“Periodical cicadas have the longest life cycles known for insects. They are called ‘periodical’ because in any one population all but a trivially small fraction are exactly the same age. The nymphs suck juices from the roots of forest trees and finally emerge from the ground, become adults, mate, lay their eggs, and die, all within the same few weeks of every 17^th (or in the South, every 13^th) year. Not one species does this, but three, and they always do it together.”
—Monte Lloyd and Henry S. Dybas, 1966

There is safety in numbers or, at least, there is survival in numbers. That is the maxim that periodical cicadas live by.

Periodical cicadas—insects of the genus Magicicada—are remarkable creatures. They develop extremely slowly, underground, before surfacing en masse at either 13- or 17-year intervals, when the ground temperature reaches 64 degrees Fahrenheit. As described in the epigraph above, they quickly mate, lay eggs and die, disappearing from view until their offspring crawl out of the ground more than a dozen years later.

Much has been made of this year’s cicada emergence, but in fact periodical cicadas rise to reproduce in most years: there are 15 different geographic “broods” of periodical cicadas, each on its own synchronized life cycle. This year, brood II—which stretches from North Carolina to New York and Connecticut—is emerging for the first time since 1996. Meanwhile the 14 other broods are maturing underground, awaiting their turn in the limelight.

Staying Alive
Periodical cicadas are only found in the forests of the Eastern U.S. (Other, more numerous species of nonperiodical cicadas appear more often and in more locations.) The genus Magicicada includes seven species: three 17-year cicadas in the northern U.S. and four 13-year cicadas in the south. Those species are more broadly divided into three groups: decula, cassini and decim. For each group there exists a 13- and a 17-year species—for instance, the 13-year Magicicada tredecula and the 17-year Magicicada septendecula—which, other than their lifespans and their geographic range, are almost indistinguishable. Amazingly, a single brood often contains multiple species, which grow alongside one another as nymphs and emerge from the ground in synchrony but do not interbreed. The video above shows the subtle visual differences between the species and the much more dramatic differences between their respective mating calls.

Synchronized life cycles deliver Magicicada a major benefit: when all the insects emerge at once, their predators, which can only eat so much, become sated before consuming the entire population. It is a brute-force survival tactic—akin to storming a fortress, unarmed, in huge numbers—but it works.

The long life cycles of periodical cicadas have fascinated entomologists for decades. As Richard D. Alexander and Thomas E. Moore of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor put it in 1962:

Their incredible ability to merge by the million as noisy, flying, gregarious, photo-positive adults within a matter of hours after having spent 13 or 17 years underground as silent, burrowing, solitary, sedentary juveniles is without parallel in the animal kingdom.

And for years researchers have sought to explain how the Magicicada life cycles developed, why they are so long, and why they are both prime numbers.

Why So Slow?
The pronounced elongation of the Magicicada life span may trace to about 20,000 years ago, during the last glacial period. The colder conditions then may simply have slowed the growth and development of cicadas—as suggested in 1997 by Jin Yoshimura, now of Shizuoka University in Japan—thereby extending what had been a somewhat shorter lifespan toward the long life cycles that exist today. (Warmer ground temperatures in the south as compared to the north allow cicadas to develop more rapidly, which may account for their shorter 13-year life cycles.)

Alternately, the insects may have adapted to life in the glacial period by extending their life cycle so as to limit the chances of emerging in an unusually cold year that would prevent mating. As proposed in 1988 by Randel Tom Cox, now at the University of Memphis, and C. E. Carlton, now at Louisiana State University, the lifespan of Magicicada ancestors may have “increased progressively to lengths similar to those observed today as an adaptive strategy during glacial stades in which maximum annual temperatures may occasionally not have reached the critical level for flight and copulation…. The longer the nymphal life cycle, the smaller the chance of emerging during a cold summer.” Such an effect would be strongest in colder climates, which would also explain the longer 17-year lifespans of northern Magicicada species.

Primed for Success
If a cold climate forced cicadas to develop long lifespans, the insects may have emerged from the last glacial period with a spectrum of life cycles, perhaps ranging from 12 to 20 years. Eventually two of those life cycles, 13 and 17 years, won out.

The fact that the surviving periodical cicadas have life cycles built on prime numbers may have conferred key survival advantages. A prime-numbered lifespan means that predators cannot match their own shorter life cycles to the availability of cicada prey. For instance, if the cicadas had even-numbered lifespans, a predator with a two-year life cycle could expect a cicada feast, and a subsequent population bump, every few generations, because all even numbers are divisible by two. As explained in 2001 by a trio of researchers from the University of Chile and the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology in Germany, “a prey with a 12-year cycle will meet—every time it appears—properly synchronized predators appearing every 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 or 12 years, whereas a mutant with a 13-year period has the advantage of being subject to fewer predators.” Prime numbers are still divisible by themselves and by 1, of course, but they have no other divisors.

On the other hand, prime lifespans may relate to periodic overlaps between different cicada species, rather than overlaps between cicadas and their predators. The two prime-numbered life cycles of Magicicada ensure that asynchronous broods rarely interact where their geographic ranges overlap—a 13-year cycle and a 17-year cycle match up only once every 221 years. Those rare meetups may confer the advantage of preventing the two groups from mating and producing hybrid offspring. As Cox and Carlton wrote in 2003, “cicadas that are hybrids of two populations with different life cycle lengths will suffer greater predation losses, as many may emerge on years before or after the main population. Cicadas with prime-numbered cycles (13 years and 17 years) will hybridize significantly less frequently than cicadas with non-prime (composite) cycles and thus will have larger emergences and a greater advantage of predator satiation.”

More recently, in a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers in Japan and the U.S. have deployed genetic evidence in support of a different model: that periodical cicadas simply jumped from one life cycle to the other. “They are time travelers,” says study co-author Chris Simon of the University of Connecticut. “They undergo these four-year accelerations or decelerations in their life cycles. If you go to a site where 17-year cicadas emerge, you’ll find a lot of them coming out four years early.” Some stragglers will also emerge four years late.

Given a large enough population of Magicicada, the insects emerging four years off-schedule could form a group numerous enough to survive predation, thus spinning off their own population on a new life cycle. Four years is a key offset—populations separated by less than that seem not to be able to coexist in the same location, perhaps because of fierce competition for resources between nymphs growing underground.

Once a 13-year brood had successfully spun off from a 17-year brood, or vice versa, that new population would act as a “nurse brood,” Simon and her colleagues argue, protecting invading cicada populations—provided that the invaders adapted to the new life cycle as well. “Natural selection would have promoted synchronization of invading populations to resident populations because invaders would gain protection from predation and, consequently, avoid Allee effects (failure to reproduce due to low population density),” the researchers propose. In that case, the four-year gap between the two life cycles may be more important than the fact that both are prime numbers. Says Simon: “It’s hard to say whether 13 and 17 is an accident or whether it has an advantage.”

As brood II makes its long-awaited 21^st-century debut, Simon and her colleagues are out in the field studying these unique insects and working to uncover the basis for their extreme behaviors. She notes that anyone in the vicinity of a cicada brood can aid in this ongoing investigation by reporting cicada sightings to magicicada.org, a Web site run by her University of Connecticut colleague and PNAS study co-author John Cooley.

And now, for your viewing pleasure, here are the expected emergences of periodical cicadas in the next few hundred years:

On May 3, in just under 20 hours, the Solar Impulse airplane flew from Moffett Field near San Francisco to Sky Harbor International Airport in Phoenix. After the long, slow flight, the solar airplane still had 75 percent of its battery power remaining when pilot Bertrand Piccard, who previously circumnavigated the globe in a balloon, landed the unwieldy aircraft just after midnight local time. A full breakdown of the technology that makes the manned solar airplane possible is here, including a slide show.

And here’s a brief video explainer answering the most important question: how do the pilots go to the bathroom during these epic flights?

The solar airplane has been waiting in Phoenix for the winds in Dallas to die down. After all, the solar airplane can’t handle turbulence, let alone cloudy weather. “We are extremely meticulous about flight planning,” Borschberg says. This flight will take Borschberg over Roswell, N.M.—hopefully not prompting U.F.O. fears—among other communities before a planned arrival in Dallas around 1 A.M. local time on May 24. After Dallas, the next interim stop will be St. Louis and the journey will end in New York City in late June or July.

Just last week the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released an internal study that judged how well its National Weather Service (NWS) did in predicting Hurricane Sandy. The report came to a curious conclusion: “The National Weather Service provided accurate forecasts for Sandy, giving people early awareness of the significant storm churning toward the mid-Atlantic and Northeast…. Forecasters performed well predicting the track of this extremely large and complex storm.”

But the weather community knows full well that the so-called European model for medium-range forecasts predicted that Sandy would “turn left” from the Atlantic Ocean toward the mid-Atlantic coast—a highly unusual path—while all the American models had the hurricane drifting northeast off to sea. It took several days before U.S. models began to show the same track that the European model had been indicating all along. The new head of the NWS, Louis Uccellini, recently acknowledged that the lag was a “miss” and told the Reuters news service that the European model is “the number one model, there’s no question about that.”

