U.S. Air Force

The U.S. Air Force's sleek, light-colored X-51A Waverider hypersonic vehicle can be seen tucked under the wing of a B-52H Stratofortress for this week's test launch.

The U.S. Air Force's $300 million, nine-year test program for a hypersonic plane ended on a high note this week, when the last of its X-51A Waverider vehicles made the longest flight of its kind. The success was made sweeter by the fact that it followed last year's high-profile failure.

"I believe all we have learned from the X-51A Waverider will serve as the bedrock for future hypersonics research and ultimately the practical application of hypersonic flight," Charlie Brink, X-51A program manager for the Air Force Research Laboratory Aerospace Systems Directorate, said in a news release.

The 14-foot-long (4.3-meter-long), scramjet-powered vehicle hit a top speed of Mach 5.1 during just over six minutes of flight on May 1, the Air Force said. That's the longest of the Boeing-built X-51A's four test flights, and the longest air-breathing hypersonic flight ever.

Hypersonic scramjet propulsion has been widely touted as eventually opening up the way for flights between London and New York in less than an hour. But in reality, the first application is more likely to come in the form of super-fast cruise missiles.

Scramjet is a short way of saying "supersonic combustion ramjet." There have been many efforts through the years to perfect hypersonic aircraft — that is, vehicles that travel at speeds beyond Mach 5. But the Air Force says the X-51A is unique primarily because it used hydrocarbon fuel rather than hydrogen fuel. Without any moving parts, the fuel is injected into the scramjet's combustion chamber, where it mixes with the air rushing through the chamber. The fuel is ignited in a process that's been likened to lighting a match in a hurricane.      

This week's experiment followed the flight profile used for the X-51A's earlier tests: A B-52H Stratofortress took off from California's Edwards Air Force Base, flew 50,000 feet over a Pacific test range, and then released a solid rocket booster with the plane attached. When the cruiser reached Mach 4.8, the X-51A separated from the booster and lit up its scramjet engine. The scramjet exhausted its fuel in 240 seconds. The sleek vehicle coasted for another couple of minutes and splashed down into the ocean as planned. The X-51 traveled more than 230 nautical miles and yielded 370 seconds of data, the Air Force said.

"This success is the result of a lot of hard work by an incredible team.  The contributions of Boeing, Pratt and Whitney Rocketdyne, the 412th Test Wing at Edwards AFB, NASA Dryden and DARPA were all vital," Brink said.  

All this is a huge improvement over the previous test, which ended in failure last August. During that flight, the X-51A veered off course less than a minute after launch and crashed, due to a problem with one of its control fins. The issue was resolved after a months-long investigation. The first X-51 test was successful in May 2010, resulting in a 200-second flight, but the second test in June 2011 was a disappointment. 

There's no immediate successor to the X-51A, but the Air Force has pledged to continue with hypersonic research. It says the lessons learned during the X-51A program "will pay dividends to the High Speed Strike Weapon program" at the Air Force Research Laboratory.

More about supersonic flight:

• Video: What the X-51 was designed to do
• Futuristic space plane closer to reality
• Supersonic biplane puts an end to sonic booms

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Thermal-imaging devices have been used to seek out pot-growing operations, map Martian geology — and now, to watch the second suspect in this week's Boston Marathon bombings as he was holed up in his last hiding place.

Authorities said a helicopter equipped with a thermal imager spotted the heat signature of a person inside a tarp-covered boat, sitting in a backyard in Watertown, Mass. Police used the sensor after an area resident reported seeing a trail of blood leading to the boat — and catching a glimpse of a blood-covered body inside. The thermal readings confirmed that there was indeed someone under the tarp, and that the person was still alive.

"Our helicopter had actually detected the subject in the boat," Col. Timothy Alben of the Massachusetts State Police told reporters. "We have what's called a FLIR — a forward-looking infrared device — on that helicopter. It picked up the heat signature of the individual, even though he was underneath what appeared to be the 'shrink wrap' or cover on the boat itself. There was movement from that point on. The helicopter was able to direct the tactical teams over to that area."

There was an exchange of gunfire when a SWAT team approached the boat, so police had to back off. The helicopter continued to track the body's movements inside the boat. Eventually, the tactical team moved in and took the wounded bombing suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, into custody.

How thermal imaging works
Thermal imagers can spot the signature of a heat source inside a house, a vehicle, or in this case, a vessel. Walls may stop visible-light wavelengths, but the heat can still pass through. Variations in heat emissions can be picked up by camera chips designed to be sensitive to the infrared part of the spectrum. The signature would be particularly noticeable when there's a significant difference between the background temperature and the temperature of the heat source.

Police have long used such devices to find out whether marijuana was being grown inside a house using heat lamps. In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that the use of thermal scans to monitor heat sources inside a person's home should be considered a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, and thus would require a warrant. The court said such scans could reveal private details about the homeowner, including the time of night when "the lady of the house takes her daily sauna and bath."

