• Teens send toy above the clouds

    Lego Man rises above the clouds in a time-lapse video.

    By Alan Boyle




    It's very cool that two 17-year-old Canadians sent a flag-toting Lego figurine into the sky on a weather balloon, as part of a weekend project that cost less than $500. It's cooler still that they got back some fantastic video of the toy silhouetted against the backdrop of a curving Earth beneath a black sky. But let's not call it putting a "Lego man in space." Even though the balloon ascended to around 80,000 feet, that's only a quarter of the way to the boundary of outer space.

    That distinction doesn't take anything away from the feat that Toronto teens Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad pullled off this month: The high-school students worked during four months' worth of free Saturdays to put together their balloon-borne experimental package, including four cameras, a cell phone with a GPS app, a home-sewn parachute and a Lego "mini-fig" holding a Canadian flag.

    When the wind conditions were right, as determined by a website that calculates balloon trajectories, the teens headed out to a soccer  field in Newmarket and sent their rig up on an $85 weather balloon. The data suggest that the balloon rose to somewhere around 80,000 feet over the course of 65 minutes, then blew apart. The Lego man and the cameras came back down to Earth, buoyed by the parachute and protected within a plastic-foam box during the half-hour descent. Eventually, the cell phone guided the kids to a field about 75 miles away from the launch point.

    The cameras recorded two videos and 1,500 photos, documenting the Lego man's amazing trip up through the clouds. "We never knew it would be this good," Ho told the Toronto Star.

    But it got even better: After the Star published the teens' story, they were swamped with media attention. Canon, the company that made the cameras used on the Lego man's trip, said it would give Ho and Muhammad top-of-the-line cameras so they could continue their "creativity and inspiration." Lego sent its congratulations. A Toronto couple offered to reimburse the kids for their costs. Reports about the feat filtered out to The Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Huffington Post and elsewhere. The YouTube video has been viewed more than 600,000 times, and there's even a Facebook fan page.

    Most of the reports refer to the Lego man as being "in space" — which makes for a nice headline but is unfortunately wrong. The issue may not seem like a biggie, but over the past year there have been all sorts of things sent up on balloons to stratospheric heights — including a chair, an iPad (sans parachute), a vibrator and iPhones galore. Heck, a 7-year-old and his dad sent up an iPhone a couple of years ago, and the Toronto teens said they took their inspiration from the MIT students who kicked off the craze with a $150 balloon mission in 2009.

    This is all great, but it could give folks the impression that sending things into space is so easy a kid can do it — so why are we spending millions or billions of dollars to put things into orbit?

    Lofting payloads on suborbital trips beyond the internationally accepted boundary of outer space — 100 kilometers or 62 miles or more than 328,000 feet in altitude — is devilishly hard. Just ask Virgin Galactic. or XCOR Aerospace, or Blue Origin, or Armadillo Aerospace, or Masten Space Systems, or all the other ventures that are trying to open the suborbital frontier.

    Putting payloads in orbit is much, much harder. Just ask SpaceX, which burned through three launches and millions of dollars before achieving its first success.

    Ho and Muhammad haven't reached those heights ... yet. But someday, they may well be putting real men and women into space. The teens are off to a good start, and they deserve all the accolades they're receiving this week for their near-space adventure.

    More about near space:

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

  • Sunspot unleashes a parting shot

    NASA via SpaceWeather.com

    NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captures a picture of sunspot 1402 unleashing an X2-class solar flare on Friday, seen in ultraviolet wavelengths.

    By Alan Boyle




    The sunspot responsible for setting off a colorful round of northern lights over the past week got off a doozy of a parting shot today, just as it was about to pass around the edge of the sun's disk.

    Sunspot 1402 let loose with an X-class flare, the most powerful class of solar outburst, at 1:37 p.m. ET today, and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured a sequence of ultraviolet images as the blast went out. Fortunately, this one was not directed right at Earth.

    SpaceWeather.com says NASA's Goddard Space Weather Laboratory detected a "spectacular" coronal mass ejection blasting away from the sun at 5.6 million mph (2,500 kilometers per second). CMEs send out electrically charged particles that can eventually interact with Earth's magnetic field — but here again, this particular ejection is not heading directly for Earth. There's a chance that it might strike a glancing blow on Saturday or Sunday, sparking another bout of auroral displays.

    The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center reports that the flare created R3-level radio blackouts at about 1:30 p.m. ET today. That level can result in wide-area loss of high-frequency radio comunication, as well as a temporary degradation of low-frequency GPS signals, but no significant problems came to light immediately. Solar radiation levels are elevated — which may lead to the rerouting of some airline flights. NOAA's guide to space weather scales explains what's what.