NOAA’s report may be political cover, or it may be an attempt to change the subject, because it goes on to say that its review did reveal that the NWS can do better in getting people to heed its storm warnings. That challenge is a sticky one, though, involving complex social and psychological factors.

Perhaps the NWS itself knows it can improve hurricane forecasts. Last week it announced it would use $25 million recently appropriated by Congress to upgrade some of it supercomputers. U.S. hurricane models have a resolution of 25 kilometers, yet the European model has a resolution of 16 kilometers. Tighter resolution could allow forecasters to better assess how a hurricane is growing and moving, given that the inner core of such a storm is often in the range of 80 kilometers across. Predicting how high a coastal hurricane’s storm surge might be—often the cause of the greatest damage—is even harder than predicting its path, however, and might require different advances.

Technology alone is not the answer, however. “A new computer is really good, but you also need the people to use it,” says Chris Davis, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo. “It takes a lot of work to use that better resolution well.” Researchers must properly recalibrate models to exploit the new resolution, and must learn how to interpret the results.

Although Davis thinks improved resolution is helpful, he maintains that better coordination among researchers could provide greater gains. Right now the NWS uses its exclusive models, university-based researchers like those at NCAR use their own, and private weather services use their own as well. If, instead, the three research groups integrated their work, forecasts could improve regardless of the technology used. “There has to be a better way to entrain all the people in the research community,” Davis says. “I would argue that the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting does that better.”

Greater cooperation also begs the question of whether U.S. models have to be the best in the world, which is what most NWS supporters say. Not necessarily, Davis notes. “We would want a model that on average is as good as the European model, but it doesn’t have to be better.” Actually, forecasts would be more likely to improve “if the U.S. model was equally as good but made different kinds of errors.”

All models have strengths and weaknesses, he explains, but if an improved U.S. model essentially duplicated the European model, it would not provide much new insight. If new U.S. models had different traits, “then we’d get much more insight when we combined the U.S. and European models,” which could provide earlier and more accurate forecasts. Davis suggests that NWS use funding not just to upgrade computers but to develop new forecasting techniques that might lead to models with unique attributes.

Infrared image of Hurricane Sandy courtesy of U.S. Navy

Credit: StarDate

Cicadas aren’t the only scientific rarity expected this month. At the end of May three planets will be visible to the naked eye in one small area of the sky. The planets Mercury, Venus and Jupiter will form “the tightest gathering of three naked-eye planets that the world will see until 2026,” according to the venerable Sky & Telescope magazine.

“Add the Earth under your feet, and you’re seeing half of the solar system’s planets at once,” Sky & Telescope senior editor Alan MacRobert said in a prepared statement.

For viewers in the northern midlatitudes (including the U.S. and most of Europe), the best place to look for the trio is “in the western twilight about half an hour after sunset Saturday [see diagram above] and for a few days after,” according to StarDate, a magazine published by The University of Texas at Austin’s McDonald Observatory. The three planets will draw into closest alignment on the evenings of May 25 and 26 [see orbital diagram below]. Tiny Mercury, which orbits close to the sun, is usually much harder to spot than Venus and Jupiter, “but its proximity to them will make it stand out,” StarDate predicts.

A diagram of the solar system on May 25. Orbits of Mercury, Venus and Mars have been hidden for clarity. Credit: JPL/NASA

The near-alignment of three planets is indeed unusual, but it is only a warmup for an even rarer celestial event in 2040. In September of that year, all five bright planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn—will cluster in the evening sky.

The MQ-8 Fire Scout is an unmanned autonomous helicopter developed by Northrop Grumman for U.S. military. Image courtesy of Dammit, via WikiMedia Commons

Drones come in a variety of shapes, sizes and capabilities that could greatly improve surveillance for law enforcement and public-safety purposes, whether it’s monitoring forest fires or providing reconnaissance for search-and-rescue operations. This technological diversity has served the U.S. military well, but it has a dark side in threats to personal privacy—and makes drones difficult to regulate.

In a subcommittee hearing that could play a crucial role in shaping drone policy—especially given that the technology is so new that current case law provides little guidance—legislators and legal experts gathered on Friday in Washington, D.C., to hash through the matter. They found a lot to disagree about, including whether existing U.S. laws—including the Fourth Amendment—are sufficient to protect privacy, or, assuming more laws are needed, whether the right frameworks should center on types of technologies or types of drone missions.

Congress has given the Federal Aviation Administration until 2015 to come up with rules governing domestic drone use. Fresh thinking is needed, as Scientific American noted in a recent editorial.

The overriding question is the impact of drone use on privacy. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to hear a case specifically involving drone use, plenty of laws already on the books as well as legal precedents can guide drone use, John Villasenor, a nonresident senior fellow at Brookings Institution, said during Friday’s House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations hearing. The Fourth Amendment, for example, protects U.S. residents against unreasonable searches and seizures and requires probable cause for a court to issue a search warrant specific to a given location. Any new laws must consider the legality of a particular drone’s mission rather than the specific technology in use, he added.

Given the speed of technological change, it’s tempting for lawmakers to create frameworks that regulate the use of certain equipment, such as infrared cameras or systems that can keep drones in the air for days at a time without needing to refuel. But doing so would miss the point, said, Gregory McNeal, associate professor at Pepperdine University School of Law. It might be more effective for Congress to craft simple surveillance legislation, not specific to drones, that addresses the duration of a surveillance operation, as opposed to the platform used to do the surveillance. As an aid toward tracking correct usage, Congress could mandate that agencies employing drones catalog and publicly reveal their operations—where, when, drone type and purpose of surveillance, for example.

Aeryon Scout UAV in flight. Image courtesy of Dkroetsch, via WikiMedia Commons.

The American Civil Liberties Union disagreed that existing laws can manage drone use, explaining that potential privacy incursions can’t be compared with other methods of surveillance, particularly when as insect-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) could someday act, literally, as a fly on the wall. Although drone use has been limited by cost and capability, this is changing, Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel at the ACLU’s Washington legislative office, testified. He suggested that any new laws be based on four guiding principles:

1. Following the principle that the accused are innocent until proved guilty, the government should not use drones for widespread surveillance of large areas in the hope of catching some wrongdoing. Instead, drone use should be subject to a warrant targeting a particular person and/or location.
2. Information collected via drones for one purpose should not be used for other purposes and should be destroyed after it is no longer needed.
3. Drones should not carry weapons; a drone does not have to defend itself or to apprehend someone, nor do drone operators necessarily have the training to determine when to use force.
4. Ongoing oversight is crucial and should include feedback from the communities in which that drone is used.

Also discussed was the intersection of drones near private property. A 1989 Supreme Court decision ruled that police may use helicopters to peer into semiprivate areas—say, the backyard of a home—without first obtaining a warrant. Does this give local law enforcement the green light to deploy a fleet of drone helicopters equipped with high-definition and infrared cameras over a particular neighborhood?

Some legislators asserted that citizens have the right to privacy against drones while on their own property. “If you have private land, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy even from the air,” Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R—Utah) said.

Following this line of thinking, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-Texas) asked whether any laws prohibit landowners from shooting down drones lingering over their property. Villasenor noted that the landowner would be liable for any injuries resulting from the takedown, but Rep. Frank Sensenbrenner (R—Wisc.) quickly noted that the hearing had run out of time and adjourned before any additional responses could be made to Gohmert’s question.

The debate’s hasty conclusion punctuated the message that the legalities surrounding drone use here are still very much up in the air.

City skies (right) are often significantly dimmed by sky glow. Credit: Jeremy Stanley

Step out into the darkness a few hours after sunset. What do you see overhead? If you live in a relatively unpopulated part of the world, you might see the broad stripe of the Milky Way splashed against a backdrop of black sky punctuated by countless stars. If, on the other hand, you live in a teeming metropolis, what’s visible might have much more to do with where you find yourself on the planet than where we find ourselves in the galaxy.

Artificial illumination has dramatically changed the night sky across the globe. And considering that more than half of people worldwide live in urban areas—and more than one fifth live in large cities of one million or more inhabitants—light pollution obscures the stars above billions of people.

Since 2006 a project called GLOBE at Night has been quantifying light pollution using the very people it affects as measuring instruments. The project enlists citizen scientists to make naked-eye observations of a given constellation, then compare what they see with a series of star charts calibrated for different levels of light pollution. Participants submit their observations via an online form. The GLOBE at Night’s most recent campaign, for 2012, gathered nearly 17,000 observations from participants in 92 countries. (The 2013 campaign is still accepting data for a few more weeks.)

Now a new study analyzing several years of GLOBE at Night data reveals some of the promise of the project—as well as its limitations. Aggregated data from the citizen scientists are indeed strongly correlated with levels of sky glow—artificial light scattered by the atmosphere—as estimated from satellite data. The amateur observations could thus find use in tracking regional or global changes in light pollution over time, note Christopher Kyba of the Free University of Berlin and his colleagues in a study published May 16 in the online, open-access journal Scientific Reports. (Scientific American and Scientific Reports are both parts of Nature Publishing Group.) But the data points are too imprecise to say much about local changes.

