popular science

Just one half-second before liftoff, computers aborted the launch of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket early this morning, delaying the dawn of the commercial space age at least until Tuesday. After all nine engines ignited, launch control detected abnormally high pressure inside the center engine and terminated the countdown. The next available launch window for an historic rendezvous with the International Space Station comes early-morning Tuesday, but NASA and SpaceX engineers will first have to inspect the engine and locate the source of the problem. You can read more about this historic mission here.

This Week in the Future, May 14-18, 2012 Baarbarian

A lot of people didn't agree with us that multitouch is magic. But we think those people are all doing it wrong, because this is literally what happens to us when we swipe. Our hands become instantly magnetic and we gain the power of telekinesis.

Want to win this ghostly Baarbarian illustration on a T-shirt? It's easy! The rules: Follow us on Twitter (we're @PopSci) and retweet our This Week in the Future tweet. One of those lucky retweeters will be chosen to receive a custom T-shirt with this week's Baarbarian illustration on it, thus making the winner the envy of their friends, coworkers and everyone else with eyes. (Those who would rather not leave things to chance and just pony up some cash for the t-shirt can do that here.) The stories pictured herein:

• Video: MIT's Latest User Interface Employs Gravity-Defying, Levitating Metal Orbs
• Electrical Engineer Can Feel Magnetic Fields Through Magnets Implanted in His Fingertips
• Living in the Future: Multitouch, or How I Learned to Love the Mac

And don't forget to check out our other favorite stories of the week:

• Book Review: Why You Are the Future of Video Games
• The Most Amazing Science Images of the Week, May 14-18, 2012
• The Dawn of the Commercial Space Age is (Probably) Happening This Weekend
• Archive Gallery: Beauty Secrets of Popular Science
• PopSci Q&A: NASA Just Gave You A Telescope. What Will You Look At First?
• FDA Panel Endorses an Over-the-Counter HIV Test that Diagnoses in Just 20 Minutes
• Gray Matter: In Which I Play With White Phosphorus
• Test Drive: The 2013 Mercedes-Benz SL 63 AMG
• FYI: My Dog Is A Very Good Listener, But How Much Can He Understand?
• Engineer Details Plans to Build a Real, Burj-Dubai-Sized Starship Enterprise in 20 Years
• Electrical Engineer Can Feel Magnetic Fields Through Magnets Implanted in His Fingertips

Synergy Aircraft John McGinnis

The Synergy aircraft, propelled by a fan in back and buoyed by a boxy tail, promises to be cheaper, safer, quieter, and vastly more efficient than a jet airplane. The hitch is that it doesn't quite exist yet, but it's nearly halfway to its goal on Kickstarter, so now is your chance to invest.

The shape is not unlike the jets of the future we looked at in our May issue, but the technology is very different. A quarter-scale flying prototype was unveiled a year ago, demonstrating the unique "induced drag reduction" method developed by inventor John McGinnis.

I'm very curious to see the full-size prototype in action.

Lesbian Spider Queens from Mars Anna AnthropyIn Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, Anna Anthropy wrests gaming out of the hands of the mainstream

The internet revolution has changed the way we create and showcase work. Amateur videos recorded on cellphones are getting more eyes than the latest ABC midseason replacement. The blog has brought democracy to the written word. Cheap technology and digital distribution make it easier than ever before for your little brother's band to be heard around the world. Why hasn't this populist revolution happened to video games?

In her new book Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form, Anna Anthropy looks at the daunting technological barrier to the medium's growth, and presents a solution.

Because serious programming has been a prerequisite of game development, the people who put in the effort to make games are predominantly the people who have been playing them, and they make games like the ones they play. Coupled with the rising cost of making a blockbuster game, you have an industry that is allergic to risk. It's a feedback loop that's threatened to make the medium creatively stagnant.

The picture is less bleak outside of the mainstream. Indie game developers have more channels than ever to distribute their work. Every console has its own online market place, and breakout successes like Angry Birds and Draw Something are changing the way we think about the viability of mobile gaming. This digital revolution is already happening. It's allowed somebody like Anthropy, a transgendered game design school dropout, to buck the system and gain critical acclaim outside the mainstream, with her own brand of games that mash up '80s arcade hits and transgressive gender politics. She released her first game, Calamity Annie, a lesbian western shooter, in 2008, the year that Grand Theft Auto IV shattered sales records by giving the audience more of the same old thing. Anthropy has always stayed comfortably at the fringes of the indie scene, a position nearly impossible before the internet age. As somebody who created her own niche in the industry and has never censored herself to make herself commercial, she is an excellent guide into the world of game design as a form of self-expression. Her latest game, Dys4ia, is a short collection of autobiographical mini-games, playable for free online, chronicling her hormone replacement therapy. Meanwhile, mainstream games wouldn't know what to do with a transgendered character if it hit them in the face.

"Every game that you and I make right now -- every weird experimentation, every dinky little game about the experience of putting down your dog -- makes our art form larger."But even the growth of the indie scene isn't enough for Anthropy. "What I want from videogames," she writes, "is for creation to be open to everybody, not just to publishers and programmers." Will every game be worth playing? Of course not. Some garage bands should stay in the garage. Then what is the point? Zinesters isn't about creating game for other people: for most of the medium's life, its been packaged and sold for other people to enjoy. Indie games are now gaining attention because of their financial success. There has been no equivalent to home movies or personal journals. The subliminal message in the book is to remove commerce from the equation completely.