Thermal imagers have been taken to other worlds — for instance, aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, which analyzes variations in the composition of the Red Planet's surface using the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS.

Immigration authorities have used thermal scanners to look for the signs of fever among arriving passengers, and researchers have been experimenting with them as a lie-detector technique.

In 2009, FBI investigators used thermal imagers to search for graves in the neighborhood where Cleveland serial killer Anthony Sowell lived. That may well have been the most notorious case where the technology was brought to bear. Until now.

Update for 5:43 p.m. ET April 20: The comments on this story might suggest I've shed more heat than light on the role played by thermal imaging. There's no question about it: The crucial break in the case came when the boat owner, David Henneberry, saw the blood-covered body in the boat, called police and then got out of the way. Police used thermal imagery to track the suspect's movements inside the boat, and help guide the SWAT team's response.

In most cases, thermal imagers can detect only the heat signature emanating from a wall or a vehicle. For example, you could tell whether there were heat lamps (or a lady taking a bath) in a particular room by noticing the high level of heat emitted by the room's walls. But you generally wouldn't see the outline of the heat lamps themselves (or the lady, for that matter). In the Cleveland serial-killer case, thermal imaging was used to look for the signs of freshly turned soil rather than for the cold, dead bodies themselves.

The Watertown case is special: The tarp was so thin that police could indeed see Tsarnaev's outline, as graphically illustrated by these pictures.

More about thermal imaging:

• PhotoBlog: More thermal images of suspect
• Infrared holography identifies fire victims
• Like Pinocchio, your nose shows when you lie
• New tech gives soldiers Predator-style vision

Slideshow: Search for suspects in Boston Marathon bombings

Jared Wickerham / Getty Images

Cheers filled the streets after a Boston Marathon bombing suspect was captured alive but wounded Friday night — following a daylong manhunt that shut down the city.

Launch slideshow

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Fri Apr 19, 2013 9:14 PM EDT

When you click a "like" button on Facebook, you could be telling the world whether you're gay or straight, liberal or conservative, intelligent or not so much — even if you don't intend to. That's what researchers found when they ran tens of thousands of Facebook profiles and questionnaires through a computer algorithm to find the obvious as well as not-so-obvious connections.

The results were published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and you can sample the method for yourself at a website called YouAreWhatYouLike.com.

"The main message of the paper is that whether they like it or not, people do communicate their individual traits in their online behavior," said lead author Michal Kosinski, operations director at the University of Cambridge's Psychometrics Center.

Some of the correlations are obvious: For example, If you're a fan of the "I'm Proud to Be a Christian" Facebook page, it's a pretty safe bet that you're a Christian. But others are hard to explain: Why is it that liking the "Curly Fries" page is associated with having a high IQ? Why does the computer model put "Sometimes I Just Lay in Bed and Think About Life" in the category for homosexual females, while "Thinking of Something and Laughing Alone" is linked to heterosexual females?

"These little patterns are really not perceptible to humans," Kosinski said. Sometimes, it takes a computer.

Kosinski and his colleagues conducted their experiment over the course of several years, through their MyPersonality website and Facebook app. More than 8 million people took the MyPersonality survey, which asked participants about their personal details and also had them answer questions about personality traits. About half of the test-takers gave their OK for the researchers to match up their survey results with Facebook likes, on an anonymous basis. More than 58,000 of the volunteered profiles from U.S. respondents were selected for matching.

The results were analyzed to produce correlations in more than a dozen categories, including five widely accepted personality attributes (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and emotional stability). Those are the attributes analyzed on the "You Are What You Like" website. The other categories included IQ, religion, politics, sexual orientation, age, gender, race, relationship status, alcohol and drug use, tobacco use, life satisfaction, number of friends — and even whether a Facebook user's parents had separated by the time the user was 21.

This PDF file shows you which Facebook pages are the best fit for each of the categories.

YouAreWhatYouLike.com

Researchers set up a website that assesses your personality based on Facebook "likes."

The researchers' computer model did the best at predicting black-vs.-white and male-vs.-female (95 and 93 percent accuracy, respectively). It could distinguish correctly between Republicans and Democrats 85 percent of the time, and between Christians and Muslims 82 percent of the time.

The accuracy rates for predicting sexual orientation were 88 percent for males and 75 percent for females. But don't think reaching that result was as easy as seeing who clicked the "like" button for "Gay Marriage." Less than 5 percent of the gay users were fans of such obvious pages, Kosinski and his colleagues said. The predictions were based instead on inferences from likes for less obvious pages. For example, the computer model associated the fan pages for Kathy Griffin and "Wicked, The Musical" with homosexual males, while heterosexual males were associated with the pages for Bruce Lee and WWE wrestling.