    Active regions move across the sun's disk from left to right, as seen from earth, so sunspot 1402 is just about to go around to the far side of the sun. There's a chance that the sunspot will come around again as the sun goes through its 27-day rotational cycle, and there are certain to be more (and stronger?) outbursts as the sun approaches the peak of its 11-year activity cycle in 2013 or so.

    Keep a watch on SpaceWeather.com, NOAA's space weather website and the prediction center's Facebook page for updates during the weekend. And if you're living the high-latitude life, keep a watch for better-than-usual auroras as well.

    Update for 4:05 p.m. ET: Sunday's solar storm not only blasted past Earth; it also sent solar particles streaming by NASA's Mars Science Laboratory, which is on its way to the Red Planet. Today, the Southwest Research Institute reported that one of the instruments on the spacecraft, the Radiation Assessment Detector, measured the effects of the solar storm.

    "We only have a few hours of data downloaded from the RAD so far, but we clearly see the event," RAD principal investigator Don Hassler, science program director in SwRI's Space Studies Department, said in a news release. "It will be very interesting to compare the RAD data, collected from inside the capsule, with the data from other spacecraft."

    Once Mars Science Laboratory gets to its destination, it will measure radiation levels on the Martian surface to determine what the effect might have been on past life ... as well as the radiation effects that astronauts can expect to experience during future interplanetary missions.

    More auroral glories:

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

  • Foldable electric car debuts in Europe

    Hiriko

    Hiriko is a foldable electric car unveiled Jan. 24 in Europe. It is designed to fit in tight parking spaces and be part of car-sharing programs.

    By John Roach

    The commercial version of two-seater foldable electric car that driver and passenger enter through a pop-out windshield was officially unveiled this week in Europe.

    The car, called Hiriko, is powered by four in-wheel motors that each turn a full 90 degrees. Its compact — and compactable — design coupled with four-wheel steering should allow parking in the tightest of spaces on crowded city streets.

    The concept is based on the electric CityCar created by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, and commercialized by a consortium of automotive companies in the Basque region of Spain.

    Hiriko, which is Basque for "urban," made its debut at a ceremony Jan. 24 by José Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission in Brussels.

    With electric motors in the wheels, there's no need for a gas tank or traditional gasoline engine, transmission and gearbox, allowing the rear of the car to slip under the chassis. 

    When folded, three of the cars can fit in one traditional parking space.

    MIT Media Lab

    MIT Media Lab's CityCar, which is the car Hiriko is based on, is compared to standard-size automobiles and a Smart car.

    The MIT Media Lab envisions the cars finding a home in car-share programs where members drive any available ride around the city and parking at widely distributed charging stations.

    The cars have a reported range of 100 km (62 miles) per charge, making them well suited for in-city driving in compact European cities already accustomed to small, fuel-efficient vehicles.

    While the vehicles should appeal to cities and consumers keen to save money and the environment, the Economist notes that "supercompact cars have not done nearly as well as their proponents had hoped."

    One of the hurdles, IHS Global Insight analyst Tim Urquhart told the magazine, is that cars like Hiriko are low value, low price, "and, therefore, they are low margin" — not much of a money maker.

    Time will tell if these little electric rides find market acceptance. The first car-sharing trial is slated for Malmo, Sweden's third largest city, the Guardian reports. Other cities around the world have reportedly expressed interest, including Berlin, San Francisco, and Hong Kong.

    Commercial production is slated to begin in Spain next year. The cars will cost 12,500 Euros each to build. A video of the unveiling ceremony is below.

    More on electric car technology:

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

    Jane Pauley and Gene Shalit show how far voice-activated commands had to go, when a toy van named came to visit the Today Show set, in 1979.

     

  • Take a shot at the science of hockey

    NBC Sports Group

    Nashville Predators goalie Pekka Rinne gets face time in "Science of NHL Hockey."

    By Alan Boyle




    Why does a hockey player's stick actually strike the ice behind the puck for a slap shot? How quickly does a player pick up speed during a breakaway? The answers to these and other questions are explored from a scientific point of view in a new series of videos presented by the NHL, the National Science Foundation and NBC Learn.

    "Science of NHL Hockey" is the latest video tutorial done up by NBC News' educational arm with the cooperation of sports officials, athletes and scientists. (NBC Universal is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.) It's made for students and teachers to use in the classrooms, in conjunction with specially prepared lesson plans. But you don't need to be in school to check out the series. The videos, anchored by NBC News' Lester Holt, are available online via NBC Learn, NBCSports.com and Science360.gov. You can also catch the segments this weekend during NBC's coverage of the NHL All-Star Game.

    The scientific concepts at work in the fastest game on ice are broken down using a high-speed camera that can capture movement at rates of up to 10,000 frames per second. The super-slo-mo views allow for frame-by-frame analysis of the Newtonian physics and biomechanics behind the action. There's even a segment about the science of the Zamboni machine.

