached differently: Brain cells exist in an environment vastly different from muscles or the liver. Consequently, the funding is spread over a number of institutions and programs, some of which are specializing in just one type of tissue or organ.

Vanderbilt University, for instance, will be receiving up to $2.1 million from the NIH's $70 million allocation, for the creation of what they call a "microbrain reactor." It would put human brain cells into an artificial environment that not only keeps them alive, but simulates the physiological barriers that protect the brain from contaminants in blood and other fluids. John Wikswo, who is leading Vanderbilt's effort, is enthusiastic about the research:

"Given the differences in cellular biology in the brains of rodents and humans, development of a brain model that contains neurons and all three barriers between blood, brain and cerebral spinal fluid, using entirely human cells, will represent a fundamental advance in and of itself."

Much more information on the project and its multidisciplinary lineup of researchers can be found in Vanderbilt's news release.

Other institutions are undertaking much larger efforts. Harvard University has received a similar amount from the NIH, but Harvard's Wyss Institute could also get more than 10 times as much — up to $37 million — from DARPA to develop a device that integrates as many as 10 organs on a chip. It would be a closer and more complete representation of the human body than has ever been created — a veritable homunculus that could open the way to cheaper, quicker and safer drug testing. It would also reduce the number and variety of animals used in testing, and enable widespread, standardized techniques requiring less training.

This video of experts explaining the Wyss Institute's lung on a chip gives a more specific idea of the context and purpose of this technology:

Another double-barreled dose of funding is heading toward the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT and the Draper Laboratory, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, are set to receive up to $6.25 million from NIH to model cancer thereapies using engineered human tissue constructs. Up to $26.3 million more will be provided under an agreement with DARPA to create an "organ-on-a-chip" platform, through a new program called BIO-MIMETICS. (That's not only a word in itself, but also a mouthful of an acronym standing for "Barrier-Immune-Organ: Microphysiology, Microenvironment Engineered Construct Systems.")

If everything goes as planned, the MIT-led work with human tissue would be adapted for the BIO-MIMETICS platform. MIT's news release provides more details.

The NIH, DARPA, and the Food and Drug Administration are working in concert, but their funding is separate. (The description of DARPA's proposal is here). In addition to the grants given to Vanderbilt, Harvard and MIT, the NIH has awarded funding to 14 other projects, adding up to a potential total of $70 million over five years.

The FDA isn't kicking in any money for the researchers right now, but the fact sheet for the initiative says the FDA "will help explore how this new technology might be used to assess drug safety prior to approval for first-in-human studies."

You'll find more details about all 17 projects via the NIH's webpage on the Tissue Chip Project Awards. Here's a brief rundown on the projects and their principal researchers.

Ten awards are aimed at investigating or creating systems by which organs are simulated on an extremely small scale. The terminology differs but they are largely working in the same sphere. We've already touched on the funding going to Vanderbilt, Harvard and MIT. Here are the other seven projects:

• Microphysiological systems and low-cost microfluidic platform with analytics (Cornell University - Michael Shuler and James Hickman)

• Circulatory system and integrated muscle tissue for drug and tissue toxicity (Duke University - George Truskey)

• Human induced pluripotent stem cell and embryonic stem cell-based models for predictive neural toxicity and teratogenicity (University of Wisconsin, Madison - James Thomson)

• Disease-specific integrated microphysiological human tissue models (UC Berkeley - Kevin Healy and Luke Lee)

• An integrated in vitro model of perfused tumor and cardiac tissue (UC Irvine - Steven George)

• A 3-D biomimetic liver sinusoid construct for predicting physiology and toxicity (University of Pittsburgh - D. Lansing Taylor and Martin Yarmush)

• A tissue-engineered human kidney microphysiological system (University of Washington - Jonathan Himmelfarb)

Seven awards are for exploring stem/progenitor cells as sources for the tissues to be used in such microsystems:

• Generating human intestinal organoids with an enteric nervous system (Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center - James Wells)

• Modeling complex disease using induced pluripotent stem cell-derived skin constructs (Columbia University Health Sciences - Angela Christiano)

• Human intestinal organoids: Pre-clinical models of non-inflammatory diarrhea (Johns Hopkins University - Mark Donowitz)

• A 3-D model of human brain development for studying gene/environment interactions (Johns Hopkins University - Thomas Hartung)

• Modeling oxidative stress and DNA damage using a gastrointestinal organotypic culture system (University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia - John Lynch)

• Three-dimensional osteochondral micro-tissue to model pathogenesis of osteoarthritis (University of Pittsburgh - Rocky Tuan)

• Three-dimensional human lung model to study lung disease and formation of fibrosis (University of Texas - Joan Nichols)
  

Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBC News. His personal website is coldewey.cc.

Alan Boyle / msnbc.com

British physicist Stephen Hawking jokes about the future discoveries that could earn him a Nobel Prize.

British physicist Stephen Hawking has lived longer and achieved more than most quadriplegics have, but he's not done yet: The 70-year-old theoretician is still waiting for experimental evidence to launch him toward a Nobel Prize.