OK, maybe the pages weren't all that much less obvious.

The model wasn't as accurate (60 percent) when it came to predicting whether a user's parents stayed together or separated before the user turned 21. But even that level of predictive power could be "worthwhile for advertisers," the researchers said. "For instance, digital systems and devices (such as online stores or cars) could be designed to adjust their behavior to best fit each user's preferred profile," they wrote.

"I know the paper might sound like we're criticizing Facebook, but not at all," Kosinski told NBC News. "I'm a fan of Facebook."

Kosinski pointed out that an analysis of your credit card purchases, online music preferences, video rentals and Web browsing habits could come up with personal profiles at least as detailed as the ones that he and his colleagues produced. It just so happens that the Facebook likes were accessible enough to yield a vivid illustration of how such analyses work.

"It's possible this will lead some people to say, 'Maybe I shouldn't be using Facebook, or I shouldn't be using Google.' And that could be bad," he said. That kind of technophobia could hamper technological and economic progress, he said. Instead, the research should lead people to think twice about what they share online.

"We hope this information will help users start a discussion with organizations like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or even policymakers about the rules of the game online," Kosinski said.

Update for 3:55 p.m. ET March 11: Kosinski's two co-authors, David Stillwell of Cambridge and Thore Graepel of Microsoft Research, passed along their comments in a news release from Cambridge. 

"Consumers rightly expect strong privacy protection to be built into the products and services they use, and this research may well serve as a reminder for consumers to take a careful approach to sharing information online, utilizing privacy controls and never sharing content with unfamiliar parties," Graepel said.

"I have used Facebook since 2005, and I will continue to do so," Stillwell said. "But I might be more careful to use the privacy settings that Facebook provides."

More about Facebook research:

• Facebook posts are more memorable than faces
• Facebook's roots go way, way back
• Scientists map 'Facebook for birds'

The PNAS paper, titled "Private Traits and Attributes Are Predictable From Digital Records of Human Behavior," includes a conflict-of-interest statement: Stillwell received revenue as owner of the MyPersonality Facebook app. Kosinski received funding from the Boeing Co. and Microsoft Research.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

This story was originally published on Mon Mar 11, 2013 3:02 PM EDT

NASA has turned the Mona Lisa into the first digital image to be transmitted via laser beam from Earth to a spacecraft in lunar orbit, nearly 240,000 miles away, thanks to a technology that may soon become routine.

The experiment took advantage of the laser-tracking system that's in operation aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the moon for the past three and a half years. NASA sends regular laser pulses from the Next Generation Satellite Ranging station at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland to the space probe's Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, or LOLA, to measure its precise position in lunar orbit.

For last March's Mona Lisa maneuver, researchers encoded a black-and-white version of Leonardo da Vinci's enigmatic masterpiece as a series of values in a 152-by-200-pixel grid. Each value represented a shade of black to gray to white, ranging from zero to 4,095. The signal for each pixel was then piggybacked on the ranging station's laser-tracking pulses: Each pulse was fired during one of 4,096 super-short designated time slots, at a rate of about 300 bits per second.

As the pulses were received in lunar orbit, LOLA's software used the precise timing of each pulse to figure out the grayscale value for a given pixel — and reassembled the black-and-white image. The process wasn't perfect: Atmospheric turbulence introduced laser transmission errors, even when the sky was clear. To accommodate the 15 percent error rate, the researchers used Reed-Solomon data coding, which is the same method used to smooth out the bumps in the playback of CDs and DVDs.

The picture was reprocessed and sent back to Earth using the orbiter's standard radio communication system, just to make sure that Mona survived the trip intact. Throughout the experiment, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter conducted its regular mapping tasks without interruption.

A research report on the experiment, with Goddard's Xiaoli Sun as principal author, was published online by Optics Express on Thursday.

NASA

This composite image shows how the Mona Lisa image looked after its trip to the moon. The left side shows the picture before error correction, and the right side shows how it looked after error correction.

Sun said the Mona Lisa was chosen for the transmission because the painting is so much more visual than strings of random numbers. "It's a familiar image with lots of subtlety," he said. "You can immediately feel whether the image looks right, and how much information got lost."

The feat marked the first time anyone has achieved one-way laser communication at planetary distances, LOLA's principal investigator, David Smith of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in a NASA news release.

"In the near future, this type of simple laser communication might serve as a backup for the radio communication that satellites use," Smith said. "In the more distant future, it may allow communication at higher data rates than present radio links can provide."

A data rate of 300 bits per second may seem achingly slow by today's standards, but NASA is planning a higher-bandwidth laser communication demonstration for its next mission to the moon, known as the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer. When LADEE is launched in August, it will carry an experimental laser system that's designed to transmit data at a rate exceeding 600 million bits per second.