    "Wayne Gretzky once said, 'The only way a kid is going to practice is if it's total fun for him ... and it was for me,'" Morris Aizenman, senior scientist for NSF's Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences, said in a news release about the project. "'Science of NHL Hockey' is an NSF and NBC Learn project that continues our effort to make science total fun for students. We hope, after watching these videos, that students will also want to learn and practice science."

    Among the players participating in the series are St. Louis Blues goalie Jaroslav Halak, Colorado Avalanche defenseman Erik Johnson, New York Islanders left wing Matt Moulson, Nashville Predators goalie Pekka Rinne and Dallas Stars left wing Brenden Morrow.

    "It was exciting to be part of a unique project that utilizes hockey to help educate students on science and physics," Morrow said. "It was fun to participate in and was very interesting. I learned a lot myself."

    More science of sports:

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

  • NASA mission piles on the planets

    NASA's Kepler planet-hunting mission has confirmed the existence of 26 more planets beyond our solar system. Msnbc.com's Alan Boyle explains how the confirmations were made.

    By Alan Boyle




    The science team for NASA's Kepler planet-hunting mission nearly doubled their list of confirmed planets beyond our solar system in one fell swoop today, announcing the discovery of 26 planets spread among 11 star systems. Their sizes range from just a little bit bigger than Earth to super-Jupiter-size, but they're all closer to their parent stars than Venus is to our own sun.

    The accelerating pace of discovery is matched by the diversity seen in the worlds discovered so far, one of the Kepler mission's co-investigators, Harvard astronomer Dimitar Sasselov, told me today.

    "There is more diversity out there than our limited imaginations could come up with, which is good," he said.

    The $600 million Kepler mission, launched in 2009, now has a list of 61 confirmed planets, and another 2,326 planetary prospects that have yet to be confirmed. At this rate, Kepler's worlds could soon account for the majority of the exoplanets detected beyond our solar system — a tally that now stands at more than 700.

    "Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky," Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters, said in a news release. "Now, in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits."

    The Kepler space telescope searches for other worlds by staring at more than 150,000 stars in that fist-sized patch of sky, straddling the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. Kepler's instruments can detect the faint dips in starlight that occur on a regular basis as a planet passes over the disk of its parent star, as seen from Earth. By analyzing the patterns of those passes, also known as transits, Kepler's scientists can figure out the orbit and the size of a potential planet — but not its mass.

    An alternative method has to be used to confirm that Kepler is actually looking at a planet rather than something else, such as mutually eclipsing binary stars. The mission's early discoveries were confirmed by looking at the candidates' stars with ground-based telescopes and checking for the telltale gravitational wobbles that are caused by big, close-in planets.

    Transit timing variations
    Most of the planets added to the list today were confirmed using a different backup method. The Kepler mission's astronomers analyzed subtle changes in the intervals between the transits, caused when multiple orbiting planets exert gravitational pull on each other. The resulting data on acceleration and deceleration can be used to confirm the planets' existence and calculate their masses.

    "By precisely timing when each planet transits its star, Kepler detected the gravitational tug of the planets on each other, clinching the case for 10 of the newly announced planetary systems," said Dan Fabrycky, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the lead author for a paper confirming four of the planetary systems, known as Kepler-29, 30, 31 and 32.

    Other newly confirmed planetary systems include Kepler-25, 26, 27 and 28, described in a paper with Fermilab's Jason Steffen as lead author; and Kepler-23 and 24, which was the focus of research led by the University of Florida's Eric Ford. In today's release, Ford said the transit timing variation method "dramatically accelerated" the pace of planetary discovery.

    Yet another study, led by Jack Lissauer, a planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center, detected five planets around Kepler-33, a star that is older and more massive than the sun. Those five planets range in size from 1.5 to five times the width of Earth, and they're all closer to their parent star than Mercury is to our own sun.

    "The approach that was used to verify the Kepler-33 planets shows that the overall reliability of Kepler's candidate multiple transiting systems is quite high," Lissauer said in today's release. "This is a validation by multiplicity."

    Five of the newly confirmed planetary systems (Kepler-25, 27, 30, 31 and 33) contain a pair of worlds that are bound together in a 1:2 resonance. That means the inner planet makes two circuit for every one circuit made by the outer planet. Four other systems (Kepler-23, 24, 28 and 32) have two planets that are linked in a 2:3 resonance, like Pluto and Neptune in our own solar system.

    "These configurations help to amplify the gravitational interactions between the planets, similar to how my sons kick their legs on a swing at the right time to go higher," Steffen said.

    Fifteen of the 26 planets announced today are Neptune-size or smaller, and the orbital periods range from six to 143 days. The planets' distances from Earth range from 623 light-years (for Kepler-25) to 4,064 light-years (for Kepler-29).