Hawking used his Nobel aspirations as a punch line more than once during his Saturday-night talk at Seattle's Paramount Theater, during a Seattle Science Festival symposium that also featured systems biology pioneer Leroy Hood and paleontologist Jack Horner. The "Luminaries Series" presentation also featured evolutionary rap and modern dance, but Hawking was clearly the headliner.

Part of Hawking's appeal is that he just keeps going, and going, and going, despite his disability. He's lived for decades with a progressively paralyzing form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. His entourage includes a nurse practitioner and an aide who looks after the high-tech system that translates his cheek twitches into speech. (He and his team have been testing a more advanced system that can turn brain-wave patterns into words.)

All this work to overcome adversity wouldn't have taken Hawking so far, however, if it weren't for his crazy smarts and his sharp wit. Both were in evidence during Saturday's talk, titled "Brane New World." Hawking laid out his perspective on what he thinks could be the ultimate theory of the universe, known as M-theory.

"We have been searching for the Theory of Everything for the past 30 years, and now we think that we have found a candidate," he said.

M-theory is a "mother" theory that fuses together several strains of string theory, and allows for dimensions of space beyond the three we're familiar with. For a long time, Hawking was reluctant to accept the idea of unseen extra dimensions, but on Saturday he said everything else about M-theory made so much sense that he couldn't resist.

Ted S. Warren / AP

Stephen Hawking composes his conversations with face movements, aided by a sophisticated sensor and computer system hooked up to his wheelchair.

"I feel to ignore it would be like claiming that God put fossils in the rocks to trick Darwin into believing in evolution," Hawking said.

The big question is, why haven't we detected those darn dimensions? M-theory's proponents suggest that some forms of energy, such as light, are confined to our three-dimensional space (known as a "brane," as in membrane). Gravity, however, just might leak out of our brane — and that effect could be theoretically be detected.

The key word is "theoretically." Picking up evidence of the extradimensional effect would require high-resolution measurements of high-energy phenomena, such as the clash of binary pulsars in outer space or the smash of subatomic particles at velocities near the speed of light. No such evidence has yet come to light, despite the best efforts of gravitational-wave observatories in the U.S. and elsewhere, as well as the Large Hadron Collider on the French-Swiss border.

If astronomers were ever able to observe the behavior of black holes, that could point to the effect of extra dimensions, Hawking said. One of the biggest achievements of his career was to lay out the theory for how black holes can eventually fizzle out, due to a phenomenon known as Hawking radiation. If black holes emitted part of their energy into extra dimensions, in a form Hawking called "dark radiation," that could explain why astronomers have not yet seen the expected gamma-ray burst from a dying black hole. The alternative would be that low-mass black holes are so rare that virtually none of them have gotten small enough to die out.

"That would be a pity," he said, "because if a low-mass black hole were discovered, I would get a Nobel Prize." At that point, a giant image of the Nobel Prize medallion flashed above the stage.

It might also be possible to detect the leakage of energy into extra dimensions by creating microscopic black holes at the Large Hadron Collider, Hawking said. That phenomenon hasn't yet been observed at the LHC. Before the collider started up, there was a huge flap (and a federal court case) over fears that such micro-black holes, if created, might gobble up the planet. But Hawking said that would never happen.

"Instead, the black hole would disappear in a puff of Hawking radiation — and I would get a Nobel Prize," he said.

Before his talk, Hawking answered a few questions that were submitted by journalists (including yours truly) in advance. The topics covered some of the physicist's favorite topics, including time travel and the potential threat of an alien invasion. He also referred to his family life, which was a big part of his agenda in Seattle. One of his three children lives in the area, and over the past few days, Hawking and his family took in the King Tut exhibit at the Pacific Science Center, a boat cruise on Elliott Bay and a circus-dinner performance at Teatro Zinzanni. It all made for a great Father's Day visit to the Emerald City.

Here's the Q&A from the pre-talk press conference:

Q: What would it take to make time travel a reality, and how would that affect our present reality?

A: "We are all traveling forward in time anyway. We can fast-forward by going off in a rocket at high speed, and returning to find everyone on Earth much older or dead. Einstein's general theory of relativity seems to offer the possibility that we could warp space-time so much that we could travel back in time. However, it is likely that the warping would trigger a bolt of radiation that would destroy the spaceship, and maybe the space-time itself.

"I have experimental evidence that [backward] time travel is not possible. I gave a party for time travelers, but I didn't send out the invitation until after the party. I sat there a long time, but no one came."

Ted S. Warren / AP

Physicist and best-selling author Stephen Hawking, right, answers questions from reporters as people waiting for his public appearance look on at left at Seattle's Paramount Theater on Saturday. Hawking was taking part in a Seattle Science Festival symposium focusing on the topic of evolution. Science editor Alan Boyle ... or at least the back of his balding pate ... can be seen in the foreground.

Q: If M-theory is the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe, what’s the best evidence that you think will be found to support the theory? Lacking that evidence, isn’t M-theory merely another kind of religion?