In 2017, NASA is due to send an experiment called the Laser Communications Radar Demonstration into orbit aboard a commercial satellite to test a full-fledged, beam-based communication system. Studies suggest that laser systems have the potential to transmit data at rates 10 to 100 times faster than traditional radio systems for the same mass and power, or match radio's data rate with a smaller, more efficient package.

Who knows? Mona Lisa may well mark the start of a renaissance in high-speed satellite communications.

More about next-generation communications:

• Interplanetary Internet passes test
• NASA mission to test ultimate space Wi-Fi
• Military's new radio: laser beams

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Hanna-Barbera / TriStar / Disney / Pixar

Rosie of "The Jetsons," Johnny 5 from "Short Circuit" and WALL-E are vying for a place in the Robot Hall of Fame.

For the past nine years, the Robot Hall of Fame has relied solely on expert judges to dole out its honors — but this time, the people will get their say. Should Rosie, Johnny 5 or WALL-E join other robotic greats such as R2-D2 and C-3PO in the hall of honor?

This competition isn't just for fictional robots: Internet voting is being conducted to select robot laureates in four categories, from a field of 12 nominees. The idea of factoring in the popular vote is a first for the Robot Hall of Fame, which was created in 2003 by Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

"The technology and art of robotics are advancing at an increasingly rapid rate, and so the Robot Hall of Fame also must evolve," Shirley Saldamarco, the hall of fame's director and a faculty member at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center, said in an announcement kicking off the voting. "As more students, workers and consumers become accustomed to robots, it seems like a natural step to give the public a voice in selecting inductees."

The 12 finalists were nominated by 107 robotics experts, industry leaders and robo-aficionados. You can cast a ballot for one robot in each of the four categories by stepping into this online voting booth, between now and Sept. 30. The popular vote will be factored in with a survey of the robotics experts, on a half-and-half basis, to determine the winners.

The newly chosen robots will be inducted into the Hall of Fame on Oct. 23 at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh, in conjunction with the RoboBusiness Leadership Summit. "We love robots, and we love to see their inventors and creators get the public recognition they deserve," summit chairman Dan Kara said.

The October induction ceremony also will pay tribute to the 2010 class of Hall of Fame robots: NASA's Spirit and Opportunity rovers, iRobot's Roomba vacuum cleaner, the da Vinci surgical system, the three robots from the film "Silent Running" (Huey, Dewey and Loui) and T-800, the character played by Arnold Schwarzenegger in the "Terminator" film series. To get more information about the ceremony — and to buy tickets at $99 a pop — check out this Eventbrite webpage.

Here's the full list of this year's nominees in the four categories:

Education and consumer robots:

• Aldebaran Robotics' NAO, a 22-inch-tall humanoid that is widely used in education (and robo-soccer games) worldwide.
• iRobot's Create, a programmable robot based on the Roomba vacuum cleaner design.
• VEX Robotics Design System, a kit for designing and building robots for the classroom and for competitions.

Entertainment robots:

• WALL-E, the waste-collecting robot that's the hero of the 2008 animated film of the same name, presented by Pixar and Disney.
• Johnny 5, a prototype military robot that learns to reject destruction and embrace life in the 1986 movie "Short Circuit."
• Rosie, a robotic maid with a mind of her own who took care of her human family on "The Jetsons," a 1960s animated sitcom from Hanna-Barbera.

Industrial and service robots:

• iRobot's Packbot, which takes care of bomb disposal and other dangerous assignments for the U.S. military.
• Kiva System's autonomous warehouse robots, which speed the process of customer orders. (Amazon.com acquired Kiva this year.)
• Jason, a remotely operated vehicle built by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution to explore the deep ocean.

Research robots:

• BigDog, a four-legged robot that's being developed by Boston Dynamics for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to walk, run or climb over rough terrain with heavy loads.
• PR2, a two-armed robot built by Willow Garage that can navigate human environments and has the dexterity to grasp and manipulate objects.
• Robonaut, a dexterous, two-armed robot developed by NASA and GM to help humans work in space. The latest version, Robonaut 2, was delivered to the International Space Station last year.

In addition to the Robot Hall of Fame voting, you can help us continue the tradition of choosing an extra Robot People's Choice for Cosmic Log. Feel free to make your suggestions below, and I'll try to get a sense of the people's will. If you're nominating a People's Choice robot, you should know that all the robots we've mentioned so far are ineligible, as well as the robots that have already been inducted into the Hall of Fame. Here's the list:

• 2010: Spirit and Opportunity; Roomba; da Vinci; Huey, Dewey and Louie; T-800 Terminator.
• 2008: Commander Data, the Raibert Hopper, NavLab 5, Lego Mindstorms robot kit.
• 2006: AIBO, Scara, David (from "A.I."), Maria (from "Metropolis"), Gort (from "The Day the Earth Stood Still").
• 2004: ASIMO, Shakey, Astro Boy, Robby the Robot, C-3PO.
• 2003: HAL 9000, Mars Pathfinder's Sojourner rover, R2-D2, Unimate.