    Great expectations
    Sasselov, who has just come out with a book about the Kepler quest titled "The Life of Super-Earths," marveled that so many of the newfound worlds are in multiple-planet systems. He recalled that when the Kepler mission was proposed to NASA, more than a decade ago, "there was one little sentence that said maybe two or three of the systems will have multiple transiting planets."

    None of the planets announced today would be conducive to life as we know it, because their orbits are so close to their parent stars. It's likely to be just a matter of time before Kepler achieves its main goal — confirming the existence of Earth-size planets in Earthlike orbits around sunlike stars. Unfortunately, it may be a matter of more time than initially expected.

    Funding for the Kepler mission is due to run out in November, but the mission's scientists "don't have enough to statistically complete the core goal of the mission," Sasselov said. It turns out that the data collected by the telescope is "noisier" than expected. That means more observations will be required to confirm the mission's trickiest planetary finds.

    The Kepler team has applied for a four-year extension, and is currently waiting for a decision from NASA executives.

    More about the planet search:

    The planetary confirmations are described in four research papers:

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

  • Robotic rat with a monkey's smarts to the rescue?

    Mat Evans / University of Sheffield

    A Roomba robot outfitted with whiskers and reprogrammed with monkey smarts determines what type of flooring is beneath it.

    By John Roach

    The next time you find yourself trapped under a pile of rubble, your savior might be a Roomba — souped-up with whiskers and a monkey brain.

    Such a robot was recently shown to outperform other whiskered robots in characterizing its environment, using technology that could wend its way into next-generation search and rescue robots, the University of Sheffiled reports.

    Researchers have long known that rats sense their environment with whiskers. But models of how their brains interpret these signals vary. 

    One approach, for example, has assumed that rats looked at whisker movement patterns and vibrations over a set period of time and then used that information to make a decision.

    But various robots created with this model, Science Now explains, correctly guessed the floor beneath them only 50 to 80 percent of the time, after 0.4 seconds of exposure.

    Nathan Lepora at the University of Sheffield in England wondered if outfitting these robots with a model of how the monkey brain makes decisions would be an improvement.

    Previous research shows that individual neurons in monkey brains ramp up their firing rates when making decisions about the direction of motion for a group of random dots flashing on a screen.

    A decision is made when the firing of these neurons cross a certain threshold. If the neurons responding to the up motion cross the threshold first, for example, the monkey would say the dots are moving up.

    Lepora and his team fitted a brain model based on this monkey study into an existing Roomba with rat whiskers and found that it nearly flawlessly correctly identified the type of flooring beneath it.

    The findings are reported Jan. 25 in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.

    In addition to improved rescue robots, the result suggests that rat brains may function similar to those of monkeys — in fact, they "suggest the possibility of a common account of decision-making across mammalian species," the team conclude.

    [Via: Science Now and University of Sheffield]

    More on whiskers, rats, monkeys, and brains:

     

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

     

    Ten years of war have given robot developers a chance to refine and improve their bots. Now the robots are finding all sorts of new jobs on the homefront.

     

  • Planet looks back at northern lights

    Goran Strand

    Göran Strand of Östersund, Sweden, took a panoramic photo of Tuesday night's sights and wrapped it into a 360-degree composition titled "Planet Aurora."

    By Alan Boyle




    The skies are settling down after this week's big solar storm, leaving behind a gallery of green-glowing pictures as a lasting legacy.

    For a time on Tuesday, the solar radiation levels registered as the highest in more than eight years, but the most significant impact came in the form of shifts in airline routes to avoid polar disruptions in communications. Strong solar storms have the potential to disrupt electrical grids and satellite operations, but no big problems were reported on those fronts this week.

    "Conditions are now beginning to trend back toward quiet levels," the experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center reported today. By Thursday, geomagnetic activity is expected to be back down to background levels.

    The bright northern lights associated with the storm wowed observers in Scandinavia, Iceland and Greenland, but the show "petered out almost completely by the time it reached North America," SpaceWeather.com's Tony Phillips reported. Oh, well. At least we have the photographs captured by those who did get in on all the fireworks.

    One of the most unorthodox views comes from Göran Strand of Östersund, Sweden, who took a panoramic photo of the northern lights and wrapped the sights into a 360-degree composition titled "Planet Aurora." The picture shows a photographer standing on a snowy circle, with trees bristling around the edge and ripples of red and green light glowing in the surrounding sky.

    "Me and a friend went out to capture the beauty, and what a show it was," Strand told SpaceWeather.com. "I made two panoramas of my friend while he was taking pictures." Check out this page to see how the wide-screen panorama compares with the 360-degree planet view. While you're at it, visit Strand's AstroFotografen website, and don't miss the other images in SpaceWeather.com's aurora gallery.

    Here are a few videos featuring views of the northern lights:

    The northern lights shine in photos from Fairbanks, Alaska. NBC's Brian Williams reports.