A: "M-theory is the only theory that seems to have all the properties that we would expect of a complete and consistent theory of everything, but that may just reflect our lack of imagination. If M-theory is correct, it predicts that every particle should have a superpartner. So far we have not observed any superpartners, but the hope is that they will be found at the LHC. If they are discovered, that will be strong evidence for M-theory. On the other hand, if they are shown not to exist, that will be exciting, because then we'll learn something new."

Q: How would you describe your quality of life? What do you miss most from before the onset of ALS?

A: "Although I'm severely disabled and on a ventilator, my quality of life is pretty good. I have been very successful in my scientific work, and have become one of the best-known scientists in the world. I have three children, and three grandchildren so far. I travel widely, have been to Antarctica and have met the presidents of Korea, China, India, Ireland, Chile and the United States. I have been down in a submarine, and up in a zero-gravity flight in preparation for the flight into space that I'm hoping to make on Virgin Galactic. 

"Despite my disability, I have managed to do most things I want. My main regret is that it has prevented me from playing with my children and grandchildren as fully as I want." 

Q: John Gribbin recently argued that we are almost certainly the only intelligent life in the Milky Way –  do you think he’s right or wrong, and why? Also, SETI astronomer Seth Shostak argues that even if there are other intelligent civilizations out there, it’s too late for us to keep quiet about our existence, because it’s possible to pick up the signals we’ve sent out over the past 70 years. So isn’t it too late for us to keep quiet, and shouldn’t we be thinking about upgrading our defenses against the alien hordes?

A: "We think that life developed spontaneously on Earth, so it must be possible for life to develop on suitable planets elsewhere such as the Earth. But we don't know the probability that a planet develops life. If it is very low, we may well be the only intelligent life in the galaxy. Another frightening possibility is, intelligent life is fairly common, but that it destroys itself when it reaches the stage of advanced technology.

"Evidence that intelligent life is rare or short-lived is that we don't seem to have been visited by extraterrestrials.I am discounting claims that UFOs contain aliens. Why would they appear only to cranks and weirdos? Nor do I believe that there is some government conspiracy to conceal the evidence, and keep for themselves the advanced technologies the aliens have. If that were the case, they aren't making much use of it. Further evidence that there isn't any intelligent life within a few hundred light-years comes from the fact that SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, hasn't picked up their television quiz shows. 

"It is true that we advertise our presence by our broadcasts. But given that we haven't been visited for 4 billion years, it is unlikely that aliens will come anytime soon." 

Updates on the 'Chicken-saurus'
Hawking may have been the headliner, but he wasn't the only luminary at Saturday's "Luminaries Series" symposium on the theme of evolution. Jack Horner, who's based in Bozeman at Montana State University's Museum of the Rockies and has served as an adviser for the "Jurassic Park" movies and the "Terra Nova" TV series, brought the sellout crowd at the Paramount up to date on his quest to create a "Chicken-saurus."

"We're basically going to turn a chicken into a dinosaur," Horner said.

The idea is that the genetic code in chicken cells may still carry the instructions for producing traits that are associated with the dinosaurs from which they descended. "Birds are dinosaurs, so we don't have to 'make' a dinosaur — we already have them," Horner said. He and his colleagues are looking for ways to express those long-buried traits, known as atavisms. Even humans can express atavisms. For example, there have been cases of children born with tails.

"You don't have to do any magic," Horner told me. "You just have to find the atavisms in the genes."

Some researchers have already found the genes to produce chicken teeth, and Horner and his colleagues are methodically checking chicken embryos for avenues that could be used to create birds with long, dino-like tails or three-fingered claws like the ones sported by the velociraptors in "Jurassic Park." Horner told me that one of his students compared the effort to the Apollo moonshots.

"It's more than possible," Horner said. "It's just going to take a lot of money."

The future of medicine
In his talk, biologist Leroy Hood outlined his vision of the medical frontier. As the founder of Seattle's Institute for Systems Biology, Hood champions an approach to health care he calls P4 — predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory medicine. He said P4 medicine will arise from the convergence of revolutions in genetic analysis and data processing.

"Ten years in the future, each and every one of you will have your complete genome sequenced," Hood said. If quintillions of bytes' worth of genomic data can be used to nail down the linkages to disease factors as well as the factors that lead to wellness, it should be possible to get health care that's better as well as cheaper.

But getting the payoff from that promise depends on making the genomic data available to researchers, most likely on an anonymized basis, as well as developing the computational firepower to make sense out of a massive cloud of that data. "None of the IT companies have looked at this seriously," Hood said.

To get the ball rolling, Hood said he and his colleagues are talking with four small countries to implement P4 health-care programs in the next two or three years. Although Hood didn't name the countries, his institute already has a partnership with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg to work on P4 initiatives.

"I have thought about going to small countries because I think the health-care system in the U.S. is too fragmented and disjointed to have any coordinated kind of change, but if you see that another country has done it very well, then that will be quite convincing," he said.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

X Prize Foundation

The medical diagnostic tool envisioned by the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize may well look much like a smartphone running an app with wireless sensing capability, as shown in this artist's concept.