Sky glow over a populated area. Credit: Ralf Steikert

The researchers note that although the human eye has its foibles, it does have some advantages over satellites and other electronic sensors. For one thing, humans are everywhere—and, increasingly, so are smartphones and other portable devices with Internet access. Then there is the fact that the human eye is relatively stable instrument. “Satellite sensors are replaced on a timescale of a few years, whereas the evolution of the human eye proceeds much more slowly,” the researchers note. As such, gathering naked-eye observations over many years or decades may allow for apples-to-apples comparisons of sky glow now with that in the future.

Light pollution is more than just an aesthetic and astronomical concern, Kyba and his colleagues note. Some species, such as dung beetles, have been shown to navigate by the light of the Milky Way, and those creatures could struggle in places where the stars are veiled by light pollution.

Kepler artist's conception. Courtesy NASA

The prolific planet-hunting spacecraft that has already discovered some of the most intriguing exoplanets known has abruptly lost the capacity to carry out its mission, NASA officials announced May 15.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, which launched in 2009, relies on an array of flywheels, or reaction-wheel assemblies, to stabilize the pointing of its telescope toward a field of stars in the Milky Way. Kepler needs three of its four reaction wheels in working order to carry out its exoplanetary mission, and the spacecraft had already lost one wheel in July 2012. Now a second wheel appears to have failed, and unless it can be revived the spacecraft’s search for extrasolar worlds may be over.

“Basically we need three wheels in service to give us the pointing precision we need to find planets,” Kepler principal investigator Bill Borucki of the NASA Ames Research Center said in a teleconference with reporters. “Without three wheels it’s unclear whether we could do anything of that order.”

One of the remaining reaction wheels, which had been giving indications of trouble for some time, was discovered to have failed yesterday. The spacecraft is programmed to go into a protective safe mode when it loses its ability to orient its telescope. “Yesterday we turned on the antennas on the ground and we found the spacecraft was in safe mode,” said Charles Sobeck, deputy project manager for Kepler at NASA Ames, adding that mission controllers then attempted to fire up the reaction wheels. “We did that and we initially saw some movement of the wheels, but wheel four went back to zero speed.” He said the plan now was to put Kepler into a parking mode that will preserve its fuel while mission planners decide what to do next.

Kepler has already identified more than 100 confirmed exoplanets, including nearly all of the worlds discovered to date that are comparable in size to Earth. But mission scientists have yet to deliver the prize that astronomers have been waiting for: an Earth-size planet orbiting in the habitable zone of a sunlike star—in other words, the first planet that might pass for our own. Even more important, it is hoped that Kepler will reveal how common such planets are, thereby providing an indication of how many potentially habitable locales exist in the galaxy.

But Borucki said that “we’re well on our way” to determining the prevalence of roughly Earth-size planets in the habitable zone, noting that the spacecraft has already collected roughly two years of data “that has not been fully searched for planets.” Added John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, “We’re not ready to call the mission over, but by any measure this has been a very successful mission.”

Bell Labs Holmdel Complex, where Hofmann is based. Courtesy of MBisanz, via WikiMedia Commons

Apple introduces the latest “i”-gadget; Samsung takes the reins as the world’s leading smartphone provider; Blackberry mounts an all-or-nothing comeback.

Just a typical day of tech headlines, right? Dig deeper, however, and you have to wonder what impact all of these new multimedia devices will have on the networks that give them life. Short answer: Real-time streaming video and other large-byte-size content are gobbling up bandwidth on the Internet, a network of networks originally designed to share documents and data.

Researchers working behind the scenes—away from the glitzy tablet computer launches and smartphone marketing campaigns—are tasked with ensuring that the Internet and mobile networks can accommodate the exponential traffic increases that these new gadgets portend. In the June issue of Scientific American, Markus Hofmann, head of Bell Labs Research, the research and development arm of Alcatel–Lucent, describes how he and his team of engineers are developing ways to help the Internet more efficiently route information, a move that should free up network bandwidth and reduce traffic bottlenecks.

Hofmann provides some additional insight into his work in a July 2012 podcast that Bell Labs posted to YouTube. In the podcast Hofmann emphasizes the importance of not only pushing past current wireless bandwidth limitations—via small cells, optical antenna arrays and dynamic spectrum management—but also designing new networks in a way that can manage a variety of mobile uses, such as the explosion of smartphone and tablet apps or simply uploading/downloading video on the go.

Re-Mission 2: Nanobot's Revenge

Doctors can’t inject cancer patients with intelligent nanobots programmed to launch surgical counterstrikes against the disease. That didn’t stop a team of medical researchers and software programmers from developing a video game several years ago that helped young patients imagine such an empowering scenario. Based on the success of that project, the team recently launched a sequel geared for mobile devices that they hope will further encourage kids undergoing chemotherapy and other treatments to better understand what’s happening inside their bodies and how they might regain their health.

Re-Mission 2 is a collection of six free online games—accessible via Web browser or Apple iPad—that share the theme of taking the fight to cancer. They do this by arming patients with a virtual arsenal of chemo, radiation and targeted cancer drug attacks designed to crush advancing malignant forces. The game—and its 2006 predecessor Re-Mission—are the product of HopeLab, a nonprofit founded in 2001 by Pamela Omidyar, wife of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

It’s hard to deny that a diversion such as “Stem Cell Defender,” in which players protect white blood cells from a bacteria invasion by unleashing antibiotic bombs, could do wonders for a child’s morale during long waits at a doctor’s office or hospital. (Bacterial infections, nausea and constipation are some treatment-related effects patients may experience.) HopeLab, however, insists the games do more even more than this, claiming they improve treatment outcomes by educating young patients about the disease and how it can be fought. Such knowledge makes these patients more likely to adhere closely to their treatment regimens.

HopeLab has backed this claim over the past few years with a number of studies, although the organization is careful not to directly associate game play with actual cancer remission. In the most recent study, HopeLab worked with Stanford University associate professor of psychology and neuroscience Brian Knutson on a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study analyzing brain regions activated when people play the original Re-Mission. The paper, published in the March 2012 PLoS ONE, compared brain scans in 57 cancer-free undergraduates who were randomly assigned to actively play Re-Mission or passively watch the game. Re-Mission players experienced more activity in neural circuits associated with incentive motivation when compared to those who merely observed game play. Such reward-related activation could shift attitudes and emotions and boost players’ adherence to prescribed chemotherapy and antibiotic treatments to fight infection, the researchers said, although they acknowledge that further tests are needed on actual cancer patients before they can read too much into the results.

A young cancer patient plays Re-Mission 2: Nanobot's Revenge in a waiting room at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital in Palo Alto, Calif.

An earlier study published in the journal Pediatrics in August 2008 (pdf) sought to determine whether video games could encourage adolescent and young-adult cancer patients to more consistently take self-administered treatments such as oral chemotherapy, a particularly difficult problem in that age group. The study—which included 374 adolescents and young adults with malignancies including acute leukemia, lymphoma, and soft-tissue sarcoma—found that those who played Re-Mission took their medication more consistently, increased their knowledge of the disease and generally played a more active role in their treatment (pdf). Although that study was led by principal investigator and former HopeLab president and CEO Pamela Kato, it also included researchers from West Virginia University and the University of Texas Health Science Center.

Re-Mission 2 caters to kids who have grown up playing Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja and other games on the Internet or via apps on their mobile devices. In fact, the sequel can be played only online or on the iPad. HopeLab is working on versions that will work on Android devices. This is a calculated switch from the format of the original version of Re-Mission, which took players on a quest heavily influenced by popular video games at the time, most notably Tomb Raider. Instead of Lara Croft, Re-Mission featured a microscopic robot named Roxxi, clad in form-fitting silver body armor, who traveled through the bodies of fictional cancer patients, blasting cancer cells and battling the side-effects of cancer and its treatments.

The Re-Mission re-boot is a welcome change, says Brooke Jaffe, a 21-year-old junior at Barnard College in New York City. Quest games like Tomb Raider that are played on PCs and video game consoles like Xbox or the Wii can be intimidating to people who don’t already play them, adds Jaffe, an English major who became aware of HopeLab’s work after she was successfully treated for papillary carcinoma—thyroid cancer—in 2011.

Re-Mission 2 is a much more casual approach to gaming. It may not have the complicated 3-D graphics and the emphasis on anatomical realism of its predecessor, but it’s certainly more accessible to a kid waiting to undergo treatment, or who is fatigued from having just undergone treatment, says Jaffe, one of 120 teens and young adults HopeLab recruited to help develop and evaluate Re-Mission 2. The idea is that patients will get a lot more enjoyment from playing 10 minutes of one of Re-Mission 2’s simpler games than they would from 10 minutes of the original version, which might require 30 minutes of play to get past the first level.