    Msnbc.com's Dara Brown reports on the spectacular light show over northern Europe.

    Photographer Chad Blakley shot this video over the course of three hours in Sweden's Abisko National Park. It shows eight photographers participating in the "Lights Over Lapland" aurora photo expedition. "We had a fantastic night!" Blakley writes. Lights Over Lapland Photo Expedition video of CME impact on 1-24-2012 from Lights Over Lapland on Vimeo.

    Norway's Orjan Bertelsen says this time-lapse video draws upon 1,600 still images. Auroras 22.01.12 Birtavarre Norway from Orjan Bertelsen on Vimeo.

    More auroral glories:

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

  • Steve Jobs: Second greatest innovator of all time?

    Lemelson-MIT Program

    Steve Jobs ranked behind Thomas Edison in a question to young Americans about who is the greatest innovator of all time.

    By John Roach

    Apple co-founder Steve Jobs ranks behind only Thomas Edison as the world's greatest innovator of all time in a survey released today on young Americans' attitudes about invention and innovation.

    Jobs' innovations include the iPhone and iPad, the popular gadgets that are helping to revolutionize how we communicate with each other and sent Apple's stock to a record high Wednesday. 

    His second-place finish in the survey of Americans aged 16 to 25 surprised Leigh Estabrooks, the invention education officer with the Lemelson-MIT Program, which conducted the survey.

    "Here we have this innovation role model who has changed the way we live and yet young people still go back to Thomas Edison," she told me. "While he did great and wonderful things, most of his work was in the 1880s."

    The result highlights the fact that invention and innovation are primarily taught in history class, not the math and science courses that are the foundation for careers in invention and innovation.

    "Thomas Edison comes up because all students take history," she said. That's where we learned, for example, about his life-changing electric power distribution system and his money-making stock ticker.

    Next-generation innovators
    The Lemelson-MIT Program aims to foster an innovative spirit in America's youth. The annual Invention Index helps the program gauge the level of interest among young people in becoming innovators.

    This year's results show that young Americans are aware of the role invention and innovation play in their lives and its importance as an economic driver, but 60 percent feel inhibited in pursing inventive careers themselves.

    Many — 34 percent — said they simply don’t know enough about these fields. "That's daunting for a teenager to think about going into a field that they don’t know much about," Estabrooks noted.

    Other students consider these fields too challenging to pursue and/or feel they were unprepared for such a career track in school.

    According to Estabrooks, increasing awareness of career options in these fields is a key step. That means more mentors coming into classrooms to talk, especially to elementary and middle school students.

    "The sooner we can share with kids the things they can do with science, technology, engineering and math, the better off we'll be," she said. 

    "It is awfully hard to catch up with the math once you're in high school and almost impossible once you're in college."

    "And it is hard," she added. "Therefore mentors can help by encouraging students to stick with it."

    Hands-on experiences
    More than just listening to an engineer or computer programmer talk, hands-on experiences inside and outside the classroom are paramount to fostering a new generation of innovators.

    The survey shows American youth hunger for these opportunities, such as invention projects at school and creative field trips. Simply "a place to develop an invention" would be a good start for 52 percent of the respondents.

    The opportunity to invent is working its way into classrooms across the country thanks to initiatives such as a framework for next-generation science standards released in July 2011 by the National Academy of Sciences.

    The framework outlines a way for science teachers to incorporate engineering into their lessons, Kristina Peterson, head of the middle school science department at the Lakeside School in Seattle, Wash., explained to me.

    (Disclosures: I'm a Lakeside alumnus as is Microsoft co-founder and chairman Bill Gates, another great innovator who, it turns out, wasn't included in the survey. Msnbc.com is a joint venture between Microsoft and Comcast/NBC Universal.)

    The school is in its second year of a revamped science curriculum that includes an engineering thread in all the science courses, grades 5-8, partially based on materials from the Boston Museum of Science.

    "A key thing is engaging students in what's called engineering design process," Peterson said. "It has them not only inventing things, but also the big picture of the process of inventing."

    Students learn to brainstorm ideas, research them, and communicate their goals, for example. They also learn to evaluate what they create so they can improve it with a redesign.

    Other schools around the country are involved with programs such as Lemelson-MIT's own InvenTeams as well as First Robotics and First Lego League that provide the hands-on experience outside of the class.

    And outside of the classroom learning has its advantages, according to Estabrooks.

    For one, there's a finite amount time within the school day to learn. Students can tinker more outside of class time. As well, grades don't apply after school.

    "One thing about inventors is that we encourage them to fail quickly and fail often," she said. "And in our academics, we certainly don't encourage our youth to fail."

    Steve Jobs, who died last October, was certainly prone to fail. Products from the Apple III computer (1981) to Apple TV (2007) are considered among his misses. 