Qualcomm and the X Prize Foundation have laid out a $10 million plan to spur the development of medical diagnosis devices like the ones seen on "Star Trek" science-fiction shows — not by the 23rd century, but by mid-2015.

The Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize is the latest multimillion-dollar competition designed to serve as an incentive for technological breakthroughs, following in the footsteps of X Prizes for private-sector spaceflight, ultra-efficient automobiles. low-cost genome sequencing and robotic moon missions.

"There is a generation of exponentially growing technologies ... that are coming together to empower us to make real the 'Star Trek' technology of a medical tricorder," Peter Diamandis, the X Prize Foundation's CEO, told me today.

Tricorders are the hand-held props that have been used by "Star Trek" characters dating back to the 1960s to check a crew member's vital signs — with the aim of keeping Bones from having to tell Captain Kirk, "He's dead, Jim." The old ones looked like cassette recorders with mini-TV screens, while the later models looked like flip phones gone wild.

The tricorder envisioned for the X Prize would be a hand-held wireless device like a smartphone, weighing no more than 5 pounds. It'll have to record health indicators such as blood pressure, respiratory rate, pulse and temperature, and diagnose a set of 15 diseases to be named later. Diamandis said the diseases on the list would probably include respiratory and cardiovascular conditions.

Details still to be determined
The X Prize specifications still have to be filled out, along with the scale to be used for judging the various models in the competition, but the foundation says "teams will have to consider tradeoffs amongst weight, functionality, power requirements, battery life, screen resolution, A.I. engine location, diagnosis capability, end consumer cost, and so on."

The schedule calls for the initial draft of the competition guidelines to be made public later this month, and massaged into their final form by September or so. The teams that seek the prize will show off their prototypes during a qualifying round in mid-2014, and the top 10 teams will compete in a final round in mid-2015. That final round will require teams to use their devices to diagnose 15 to 30 consumers over the course of three days. The teams will be judged based on the diagnoses as well an assessment of consumer experience and proof of adequate high-frequency data logging.

The top team will win $7 million, and there'll also be a $2 million second prize and a $1 million third prize, all put up by the Qualcomm Foundation.

"Health care today certainly falls far short of the vision portrayed in 'Star Trek,'" Paul Jacobs, who is Qualcomm's chairman and CEO as well as chair of the Qualcomm Foundation, said today in a news release. "By sponsoring the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize competition, the Qualcomm Foundation will stimulate the imaginations of entrepreneurs, engineers, scientists and doctors to create wireless health services and technologies that improve lives, increase consumer access to health care and drive efficiencies in the health care system. This competition will accelerate the development of tools that can empower consumers to take charge of their own bodies and manage their own care."

The competition's formal kickoff came today during Jacobs' keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. It follows up on last May's announcement that Qualcomm, a global company focusing on wireless network technology, would sponsor the competition.

Tricorders galore
Whether or not you call it a tricorder, the hand-held medical diagnostic device definitely seems to be an idea whose time has come. Just last month, the Canadian government and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation announced a $38.5 million initiative to further the development of such devices, as well as the medical tests and protocols that would run on them. Also last month, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave its approval to the first hand-held device to detect brain bleeding.

Meanwhile, a startup called Scanadu is working on a "tricorder" that parents can use to monitor their kids' health, and there are so many medical monitoring apps for smartphones that the FDA is working on regulatory guidelines for them.

Like other X Prizes, the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize is intended to provide an extra incentive for innovators rather than a profitable venture in itself. The Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight serves as an example: Software billionaire Paul Allen spent upwards of $25 million to win the $10 milllion prize in 2004. But that venture opened the way for what could be more profitable space ventures to come, including Virgin Galactic and Stratolaunch.

Diamandis said the Tricorder X Prize competition was open to ventures that were already involved in the medical-device market, although he emphasized that the eligibility rules had not yet been put in their final form. He also emphasized that the winning device won't be the final word in the future history of the "Star Trek" tricorder.

"The target here is Tricorder 1.0," he told me. "It's about demonstrating the diversity of different diseases or conditions that can be diagnosed with a mobile, user-friendly, hand-held device."

Does it sound as if we're at a turning point for medical technology, or will this turn out to be just one more chapter in a science-fiction novel about more affordable health care? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about tricorder dreams:

• From 2000: Medicine meets the final frontier
• From 2008: Trekkie tricorder detects ailments
• From 2011: iPhones turn into medical imagers
• Gallery: Reality check for 'Star Trek' tech

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Last updated 12:45 p.m. ET Sept. 20:

Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.

"This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS," Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can't accomplish as easily.

"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit's lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans."

Unraveling a retrovirus
For more than a decade, an international team of scientists has been trying to figure out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. Such enzymes, known as retroviral proteases, play a key role in the virus' spread — and if medical researchers can figure out their structure, they could conceivably design drugs to stop the virus in its tracks. The strategy has been compared to designing a key to fit one of Mother Nature's locks.