Images courtesy of HopeLab

In preparation for his departure from the ISS, Hadfield has recorded a version of David Bowie’s classic “Space Oddity,” complete with some orbital strumming on an acoustic guitar and ambient sounds that Hadfield taped on the station. (See this video for Hadfield’s explanation of why the space station has an onboard guitar, and why it’s hard to play guitar in space.) The surprisingly polished video is embedded below. The response from the Bowie camp has been positive—the singer’s official Twitter and Facebook accounts both shared the video. (Bowie’s reaction to that most modern of online phenomena—the YouTube tribute—seems appropriate, given that this is the same man who in 1998 launched his own Internet service provider.)

Hadfield is scheduled to land in Kazakhstan at 10:31 P.M. (EDT) on Monday. Expect to see him making the talk-show rounds shortly thereafter.

Muon storage ring at Brookhaven. Credit: BNL

When NASA flew the shuttle prototype Enterprise through New York City last year, all we had to do was look out our windows at Scientific American one morning to watch it cruise past. Countless Americans got a look at one of the decommissioned shuttles as NASA paraded them around the country en route to their new homes at various museums. Part of the thrill was in getting close to the shuttles, of course, but there was also the appeal of seeing something so exotic gracing the mundane streets, the skies and the waterways of our cities.

But as large and heavy as the shuttles are, transporting them was relatively simple because their scientific lives were already over. The orbiters could withstand plenty of jostling and even a few accidental dings during shipping and handling.

Not so with a giant magnetic ring that is scheduled to traverse a good swath of the U.S. this summer. The 50-foot-wide ring, filled with superconducting coils, was built in the 1990s at Brookhaven National Laboratory on New York’s Long Island as part of an experiment to investigate the properties of the muon, a heavy, short-lived cousin of the electron. Physicists are planning to reuse the apparatus as a particle-storage ring for a new run of the experiment, called Muon g-2. The new iteration may be able to confirm an anomaly suggested by the Brookhaven data—specifically, that the muon’s spin reacts differently to a magnetic field than predicted by the Standard Model of particle physics.

The only catch is that the new experiment will take place at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, near Chicago, whose particle accelerators can produce better beams of muons. Building a new magnet there would cost far more than moving the old one. But pulling off the move will hardly be easy, as a statement from Brookhaven explains:

While most of the machine can be disassembled and brought to Fermilab in trucks, the massive electromagnet must be transported in one piece. It also cannot tilt or twist more than a few degrees, or the complex wiring inside will be irreparably damaged. The Muon g-2 team has devised a plan to make the 3,200-mile journey that involves loading the ring onto a specially prepared barge and bringing it down the East Coast, around the tip of Florida and up the Mississippi River to Illinois.

A model demonstrates how a truck will pull the Muon g-2 ring (slowly) down the street. Credit: Fermilab

The move will begin in early June and end in late July. At either end of the barge trip the magnet will travel by truck, at a crawl of no more than 10 miles per hour. But the slow-moving road trip is scheduled for nighttime—one night in New York and two nights in Illinois—to limit the traffic impact. So if you want to get a glimpse at an exotic particle-physics apparatus cruising the streets, you’ll have to do more than just look out your window.

But yesterday Republicans boycotted a vote on Gina McCarthy, President Barack Obama’s nominee to become the new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. She would fill the spot left by Lisa Jackson, who stepped down. McCarthy faced little dissent when the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held confirmation hearings in April. But just before the committee’s scheduled vote on her nomination yesterday, which would have sent her name to the full Senate for a final confirmation, all eight Republicans on the committee of 18 failed to show up. Under Senate rules, the vote could not be taken.

The move was a surprise to committee chairwoman Barbara Boxer, a Democrat. In a last-minute letter sent to her by the Republican members, they said they wanted more answers about former administrator Jackson’s occasional use of a personal email account to conduct EPA business, allegedly to cloud transparency. After many Democrats objected loudly to the boycott—a rare event, reserved for a very contentious nominee—the Republican committee members indicated indirectly that they were not against McCarthy per se, but that their questions to her, during the hearings, about email conduct were not answered adequately. Critics of the move called it a stunt, pointing out that David Vitter, the top Republican on the committee, had asked McCarthy a record-breaking 653 questions, which she had answered.

Although neither the committee nor Boxer has released a statement yet about what might happen next, Congress-watchers say a new vote would be unlikely for two to three weeks.

More objections could arise if McCarthy’s name goes to the full Senate. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, for one, has said that he opposes the nomination because McCarthy would thwart the coal industry in his state of Kentucky. “I am concerned,” he wrote in a statement issued by his office, “that Gina McCarthy would continue to foster this administration’s radical environmental and anti-coal jobs agenda.”

The sudden blockade is surprising and disappointing because McCarthy has succeeded in bridging the infuriating gap between parties. McCarthy, 58, has been director of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation for four years, where she has developed a reputation for taking a collaborative, common sense approach to devising regulations. A shining example was her central role in setting new carbon pollution standards, issued jointly in 2011 with the Transportation Department’s new Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards, which raised the gas mileage that new cars and trucks must get by as a much as 50 percent by 2025. Although the rules are challenging, automobile manufacturers as well as consumer and business groups ultimately embraced them. The regulations, McCarthy told the Senate committee during the hearings, would save Americans more than $1.7 trillion in fuel costs and eliminate six billion tons of carbon pollution.

Her efforts earned praise from Richard Eidlin, policy director for the American Sustainable Business Council. In a May 1 blog for The Hill, a Web site that watches Congress, he wrote: “It is one of the great myths of our political debate that we must choose between economic growth and environmental protection. Gina McCarthy…has spent her career proving this a false choice.” He added that McCarthy has a knack for devising solutions to environmental issues that can improve market certainties and thus create opportunities for businesses.

Part of McCarthy’s ability to reach compromise stems from her prior posts. The Boston native was an environmental advisor to five Massachusetts governors—Democrats and Republicans—including former Gov. Mitt Romney, and was commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.

If approved, McCarthy could face issues that have been simmering at EPA because they are thornier than CAFÉ standards. Of note are proposed regulations on power plant emissions, a decision for President Obama on whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline to bring tar sands oil from Canada to the U.S. (which would raise carbon dioxide emissions in North America), and the never-ending battle between environmental and business groups over enforcement of clean air and water laws. Also, EPA’s multi-year study on the controversial environmental impacts of natural gas fracking is due in 2014.

Image courtesy of EPA on Wikimedia Commons

John Holdren, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), says the administration is taking concrete steps to address climate change and revamp science education in the U.S. Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls

President Obama has restored science to its rightful place in the White House, says John Holdren, Obama’s senior science advisor.

“Science is again where it should be,” he told an audience of 200 as part of a lecture series at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J. on Wednesday, although he warned that the president’s initiatives are threatened by a Congress hesitant to support them.

Holdren, who leads the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and co-chairs the President’s Council on Science and Technology (PCAST), told the crowd that he has helped Obama revitalize several science programs that lay dormant under the previous administration. These programs, he says, are integral to securing the U.S.’s position at the forefront of global innovation on climate change, biomedicine and, of course, space. He has had less success, however, ensuring funding for new research projects, particularly those that are experimental by nature. Citing a Congressional attempt to require research groups like the National Science Foundation (NSF) to prove that their projects are “in the national interest,” Holdren warns that the hurdle could have a freezing effect on critical scientific research.

As evidence of Obama’s achievements since entering the White House in March 2009, Holdren cites the resurrection of several international task forces aimed at addressing climate change, including a key partnership between the U.S. and some of the world’s other top polluters, such as China and India. The President has also jumpstarted another key partnership with China, the U.S.-China Innovation Dialogue, tasked with tackling cyber theft.

Under Obama, Holdren adds, PCAST has shifted priorities to give particular attention to climate change. In 2008, the President renamed the Climate Change Science Program (CCSP)—which under President Bush had focused primarily on research aimed at testing what he saw as theories of global warming—calling it the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), and turned it into a comprehensive national research program charged with assessing, predicting and responding to climate change. “He really likes working with scientists,” says Holdren of President Obama, “And he understands why science is important for the national agenda.”

The President has also used the 2014 budget to highlight scientific priorities, from preserving funding for USGCRP to setting aside money to overhaul science and math education. But he’s run into many obstacles, says Holdren, primarily in the form of a Congress that has been resistant to funding science programs. “It’s not the budget we’d wanted in better times,” remarks Holdren. Nevertheless, Obama has earmarked funding that would prepare an additional 100,000 science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) teachers for grades K-12 and create a Master Teaching Corps of leading science and math instructors. The Master Teaching Corps, which was supposed to receive funding in 2012, was returned to the 2014 budget after Congress refused to appropriate the necessary funds.

Beyond revamping the way science and math are taught in American schools, the President has taken pains to broadcast the importance of science to young people, Holdren says, noting that Obama has used the presidential pulpit to “talk more about science” and to increase the visibility of researchers and innovators by inviting them to such events as the three White House science fairs Obama has already overseen. “The President always says, if we bring football stars to the White House, we should certainly be bringing scientists.”