    He was even fired from Apple in 1985, a humbling experience that led to his most fruitful innovations, he said during a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005:

    "The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life." 

    More on innovation education:

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

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Archbishop Mitty High School students say the iPad brings diverse subject materials — but no more excuse for missed homework.

  • Facebook's roots go way, way back

    Coren Apicella

    A woman from Tanzania's Hadzabe tribe studies a social-networking chart.

    By Alan Boyle



    Hunter-gatherers exhibit many of the "friending" habits familiar to Facebook users, suggesting that the patterns for social networking were set early in the history of our species.

    At least that's the conclusion from a group of researchers who mapped the connections among members of the Hadza ethnic group in Tanzania's Lake Eyasi region. The results were published in this week's issue of the journal Nature.

    "The astonishing thing is that ancient human social networks so very much resemble what we see today," senior author Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist at Harvard Medical School, said in a university news release. Researchers from Harvard, the University of California at San Diego and Cambridge University worked together to document the Hadza's social networks.

    "From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we've made networks of basically the same kind," Christakis said.

    Another co-author of the study, UCSD's James Fowler, said the results suggest that the structure of today's social networks go back to a time before the invention of agriculture, tens of thousands of years ago.

    For decades, social scientists have puzzled over the origins of cooperative and altruistic behavior that benefits the group at the expense of the individual. That seems to run counter to a basic "tooth and claw" view of evolution, in which each individual fights for survival, or at least the survival of its gene pool. One of the leading hypotheses is that a system to reward cooperation and punish non-cooperators ("free riders") grew out of a sense of genetic kinship between related individuals. But how far back did such a system arise?

    Harvard Medical School researcher Coren Apicella discusses the Hadza social network.

    To investigate that question, researchers spent two months interviewing more than 200 adult members of the Hadza group who still live in a traditional, nomadic, pre-agricultural setting. To chart the social connections, the researchers asked the adults to identify the individuals they'd like to live with in their next encampment. They also looked into gift-giving connections by giving their experimental subjects three straws of honey — one of the Hadza's best-loved treats — and asking them to assign them secretly to anyone else in the camp. That exercise produced a complex web of 1,263 "campmate ties" and 426 "gift ties."

    Separately, the researchers gave the Hadza additional honey straws that they could either keep for themselves or donate for group distribution. That was used as a measure of cooperation vs. non-cooperation.

    When the researchers analyzed all the linkages, they found that cooperators tended to group themselves together into one set of social clusters, while non-cooperators were in separate clusters. Even when other factors were taken into account, such as connections between kin and geographical proximity, the cooperation vs. non-cooperation distinction was significant. That finding suggested that even in pre-agricultural societies, social networking strengthened the connections between people inclined toward different kinds of behavior.

    "If you can get cooperators to cluster together in social space, cooperation can evolve," said Coren Apicella, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in health-care policy at Harvard Medical School and the Nature paper's first author. "Social networks allow this to happen."

    The researchers said the dynamics of the Hadza social networks — including the kinds of ties that bind a group's most popular members and the reciprocal connections within the group — were indistinguishable from previously gathered data about social networks in modern communities.

    "We turned the data over lots of different ways," Fowler said in the news release. "We looked at over a dozen measures that social network analysts use to compare networks, and pretty much, the Hadza are like us."

    Beyond the Facebook angle, the rise of relationships between cooperative individuals has larger implications for the study of human evolution. "This suggests that social networks may have co-evolved with the widespread cooperation in humans that we observe today," the researchers wrote.

    Update for 2:15 p.m. ET: In a Nature commentary, University of British Columbia anthropologist Joseph Henrich said that the study provided a "glimpse into the social dynamics of one of the few remaining populations of nomadic hunter-gatherers" — and pointed up the parallels between modern-day social networking and the kind of society in which our distant ancestors lived.

    One of the more interesting findings was that non-cooperators preferred to associate with other non-cooperators, rather than with the givers in the Hadza group, Henrich told me. That could be because people tend to make those they associate with more similar to themselves — sort of like a curmudgeonly married couple. Or it could be because non-cooperative types avoid the cooperators in the first place — sort of like the high-school kids who shun the goody-goodies and form their own clique of bad boys and girls.

    Henrich said the cooperation vs. non-cooperation distinction was surprisingly strong. "In fact, the gift-network results indicate that this extends to friends of friends: if your friend's friend is highly cooperative, you are likely to cooperate more, too."

    He said the findings support the principle of homophily in social relations: "People tend to pick people like themselves." But does the cooperation connection apply to modern-day social networks as well? If you're a giving person, do you tend to friend other givers online? "We don't know," Henrich told me. That's a topic for further research.

    Update for 10:35 p.m. ET: In a follow-up phone interview, Fowler told me the results that he and his colleagues are reporting add a new twist to the old nature vs. nurture debate. People aren't shaped merely by genetics and their physical environment, he said.