The problem is that enzymes are far tougher to crack than your typical lock. There are millions of ways that the bonds between the atoms in the enzyme's molecules could twist and turn. To design the right chemical key, you have to figure out the most efficient, llowest-energy configuration for the molecule — the one that Mother Nature herself came up with.

That's where Foldit plays a role. The game is designed so that players can manipulate virtual molecular structures that look like multicolored, curled-up Tinkertoy sets. The virtual molecules follow the same chemical rules that are obeyed by real molecules. When someone playing the game comes up with a more elegant structure that reflects a lower energy state for the molecule, his or her score goes up. If the structure requires more energy to maintain, or if it doesn't reflect real-life chemistry, then the score is lower.

More than 236,000 players have registered for the game since its debut in 2008.

The monkey-virus puzzle was one of several unsolved molecular mysteries that a colleague of Khatib's at the university, Frank DiMaio, recently tried to solve using a method that took advantage of a protein-folding computer program called Rosetta. "This was one of the cases where his method wasn't able to solve it," Khatib said.

Fortunately, the challenge fit the current capabilities of the Foldit game, so Khatib and his colleagues put the puzzle out there for Foldit's teams to work on. "This was really kind of a last-ditch effort," he recalled. "Can the Foldit players really solve it?"

They could. "They actually did it in less than 10 days," Khatib said.

University of Washington

A screen shot shows how the Foldit program posed the monkey-virus molecular puzzle.

One floppy loop of the molecule, visible on the left side of this image, was particularly tricky to figure out. But players belonging to the Foldit Contenders Group worked as a tag team to come up with an incredibly elegant, low-energy model for the monkey-virus enzyme.

"Standard autobuilding and structure refinement methods showed within hours that the solution was almost certainly correct," the researchers reported in the paper published today. "Using the Foldit solution, the final refined structure was completed a few days later."

Khatib said the Seattle team's collaborators in Poland were in such a celebratory mood that they insisted on organizing a simultaneous champagne toast, shared over a Skype video teleconference.

"Although much attention has recently been given to the potential of crowdsourcing and game playing, this is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem," Khatib and his colleagues wrote.

The parts of the molecule that formed the floppy loop turned out to be of particular interest. "These features provide exciting opportunities for the design of retroviral drugs, including AIDS drugs," the researchers said.

Looking for new problems to solve
The monkey-virus puzzle solution demonstrates that Foldit and other science-oriented video games could be used to address a wide range of other scientific challenges — ranging from drug development to genetic engineering for future biofuels. "My hope is that scientists will see this research and give us more of those cases," Khatib said.

He's not alone in that hope. "Foldit shows that a game can turn novices into domain experts capable of producing first-class scientific discoveries," Zoran Popovic, director of University of Washington's Center for Game Science, said in today's news release. "We are currently applying the same approach to change the way math and science are taught in school."

That's something that Carter Kimsey, program director for the National Science Foundation's Division of Biological Infrastructure, would love to see happen. "After this discovery, young people might not mind doing their science homework," she quipped.

One caveat, though: Playing Foldit isn't exactly like playing Bejeweled. "Let's be honest, proteins aren't the sexiest video game out there," Khatib told me. Give the game a whirl, and let me know whether it's addictive or a drag.

Tale of a Contender
The final decisive move in the Foldit Contender Group's solution to the monkey-virus puzzle involved twisting around that floppy loop, or "flap," in the structure of the enzyme. The paper published today notes that one of the Contenders, nicknamed "mimi," built upon the work done by other gamers to make that move. I got in touch with mimi via email, and here's the wonderfully detailed response she sent back today from Britain:

"I have been playing Foldit for nearly three years, and I have been in the Contenders team for two and a half years.

"Although there are 35 names on the members list on the website, when you take off duplicate names and non-active players, it comes down to about 12 to 15 people.

"The team members come from a wide range of backgrounds, chiefly scientific or IT [information technology], although our best player is from neither.

"One of the main features of Foldit is the ability to communicate via chat within the game. There is both global chat, which everyone can access, and individual group chat, which allows team members to talk easily to one another. The Contenders are spread out between Canada, USA, UK, Europe and New Zealand, so this is essential.

"Each player can work on a solo solution to a puzzle, but we can also exchange solutions between the team and add our own improvements to achieve a better result. Often the evolved solution for a team scores higher than the top solo score.

"The game is not only an interesting intellectual challenge, allowing you to use your problem-solving skills, 'feel' for protein shapes, and whatever biochemical knowledge you have to obtain a solution to each puzzle, but it also provides a unique society of players driven by both individual and team rivalry with an overall purpose of improving the game and the results achieved. A body of knowledge has been built up in the Wiki by contributions from players, and ideas are constantly fed back to the game designers.

"In the case of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, I had looked at the structure of the options we were presented with and identified that it would be better if the 'flap' could be made to sit closer to the body of the protein — one of the basic rules of folding is to make the protein as compact as possible — but when I tried this with my solo solution, I couldn't get it to work. However, when I applied the same approach to the evolved solution that had been worked on by other team members, I was able to get it to tuck in, and that proved to be the answer to the structure. I believe that it was the changes made by my colleagues that enabled mine to work, so it was very much a team effort.