That still leaves plenty of robots to nominate, including the newest star, NASA's Curiosity rover. Feel free to pass along your own People's Choice picks, or take issue with the Hall of Fame selections that have been made so far, by leaving a comment below.

More about robots:

• Gallery: Movie robots to be remembered
• Robots that pop popcorn and make sandwiches
• Gallery: Nine jobs that humans may lose to robots
• Robots get their own encyclopedia

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.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. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

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.

Ted S. Warren / AP

To produce the words for text or speech, British physicist Stephen Hawking currently uses an infrared sensor mounted on his eyeglasses, visible here during an appearance this month in Seattle. The sensor picks up twitches from his cheek, which are translated into the desired letters or words. Hawking and neuroscientist Philip Low are experimenting with a system that can translate brain waves directly into text and speech.

After months of tweaking, researchers are finally ready to show off a high-tech headband that can translate Stephen Hawking's brain waves into speech — providing what could eventually become an easier avenue for the paralyzed British physicist and many others to share their deep thoughts.

The system, developed by San Diego-based NeuroVigil and known as iBrain, uses a head-mounted receiver the size of a matchbox to pick up different types of brain waves. iBrain employs a computer algorithm called SPEARS to analyze the brain emanations and encode them for a text-based speech reader. Philip Low, NeuroVigil's founder, chairman and CEO, is to present the latest results from his work with Hawking on July 7 at a Cambridge conference on consciousness.

"I haven't discussed doing a demonstration with Stephen, but we could do that, of course," Low told me today. During the conference, Low will be showing video clips of Hawking using the iBrain to communicate.

For decades, Hawking has been coping with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative nerve disease that has left the theoretical physicist confined to a wheelchair and unable to move even his fingers. To write or speak, he currently uses an infrared sensor system mounted on his eyeglasses: His cheek twitches are read by the sensor to control a wheelchair-mounted computer system that slowly encodes the patterns of those twitches. It can take a half-hour for Hawking to twitch out a couple of sentences in response to a question.

In an abstract prepared for next month's presentation, Low and Hawking describe how they worked out their technique for the iBrain system. Hawking (who is described as a "high-functioning 70-year-old ALS patient" in the abstract) was told to try moving one of his hands or feet — for example, flexing his foot or scrunching his hand into a ball. The limbs didn't move, of course, but just thinking about trying to move them generated readable brain-wave patterns.

"The subject's brain activity demonstrated distinct broad-spectrum pulses extending to the gamma and ultra-high gamma ranges," the researchers wrote. "Such pulses were present in the absence of actual movement, and absent when the subject was not attempting motion."

The abstract said Hawking's brain also buzzed with alpha brain waves when he closed his eyes, as expected. Alpha waves are associated with wakeful relaxation, and are probably familiar to anyone who's undergone biofeedback training. Gamma waves, in contrast, are associated with increased attention — and in the past have been linked to activities ranging from running to learning.

Lots of possibilities
The fact that Hawking's brain signals could be read reliably is a good sign, not only for one of the world's best-known scientists but for hundreds of thousands of others around the world. Low and Hawking say their work "opens the possibility to link intended movements to a library of words and convert them into speech, thus providing ALS sufferers with communication tools more dependent on the brain than on the body."

Low told me that the brainwave-reading device could be used to control prosthetic devices "to give ALS sufferers mobility" — sort of like a real-life version of the Stephen Hawking robotic exoskeleton proposed in an Onion parody 15 years ago.

The iBrain device could have other applications, such as diagnosing sleep apnea, studying autism and monitoring other brain conditions. It's already been used in a clinical trial to monitor the effects of experimental drugs on brain activity. The U.S. military is also looking into how the device can help treat traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, which are big issues for combat veterans. Direct brain-to-speech communication, however, represents the highest-profile application, particularly when Stephen Hawking is involved.

"We'd like to find a way to bypass his body, pretty much hack his brain," The Telegraph quoted Low as saying.

The key question for Hawking is whether iBrain represents an improvement over the system he currently has. Back in April, the professor told The New York Times that the project hadn't quite reached that point. "At the moment I think my cheek switch is faster ... but should the position change I will try Philip Low's system," he wrote in an email sent by an assistant.

In that quote, Low said Hawking was talking about brain-computer interfaces in general, rather than specifically about iBrain. "What we are seeing is in fact an immediate response, so the question is going to be to productize this, so that he can communicate reliably should he lose control of his cheek muscles," he said.