    "Social networks were actually just as important as the other two," he said. There may even be a genetic component to the associations you make. Along with Christakis and UCSD's Christopher Dawes, Fowler conducted research suggesting that genetic factors affect social behaviors. Previous studies have also shown that social networking among hunter-gatherer societies like the Hadza are not governed strictly by kin-based relationships.

    "What's new here is that we've specifically tied this idea of cooperation to ties between non-kin," Fowler said.

    Fowler acknowledged that studying hunter-gatherer societies are not a foolproof way to trace the evolutionary roots of the behaviors we see in modern-day society, including Facebook friending and Twitter tweeting. "This isn't necessarily the be-all and end-all of determining what we were like hundreds of thousands of years ago," he said. But considering that scientists can't interview Stone Age social networkers, Fowler believes this is one of the best methods available to anthropologists.

    More social-network science:

    In addition to Apicella, Christakis and Fowler, authors of "Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers" include Cambridge University's Frank Marlowe.

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

  • Strange species found in Suriname

    In a Conservation International video, researchers describe what they've been finding during a Rapid Assessment Program survey of southwest Suriname's species.

    By Alan Boyle




    Surveying the biodiversity of the world's last wild areas is often a depressing business, due to the effects of deforestation and development, but in a roadless region of the South American country of Suriname, scientists have come upon a good-news story.

    "We can say for sure that this is still a pristine area, in contrast to most of the places that we visit," Trond Larsen, director of Conservation International's Rapid Assessment Program, told me today.

    Part of the payoff for Conservation International comes in the form of scientific discovery. Today, the nonprofit group is reporting the identification of 46 potentially new species, observed during a three-week expedition to southwest Suriname in 2010. The list includes a fancifully named "cowboy frog," a strangely spiked species of armored catfish, and colorful breeds of beetles and katydids. Check out our slideshow to get a close look at a few of the newly identified critters.

    As far as Larsen is concerned, it's just as important to document the nearly 1,300 previously known species that were observed during the survey. After all, the main purpose of the Rapid Assessment Program is not just to add names to a list, but to lay down a baseline for assessing the health of an entire ecosystem.

    "It's a quick and dirty way to go into an area ... and say something meaningful about the importance of that place," Larsen said.

    CI-Suriname

    This map of South America highlights the region known as the Guiana Shield in medium-toned green and the country of Suriname in dark green. The Guiana Shield is one of the world's most biologically diverse regions.

    Thanks to the RAP survey, Larsen and his colleagues know that the remote area along Suriname's Kutari and Sipaliwini Rivers is an important place. "It's one of the last really vast areas of unroaded tropical wilderness," he said.

    Conservation International's survey was conducted by 53 scientists in collaboration with students and the region's indigenous Trio people.

    Leeanne Alonso, a former director of the RAP program who is now with Global Wildlife Conservation, said the scientists were impressed by "the amazing diversity of birds and mammals of the region."

    "You can really get up close to wildlife here," she said in a news release. "A camera trap recorded a jaguar about one hundred yards from our camp." The cameras captured nighttime glimpses of a giant armadillo, a peccary and an ocelot as well.

    Conservation International Suriname

    This ocelot (Leopardus paradalis) was captured on film by a camera trap on Aug. 8, 2010.

    The scientists also observed cave petroglyphs near the Trio village of Kwamalasamutu, at a site that Conservation International is helping local communities preserve as an ecotourism destination. The site, known as Werehpai, is the oldest known human settlement  found in southern Suriname: Radiocarbon dating and archaeological studies suggest that the first signs of habitation go back at least 5,000 years.

    "The Kwamalasamutu area's pristine nature and cultural heritage make it a unique destination for more adventurous tourists, who enjoy trekking through the dense rainforest to discover flora and fauna," said Tjon Sie Fat, executive director of Conservation International's operation in Suriname. "CI-Suriname and the Trio are hoping to further develop a niche market ecotourism site here."

    Trond Larsen / Conservation International

    Petroglyphs have been discovered in a cave system near the Trio village of Kwamalasamutu in Suriname.

    The region's newfound species add to the strangeness of the setting. Among the finds reported in the RAP Bulletin of Biological Assessment series are these:

    • Cowboy frog: This potentially new species of frog (Hypsiboas sp.) was discovered during a night survey in a swampy area of the Koetari River. It has white fringes along its legs and a spur on each heel — which inspired the amphibian's nickname.
    • Armored catfish with spines: There are numerous species of catfish that are "armored" with external bony plates, but this one (Pseudacanthicus sp.) is unique because of the spines covering its plates of armor. Larsen noted that the fish live in a river that is infested with giant piranha fish. "Presumably, the spines are adapted to protect against the piranha," he said.
    • Crayola katydid: The Suriname species (Vestria sp.) is one of only a few types of insects that are named after the popular brand of crayons, because of their striking coloration. The "Crayola" critters are the only katydids known to employ chemical defenses to repel bird and mammalian predators.