"We were all very excited to hear that we had helped to find the answer to this crystal form, especially since it had been outstanding so long and other methods had been unsuccessful. The feeling of having done something that could make a significant contribution to research in this field is very special and unexpected. Foldit players have achieved a number of successes so far, and I hope we will go on to make many more.

"You may be aware that we asked for accreditation for the Foldit Contenders Team within the article, rather than being named individually.

"Many of the people playing the game are known only by their user name, even within a team.

"I would be grateful if you could refer to me as 'mimi' rather than using my full name."

Update for 12:45 p.m. ET Sept. 20: I've added an MSNBC video about the Foldit project, and I've also heard back via email from another one of the Contenders, a player known as "Bletchley Park":

"We are all very excited about the discovery, to see the story unfold now is very gratifying. The main motivator of the Contenders group, and most Foldit players for that matter, is the advancement of science. It is very typical for mimi not to have her real name listed or even to claim the discovery as her own.

"Contenders is a group of like-minded individuals. The strength lies in comradeship, cooperation and perseverance. Most of us have been 'folding' for several hours each day over the past years.

"To be part of this adventure is a very fulfilling experience. Quite a few of us have or have had family members who suffered from the modern terminal diseases and find energy in those experiences to keep folding with the intention to make a difference."

More games for science:

• Play a game and engineer real RNA
• Fight disease by playing a game
• Xbox's Kinect could improve surgery
• Help scientists decipher a 'lost' gospel
• Join a worldwide planet search
• Look for icy worlds over the Internet
• Still more research games from Zooniverse
• SETI @ home and much more from BOINC

In addition to Khatib, DiMaio, Cooper, Popovic and the Foldit Contenders Group, the authors of "Crystal Structure of a Monomeric Retroviral Protease Solved by Protein Folding Game Players" include the Foldit Void Crushers Group, Maciej Kazmierczyk, Miroslaw Gilski, Szymon Krzywda, Helena Zabranska, Iva Pichova, James Thompson, Mariusz Jaskolski and David Baker. The authors also acknowledged "the members of the Foldit team for their help designing and developing the game and all the Foldit players and Rosetta @ home volunteers who have made this work possible."

The work was supported by UW's Center for Game Science, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Czech Ministry of Education, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Microsoft Corp. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture involving Microsoft and NBC Universal.) Foldit was created by computer scientists at the Center for Game Science in collaboration with the UW's Baker Laboratory.

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. 

NASA file

The development of a "Star Trek" tricorder-style medical device, similar to this NASA mockup, may be worth a $10 million prize.

A real-life diagnostic device that does something akin to what the tricorder did on "Star Trek" just might earn its developers $10 million prize. And yes, the proposed competition is actually being called the Tricorder X Prize. It's just one more example of life imitating "Trek." In the words of Mr. Spock: Fascinating!

The objective of the project, currently being explored by the X Prize Foundation and Qualcomm, is not just to create one more cool gadget for "Trek" fans ... although the idea of a hand-held, automated medical diagnostic device is pretty cool. The objective is to extend the reach of health information and services to billions more people in the world.

"We believe this is a fundamental step in helping people become true 'health consumers' who can have as much say in assessing and accessing health care as they would any other service or product," Don Jones, vice president of wireless health strategy and market development at Qualcomm Labs, said in this week's announcement about the project. "Qualcomm believes the value of this X Prize is also in changing the cost structure and focus of health care. By having consumers take the initial actions to obtain health assessment data, the use and the quality of physicians' time is improved."

The competition is modeled on earlier incentive programs such as the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private-sector spaceflight, or the $10 million Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize for super-efficient road vehicles. The basic idea is to encourage the development of mobile devices that can diagnose patients at least as well as a panel of board-certified physicians.

"The goal obviously is to drive a lot of innovation toward this narrow goal of easy-to-use, low-cost, minimally invasive, rapid, portable and scalable diagnosis," Jones told me during a follow-up interview.

Over the next few months, Qualcomm and the X Prize Foundation will be working together to flesh out the rules and requirements for the Tricorder X Prize. Jones emphasized that this is just the "design phase" for the venture. Qualcomm isn't yet committed to putting up any prize money, but it does have "the option of funding part or all of the prize," he said.

If the design phase is successful, the competition would begin in early 2012.

So what's in it for Qualcomm, a company that focuses on wireless network technology? "Qualcomm has a wireless health effort, we've had it for some time, and we believe there is a real interest to tie together the world of sensors and the world of informatics," Jones told me. "We're very interested in connecting more items to the cellular-powered Internet, and this is a category of items. Perhaps many categories of items will come out of this."

There are already a goodly number of mobile medical devices out there, including some pretty fancy hand-held ultrasound imagers. Three years ago, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley demonstrated a portable medical scanner that could be hooked up to a mobile phone to create a tricorder-like diagnostic system. But Jones said he thought the device that won the Tricorder X Prize would have to hit a higher level of sophistication — in effect, telling users on the spot whether they should go see a professional.