Interrupted by audience members complaining about the President’s cuts to funding for space exploration, Holdren replied that the NASA of the previous administration was badly managed and poorly funded. “The NASA we inherited was hopelessly behind schedule,” he said. He also added that Obama has taken steps to re-balance the administration’s space policy, including preserving $1 billion in funds (just a 0.8 percent cut) for NASA and continuing to fund Mars Curiosity, an SUV-sized robotic rover launched in 2011 whose mission Obama extended indefinitely in December 2012.

On May 2, after nightfall shut down photosynthesis for the day in Hawaii, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere touched 400 parts-per-million there for the first time in at least 800,000 years. Near the summit of volcanic Mauna Loa—where a member of the Keeling family has kept watch since 1958—sensors measured this record through sunrise the following day. Levels have continued to dance near that benchmark in recent days, registering above 400 ppm for the first time in eons after midnight on May 7. When the measurements started the daily average could be as low as 315 ppm, already up from a pre-industrial average of around 280 ppm.

This measurement is just the hourly average of CO2 levels high in the Hawaiian sky, but this family’s figures carry more weight than those made at other stations in the world as they have faithfully kept the longest record of atmospheric CO2. Arctic weather stations also hit the hourly 400 ppm mark last spring and this one. Regardless, the hourly levels at Mauna Loa will soon drop as spring kicks in across the northern hemisphere, trees budding forth an army of leaves hungrily sucking CO2 out of the sky.

Courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography

It may be next year before the monthly average level reaches 400 ppm—and yet longer still until the annual average reaches that number.

But there is no question that the world continues to inexorably climb toward higher levels of greenhouse gas concentrations. Barring economic recessions, the world may be lucky to stop at 450, 500 or even beyond. Last year, humanity spewed some 36 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases, up from 35 billion the year before.

In the coming year, Scientific American will run an occasional series, “400 ppm,” to examine what this invisible line in the sky means for the global climate, the planet and all the living things on it, including human civilization. Some scientists argue we passed the safe level for greenhouse gas concentrations long ago, pointing to the accelerating impacts, from extreme weather to the meltdown of Arctic sea ice. Others argue that we have yet more room to burn fossil fuels, clear forests and the like—but not much—before catastrophic climate change becomes inescapable. And the international community of nations has agreed that 450 ppm—linked to a rise of 2 degrees Celsius in global average temperatures—should not be exceeded. We are not on track to avoid that limit, whether you prefer the economic analysis of experts like the International Energy Agency or the steady monitoring of mechanical sensors.

The last time CO2 levels at Mauna Loa were this high, Homo sapiens did not live there. In fact, the last time CO2 levels are thought to have been this high was more than 2.5 million years ago, an era known as the Pliocene, when the Canadian Arctic boasted forests instead of icy wastes. The land bridge connecting North America and South America had recently formed. The globe’s temperature averaged about 3 degrees C warmer, and sea level lapped coasts 5 meters or more higher.

Courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography

The world will change again due to human activity and associated emissions of CO2, perhaps causing another set of coral reef extinctions like those found during the Pliocene, among other impacts. When Charles D. Keeling first started his measurements, CO2 made up some 317 ppm of the air we breathe and climate change was already a concern thanks to the work of John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius and Guy Callendar. Every year since 1958 the sawtoothed line depicting Keeling’s measurements—readings kept up by his son Ralph—has climbed up, capturing the rise in greenhouse gas concentrations as well as the world’s breath.

Courtesy of Scripps Institution of Oceanography

What can be done? In the short term, more potent but shorter-lasting greenhouse gas emissions could be curbed or a concerted effort to develop CO2 capture and storage technology could be undertaken. Whether we do that or not, given CO2′s long lifetime in the atmosphere, the world will continue to warm to some extent; at least as much as the 0.8 degree C of warming to date is likely thanks to the CO2 already in the atmosphere.

At present pace, the world could reach 450 ppm in a few short decades. The record notches up another 2 ppm per year at present pace. Human civilization developed and flourished in a geologic era that never saw CO2 concentrations above 300 ppm. We are in novel territory again and we show no signs of slowing to get our bearings, let alone stopping.

Image from President Obama’s campaign to end the sequester. The campaign addresses national security, men and women in uniform, people living with mental illness, seniors, small business, and students and teachers. Basic science research, curiously, is not mentioned prominently in the campaign. Courtesy of Whitehouse.gov.

By now we’re all painfully aware of the federal government’s across-the-board cutbacks on discretionary spending—better known as the sequester—and how it has imperiled publicly funded scientific research in the U.S. The only thing less clear than the sequester’s long-term impact on academia, industry and the economy is how to end its austerity measures, which could last through 2021.

A group of science and technology pundits on Tuesday posited some potential approaches to overcoming the sequester during a teleconference hosted by the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies (C-PET). Based on their suggestions, however, we’ll be living with the current budget cuts for some time.

A predominant question is how to make up for shortfalls in funding for early stage research. Industry, which has long benefitted from publicly funded research, could be encouraged to make up for the government’s lack of early stage funding by investing more in the R&D it ultimately uses to sell its products, C-PET president Nigel Cameron noted during Tuesday’s teleconference. Apple, which ended its most recent earnings period with $145 billion in cash, “is sitting on more money than the federal government spends on all of its discretionary R&D combined,” Cameron added. In essence, industry could, for a time, begin to freight the bill for earlier stages of the R&D process, not necessarily a significant burden as most investment occurs later on when bringing products to market.

If companies don’t want to spend more on basic science, then their most important role in preventing the sequester from long-term damage to the economy and U.S. competitiveness could be to bring to bear their considerable lobbying influence to get the government to decide where to spend limited funds, said Nagy Hanna, a C-PET senior fellow and former head of corporate strategy at the World Bank. “They have to have a collective voice and effort to push policy makers [to see] that this is important not just for university systems but for the longer term impact on the U.S. economy,” he added.

Arguments over the U.S.’s lasting competitiveness within the global economy resonate on both sides of the aisle in Congress. Perhaps it’s time to highlight the growing crisis by laying out the implications of a research funding deficit that lasts beyond the end of this decade, said Jennifer Poulakidas, head of government relations for the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, which advocates for universities nationwide. For example, the influential 2005 National Academies report “Rising Above The Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future,” paved the way for the America Competes Act in 2007 (reauthorized in 2010), which emphasizes the importance of funding high-risk, high-reward research. That act, among other things, set baselines for funding, including the goal of doubling the annual appropriations for the National Science Foundation by 2011. Yet another turgid policy tome may for some members of Congress seem like an old and tired argument, but “it still makes the case for why federal investment in basic research is important,” she added.

The sequestration was “a strange little accident” that took place at a time when there’s been a lot of opposition to federal government spending, Cameron said, and U.S. scientists have come to rely on federal funding for basic research, with the government picking up more than one third of research and development tab.

The federal budget sequestration kicked in March 1 after Congress and the Obama administration failed to come up with a compromise plan for reducing federal budget by $4 trillion, leading to more than $1 trillion in cuts to the federal government’s discretionary spending allowance. Unless an alternative is proposed, the sequestration will continue through fiscal 2021, although spending will increase a bit annually beginning in fiscal 2014.

In the meantime, researchers are left fighting for a bigger piece of a shrinking pie, Poulakidas said. In the 1970s, the mandatory side of the federal budget—which includes programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security—accounted for 40 percent of spending. By 2017, mandatory programs are expected to gobble up about 74 percent of the federal government’s finances, she added.

A full assessment of the sequestration’s impact won’t be possible for years, when government, industry and academia can look back at lost opportunities that arose from not investing enough in basic research. Poulakidas said, “It’s hard to fight sequestration because we can’t make specific arguments about what we’re losing.”

Polio vaccination team in India. Image: WHO

Scientific American‘s editorial board strongly believes that the US was wrong to mount a fake hepatitis B vaccination campaign in the effort to kill Osama bin Laden. Apart from moral issues, the blowback from the clandestine effort threatens the global campaign to eradicate polio from the face of the planet.

This year’s polio season–the bulk of cases occur in late summer and autumn–will be crucial.  Polio still spreads in the wild in only three countries: Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan.

I  downloaded data from the World Health Organization about polio vaccination rates for one-year-olds in those three countries in order to get a better sense of how well their national  campaigns are faring. Then I used Excel to chart the information over the past three decades. The closer the world gets to eradication, the more important it is to keep vaccination rates high.

Note that Nigeria’s vaccination rates were still climbing–albeit at a slower rate–after a boycott had been organized in the north in 2003. Nevertheless, the increase was not high enough or fast enough to prevent the virus from spreading in the following few years to 20 other countries that had previously been free of polio.

Click on the image below to see a larger version of the chart.

The research is in its early stages and in some ways relies heavily on data that’s easy to misinterpret. Yet the experiment is noteworthy both for its objective—to potentially identify and assist young families in distress—and for the idea that social media might be mined for the good of social science. An added benefit could be the development of apps installed on smartphones, tablets and computers that can monitor tweets, flag warning signs and discretely offer assistance to women who otherwise might suffer quietly.