The technological hurdles can now be overcome - the programming language Scratch, for example, is specifically made for children to create their own games - but there is still the perception that making a game is the domain of programmers. Zinesters aims to demystify the digital wizardry.

Before even starting Anthropy excuses the reader. "Your first game will be rough and derivative." Quality is not the aim here: Anthropy wants more games by more people. What she offers here isn't the normal racket that artist-targeted how-to books tend to peddle. This is not How to be a Successful Game Developer in 5 Easy Steps or Make a Blockbuster Videogame! "Nor is she writing for the designer who is hoping to hone their skills. Zinesters sets itself apart from excellent game design tomes like Steve Swink's Game Feel and Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun and Game Design, by not assuming a familiarity with game design. Because there are so many tools available to the would-be developer, all of which she gets into, the advice in Zinesters is creative and not technical. The advice sounds rudimentary ("Task #3: Teach Your Character to do Something"), but it acts more as a catalyst for ideas and brainstorming. Anthropy, herself a lecturer of game design and a meticulous designer, does not demand formal proficiency here. Zinesters advocates self-expression before all else. The point is not to make a good game, but to make a game, itself a radical notion in a medium that has long been an oligarchy.

Rise of the Zinesters is about education. It is a how-to, indie history lesson, design theory 101, a manifesto, and, surprisingly, as memoir. It serves as an entry into the importance of games and how to make them. But it also is about why making them for ourselves is important.

"Every game that you and I make right now -- every five-minute story, every weird experimentation, every dinky little game about the experience of putting down your dog -- makes the boundaries of our art form (and it is yours) larger."

Like a skilled developer, Anthropy, who has been at the vanguard of this movement for years, does not explicitly point the way, but, instead, gently guides.

Blastoff Launching from Baikonur Cosmodrome (how come we don't have a cosmodrome? That is the greatest word) in Kazakhstan, the Soyuz TMA-04M rocket heads to the ISS with astronauts in tow. For more photojournalism like this, head over to American Photo. NASA

Got a space-heavy lineup for you guys this week, looking forward to the SpaceX launch this weekend: a Soyuz rocket launching from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, a time-lapsed photo taken from the ISS, a roving space shuttle cafe that looks like an actual space shuttle, and more. Enjoy!

Click to see the greatest images we've seen this week.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 Takes Off SpaceXSpaceX's Dragon heads for the ISS in a historic first flight for the commercial space industry

Update: After abnormally high pressures were detected inside the Falcon 9's center engine, this morning's launch was aborted at the last second. The next available launch window is this Tuesday.

Tomorrow morning, whether they realize it or not, Americans will likely wake up to a new era. Though nothing will be outwardly different, a fundamental shift in the nature of spaceflight will commence during the wee morning hours. Call it a defining moment, or a milestone, or simply call it what it is: the dawn of the private spaceflight industry's real presence in outer space.

Barring some unforeseen setback, at 4:55 a.m. EDT, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon spacecraft--both built by private spaceflight firm SpaceX--will blast off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida en route to the International Space Station with the goal of becoming the first privately built spacecraft to rendezvous with the ISS. This is the partial culmination of NASA's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, which aims to do two things: jumpstart the commercial space industry's ability to service low Earth orbit, and get NASA out of the low Earth orbit transportation business so it can once again focus on pushing the boundaries of space exploration.

Both of those goals are meaningful. For NASA, that (hopefully) means a return to days of boldly going where no man has gone before (to Lagrange points, for instance, or to asteroids and eventually Mars). But more so this weekend belongs to SpaceX. The company has once made history by being the first private company to launch and successfully retrieve a spacecraft from Earth orbit. A successful rendezvous with the ISS followed by a successful return of cargo to Earth will ring up so many "firsts" for the company that its place in spaceflight history will be secure.

Because, simply put, that's what this weekend is: historic. It's a shame almost no one is going to be awake to see it get underway.

Tomorrow's rocket launch marks a passing of the torch that's beyond symbolic.

As launches go, this is business as usual. But it marks a passing of the torch that's beyond symbolic. NASA wasn't the first to go to space, but it became the best. Post-Apollo, both the Russians and the Americans proved they could make regular trips to low Earth orbit and back--albeit at a high financial cost. What SpaceX and the rest of the private space industry aims to do is bring low Earth orbit even closer to home by proving that space is no longer only reserved for wealthy governments--that everyday civilians can access space at regular intervals and at a reasonable cost. Fifty years after we first went there the space immediately around the planet will cease to be a frontier and become a settled and civilized place.

On Saturday morning, the company's Falcon 9 rocket will lift off as it has before, carrying a Dragon capsule full of non-essential cargo skyward. The real point of this mission is to prove that SpaceX can safely maneuver its robotic capsule on orbit prior to linking up with the ISS.

To that end, from the moment the Dragon capsule reaches its preliminary orbit and deploys its solar arrays it will be undergoing something of an audition that will last for several days. A series of carefully orchestrated engine firings will bring it closer to the ISS, during which time it will test its Absolute Global Positioning System, which uses GPS satellites to determine its precise position in space. It will conduct a free drift demonstration, wherein all of its thrusters will be powered off and the spacecraft will simply float. And at the opposite extreme, it will try out its abort function to make sure that in an emergency, it can quickly clear the vicinity of the ISS.