The tricorder might have to check not only ultrasound readings, but heart rate, respiration, perspiration, salivation and other health indicators. "It's fairly clear that a prizewinner is going to have to figure out how to integrate multiple sensing technologies, using multiple databases," Jones said.

Can one device do it all ... and make those cool "Star Trek" noises as well? Share your thoughts in the comment section below, and stay tuned for future episodes.

More about 'Trek' medical tech:

• Ex-astronaut aims to build tricorders 
• Researchers use phones to detect cancers
• Health-oriented smartphone apps draw caution
• The doctor will see you now ... on the space shuttle

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," Alan's book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Jim Watson / AFP - Getty Images

Todd Kuiken, director of the Center for Bionic Medicine and director of amputee services at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, explains the technology behind the bionic arm being used by Glen Lehman, a retired Army sergeant who received targeted muscle reinnervation surgery after he lost his arm in Iraq,

It's been nine years since the Center for Bionic Medicine installed its first nerve-controlled prosthetic limb — and during that time, bionic arms have become stronger ... faster ... better. They may not yet match the fictional body parts sported by Steve Austin in "The Six-Million Dollar Man," but they're giving scores of amputees the opportunity to lead a more normal life.

Take Glen Lehman, for example: Lehman, a retired Army sergeant who lost his right arm three years ago in a grenade attack in Iraq, showed off his bionic arm this week in Washington during sessions at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Lehman twisted and closed a lifelike hand, at the end of a prosthetic arm that took commands from the nerves once leading to his real hand.

Glen Lehman takes a look at his bionic hand.

A video released at the AAAS meeting shows Lehman holding a food tray, grabbing a bag of snacks and handing a drink bottle with the bionic arm, with movements that are close to natural.

"My arm is pretty much in tune with my thoughts," he told reporters Thursday.

That represents a big advance over old-style prosthetic limbs — even over the first bionic arm, which was given to double-amputee patient Jesse Sullivan in 2002. The key innovation was pioneered back then by Todd Kuiken, director of the Center for Bionic Medicine and director of amputee services at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

Kuiken calls his technique "targeted muscle reinnervation," or TMR. The procedure involves taking the nerves that once led to the missing limb and rerouting them to intact muscles on what's left of the arm. The flexing of those muscles, in turn, sets off actuators that reproduce the movements of the elbow and hand.

"Muscle becomes the biological amplifier," Kuiken explained.

CBM / RIC

Glen Lehman's bionic arm is hooked up to electrical leads that are implanted in his intact upper-arm muscles. Nerves that once went to his amputated arm have been re-routed to go to those particular muscles.

So far, more than 50 amputees have been outfitted with TMR-enabled bionic arms, including more than dozen combat veterans like Lehman. Several surgeons have been trained in the procedure. Lehman's arm surgery was performed by Martin Baechler, a surgeon at Walter Reed Medical Center. The technique could spread wider in the years ahead: This week marked the launch of the first-ever training video for TMR, developed by Kuiken and Gregory Dumanian of Northwestern University's Department of Plastic Surgery.

Kuiken and his colleagues have a couple of tricks they're planning to add to bionic arms — including restoring skin sensation of the missing arm (which involves sensory nerves implanted into tissue) and providing touch feedback for artificial hands (which involves wiring up the hands with sensors that send impulses back into the nerves).

For now, the technique has been used only in arms, and not in legs. "That's an area we've just started to look at," Kuiken told reporters. He explained that the challenge for artificial legs is different from what it is for hands: There are fewer parts that have to be controlled, but those parts have to be controlled very, very well. If there's just one wrong step out of 1,000 that leads to a fall, "that's a problem," Kuiken said.

Other researchers gave a status report on their progress in developing thought-controlled tools for people with disabilities. Here's a sampling:

• Researchers at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne are developing brain-computer interfaces that rely on a "thinking cap" — a skullcap outfitted with electrodes that take in electroencephalogram readings and feed them to a computer program. The software uses statistical analysis to translate the typically low-resolution EEG signals into more precise commands. Such a system lets subjects drive a wheelchair or a camera-equipped robot using their thoughts alone, as shown in the video below. Studies have shown that, with training, the effort isn't overly taxing. "People can truly use brain interfaces 24 hours a day, seven days a week," research team leader Jose del R. Millan said.

• A Pentagon-funded project is developing a direct brain-to-bionic control system that involves tiny arrays of electrodes implanted on the surface of the brain. The electrodes read activity from individual neurons, producing signals that can control a robotic limb. So far, the procedure has been tested only in monkeys, but tests with humans are expected to begin late this year. "Our animal studies have shown that we can interpret the messages the brain sends to make a simple robotic arm reach for an object and turn a mechanical wrist," Andrew Schwartz, a neuroscientist at the Pitt School of Medicine, said in a news release. "The next step is to see not only if we can make these techniques work for people, but also if we can make the movements more complex."

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."