“What’s exciting is that we could identify individuals potentially at risk for having an emotional downturn just by looking at streams of publicly shared data,” in this case Twitter feeds, says Eric Horvitz, managing co-director of the Microsoft Research lab. Horvitz and his colleagues presented the results of their efforts to predict postpartum emotional and behavioral changes via social media this week at an Association for Computing Machinery conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Paris.

This postpartum study is part of a larger effort to use social media as a sensor network for public health, Horvitz says. In the past, Microsoft Research has helped create systems that can predict the likelihood a patient will contract an infection while in the hospital or that a hospital patient being discharged will soon be readmitted. Another project demonstrated the ability to detect previously unknown drug interactions by analyzing anonymized Web-search logs that include tens of millions of queries sent to search engines by millions of users. (pdf)

The researchers are not claiming they can diagnose postpartum depression. However, Microsoft’s team does say it was able to identify 376 Twitter users as new mothers and use machine learning software to predict—with 71 percent accuracy—which of these women would exhibit significant changes in their postpartum use of the social network. “We studied the language the women used as well as how many re-tweets they were involved in, whether they were actively re-sharing different external links to other Web sites or whether they were engaging in one-to-one interaction with folks on Twitter,” says Munmun De Choudhury, a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research. “We also looked at the structure of their Twitter network—how many people they follow, how many people follow them and how much this changed following the birth of a child.”

To find women for their study, the researchers first created an automated process that sifted through thousands of tweets published between June 2011 and April 2012. The program searched phrases and keywords—height, weight and gender, for example—that suggested a woman had recently given birth. The software picked up on tweets describing labor and listing the height and weight of a baby, for instance. After creating this initial pool of candidates, the researchers used a program to help identify the gender of the tweeter, discarding male names as well as those that could be either male or female. Then, to distinguish between tweets made by new mothers and those made by female family and friends, Microsoft Research turned to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk digital labor marketplace, hiring workers to analyze a candidate’s birth-announcement posting in the context of her tweets before and after the birth.

Microsoft Research examined several months of tweets for each Twitter user they identified as a new mother. Not surprisingly, the new mothers didn’t tweet as often (changing lots of diapers will do that), but the researchers also noted in some users a drop in positive expressions and an increase in negatives—words associated with anger, anxiety and sadness. Women that seemed to experience more profound behavior changes—compared with their prenatal selves on Twitter—also tended to use first-person pronouns more often in their tweets. This may be an indication of isolation and an increasing focus on themselves, says De Choudhury.

The most interesting aspect of this project is yet to come, as Microsoft Research is now working with experts in postpartum depression at the University of Washington and elsewhere to see how their predictive modeling holds up in a population of women that includes those who have been professionally diagnosed with postpartum depression, Horvitz says.

Acknowledging the limitations of this study (none of the new mothers were actually contacted to confirm any of the researchers’ assessments, for example), Horvitz says the predictive models he and his team are testing could someday be used to help design new kinds of early warning systems for women at risk of postpartum depression, even though Microsoft itself would not necessarily develop such technology.

“Postpartum depression is believed to be a very underreported condition,” he says, adding that any efforts to help women recognize their situation and encourage them to seek help would be welcome.

Image courtesy of Ambro at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Today, the team checks off one important box: as they report in the journal Science, they have managed to build a RoboBee that can hover:

As the authors describe in Scientific American, the flight mechanics of a coin-sized robot isn’t at all like any other kind of robot flight:

The most obvious challenge in creating a small flying robot is figuring out a way to get it to fly. Unfortunately, the steady progress that has been made in miniaturizing robots over the past decade is of little help to us because the small size of the RoboBee changes the nature of the forces at play. Surface forces such as friction begin to dominate over volume-related forces such as gravity and inertia. This scaling problem rules out most of the mechanical engineer’s standard tool kit, including rotary bearings and gears and electromagnetic motors—components ubiquitous in larger robots but too inefficient for a RoboBee.

The researchers solve the problem by relying on so-called artificial muscles…

…piezoelectric materials that contract when a voltage is applied. The wings can move in two ways—stroking back and forth and rotating their pitch. Instead of the up-and-down motion characteristic of bird flight, think of how you would tread water in a pool with your arms. Muscles control the flapping, but rotation is passive—determined by wing inertia, the interaction of the wing with the air, and the elasticity of the wing hinge.

As you’ll notice in the video, the RoboBee has a small wire hanging down from its underside. The wire is necessary because a robot with a mass of just half a gram doesn’t have much room to carry its own power source. As the researchers admit,

To overcome the demanding energy requirements of flight at small scales, much of the bee’s mass must be taken up by the main actuator and power unit (think “battery,” although we are also exploring the possibility of using a solid-oxide micro fuel cell). The power question also proves to be something of a catch-22: a large power unit stores more energy but demands a larger propulsion system to handle the increased weight, which in turn requires an even bigger power source.

So while we’re not yet at the point where we might expect to see a swarm of thousands of bees take flight, the researchers estimate that within a decade or two, your might imagine the following:

Consider a rescue worker with a box full of 1,000 RoboBees—a package that would weigh less than a kilogram. The RoboBees could be released at the site of a natural disaster to search for the heat, sound or exhaled carbon dioxide signature of survivors. If only three of the robots accomplish their task while the others fail, this is a success for the swarm. The same cannot be said about the current generation of $100,000 rescue robots.

Image and videos courtesy Kevin Ma and Pakpong Chirarattananon, Harvard University

Atom on his trampoline. Courtesy of IBM Research.

What is the “final frontier”? Star Trek fans will tell you it’s space. Filmmaker/aquanaut James Cameron will tell you it’s the ocean’s depths. IBM, however, is thinking much smaller.

The company’s research division on Wednesday released a stop-motion movie whose main character is a stick figure only a few atoms in size. “A Boy and His Atom” is the story, not surprisingly, of a character named Atom who befriends a single atom and proceeds to play with his new friend by dancing, playing catch and bouncing on a trampoline. It may not be an Oscar-winning script, but the performance does mark a breakthrough in scientists’ ability to capture, position and shape individual atoms with precision using temperature, pressure and vibrations.

“Think of this as Claymation—you shape your Wallace and Gromit, put them in your scene and take a picture of it,” says Andreas Heinrich, principle investigator at IBM Research. “Then you change the position of the characters and take another picture.” Heinrich and his team arranged and rearranged atoms to create 242 distinct frames later stitched together to make their movie, which Guinness World Records has certified as the tiniest stop-motion film ever made.

IBM researchers relied on a bit of movie magic to bring Atom to life (see video below). Each of the dots used to make the character is actually a molecule of carbon monoxide resting on a copper surface, framed so that the audience can see only the oxygen atoms (the carbon atoms are off screen). The researchers used a two-ton scanning tunneling microscope to magnify the atoms’ surfaces more than 100 million times. The microscope features an extremely sharp needle that the researchers used to move the molecules to specific locations.

This ability to manipulate individual atoms has big implications for the future of computing and communications. Engineers have managed to shrink certain components within today’s magnetic disk drives down to a few dozen nanometers. “We’re interested in exploring data movement and storage at the atomic scale,” the stuff of quantum computing, Heinrich says. Whereas a classic computer uses bits—a zero or a one—to store information, a quantum computer lets you—in principle at least—have a zero and a one at the same time in a quantum bit (or a qubit).” If you can do both of these at the same time, you can calculate answers faster than any computer using classic bits,” he says, adding that his lab’s mission is to determine whether atoms can someday be harnessed for computation and data storage.

In a tie-in with the upcoming film "Star Trek into Darkness," IBM Research created this nanometer-sized image of the Enterprise. Courtesy of IBM Research.

IBM researchers decided to make their movie last year after publishing the results of years of atomic storage experiments, Heinrich says. “The general public should know about this kind of work and be interested in it,” he adds. “The best way to do that is to make a movie that is told in the language of science although doesn’t necessarily tell a scientific story. It tells a human story of a boy dancing with his friend.”

Street art chimp astronaut. Image: chiptape via Flickr

This past weekend the misguided aquatic ape theory surfaced for air, only to get sunk in the most entertaining way.  The theory holds that many traits of humans—including our naked skin, upright posture and large brains–evolved as adaptations to living in an aquatic environment. But fossil and archaeological evidence simply does not support this scenario, so whenever the aquatic ape theory makes the media rounds, scientists grumble. This time, however, they responded with parody.

On April 27 the Guardian ran a story on the aquatic ape theory, highlighting a symposium that will be held in London May 8 – 9 to “explore new research and evidence which suggests that at some stage during the last few million years, our human ancestors were exposed to a period of semiaquatic evolution which led to the acquisition of unique and primordial human characteristics.“ That story and other media coverage of the aquatic ape idea inspired anthropologist Brenna Hassett to propose a satirical alternative to the watery fringe theory in her blog the following day. Thus the space ape theory was born.

“Basic Arguments of the Space Ape Theory:

1. we have evolved big brains relative to our bodies because we don’t need our bodies to move around in space.