If all of that goes well, Dragon will approach within 1.5 miles of the ISS on the third day of its flight (Monday) and perform what's known as a "fly-under," in which it will fly below the station while testing out its relative GPS against the space station's and link up with it via UHF communications to ensure the astronauts aboard the ISS can exchange commands and data with the spacecraft. After all of that, on mission day four (Tuesday), NASA will either call off the demonstration or allow the docking to proceed.

Here things begin to liven up again. Having made a huge loop around the ISS from its place below it to points in front of and above it, the spacecraft will take up residence behind and below it once again. The final approach will take hours. A series of go/no-go tests will be completed at various distances from the ISS as the spacecraft inches closer. LIDAR and thermal imaging systems will be checked and rechecked. And after all this delicate dancing, at just 32 feet from the ISS, astronauts aboard will finally use the station's robotic arm to snare the Dragon capsule and reel it in. It will remain berthed to the ISS for two weeks.

And only now do we finally come to the exciting--and most important--part. Both Russia and the European Union currently have robotic space vehicles that they send to the ISS carrying cargo and supplies, vehicles that are then decoupled and discarded in Earth's atmosphere, where they burn up upon re-entry. These spacecraft work, but they are clearly wasteful; they are single-use spaceships. Dragon will go a mile further by returning to Earth to be used again. After days and weeks of waiting and watching and testing and then simply being docked, the capsule will return home in a matter of hours.

Just four hours after being decoupled from the ISS it will begin its de-orbit burn, which will last about seven minutes. All said, re-entry will take half an hour. Some 250 miles off the Pacific Coast of the U.S., Dragon will come splashing down--just like the Mercury and Gemini and Apollo capsules from NASA's golden age. But packed with cargo sent back from the ISS, the Dragon will really be more akin to a Space Shuttle. America will once again have the ability to go into space and safely return--something we've done hundreds of times before and yet, five decades and billions upon billions of dollars after first punching a hole in the sky and entering the space beyond, something totally new.

The Science of Beauty Get gorgeous with the cutting edge of twentieth-century technology

Despite having a readership made up mostly of men, Popular Sciences of old knew their way around a beauty parlor. Especially from the 20s to the 40s, PopSci offered makeup tips and advice to female readers, saying in effect "Look! We've got incredibly detailed cutaways of how things work AND beauty knowhow! What more could you want?"

Click here to check out the gallery.

What, indeed. This week's archive gallery takes a look at Popular Science's best beauty advice, some of which is spot-on (use a stencil to keep your lipstick from smudging!), some of which is less so (electrocute yourself to get rid of a double chin!).

Enter the gallery above to learn how to get gussied up, PopSci style.

You searched "Kings." Do you mean the hockey team, basketball team, or something else?

One of Google's stated goals is to index all of the world's information, the ever-changing mass of combined knowledge and snarky commentary that lives on the Internet. Today this index is getting some context, with billions of attributes and connections linking millions of individual nouns - Things, in Google's parlance. This type of context-informed dataset is frequently known as the semantic web, but Google is avoiding that term and calling it Knowledge Graph.

Human conversation is built on context, explained Jack Menzel, product management director of search at Google. But for a computer, it doesn't exist. Ask a person about "Kings" and the response will probably be another question, to put your query in context. Are you talking about the L.A. Kings? Or playing cards? Or a TV show? Google's new search algorithm seeks to disambiguate your results, much like a person would in a conversation, Menzel said.

"Understanding is part of being a human. For computers, it would be like if we suddenly pick a language that neither of us can speak. It's just a collection of sounds," he said. "What search engines have lacked so far, until today, was the notion that those words refer to a thing. If we maintain a representation of a thing, we can use that to better understand both what you are asking for and what the web itself is talking about."

Related ArticlesGoogle Instant Search Displays Full, Real-Time Results As You TypeVideo: With Semantic Search, PR2 Robot Can Plan Its Own Sandwich-Hunting Mission Google Speak and Semantic SearchTagsTechnology, Rebecca Boyle, big data, data, google search results, knowledge, semantic search, semantic web, watsonIf you're logged into Google, you may be seeing this new function already - it started rolling out May 16 and will be complete for all logged-in English language users by the 18th. Type in a search term, and instead of listing what you might interested in, the search will provide you a set of options. Menzel uses "Andromeda" as another example. You could choose between the galaxy, the Greek myth, the Swedish metal band, and so on.

To do this, Google set about indexing universal definitions, using every public database from Wikipedia to the CIA World Factbook to Google's own products. The result is a new set of 500 million people, places and things, with 3.5 billion connections among them. Along with allowing you to narrow your context, search results now contain little connections and suggestions to augment an initial search term.

People search results come with biographical information, for instance; places results come with data about the place; and so on. Search for Frank Lloyd Wright, and you'll see a Wikipedia-based summary of him, a biographical sketch, and a Google-curated list of houses he designed, which will take you to further information if you click.

Definitions of things are inherently contextual - whether your first definition of Kings is a hockey team, a basketball team, a TV show or a gang depends on who you are and where you are. Google will also make some determinations based on your search profile and especially your location, Menzel said. He used an example of place near Google's Mountain View, Calif. offices - when he searches "Great Bear," Google brings up a northern California recreation area and a coffee shop in Santa Cruz. In your location, it will probably bring up something else. But personalization is still incomplete, he said.