TEDMED via YouTube

Neuroscientist Philip Low (at right) demonstrates how the iBrain device can send brain-wave readings to a cellphone with an subject who's wearing the headband (at left) during a TEDMED 2009 presentation. Click on the image to watch the YouTube clip.

Personal quest
Low said the iBrain project was already moving on to Version 2.0, and the iBrain 3 device is due to be built next year. "That will be about the size of a U.S. quarter," he told me. "People will be able to check their brain activity much like you or I can check our blood pressure."

The 32-year-old, Vienna-born researcher's company has come a long way since its founding, which Low says he initially financed by putting $240,000 on his credit card. Someday, he hopes brain-monitoring systems will be used to pick up the signs of neurological problems early enough to do something about them. For Low, this is not just business. It's personal.

"I would have loved to see this 20 years ago, when my father suffered from a side effect of a commonly used sleep drug," he told me. "He threatened someone with a weapon ... a gun, actually. And it destroyed our family."

His father was eventually pardoned, but it took a long time to put everything back together. That experience led Low to look into the neurological basis of sleep, including experiments with bird brains. That was what led him to come up with the SPEARS algorithm in the first place.

"It's very ironic that an algorithm I initially developed to analyze the brain patterns of birds has found its way to dealing with Stephen Hawking's brain patterns, the U.S. military and autistic children," he told me. 

More about Stephen Hawking:

• Stephen Hawking keeps his eyes on the prize
• What's on Dr. Hawking's desk? A guided tour
• Stephen Hawking's biggest mystery? Women
• Hawking says God's not needed. So?

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.

E2BN / NEN

A sculpture that shows computer pioneer Alan Turing looking down at the Enigma Machine was created from stacked slate by British artist Stephen Kettle.

The June 23 centennial of Alan Turing's birth is providing an opportunity to look back at the brilliant life and tragic end of a pioneer in computer science — a Briton who was instrumental in cracking Germany's Enigma code and turning the tide of World War II, but who killed himself after his humiliation by a society that saw homosexuality as a crime.

Turing came up with the concept of a "universal machine" back in 1936, setting the stage for the quest to create artificial intelligence. It's a quest that's as old as Ovid's Metamorphoses and as new as IBM's Watson. His vision of a computer so knowledgeable and adept in the ways of society that humans would think it was human, too, led to the establishment of the "Turing Test" as a classic gauge of machine intelligence. (Some argue that a program called Cleverbot passed the Turing Test last year.)

His greatest contribution came during the war, when he designed an electromechanical device known as the "bombe." With additional refinements, the cabinet-sized machine at Britain's Bletchley Park could decode thousands of intercepted German messages, tipping off the allies about the Nazis' next moves.

The intelligence gleaned by the Bletchley Park team, code-named Ultra, was crucial to the Allied war effort. "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war," British Prime Minister Winston Churchill told King George VI.

Gay hero? Or just plain hero?
The postwar era, however, was a disaster for Turing, who was gay. He got into a messy relationship with a man who helped an accomplice break into Turing's house — and after Turing reported the burglary, the investigation of the break-in eventually turned into an investigation of the researcher's sexual behavior.

At that time, in 1952, homosexual behavior fell under a criminal category known as gross indecency, and Turing's conviction could have put him in prison. As an alternative, Turing chose chemical castration through hormone injections. His security clearance was revoked, and he was barred from working for the British government. Turing pressed for a change in Britain's laws, but homosexuality remained a criminal offense in Britain until 1967.

That was way too late for Turing. Two years after his conviction, he died in his laboratory after eating a poisoned apple.

In 2009, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a posthumous apology to Turing, saying that the computer pioneer "truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war."

"The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely," Brown said. "We're sorry. You deserved so much better."

Today, Turing is hailed in some quarters as a tragic gay hero. But during this centennial year, the spotlight is squarely on science rather than sex. Google executive Vinton Cerf, who's considered one of the creators of the Internet, said in a BBC retrospective that he hoped this year's exhibits and observances would "help make Turing a hero and household name beyond the technical community that reveres his memory."

Texts on Turing
Cerf's tribute is one of seven essays on Turing's life and legacy being posted to the BBC's website this week. Wired's British website is also presenting a rich variety of perspectives to celebrate Turing Week. This weekend, luminaries from around the world will gather at the University of Manchester for a Turing centenary conference. Video from the conference is due to be streamed live. It's all part of Alan Turing Year.

To read up on Turing and his times, you can start with Andrew Hodges' 1983 biography, "Alan Turing: The Enigma," which has been reissued in a centenary edition. (In addition to the book, Hodges maintains a biographical website at Turing.org.uk.) There's also a centenary edition of "Alan M. Turing," the biography written in 1959 by Sara Turing, Alan's mother. "The Man Who Knew Too Much" is a more recent biography of the great man, written by David Leavitt in 2006.