2. we don’t have much body hair because what would be the point of a few more follicles worth in 2.73 Kelvin (-270 Celsius)?

3. sinuses, far from being evolutionary spandrels, are little miniature internal space helmets.

4. our outsize eyes clearly show our relation to other species in space.

Follow-on arguments include the theory that language must have evolved once we re-terrestrialised, because as we all know, in space, no one can hear you scream.”

This, of course, led to the coining of a Twitter hashtag, #spaceape, whereupon more hilarity ensued. A sampling:

Body hair makes spacesuit temp control systems less efficient. Head hair is important though because it looks awesome weightless. #spaceape

— Karen James (@kejames) April 28, 2013

Of course we have back problems on Earth! We’re crushing our space-adapted intervertebral discs! #spaceape — Caitlin S (@paleophile) April 28, 2013
 

Exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics needed for mate recognition while wearing bulky spacesuits. #spaceape

— Holly Dunsworth (@HollyDunsworth) April 28, 2013

Ventral-ventral copulation evolved because, duh, otherwise the rocket packs would get in the way #spaceape — Victoria Herridge (@ToriHerridge) April 28, 2013
 

Our hairless skin provides better adhesion for spandex spacesuits. #spaceape

— Patrick N.R. Julius (@PNRJulius) April 29, 2013

Early primates developed grasping hands, knowing one day they’d be used for space-knobs, buttons, & levers. history.nasa.gov/SP-402/p58.jpg #spaceape — Patrick Clarkin (@Patrick_Clarkin) April 28, 2013
 

the fact that 98% of human population prefers to interact with screens rather than one another is ultimate proof of #spaceape theory. — Henry Gee (@HenryGeeBooks) April 28, 2013
 

Now I don’t mean to suggest that aquatic environments were not important in human evolution. They were. Indeed the #spaceape antics prompted archaeologist Becky Wragg Sykes to blog about legit research into the connection between prehistoric humans and water. But there is no substantive evidence to support the idea that the anatomical characteristics that distinguish us from our ape kin arose as adaptations to an aquatic lifestyle.

Berners-Lee proposed the Web in 1989 and had a working version in Dec 1990. But by 1993 certain user groups were positioning themselves to try to monopolize the Web as a commercial product. Chief among them was the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, which had developed a browser called Mosaic that would later become Netscape. So Berners-Lee and CERN decided to release the code for the Web, believing that software development by hundreds of Web enthusiasts at the time, and millions of people in the future, would always stay one step ahead of any company that tried to control the Web or force people to pay to use it. The decision came at a very tense time that could have ruined the Web’s primary goal as a ubiquitous, open communications platform.

You can read the full back-story in a book that Berners-Lee and I wrote in 1999, Weaving the Web. As Tim explains in the book, when early Web enthusiasts gathered at technical meetings in 1993, “I was accosted in the corridors…. I listened carefully to people’s concerns. I also sweated anxiously behind my calm exterior…. On April 30, Robert [Cailliau] and I received a declaration, with a CERN stamp on it, signed by one of the directors, saying that CERN  agreed to allow anybody to use the Web protocol and code free of charge, to create a server or browser, to give it away or sell it, without any royalty or other constraint. Whew!”

With that single step, the Web exploded across the universe. Other information systems that used the Internet, such as Gopher and WAIS, soon faded into the Web’s wake. And no company, not even Microsoft, has ever been able to out-develop the masses.

To celebrate the anniversary, CERN has posted the declaration it sent to Berners-Lee. It is also showing off original Web technology, on a page that has a photo of Berners-Lee from the early days and the NeXT computer he programmed the Web on. The site links to the written pitch Berners-Lee made to CERN, simply titled “Information Management: A Proposal,” for internal funding so he could develop a “wide-area hypermedia information retrieval” system (I’ve shown a small image of the cover, left). Another CERN page shows a copy of the world’s first Web site, which was about the WWW project itself. Berners-Lee also wrote a treatise for Scientific American in 2010 explaining why the Web must forever remain free and how to make sure it stays that way.

Image of the original Web proposal, courtesy of CERN

DARPA plans to replace GPS technology with new "game changers" like positional navigation technology (PNT), Credit: Wikimedia Commons

With relevance to homegrown, lone operator terrorist threats highlighted by the April 15 Boston Marathon bombings, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced a series of initiatives Wednesday aimed at defending the U.S. against increasingly ambiguous threats.

Whereas its core mission will remain the same—researching new types of technology for the military—the cutting-edge agency in the near term will focus on adapting its technological know-how to wage war against a wide variety of internal and external threats, from individuals, terrorist organizations and other criminal groups, DARPA Director Arati Prabhakar said at a Pentagon press briefing. Created in 1958, DARPA was originally designed to protect the U.S. from Cold War enemies with advanced technologies, first and foremost the Soviet Union, which had just taken the lead in the space race by successfully putting Sputnik 1 into orbit. “We face a world in which the actors that can put us into deeply uncomfortable positions are no longer limited to nations,” Prabhakar said.

Preparing for these types of threats requires a fundamental rethinking of current systems of national security, Prabhakar said, which would integrate DARPA’s new antiterrorism efforts with its established work in military technology development. The system DARPA envisions would integrate all aspects of U.S. defense infrastructure, from manufacturing to research and development, to reduce dependence on external sources and minimize vulnerability to outside threats. In line with this goal DARPA will also continue to invest in radical new technologies, what Prabhakar called “game changers,” which include more adaptable battleground technologies, fully integrated cyber technology and a new suite of positional technology called position, navigation and timing (PNT) with the goal of phasing out what she called the military’s overreliance on GPS.

Rather than suggesting the military implement each technological advance as it is developed, Prabhakar said the agency would develop new tools for deployment in layers; no single advance will provide the sweeping changes that the agency envisions. “DARPA is in the silver bullet business,” she said, “but only if we use a combination of technologies will we be able to maintain our superiority.”

The program, however. is also in the midst of fiscal woes; as a result of the March federal budget sequester, DARPA’s parent agency, the U.S. Department of Defense, took an 8 percent across-the-board cut, a $5.38-billion reduction from the $75 billion it was initially allocated. Plan X, a five-year cyber warfare project aimed at mapping out the entire cyber infrastructure network, was delayed as a direct result of the sequester, Prabhakar said.

Despite DARPA’s budgetary concerns, she said the agency would work to ensure that the U.S. remains one step ahead of other nations in defense technology. “Our future leaders and commanders will have real options—powerful options—for the range of threats in the years ahead,” Prabhakar noted.

Credit: Gryffindor/Wikimedia Commons

This summer, New York City will witness what might be called an airborne non-toxic event, to corrupt a term coined in Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel White Noise.

Over three days in July, the New York Police Department and scientists from Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y., will release small amounts of a harmless, colorless gas in the subways and on the streets to trace its flow through the city, both above and below the surface. The aim of the $3.4-million airflow experiment is to investigate how a harmful agent would disperse in the event of an accidental release or a terrorist attack, such as the 1995 sarin gas release in the Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult.

“The NYPD works for the best but plans for the worst when it comes to potentially catastrophic attacks such as ones employing radiological contaminants or weaponized anthrax,” police commissioner Ray Kelly said in a prepared statement.

A similar project, carried out in 2005, tracked the spread of aboveground gases in midtown Manhattan. This summer’s Subway-Surface Air Flow Exchange experiment will cover all five boroughs, including dozens of stations on 21 subway lines, and will employ some 200 detectors to monitor the dispersal of gas.

As in the 2005 test, the researchers will release gases known as perfluorocarbon tracers, which exist in such small quantities in the atmosphere—just a few parts per quadrillion, for some molecules—that their spread following a controlled release can be clearly tracked using sensitive detectors. Perfluorocarbon tracer gas systems were developed at Brookhaven in the 1980s and have been used to identify leaks in hazardous waste–containment systems as well as to trace the potential migration of airborne pollutants across distances of hundreds or even thousands of kilometers.

The gases are nontoxic, nonflammable, and chemically and biologically inert, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. But considering that 5 percent of Americans believe that airplane condensation trails are actually “chemtrails” deployed by the U.S. government for mind control and other nefarious aims, according to a recent poll, expect more than a few straphangers to steer clear of the subway system during the tracer tests.

A section of the LaPaz Icefield 031117 meteorite, courtesy of NASA.

Two primitive meteorites collected in Antarctica appear to contain grains of silica—the stuff of quartz and sand—forged in an ancient supernova that predates the birth of the solar system. In fact, some researchers believe that it was just such a stellar explosion that triggered the formation of the solar system from a cloud of dust and gas billions of years ago. Whether or not the Antarctic meteorites contain a record of that fateful cataclysm, they do contain a supernova by-product that has never before been found on Earth.

Researchers have identified so-called presolar grains in several primitive meteorites, which more or less preserve the chemistry of the raw materials from which they formed at the dawn of the solar system. Some presolar grains spilled into the molecular cloud that would become the solar system from nearby supernovae, and some seem to have arrived on the winds expelled from aging stars.