The ultimate goal is a smarter search that thinks like a person would, taking your individuality and context into account. It's not just about knowing that a thing is a thing, Menzel said - "it's what's important about that thing, what's relatable about that thing. and the connections about that thing. How can we take this understanding of the world, and make it so we can improve your information?"

Opening the Sediment Core Hans Røy opens a sediment core. The mud in the opening of this core is from the last ice age 10,000 years ago. The mud sampled from the Knorr was from the time when dinosaurs walked the earth. Bo Barker Jørgensen/© Science/AAAS

With no meal for 86 million years, and barely enough oxygen to sustain metabolism, can a single-celled organism really be considered alive? Yes, but only just, according to a new study. A microbial community buried under the ocean floor since the mid-Jurassic era is still hanging on. Their tenacity could pose some interesting questions for the hunt for alien life.

Plenty of microbes live beneath ocean sediments - about 90 percent of the planet's unicellular organisms are found there, and they've long been subjects of study among biologists interested in extreme environments. Hans Røy and colleagues wanted to dig even deeper to examine the most barren places, where food supplies are scarce or nonexistent and where oxygen barely reaches.

Røy and colleagues from Denmark and Germany surveyed red clays buried deep in the Pacific Ocean, along the equator and into the North Pacific Gyre current system. From the research R/V Knorr, they drilled core samples 92 feet into the ocean floor, dating to the time of the dinosaurs, and tested the cores with oxygen sensors. They found that organisms live in the deepest parts of these sediments and that they're using oxygen for respiration - only incredibly slowly. The deeper the sediments, the less food and oxygen is present, and the less oxygen is used up, too. These organisms have not had access to a fresh food supply since their burial, 70 to 86 million years ago.

It takes the microbes about 1,000 years to double their biomass, which could also mean it takes them 1,000 years to divide, Røy and his colleagues found. E. coli, by contrast, takes 17 to 30 minutes. Put another way, to be sure these things were actually living - meaning undergoing metabolic processes and growing biomass - you would have to wait 1,000 years.

Røy and colleagues believe these microbial communities are living at the absolute limit - they have the bare minimum energy required to keep their DNA intact and their proteins functioning. This is interesting for a couple reasons. First, these life forms are definitely odd, and they suggest that scientists' knowledge of prokaryotes is incomplete at best. The way unicellular organisms live in the lab is nothing like the way they live beneath the ocean. Second, they once again prove that live persists where it would seem physically impossible - and that is an interesting finding if you're interested in astrobiology. Even in the harshest environments on this planet, where access to any form of energy is limited at best, microbes can live. Could they live somewhere off this planet, too?

The study appears in the journal Science.

Getting Inside Phineas Gage's Head Copyright John Darrell Van Horn and the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging, 2012

Scientists are getting another chance to get inside Phineas Gage's head. The 25-year-old Gage was a railroad supervisor back in 1848, using a 13-pound, 3-foot-7 iron rod to pack blasting powder into a rock just moments before becoming history's most interesting neuroscience case. Gage somehow triggered an explosion that drove the rod straight through his left cheek and out the top of his head, taking a chunk of his left frontal lobe with it.

Yet somehow Gage survived, though not really as Phineas Gage. The previously likeable young man underwent severe personality changes, becoming irritable and profane, far from the person he once was. Scientists studied his case for the dozen years he survived after the accident, and have been fascinated with Gage's brain ever since--up to an amazing reconstruction just completed.

Studying Gage's brain today has proven difficult, and scientists have long argued over just how much of his brain matter was removed or damaged in the incident--key data that could help explain both his profound changes in behavior and the causes and effects of certain deleterious frontal lobe disorders like Alzheimer's. When Gage died there was no recorded autopsy, and while his skull was preserved it is now deteriorating. As such, the last time it was allowed to be imaged was in 2001, and those computed tomography scans were quickly lost somewhere at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, an affiliate of Harvard. The last, best data on Gage went missing.

But the authors of a paper publishing in yesterday's issue of the journal PLoS ONE were able to finally recover the CT data files that had been lost for more than a decade, and using them they have reconstructed Gage's brain using modern-day brain images of males matching Gage's age and handedness (he was a righty). These new models are the best look yet at what most likely happened to Gage's brain.

The real question here isn't how he survived, but one of the architecture of the brain and how it's wired together. The researchers, from UCLA, found that their models show that nearly 11 percent of Gage's white matter was damaged, as well as 4 percent of the cortex. That basically means that while the cortical damage was restricted to Gage's left frontal lobe, the disruption to his brain's connectivity via the white matter damage reverberated throughout the brain, severing connections between the left frontal, left temporal, and right frontal cortices as well as the left limbic structures of his brain even though the rod completely missed those areas.

This explains why this iron tamping rod--which gruesome as it may sound only physically impacted a small portion of his brain--had such widespread impact on behaviors governed by other brain regions. Gage's injury is not unlike many traumatic brain injuries, or even certain degenerative diseases. So understanding what went on in Gage's head should inform the way neurologists thing about the human brain even a century-and-a-half later.

[Science Daily]

Galaxy Evolution Explorer NASAFor the first time, NASA turns over the reins to a functioning spacecraft

If you follow NASA at all, you know the agency has had some funding troubles of late, forcing changes to its manned spaceflight and Mars exploration programs. Among more high-profile woes, the strapped budget almost doomed one of the agency's cheapest missions, the prolific Galaxy Evolution Explorer. But Chris Martin had another idea.