Charles Petzold's "The Annotated Turing" delves into Alan Turing's groundbreaking 1936 paper, while Princeton University Press is putting out "Alan Turing's Systems of Logic: The Princeton Thesis," a facsimile edition of Turing's Ph.D. thesis. There's also "The Essential Turing," a compilation of the researcher's best-known writings. And if you're looking for something fresh that puts Turing's achievements in a wider context, check out George Dyson's book, "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe."

Any birthday wishes you'd like to pass along for the centennial? Feel free to post them as comments below.

More about the history of computing:

• A brief history of computers
• British code crackers reunite, pride unbroken
• Museum celebrates 2,000 years of computing
• For tech pioneer IBM, 100 years of 'Think'

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.

Itar-Tass / Reuters

Russian leader Vladimir Putin stands with a gun at a shooting gallery of the new GRU military intelligence headquarters building in Moscow during a 2006 visit. Last month, Putin said nations would eventually develop new types of weapons, including "psychophysical" weapon systems.

Are we on the brink of an arms race over zombie ray guns? You might think so, based on the alarms being rung over Russia's potential to create mind-scrambling weapons. But the reality is that it'll be a long time before we have to worry about super-soldiers taking over our brains.

The Americans as well as the Russians have been looking into psychotronic weapons for more than 15 years. You can find ample references to the subject on the Internet, including a feature published by U.S. News and World Report in 1997 and a report written for a U.S. Army publication in 1998.

Such weapons purport to take advantage of the effect that pulsed microwaves can have on brain activity. Some researchers have reported an effect known as microwave hearing, in which a directed beam of radiation produces a sensation of buzzing, clicking or hissing in the head. "This technology in its crudest form could be used to distract individuals," according to a declassified Army review of non-lethal weapons.

Theoretically, electromagnetic beams could cause an epileptic-type seizure, or involuntary eye motion leading to dizziness and nausea. Military researchers have also looked into using infrasound or laser beams to confuse or incapacitate a foe — but when you start going down this road, before you know it, you're talking about remote viewing, ESP and all the way-out concepts chronicled in "The Men Who Stare at Goats."

The Russian connection
The Russians have looked into these potential technologies at least as deeply as the Pentagon has, and you're hearing about zombie ray guns now because top Russian officials started talking about psychotronic weapons a couple of weeks ago. That has brought the subject back from the dead like a ... well, you know.

Moscow is planning to set up an advanced military research agency similar to the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov referred to those plans on March 22. Here's what the RIA Novosti news agency quoted him as saying during a meeting with Prime Minister (and President-elect) Vladimir Putin:

"The development of weaponry based on new physics principles — direct-energy weapons, geophysical weapons, wave-energy weapons, genetic weapons, psychotronic weapons, etc. — is part of the state arms procurement program for 2011-2020 ... We will draft the proposals for the next program by December 2012."

Putin, who begins his presidential term next month, pledged during the campaign that he would beef up Russia's military. In February, he laid out his national security plan in an article published by Rossiiskaya Gazeta. At the time, most of the news reports picked up on Putin's call for almost $770 billion in spending over the course of a decade to modernize the armed forces. But Putin also observed that the current balance of power, held in place by nuclear arsenals, could well shift in the future due to new technologies. It was in that context that he brought up the psychotronic angle:

"The military capability of a country in space or information countermeasures, especially in cyberspace, will play a great, if not decisive, role in determining the nature of an armed conflict. In the more distant future, weapons systems based on new principles (beam, geophysical, wave, genetic, psychophysical and other technology) will be developed. All this will, in addition to nuclear weapons, provide entirely new instruments for achieving political and strategic goals. Such high-tech weapons systems will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons but will be more 'acceptable' in terms of political and military ideology. In this sense, the strategic balance of nuclear forces will play a gradually diminishing role in deterring aggression and chaos."

In the wake of Serdyukov's comments, folks dredged up Putin's reference to "psychophysical" weapons, added in some background about the research into electromagnetic mind control, and voila: the zombie ray gun. Last week, Britain's Daily Mail suggested that the guns "could be used against Russia's enemies and, perhaps, its own dissidents by the end of the decade."

The Mail also quoted Anatoly Tsyganov, head of the Military Forecasting Center in Moscow, as saying microwaves could make for "a highly serious weapon":

"When it was used for dispersing a crowd and it was focused on a man, his body temperature went up immediately as if he was thrown into a hot frying pan. Still, we know very little about this weapon and even special forces guys can hardly cope with it."

Based on that comment, Tsyganov was apparently talking about a different kind of non-lethal weapon, an analog to the millimeter-wave "pain ray" that the U.S. military has been working on for years. As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the beam of radiation can be directed at a crowd, producing a severe burning sensation on the skin that forces the target to jump away instinctively.