    Such species will take their place alongside other strangely named critters found in that region of Suriname, including the Pac-Man frog and the conehead katydid. And there may be more to come: Conservation International is planning to send another RAP expedition to southern Suriname in March.

    More about species:

    Don't miss our slideshow featuring the strange species of Suriname.

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

  • Magnetic soap made for oil spills

    University of Bristol

    A magnet plunged into test tubes filled with soap under an organic solution. The soap on the right is magnetic. You can see how it is attracted to the magnet.

    By John Roach

    Scientists have created the world's first soap that can be controlled by magnets. 

    That's right: magnetic suds.

    The breakthrough may revolutionize industrial cleaning products and the response to environmental disasters such as oil spills, reports the research team from Bristol University in England.

    The soap works like ordinary soap — breaking up the oily, grimy particles it touches and clumping it all into a drop. Only these clumps can be controlled simply by turning on a magnet.

    The property could, for example, allow environmental cleanup crews to dump soap onto an oil spill, let it do its thing and then turn on a magnet to remove it all from the environment.

    The soap was created by dissolving iron in a range of standard soap materials made of chlorine and bromine ions, similar to those found in mouthwash and fabric softener.

    Molecular change
    "Any fool would know that if you tried to put a magnet next to a soap bottle, nothing happens," Julian Eastoe, a chemist at Bristol University who led the group that developed the soap, told me Tuesday.

    "But what we did is we changed ... an important part of the molecule for a known magnetically active group." 

    Soap molecules have an oil-loving part and a water-loving part. "It is almost like a schizophrenic molecule," he explained. His team left the oil-loving part alone, but made the water-loving part magnetic.

    The addition of iron creates metallic centers within the soap particles that, lab tests show, are big enough be magnetically attractive. 

    While ionic liquid soaps infused with iron have been suggested as possible, scientists thought the metallic centers would be too isolated for the long-range interactions necessary for magnetic attraction.

    Bristol University

    A droplet of liquid soap responds to a magnet.

    "A single atom alone is not magnetic," Eastoe said. "It is only when put next to neighbors, brothers, that there is a communication between the brothers in a network and that connective communication gives rise to a macroscopic magnetic effect."

    Surprised by their lab results, the Bristol University researchers took a sample to the Institut Laue-Langevin in France where they studied it with a so-called neutron microscope. 

    The neutrons revealed the iron particles were clumping together sufficiently to make the suds magnetic.

    Potential applications
    According to Eastoe, the potential applications are many. 

    Simply by turning on or off a magnet, researchers can change the electrical conductivity of the soap, its melting point, and the size and shape of aggregates, for example.

    These properties are traditionally controlled with the addition of electrical charge, or changing the pH or temperature of a system. All of these alter the system and can cost money to remediate.

    The magnetic property also makes the soap easier to collect and remove from a system once it has done its job. This could prove particularly useful, for example, in cleaning up oil spills.

    Research to make the soap commercially viable is ongoing, Eastoe noted. 

    "We've uncovered a proof of principle," he said, noting that it should open minds to consider other ways to make magnetic soaps. Other solutions might be more attractive, less expensive, or more appropriate for a given application.

    But within one to three years, he surmised, "you might see something appear."

    More stories on soapy technology:

    Findings are reported January 23 in Angewandte Chemie.  

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

    As computing power increases exponentially, the ways we relate to computers become more natural — and more ubiquitous. Msnbc.com's Wilson Rothman explores the evolution of interfaces, from primitive punch cards to interactive buildings.

     

  • Space station sees southern lights

    This Jan. 3 video was taken by International Space Station's crew.

    By Alan Boyle

    We've been talking a lot about the northern lights lately, but here's a must-see view of the southern lights, as captured by the crew of the International Space Station on Jan. 3.

    The time-lapse video begins over the Indian Ocean, with the camera looking eastward toward southern Australia. The red and green lights of the aurora shimmer just before sunrise, which comes when the station is south of Australia and west of Tasmania. Go full screen for the full effect.

    The differences in the colors of the aurora are due to the various emissions sparked by the interaction of solar particles with oxygen and nitrogen atoms in the upper atmosphere. This previous posting delves into the colors of the auroral sky as seen from space.

    I've got to think the space station's astronauts are closely watching the current uptick in solar activity. NASA says the solar storm poses no danger to the crew, so they'll be free to snap photos and send them along to the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, which is the source of this imagery. Be sure to check out Jason Major's report on Universe Today about the whole space-storm safety issue as it relates to the station's crew.

    More views of Earth from the space station:

    Yet another tip o' the Log to Jason Major, who watches over Lights in the Dark.

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

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