Yesterday NASA formally loaned the telescope to Caltech, the first time the space agency has turned over the reins to a functioning spaceborne asset. It may not be the last, however - if funding pressures persist, the GALEX experiment could pave the way for many future spacecraft adoptions.

Click to launch the photo gallery

GALEX, an ultraviolet telescope, was supposed to last two years, and it's been cruising in low-Earth orbit for nine years now. It was up for decommissioning in 2011, but Martin and members of the telescope's science consortium were able to stretch that out another few months. Last November, he approached NASA's Astrophysics Division to ask about taking on responsibility for the scope. This spring, the spacecraft was placed on standby mode and NASA gave the OK to transfer it. On Monday the space agency signed a formal agreement ceding control of the spacecraft.

"NASA sees this as an opportunity to allow the public to continue reaping the benefits from this space asset that NASA developed using federal funding," said Paul Hertz, NASA's Astrophysics Division director. "This is an excellent example of a public/private partnership that will help further astronomy in the United States."

PopSci talked to Martin, the telescope's principal investigator, about his pioneering idea, what GALEX has already told us about the universe, and his big plans for the telescope's future.

PopSci: So who owns the telescope now?
Chris Martin: The original idea was to transfer the title, but that led to an issue of liability. In the end we actually solved it, because (builder) Orbital Sciences agreed to assume liability, but in the meantime, NASA figured out a different way of doing it through a Space Act agreement. That's really a loan, so there is no transfer of liability. That worked out better for the president and board of trustees of Caltech.

PS: Why did you want to keep it running?
CM: It's a small explorer, so it's one of NASA's smallest set of missions, about $100 million in development. Yet it's been extremely productive scientifically with many interesting discoveries, ranging from stars in our own galaxy, to galaxies in the nearby universe that look like early young galaxies - "teenager" galaxies. There have been hundreds of papers from this telescope. So we felt very bad about shutting it down, and we knew we could operate it at very low cost.

My No. 1 issue was, we hadn't completed the whole sky survey. With GALEX, there is no limit in the brightness we can look at. The Milky Way is very bright. A year ago, we tried out pointing the satellite at much brighter regions, and found the data is very high quality. So now we have the ability to essentially look in all directions of the sky. There's about 20 percent of the sky, mostly in the direction of the Milky Way, to complete. That's my No. 1 goal.

PS: What will this tell us about the cosmos?
CM: This [survey] is in the UV spectrum, centered around 2,000 Angstroms. It's sensitive to hot massive stars as well as other sources of radiation which are not visible, or infrared, or other bands. It gives you a very different picture of, for example, a galaxy, or the evolutionary life of a star. To survey the remaining 20 percent would take about another 4 to 5 months. We're still looking for support to do that.

PS: What else are you going to do with it?
CM: We have an international collaboration of 16 institutions, and they are interested in studying the history of galaxy evolution. One of the original purposes of GALEX was to study galaxy evolution in UV, and especially a region of the sky that is well served by other telescopes.

A group of Israeli universities [Weizmann Institute of Science, Tel Aviv University, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and the University of Haifa] are interested in studying the dynamic variable UV sky. When a black hole swallows a star, it produces this flash that lasts for many weeks. An object will suddenly become bright in UV, and that can mean that it's a black hole in a distant galaxy, or it can also mean it's a star exploding, a supernova. So we have a very exciting possibility of detecting the first moments of a supernova explosion, in a blinding UV flash.

Another partner is Cornell, and they're interested in surveying the Kepler field. Kepler is looking at stars with transiting exoplanets, and UV provides incredibly important information for understanding the stars themselves, their variability, their star spots, as well as helping look for planets. So we're finding multiple new science paths for GALEX.

There's plenty of science remaining to be done, and at very low cost, about $100,000 per month. Compare that to the operations cost of other NASA missions, and it's rock bottom.

PS: GALEX may not be as famous as spacecraft like Kepler or Hubble, but it's done some pretty amazing things. What are some of its most important finds?

CM: We found that galaxies were much more actively forming stars 8 billion years ago than they are today. That's one thing. It used to be thought that galaxies have a standard type, and we now understand that galaxies can change their types or qualities over cosmic time. A galaxy which may have been elliptical may have stopped forming stars, and become like a spiral galaxy, or a galaxy in between the two, over the history of the universe.

Third, we discovered the nearby universe looks more like young galaxies from the early history of the universe than it does the dinosaurs in the backyard.

The final thing is that around many galaxies, there are large gigantic zones of star formation that were not known before. We haven't explained them yet, but it's likely that there's new galaxy-building material coming from the region between galaxies and creating new stars in the very outskirts of galaxies.

PS: Now that you've figured out how to get a NASA loan, do you think this will happen with other spacecraft?

CM: GALEX has the unique feature that the operations cost is very low, and the science impact of these ongoing extended operations continues to be very high. $100,000 is a chunk that can be swallowed by many organizations, and a month of observations gives you a huge amount of data. So we think it's cheap in that respect. But I think other missions will be contemplating this as we go forward.

It's a new kind of arrangement, so I would expect that it would open doors. it's already piqued interest in a number of corners. We're looking for private foundations which might be interested in being a part of this new paradigm space mission.