Presolar grains stand out from the rest because of their unusual mix of chemical isotopes, “which cannot be explained by any known process acting in the solar system,” according to a study in the May 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters. “Their isotopic compositions can only be explained by nuclear reactions occurring in stellar environments.”

In the new study (pdf), Pierre Haenecour of Washington University in St. Louis and his colleagues analyzed two meteorites collected in Antarctica in 2003, each named for a geographic feature near the spot where the meteorite fell. (Antarctica makes an ideal hunting ground for dark-colored meteorites, which stand out clearly against the ice fields.) Grove Mountains 021710, found by a Chinese expedition, and LaPaz Icefield 031117, collected by U.S. searchers, each harbor presolar grains of silica (SiO₂), the researchers found, as evidenced by the grains’ enrichment in a heavy isotope of oxygen known as oxygen 18. That signature points to the grains’ formation in a type II supernova—the explosion initiated by the collapse of a massive star’s core. Other researchers had spotted presolar silica in meteorites before, but those grains had different isotopic signatures that indicated that they came from an aging star called an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star rather than from a supernova.

The conclusion by Haenecour and his colleagues that a supernova seeded our corner of space with silica grains, among other types of dust, lends laboratory support to a 2008 study, using the Spitzer Space Telescope, that spotted the possible spectral signature of silica in the remnant of a supernova that exploded in the Milky Way so recently that its light reached Earth just 300 or so years ago.

Amassing and analyzing these presolar grains is more than just an exercise in interstellar history—a shock wave from a nearby supernova or the gentler expulsions of an AGB star could have stirred a cloud of dust and gas to collapse into the system of sun and planets that we inhabit today. Collecting presolar detritus allows astrophysicists a glimpse into the violent inner workings of dying stars and may ultimately help pinpoint just how the solar system came to be.

Composite reconstruction of Australopithecus sediba, based on remains from three individuals found at the site of Malapa in South Africa. Image: Courtesy of Lee R. Berger and the University of the Witwatersrand

Three years ago researchers added a new branch to the human family tree: Australopithecus sediba, a nearly two-million-year-old relative from South Africa. By all accounts it was a dazzling find—two partial skeletons, an adult female and young male, from a site called Malapa just outside Johannesburg. And it has been making headlines regularly since then whenever scientists release results of new studies of the material, as they did earlier this month. Any time human fossils, especially skeletons, are unearthed it’s a big deal, because such remains are so incredibly rare. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that A. sediba may just be the most important hominin (modern humans and their extinct relatives) discovery yet.

Now, I can already hear the protests of more than a few paleoanthropologists. But hear me out–and then if you don’t buy it you can tell me why I’m wrong in the comments.

To appreciate the importance of any given discovery, we must consider it in its historical context. Viewed that way, one might consider the 1856 discovery of Neandertal fossils in western Germany to be the most important, since it marked the beginning of human paleontology as a field of inquiry. The Taung child (Australopithecus africanus), found in South Africa in 1924, was another momentous find, offering up the first convincing evidence that humankind originated in Africa. Then there’s the 3.2-million-year-old Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis)–the most complete hominin skeleton known at the time she was found in Ethiopia in 1974 and still the best known to the public—whose anatomy established that hominins walked upright long before brain size expanded, settling a longstanding debate.  More recently, the 18,000-year-old Flores hobbit (Homo floresiensis), announced in 2004, made waves with her diminutive proportions and other traits that challenge longstanding ideas about hominin adaptation and biogeography. And Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus) was a sensation when scientists unveiled her in 2009, suggesting that some enduring notions about the origin of bipedalism and the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees might be wrong.

These fossils and many others are landmark discoveries in paleoanthropology, finds that have filled crucial gaps in scientists’ understanding of human origins. They are all vitally important. And yet the A. sediba fossils manage to stand out from even this elite crowd, because of the sheer volume and quality of information they contain. The finds from Malapa tick pretty much all the boxes on a paleoanthropologist’s wish list. Specimens that preserve multiple skeletal elements? Check. Remains of multiple, coeval individuals (important for understanding variation within a species)? Check. Fossils in near-pristine condition, thus eliminating uncertainties about how pieces fit together? Geological context that allows for precision dating of the fossils? Associated plant and animals remains? Check, check, check.

Since the initial announcement in 2010 the discovery team, led by Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johnannesburg, has published a slew of papers detailing what A. sediba looked like, when it lived, what it ate and how it is related to us, among other insights. The latest analyses, described in six papers published in the April 12 Science, reveal a creature that excelled at climbing trees and also walked upright on the ground with its shoulders shrugged and its arms unswinging, rolling its feet inward with each step—a previously unknown form of bipedalism. Yet in contrast to its alien way of walking, aspects of A. sediba’s teeth and jaws are decidedly familiar, resembling those of our genus, Homo, according to two of the new studies. Indeed A. sediba’s dizzying mosaic of apelike and humanlike traits is a theme the researchers have emphasized with each new round of papers. And it is this mosaic that has researchers debating the central question about the hominins from Malapa: namely, where they belong in our family tree.

Berger and his colleagues have argued from the beginning that A. sediba might well be the long-sought species that gave rise to our genus (or a close relative of that species). Such an arrangement would root Homo in South Africa instead of East Africa and could banish Lucy’s species–traditionally thought to be in our direct line of ancestry—to the evolutionary sidelines. But critics have countered that A. sediba is not particularly Homolike overall and that it probably instead belonged to a South African lineage of hominins that ultimately went extinct—one of many dead-end branches in our family tree.

Because the origin of Homo is perhaps the biggest mystery in paleoanthropology, A. sediba’s perceived importance would get a big boost if new evidence were to strengthen its link to Homo. But I’d go one step farther and argue that regardless of whether it is found to be the ancestor of Homo or a dead-end branch of humanity, the Malapa hominins are now the ones to beat. Because what A. sediba brings to the table is the potential for the most detailed understanding yet of a hominin anywhere near this old.

The Malapa site is an incredibly high-resolution time capsule. The hominin remains include bones that rarely, if ever, turn up at early hominin sites, and bones often preserved only as fragments have survived intact here. Moreover, the hominins represent a range of developmental stages: in addition to the two skeletons, the site has yielded more fragmentary remains of another 4 individuals, including an infant, which will allow the team to study maturation in the species.  And the fossilized plants and animals at Malapa are the actual plants and animals the hominins had in their environment, not aggregations of remains over a period of thousands or tens or even hundreds of thousands of years.

Furthermore, conditions at the site, which was once a 30- to 50-meter-deep underground cavern with a shallow freshwater pool at the bottom, apparently allowed for the preservation of some very unusual features. The teeth of the young male were found to have tartar on them, which the research team was able to analyze for clues to what he ate in his final days. Previously the oldest known hominin tartar came from much younger Neandertals and early modern humans. And at the annual meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society in Honolulu earlier this month, Rachelle Keeling of the University of the Witwatersrand reported that molecular imaging of what appears to be skin preserved on some of the bones supports that interpretation. If verified this would be the first evidence of fossil hominin soft tissue, and could conceivably provide insights into A. sediba’s skin color and hair color, and the distribution of hair and sweat glands. Such skin features are themselves clues to the body’s ability to offload excess heat, which became increasingly important as hominins became more active over the course of evolution.

OK, I’m more than 1,000 words into this post and I’ve still barely scratched the surface of what makes the A. sediba find so extraordinary. I can’t hope to be comprehensive here, but I do want to mention two more aspects of this discovery that add to its importance. First, there are more fossils to come, perhaps lots more. CT scanning of some of the many chunks of rock blasted from the site by limestone miners back in the early 1900s has already revealed several bones. And additional hominin bones can be seen sticking out of the ground at Malapa, awaiting excavation. (This blew my mind when I visited the site in November of 2011.)

Second—and this may sound a little insidery, but it’s critical–the way Berger and his collaborators are studying the finds and disseminating what they learn represents a real departure from the cloak-and-dagger manner in which paleoanthropological investigations often proceed. Berger has assembled a huge team of specialists to work on the remains and has made the project open access, with a policy of granting permission to any paleoanthropologist who asks to see the original fossils. He has also sent out scores of replicas to institutions around the world, and routinely brings casts of the bones—even ones that his team has yet to formally describe–to professional meetings to share with other researchers. This can only improve the quality of the science that comes out of the project and may well inspire other teams to be more forthcoming with their own data.

So there you have it. That’s my case. I realize the importance of a fossil depends on the question one is asking of it—e.g. if you want to know about the origin of, say, art, A. sediba is irrelevant. And yes, at the end of the day we need loads of fossils (and artifacts and DNA) from different times and places to piece together the full story of our origins. I’m just awed and delighted by the opportunity this discovery affords to see a human species from so very long ago in such vivid detail—whether it is the elusive ancestor of Homo, or a creature from a parallel lineage that reveals another way of being human and could perhaps elucidate why our line succeeded where others failed.

Think another hominin discovery is more important than this one? I’d love to hear which one and why in the comments. Maybe you’ll change my mind.