Using a game controller to interact with real-world objects is definitely spooky. You push around a glorified pencil to "feel" the contours of a hand resting on a faraway table. And if that faraway hand moves, you'll feel an unseen force push back. It's as if an occult hand were taking control of the magic pencil from yards or miles away.

The push of a ghostly hand, vs. the virtual sense of touch ... it's not easy for me to say which aspect of the University of Washington's Kinect-based robo-control system is spookier. But it's easy for Fredrik Ryden to say which aspect is more useful.

"We want to give robotic surgeons a sense of touch," the visiting graduate student from Sweden told me.

The point of Ryden's contraption is not merely to manipulate objects over far distances. Heck, even a monkey can use a thought-controlled robotic arm to pick up distant objects, and surgeons have been operating remote-controlled robotic scalpels for years. But it takes a more sophisticated kind of robot to give those surgeons tactile feedback about how deep they're cutting, and create a virtual force field to keep their scalpels from straying.

The fact that Ryden's robo-touch system could demonstrate that capability after just a weekend's worth of work, using a $150 motion-sensing game device, adds to the experiment's geek appeal.

"I realized what I was doing was really cool, but it was easy — so I was surprised that nobody else had done it," Ryden said.

Now that the feat has been publicized on YouTube, in the blogosphere and beyond, it seems as if everyone is trying to do it, said Howard Jay Chizeck, an engineering professor who's co-director of the University of Washington's Biorobotics Laboratory. "The sense I have is that we're just a little bit ahead of whoever is right behind us," he joked.

How it works
Microsoft (which is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture) sells the Kinect system as a "controller-less" controller for its XBox video game console. Players can interact with their games by gesturing, punching, jumping or even dancing in front of an infrared laser projector and a set of infrared depth sensors. Kinect's software analyzes the patterns of scattered infrared light to create a 3-D "cloud" of data points that reflect the players' changing positions in real time.

It didn't take long for computer geeks to hack into the Kinect system for a wide spectrum of unanticipated applications, ranging from "Air Guitar Hero" and a virtual-reality piano to extreme body jiggling and other risque pursuits. On the serious side, an outfit called Virtopsy has programmed Kinect to serve as a touch-free interface for medical imagery in operating-room environments. And then there's the Biorobotics Laboratory's hack.

Under the direction of UW's Blake Hannaford, the lab has been working for years to develop better robotic surgeons for military as well as civilian use. Surgical robots are already widely used for delicate operations such as prostate removal, but medical experts in the military (and at NASA) would love to have robots that can do a wide range of surgical operations by remote control, from hundreds of miles away.

So the Biorobotics Lab was challenged to come up with a system that could provide real-time feedback to the surgeons at the robot's controls — including a way to warn the surgeons if they were getting too close to a vital artery or some other danger zone.

Think of it as a 21st-century, virtual-reality "Operation" game with real-world consequences. Bzzzzt!

"Essentially, you're projecting a sense of touch through an image," Chizeck explained. "We'd like to have images of things generate 'force fields' around things you don't want to touch."

When the Kinect system came out in November, Ryden saw it as the perfect platform for such a device. His software translates the cloud of data points into a virtual 3-D surface. When the magic pencil (actually, a software-controlled stylus at the end of a robotic arm) "hits" the virtual surface, it moves no farther — just as if it were hitting the real surface of a faraway hand. The same thing can happen if your stylus strays up to the edge of the force field. (Though actually, if you press hard enough, you can push the stylus through the force field. It feels as if you're poking a pin through a piece of virtual cardboard.)

What it's for
The robo-touch system is currently being fine-tuned as part of the Biorobotics Lab's long-running project on surgical robotics. The beauty part is that buying Kinect systems doesn't strain the lab's hardware budget, Chizeck said. "It's 150 bucks for a system that would cost maybe $100,000 or $150,000 to reproduce," he said.

That doesn't mean low-cost Kinects will be showing up in operating rooms. The low-cost devices don't have anywhere near the resolution that the actual robo-touch device would require. Eventually, super-sensitive touch feedback systems will be built from the ground up and put through clinical trials, as part of a long and potentially expensive development process.

"You're talking at least a decade," Chizeck said. "I think in Fredrik's lifetime, it's a sure bet, but it's really hard to predict." (Fredrik Ryden is 22 years old.)

Hannaford told me that surgical robotics may turn out to be the "killer app" for the field of haptics, which focuses on methods for translating virtual-reality shapes into a real-world sense of touch. (Maybe "killer app" isn't the best phrase to use when talking about medical procedures, but you get the point.)

Chizeck had a slightly different take: "I'll make a bet with Blake," he said. "I think there'll be a game application using haptics before there's a patient operated on."

He said robo-touch technology could also be used to create more dexterous bomb-disposal robots and deep-sea autonomous vehicles. But there's one obvious application that no one in the lab was willing to discuss: the use of haptics for long-distance, virtual-reality sex.

"I'll let you think of your own apps," Chizeck said.

More on gaming and virtual reality:

• Virtual haven set up for combat vets
• 'Star Wars' holograms nearly a reality
• Virtual actor takes over in 'Tron'
• Kinect hacks unleash your inner superhero

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."