Don Pettit Plays Angry Birds in Space NASA

The International Space Station is in constant motion, whipping around the Earth at some 17,000 miles per hour. But according to current ISS inhabitant and NASA astronaut Don Pettit, there's no reason why a bullet-fast orbital space station with no fixed location shouldn't have a fixed mailing address--after all, Navy ships have mailing addresses, as do remote outposts like McMurdo Station in Antarctica--and he's devised just such a postal nomenclature to satisfy this need via his NASA blog.

My sleep station, a coffin-sized box, is located in the fifth deck space of Node 2. From an Earth-based perspective, I pop out of my sleep station as if I were coming out of the floor. I am thus situated on the International Space Station (ISS) in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) with an orbital inclination of 51.6 degrees (the angle of our orbit plane to the equator) and an average altitude of 400 kilometers. It occurred to me that my address should be: Node 2, Deck 5, ISS, LEO 51.603.

In this system, the "zip code" is 51.603, the first three digits representing the orbital inclination (which should help future space couriers locate the address on orbit) and the last two digits being a designator for the ISS itself. The station is the third such space station at this orbital location, after the Salyut series of stations and Mir. Pettit reasons that this nomenclature should work until the orbit becomes clogged with up to 99 space stations.

Postage rates, however, are likely going to be astronomical.

[NASA Blogs]

Dozuki Dozuki

iFixit's beautiful teardowns of products have long been misconstrued as simple gadget porn, when really they're more of an activist call to action: take care of your objects! Repair them, improve them, make them last. iFixit sprung up largely as a response to companies providing wholly inadequate documentation, leaving their customers stranded--and the site's new venture, Dozuki, aims to give those companies a second chance, by taking advantage of what iFixit has made--and in the process, revolutionize the whole idea of the manual.

Dozuki (named, esoterically, after a Japanese saw with teeth that only allow back-cutting, for more precision) essentially allows any manufacturer to run their own iFixit, with step-by-step instructions for repairs and maintenance, beautiful photos, videos, and a dialed-in community. I spoke to Kyle Wiens, the co-founder of iFixit and a passionate, articulate guy, about Dozuki. "I think it's going to come to a point where consumers start demanding better manuals," he says. Wiens often talks wistfully about the pre-PC period, before the mid-1980s or so. "Thirty or fifty years ago, everything came with a useful manual," he says. But not anymore. Try to download a manual for a printer, or a phone, or a laptop. It's a total mess. Hard to find, hard to read, hard to use.

Companies can use Dozuki for a monthly fee, giving them the ability to create legitimately usable, useful, and (startlingly, for a product manual) very pretty guides. The company gets a specific template for repair guides, making it easy to pop in images and text. They're available to users for free, either through a web browser, or on a mobile app (iOS is available now, Android coming soon). Wiens prefers the iPad (and soon, the Android tablet) version--they were actually designed before the smaller versions for smartphones.

Interestingly, considering the emphasis iFixit places on the wikified Web 3.0 "community" theme on their own site, Dozuki is highly structured and regimented. Everything is in a step-by-step format. Every step must have a photo of video illustration. Text must be brief. Images must go here, text must go here. No long expanses of prose. "It's very opinionated software," says Wiens. "But in exchange [for following our rules], we promise the manuals will be really good." Soon you'll be able to embed circuit schematics. Most companies opt for a limited amount of participation--users can comment with their own tips or corrections, which (ideally) would be reviewed and possibly incorporated by the company. It's not fully collaborative, but it gives users a clear voice. There's also a wiki option, fully opening the manuals up for user participation. "Manuals really need to be living," says Wiens.

The companies that have already signed up are smaller startup types. Think Kickstarter, rather than Microsoft. As a matter of fact, the biggest Kickstarter project of all time, the Pebble e-ink connected watch, is in talks to make a Dozuki manual. Wiens sees, or hopes, that Dozuki will become a selling point for these companies. "It's a way for manufacturers to differentiate themselves," he says. "If they take the time to teach you how to service their product, that's a mark of quality." And it's a way to build up goodwill--if you've ever had a car that lasted 200,000 miles, you'll always think of that carmaker first when looking for a new one. And if that carmaker gave you detailed, illustrated instructions on how to keep the car running? That can only help.

ZeroN MIT Media Lab

The future of user interfaces seems to be gesture-based, at least if one simply looks at where research dollars are flowing and what products--yes, like the Kinect--are coming to market. But the peripheral is not dead. Jinha Lee at the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab sees a different future, one that dispenses with gravity to create a much more tangible yet futuristic UI that lets users move and interact with floating, gravity-defying objects in 3-D space.

Lee's prototype ZeroN is a small metal orb floating in free space that users can manipulate by moving around and placing in midair. Suspended by a highly tuned electromagnetic field, the orb really does seem to levitate, and the degree to which the system keeps the ball stable even as it is moved around on all three axes is pretty mind-blowing. The ball floats until it is moved, and when placed in a point in space it stays there. And with an added layer of software surrounding it, the orb becomes a tool for all sorts of applications.

For instance, the ZeroN can be used as the stand-in for a camera in a 3-D scene (imagine a scale architectural model placed in the ZeroN's working space; the ball can be moved around the model, changing the point-of-view of the 3-D representation in a graphic representation). The ZeroN can also remember how it has been moved in the past, retracing a path that it was previously moved along (the ZeroN doesn't have to be moved by a human hand, but can also be moved around the space by the computer).