How fast can mad scientists work?
There are a few problems with the pain-ray technology: It takes hours to build up enough power for the beam generator, and the system reportedly works only in clear atmospheric conditions. Nevertheless, testing of the "Silent Guardian" system is continuing, not only for military applications but also for use against oceangoing pirates and rioting prisoners.

The bottom line is that Russia certainly seems to be on track to set up its own DARPA-like "Department of Mad Scientists," working on heat rays, mind-altering electromagnetic beams and heaven knows what else. But there's nothing in the comments from Putin and Serdyukov to suggest that the Russians are anywhere close to having psychotronic weapons. In fact, Putin makes it sound as if the next frontier in warfare won't be the zombie ray gun but the coordinated cyber-attack. And that's scary enough for me.

What do you think? Please feel free to register your opinion in the unscientific poll above, and the comment space below.

Update for 11 p.m. ET: A couple of commenters noted that the zombielike picture that originally accompanied this item had a caption that didn't quite square with the lore for the "Left 4 Dead" video game. The more I learned about the game, the more I saw that the picture really didn't fit. So I've put in the picture of a gun-toting Putin instead. Thanks to the gamers who pointed out the problem. If I ever play "Left 4 Dead," I'll want you on my side.

More about weapons technologies:

• U.S. military seeks 'stunning' new weapon
• Navy's ray gun disables boat with laser light
• Railgun tests could lead to super-weapon by 2020
• Military-funded brain science sparks controversy

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 or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

None of us living today will ever get beyond our celestial backyard in real life, but there's a fleet of apps out there that can blast you through hyperspace to explore — and understand — the far frontiers of the cosmos on your tablet computer. The latest app is "The Wonders of the Universe," a multimedia spin-off of physicist Brian Cox's coffee-table book and TV documentary series of the same name.

The app, sold by Harper Collins for the iPad 2 and the new iPad, organizes more than 200 interactive articles, two and a half hours of video and hundreds of graphics to do a show-and-tell that ranges from subatomic quarks to the largest scales of the cosmic web.

To navigate through this virtual universe, you use your fingers to swipe, spread and pinch the pictures and icons on the screen.  First you select one of the cosmic scales, then you tap on a topic, and then you can watch a video or read all about what you're interested in. Extrasolar planets? Colliding galaxies? Black holes? The big bang and the big chill? It's all at your fingertips. And thankfully, there's also a tutorial that shows you how to do all that swiping, spreading and pinching.

The video clips from the show are streamed on the fly, so you'll want to make sure you have a fast wireless connection. But at an introductory price of $6.99, all that content is hard to beat, even if it a lot of it lives in the cloud rather than in your tablet.

There's lots more to the iPad universe than "Wonders." Here are four other iPad / iPhone apps I touch upon (literally!) in the video above:

Star Walk: This $4.99 app takes advantage of your tablet's GPS and compass capabilities to provide an augmented-reality view of the night sky. Want to know where to look for Venus and the Pleiades star cluster? You can either hold up your iPad and scan around for the right sight, or do a search for "Venus" and follow the pointers on your screen. If you focus in on a star or planet and tap on the "information" button, you can get quick facts about the object in question. You can also look around for the International Space Station or other satellites passing overhead.

The Night Sky: This 99-cent app doesn't have as many bells and whistles as Star Walk, but it works on the same principle: Hold up your iPad, and the app will tell you what you're looking at — whether it's a constellation or star, planet or satellite. It's also available for Android devices.

Solar System for iPad: Astronomer/writer Marcus Chown has created a beautiful $13.99 app for the iPad that presents the solar system in full, with loads of text, video, pictures and graphics. You can pick and choose your planets, and give them a spin while you're at it, or make your way progressively from the sun all the way out to the icy frontier of our solar system. As the author of "The Case for Pluto," I particularly appreciate the fact that Chown gives dwarf planets, asteroids and comets their due.

Solar Walk: The folks who brought you Star Walk have also come out with Solar Walk, a $2.99 app that gives you a 3-D virtual model of the solar system. You can zoom all the way out to the Milky Way, but it's more fun to zoom in on one of the planets and find out what's going on in real time. When you focus in on Earth, you can find out the position of major satellites in their orbits. Tap on the International Space Station and you can watch it passing over our planet's landscape. You can even click a 3-D button, put on your red-blue glasses and geek out to the third dimension.

There are lots more space-themed apps for tablets and mobile phones, including the free GoSkyWatch planetarium app, Exoplanet and GalaxyCollider. I've mentioned some of these apps previously, but what are your favorites? Feel free to share your recommendations in the comment space below.

More about science apps:

• Find new worlds on your iPad
• Scientific 'Magic' on a tablet
• App tracks the space station
• Explore outer space on your phone
• Earth Now lets you take the planet's pulse
• 'Angry Birds Space' launches gamers into orbit
• iPads would be great in space, astronaut says

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 or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.