The trick to all this is a precision electromagnet fitted to a moving actuator above the ZeroN's workspace. The electromagnet can move around the space above and rapidly adjust its magnetic pull or resistance based on where the ZeroN is in space, a value that is measured every few milliseconds by an array of IR cameras. So while the ZeroN appears to float as if in defiance of gravity, the setup is purely mechanical. All it really requires is a very precise electromagnet and the right software to keep the orb stable.

Next up: replacing the actuator with solenoids, which might allow the system to place several objects in the same ZeroN workspace at the same time, allowing for whole new applications. More on this over at Co.Design and in the video below.

[Co.Design]

Centaurus A in a Whole New Way ESO

Some 12 million light-years from Earth in the southern constellation of Centaurus, the most prominent source of galactic radio emissions in the sky rests in the galaxy Centaurus A. Here, a truly gigantic black hole 100 million times more massive than our sun is (most likely) ejecting huge amounts of energy as it helps rip another galaxy apart, and the European Southern Observatory has snapped a brand new image of the elliptical galaxy in stunning new resolution.

From its perch in Chile's Atacama Desert, the ESO's Las Silla Observatory produced this stunning astro-image using its Wide Field Imager, capturing the elongated, elliptical shape of Centaurus A and the opaque glow of its billions of older stars surrounding the dusty core of the galaxy--or perhaps galaxies. Astronomers believe that the strong radio signals emanating from Centaurus A could partially be caused by a galactic collision as the larger elliptical galaxy rips apart a smaller spiral galaxy that wandered too near.

More on Centaurus A over at SPACE.

[SPACE]

OraQuick HIV Test Already available for use inside doctor's offices, Pennsylvania-based Orasure's quick HIV test could soon be available to consumers for rapid testing in the home. The test could be approved for sale later this year

It's no cure, but it could mark a significant victory in the fight against HIV. A 17-member advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration has endorsed an over-the-counter HIV test that would allow consumers to test themselves for the AIDS-causing virus in the privacy of their own homes in just 20 minutes. While the test is not perfect, the advisory panel has deemed that the benefits of regular in-home testing outweigh potential risks, and have recommended the FDA approve the test for over-the-counter sales.

Made by Bethlehem, Penn.,-based Orasure, the test uses an oral swab to return an HIV diagnosis in a matter of minutes. It is already available for use in clinical settings, and while it's not quite as accurate as actual lab diagnostics it could help curb the spread of HIV by allowing for discrete, more regular testing. HIV and AIDS are largely spread via sexual contact from one partner to the other by those who do not realize they are infected with the virus.

If the advisory panel is right, the impact could be significant. Estimates indicate that roughly 240,000 people among the 1.2 million HIV carriers in the U.S. are unaware they are infected. That's a full one-fifth. Education and other means of prevention have held the rate of new infections more or less steady at about 50,000 per year over the past 20 years in the U.S. The test has shown to be accurate in positively identifying HIV in trials 93 percent of the time. That means if everyone was testing regularly, Orasure's test would still miss roughly 3,800 cases. But it would correctly diagnose 45,000 infected individuals. The FDA estimates that overall, the test could prevent 4,000 new cases each year.

Other at-home HIV tests can be purchased over the counter, but they still rely on consumers to take a blood sample and send it in to a lab for testing. Making HIV testing easy will encourage it as a regular practice, authorities hope, while also adding a layer of discretion and privacy around a sensitive topic. A survey showed that 84 percent of gay and bisexual men would test themselves more regularly if they could do so in their own home with an over-the-counter test (men who engage in sexual contact with other men are generally considered at higher risk for acquiring HIV).

The endorsement by the panel, however, does not spell approval for Orasure's at-home 20-minute test. It still has to pass top-level FDA approval, a process that will take the panels findings into account. A final decision is expected later this year. The clinical version of the test reportedly retails to doctors for $17.50, but there's no word on what consumer pricing might be.

[R&D]

Mission Extension Vehicle A ViviSat Mission Extension Vehicle (front, gold satellite) approaches an ailing geostationary satellite and prepares to dock. ViviSat

Aside from a couple particularly nasty collisions, dead satellites comprise the bulk of our planet's space junk problem - as they die, get fried by radiation and become zombies, or are decommissioned, there's nowhere for them to go. ViviSat aims to change that by servicing satellites where they are, pushing them into new orbits and allowing them to live longer.

ViviSat, which was founded last year, says it is in contract negotiations with satellite providers to work as a sort of on-call satellite doctor. When a satellite ends up in the wrong orbit or needs extra power to maintain it, ViviSat can launch a Mission Extension Vehicle to rendezvous with it.

It would launch on an ATK rocket, which could fit two at a time. Once it reaches orbit, it unfurls a solar array and sensors to track down the satellite it's meant to assist. When it reaches its target, it uses proximity sensors and other tools to dock with the ailing orbiter, and then it could push it into a different orbit. It wouldn't add fuel or take anything off the host satellite, which ViviSat says is a plus, because satellite builders may not want a third-party company tinkering with its massively expensive spy array or whatnot.

About 350 satellites orbit Earth in geostationary paths, and every year, about 25 of these run out of fuel, according to the company. Maybe 10 of those 25 are good candidates for an MEV servicing - not a huge number, but one that could still cut down on space waste.

ViviSat is a partnership between rocket launcher ATK and U.S. Space, which will manage the missions. At a conference this spring, ViviSat officials said government and private entities are interested in their services. The company just released this animation explaining how its MEV would work.

Consider your serenity shattered

It was bound to happen and we can't say we're surprised that the forward-leaning Virgin Atlantic is the one doing it. As of yesterday passengers aboard Virgin's new Airbus A330-300 aircraft flying London-NYC routes can use their cell phones to make calls from 35,000 feet. Customers will also be able to send text messages and access the Web via GPRS. The only restrictions on usage will be during takeoff and landing or within 250 miles of U.S. airspace.

The catch? The service will be available to only six callers at a time (due to low bandwidth across the satellite connection enabling this), and thus far it's unclear exactly how Virgin is going to police the cabin to ensure everyone's calls aren't tripping over each other. Virgin envisions the system being used for "exceptional situations," like when someone absolutely needs to get a call through to the office while trapped on a transatlantic flight.

Related Articles Virgin America: Charming, but no EdenAirbus Plane of the Future Concept Has Smart Fuselage, See-Through WallsUsing Phones In-FlightTagsTechnology, Clay Dillow, air travel, aviation, cell phones, TRAVEL, virgin atlanticTransatlantic flights, of course, are often overnight journeys. That will likely spell more noise in a cabin where most people are trying to sleep. Virgin therefore may have to restrict the times of day when passengers can take advantage of this new amenity. Add to that the fact that the system currently only works with European cell phone providers O2 and Vodafone and U.S. carrier T-Mobile, and you've basically got a new feature that works for only small number from an already limited group of passengers on a certain aircraft model flying a particular route at certain times of day.

However, Virgin's in-flight calling capability will spread to nearly 20 planes by year's end, the company says, and as the technology improves over time passengers can expect this capability to grow in terms of both cell service carriers and number of simultaneous callers allowed. Even the slow-to-embrace-change U.S. Federal Aviation Administration might get on board at some point, opening in-flight calling to U.S. airspace. There's no telling if that's a good thing or a really, really annoying thing-- sometimes the best part about being airborne is also being unplugged. But working in the favor of those who prefer a silent seat-mate: international roaming rates apply.

It's worth noting that Virgin isn't the first airline to allow cell phone usage during flights, but it is the first major Western airline to do so. Dubai-based Emirates was the first carrier to allow in-flight calls back in 2008, and other Middle Eastern national and regional carriers have since followed suit.

[WaPo]

So Long and Thanks For All the Fish U.S. Navy photo by Veronica Birmingham

Communication with dolphins is getting better all the time - they've been using iPads, for one thing, and humans have been working on a type of Rosetta Stone-like two-way translation device. A new gadget could improve matters even further, by allowing humans to produce the full range of dolphin sounds. The acoustics researchers who developed it call it the Dolphin Speaker.

Plenty of work is being done with dolphin sounds, but they have mostly focused on dolphin vocalizations and their hearing anatomy. Dolphins can not only hear and produce clicks, whistles and burst pulses well outside of the range of human hearing, but they can vocalize at several different frequency ranges at once. This ocean broadband is key for communication and navigation.

To better understand how these sounds are produced, how they travel and even what they mean, researchers need to be able to play them back, watching how dolphins react. This speaker can do it, producing sounds from 6 kHz to 170 kHz. While others have worked in the low-frequency ranges, this is the first type that can cover the whole spectrum.

Researchers led by Yuka Mishima, a graduate student at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, built a new transducer sandwiched between pieces of acrylic to keep it safe from water. A quadruple piezoelectric panel can broadcast high-frequency sounds, and a single silver circle broadcasts low-frequency sounds, Mishima explains in a presentation about the research. They took it to the ocean and played some dolphin sounds, comparing the sound spectrograms with natural recorded spectrograms obtained from dolphins. The charts looked mighty similar, the researchers say.

The next step is to play back a whole sequence of dolphin noises to dolphins and watch what happens. The paper is being presented at the Acoustical Society of America meeting this week.

[Acoustical Society of America via Extreme Tech]

'Future Rolls-Royce' by Syd Mead (1967) via BravinLee ProgramsFrom the man who brought you the future of transit via 'TRON' and 'Blade Runner'

Getting around in the future is going to be something of a trip, at least to let classics of science fiction like TRON, Blade Runner, Aliens, and Star Trek tell the story. In a rare glimpse into the mind of the man that largely shaped Hollywood's sci-fi representation of the future of transport, a collection of visionary designer Syd Mead's paintings is currently on display in Manhattan.

Mead is probably best known for his work on vehicle design and environments for Hollywood films, particularly future-leaning titles like the ones mentioned above, all of which benefitted from Mead's artistic touches (those Blade Runner "spinner" cars? That's Syd Mead.). But he was also a prolific painter, using gouache--a thicker, heavier form of watercolor--to bring form to his many visions of what the future might hold.

A former designer for Ford Motor Company, Mead's work has always listed heavily toward transit (his design shop is based in Detroit). So while his work often portrayed utopian futures playing out, say, on distant planets or aboard spaceships, personal transit and particularly future analogs for the automobile are a theme throughout his body of work, which at this point reaches back far enough that it can be viewed in the context of today's cars (for instance, his Future Rolls Royce leaves something to be desired as a predictor of the future--painted in 1967, it shares little with the actual Rolls-Royce designs of 2012--and yet is undeniably amazing in its conjecture).

Others, like 2003's Hypervan (pictured below), could still prove prescient. The exhibition, titled "Future (Perfect), runs through June 30 at BravinLee Programs in Chelsea in NYC.

[via Core77]